My objective is to read all of Robert Ludlum books within a reasonable time!

The list goes like...

1. The Matarese Countown
2. The Apocalypse Watch
3. Trevayne
4. The Matlock Paper
5. The Road to Omaha
6. The Road to Gandolfo
7. The Bourne Ultimatum
8. The Holcroft Covenant
9. The Icarus Agenda
10. The Bourne Supremacy
11. The Aquitaine Progression
12. The Parsifal Mosaic
13. The Bourne Identity
14. The Matarese Circle
15. The Chancellor Manuscript
16. The Rhinemann Exchange
17. The Cry of the Halidon
18. the Osterman Weekend
19. The Scarlatti Inheritance

Yes the list is a big one.
Hopefully I should be able to finish it within a reasonable time.

Few weeks back I finished reading Gemini Contenders by Robert Lublum. The story is nicely plotted. It makes you read on and on till the point where a dramatic twist is witnessed. I would rather don't wanna go into the details of the plots and explain it. Robert Ludlum already has done that. In my personal view, the dramatic twist happens when the hero in dying moments passes his responsibilities into his two twin sons. From here on the story goes haywire and this where I diverted. I don't know why but somehow I was not interested in knowing what would be the end. This is probably because i knew what would happen! The twist is so dramatic that itself implies the end. I was hopping that my intuition and repeated indications by the author comes untrue. But I was not wrong. It was the end that was expected. I thought it could have been better with something more rational. I don't know what that could have been but i felt that it could have been better than the present one. And ultimately the story ends with the new beginning. As most of the time the Hollywood stories part 1 ends with a plot for the part 2. I think this makes for a nice Hollywood movie.

I always had the urge to have multiple desktop like the Linux in windows. Some people would say just migrate to Linux and you will have that by default. I use windows at my work place and have Linux as my primary operating system at home. When I discovered this virtual desktop tool, it made my day with excitement. I quickly installed and changed few settings. It delivered all that was expected of it. I am planning to customize and use it very similar to my Linux box.

What I liked about it was the simplicity and no difference in window switches and its very easy to work with a click. I haven't had time to tweak, but feels to be like at home (Linux). Earlier I had the notion that the graphics cards provide the multiple windows in the windows environment, now that I have got hold of this it seems that i was wrong. It feels good to be wrong at time like this.

Tuesday, 6th of Nov 2007, I was experimenting with the extensibility of windows terminal (cmd prompt). I found an interesting software that did that. You can also checkout from here. Its a nice piece of enhancement which looks very cool. After using it, I wondered why none cared to enhance the default command prompt? Probably micro$oft is not into command mode at all.

The image is a cropped desktop. Transparency setting makes this console awesome looking. You can't really differentiate between your desktop and the console. Most of my work involves console and I was bugged with the plain command prompt of windows as well as cygwin. Cygwin is better to an extent. I never went hacking cygwin so if you could do what console has done, then i would be happy :-)

One thing i liked about console was the configuration tweaks that you can do. I am still playing with it and hence have none to show here. When I do configure to my liking i will post the configuration here. Its actually very easy to do the changes. The configuration reads xml and as you know its a plain text file which can be modified by the text editors. Here is a screen shot of my desktop. This is just to illustrate how it looks!

For certain font selection which can be selected from various configurations, copy is disabled and it seems that it won't be implemented :-( Apart from this, its a nice utility to have.

The following is a story written by one of my friend.

A young second generation Indian in the US was asked by his mother to explain the significance of " Diwali" to his younger brother, this is how he went about it...

"So, like this dude had, like, a big cool kingdom and people liked him. But, like, his step-mom, or something, was kind of a bitch, and she forced her husband to, like, send this cool-dude, he was Ram, to some national forest or something... Since he was going, for like, something like more than 10 years or so.. he decided to get his wife and his bro along... you know... so that they could all chill out together. But dude, the forest was reeeeal scary shit... really man... they had monkeys and devils and shit like that.

But this dude, Ram, kicked him with darts and bows and arrows... so it was fine.

But then some bad gangsta boys, some jerk called Ravan, picks up his babe (Sita) and lures her away to his hood. And boy, was our man, and also his bro, Laxman, pissed ... And you don't piss this son-of-a-gun cuz, he just kicks them and like... all the gods were with him... So anyways, you don't mess with gods. So, Ram, and his bro get an army of monkeys... Dude, don't ask me how they trained the damn monkeys... just go along with me, ok... So, Ram, Lax and their monkeys whip this gangsta's ass in his own hood. Anyways, by this time, their time's up in the forest... and anyways... it gets kinda boring, you know... no TV or malls or shit like that. So,they decided to hitch a ride back home... and when the people realize that our dude, his bro and the wife are back home... they thought, well, you know, at least they deserve something nice... and they didn't have any bars or clubs in those days... so they couldn't take them out for a drink, so they, like, decided to smoke and shit... and since they also had some lamps, they lit the lamps also... so it was pretty cooool... you know with all those fireworks... Really, they even had some local band play along with the fireworks... and you know, what, dude, that was the very first, no kidding..., that was the very first music-synchronized fireworks... you know, like the 4th of July stuff, but just, more cooler and stuff, you know. And, so dude, that was how, like, this festival started."

-By Veda.

I have been busy all these days doing nothing. Its like you don't have enough motivation. This can't be true but i may need to consider this as a possibility. You never know the first time you experience a thing and say wrongly define it. May be.
I wanted to try many things this weekend. I wanted to erase all the data in my computer and start a new, ofcourse after taking backup. Some how my desktop had different idea. It died on me. SMPS is refusing to power on. I have to do few tests before i can declare it as dead. This will make me procure a new smps. Now i am looking at different aspect all together. I wanted a desktop which can run all the recent games. In short i needed a power pc. hmmm, it could be the right time for me to own one. Let me decide on that after smps resolved.
I am planning to have a stable distribution now. I am looking at running Debian and freeBSD as the only two OSes. I am not at all looking at windows. It's sort of going back to a year when i didn't had windows. The real problem at that time was media players. Now I can have alternate players. And one more issue i think i would have now also is gaming. I need to have windows for gaming. Yes i think i will have windows exclusive for gaming only. I don't understand why there aren't games for Linux. But have read about their availability in the market. I haven't really bothered about it as i had windows. Now that i may not have i need to do an R&D on Linux games. Hope i can have a good list to choose from!

Its been raining in Bangalore for the past few days. It starts to rain in the evening, when we pack up from office heading towards home. Anyhow it never deters me to ride in rain and enjoy the feel of it. From my childhood i used to enjoy rain. I used to stand in front of our bedroom window and used to watch rain water gushing trying to reach its destination. I never used to get bored with it. I always found reasons to drench myself in rain.
The feeling of walking in the rain is one of the most calming effects i can have. When you lookup towards the sky and see the rain drops hitting you with all its mightly bringing the calm effect makes me want to experience it every time.
On the first day of rain, I had missed it as i was early home. I made sure the next day i will fully get drenched. And thats what i did. Rain was so heavy, that I was riding my bike with a constant throttle so that the rain water doesn't enter my exhaust making my bike stop in the middle of the river road.
It was all fun in the rain.

Yesterday, I was looking for a way to send text messages via Internet. I found few sites,

1. http://www.txtdrop.net/- for international messaging,
2. http://gizmosms.com/

These above sites send text messages for free without charging the sender. I am not sure if the they charge for the receiver. I tried sending few text messages to myself and it worked. But for a friend, (who is enjoying his days in Sweden) it didn't work. I tried sending a few text messages and found that he was not able to receive any of it. Probably the telephone carrier doesn't support it. Its strange in that regard. Hope he gets to receive text messages from web so i can spam him.

It seems my Debian is broken. Its been long time since i had a chance to look at the issue closer. I broke it last month. I don't remember the reason why i reinstalled Debian, but thats where the trouble started. Mouse refused to show any movement, now it seems that i haven't been able to install the correct sound driver for my sound card. Its all gone very broke. I think i need to get the latest Debian release and work with that. I loved the way it had worked earlier.