Post Olympics: Shame On India

We are the second most populous country in the world. But we are in 50th position in Olympics medal tally. Even that single gold does not belong to India. It's Abhinav's own. Not everyone's father is a billionaire who could afford lakhs for equipment and training. In fact he succeeded against the red tapism of this country. Not because of it. Even small countries in Africa got more medals. Nothing is a mystery. There are concrete reasons for this, which could be set right.

• Firstly, we as a nation forget that there exists sports other than cricket.
• The government too is in same category given the poor infrastructure it has developed for other sports. Decline of hockey is a classic example of this. We were winning until synthetic came in the way.
  
• Our education system is so screwed up that most of the schools are bad in academic as well as in sports. The school in which I studied had only a single building without a single square feet of playground. Nothing was done even after the kumbakonam tragedy. The authorities were simply corrupt.(After our school got its approval renewed, it conducted a ceremony in which all the district officials of school education and of the then ruling party and the MLAs were honoured.)

It is high time we realised that there are many things other than +2 marks, that there are more important areas(including basic sciences) other than engineering and that we are lagging behind academically as well. I say this since many people say that we are in a very good place academically if not in sports. This is simply not true.

Insult To Hackers

The Gujarath police thinks that only a techie could hack into an unencrypted wireless internet connection:

 Now, apparently, the word[hacker] means "someone who borrows someone else's open wireless connection." And this, according to the Gujarat police, is not easy to do: they suspect a "techie", a Wipro engineer of having done it.

If its complicated enough for the police technical wing(Is there one?), then it must be hard and hence hacker worthy. :)

Here's a news flash for our police and our equally moronic media: ANYONE with a laptop within a few tens of metres from the building in question could have used the internet connection, if it was unencrypted.

Both the above quotes from Rahul Siddharthan's blog here.

Offline Saga: Is Searching In Google While Logged In Good?

Our department lab was not working for a week due to some electrical problem and I was left offline till yesterday. My spam count hit triple century and even my inbox was full. People usually get spam with Viagra, sexual strength and other such stuff. (My blog's going to get R rated! ;)) But I also get spam about watches and binoculars and there's an unusual story behind it.

Until a year ago I got only little spam with usual sex, finance themes. Then one day I searched online for watches to buy one. Two days later I got my first watch spam about a site that sold watches. I couldn't understand how that happened. Then a week later I searched for binoculars (I was on a shopping spree then... :)) The very next day a binocular spam landed. I was like 'What the hell's going on?' I searched for other things too, but they didn't materialise into spam. (I never gave my id anywhere. I was making decisions only. After selecting model I got it in retail.)  Then it hit me. On both occasions I was logged into my Google account! I still don’t understand how those people got my id. I always disabled third party cookie access too. Though I never knew how that happened, I stopped searching when I was logged in. And I no more got spam about my search queries. But my spam count has only increased. :(

Its Exam Time Again!

Assessment-1 starts coming Monday in my college. And the first paper is our worst: Propulsion. Yesterday night(around 11) my friend AR texted me and the chat went like this(my shortest SMS chat, i suppose):

AR: wat doin? studyin still?
Me: ya.. you?
AR: am goin to sleep. do u understand?
Me: I understand that u r feeelin sleepy. s tat sentence such hard to understand?
AR: i asked if u can understand wat u r readin. gud nite.
Me(confused and irritated): No. good night.

Reading  textbooks  always leads to confusion and mental tiredness. :-) Really. The great Bertrand Russel said this:

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Ha Ha Ha... I Never Thought 'Society' Could Be A Person's Name

This Book is written by Hacking, Counterhacking and another one fellow called err.. Society.

According to my college librarians:

Couldn't control laughing... lolz....

Data Recovery From A Formatted Drive

Last Sunday I formatted one of my partitions mistakenly.(Note to self: You moron. When you login as root, be EXTREMELY CAREFUL.) This is one of the occupational hazards of wanting to be in the bleeding edge of GNU/Linux. I reinstall Linux once in a while since it'll become painfully unusable due to my ripping apart all settings and damaging it to the core. This time it affected a windows partition also due to a silly mistake done by me. Affecting a windows installation is not new. But not this severe.
Fortunately, most, if not all, of the data was recovered using EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard. While searching to find a suitable software I realized that there were no decent reviews about these software. So this post.

Fortunately one of my friends had this software and helped me out. But the file names of some of the files are changed to hashes(#) etc. and the files are sometimes in more than one location(size of the recovered data is nearly 50% more than what I actually had.) Anyways, I'm happy to get them back. I was in very bad mood since it contained my entire collection of pictures, arranged. The last word is the catch. You could get almost all of them, but arranging them is a hell lot of work.

Best thing to do when you want to recover data from a drive? Don't do anything to that drive! Install the recovery software in some other dive. Don't touch that particular drive. The more you write, more the chance that your data is overwritten.

For the one who's wondering: The data is not gone when you delete it. Not even when you format it. They can be recovered back. If you want to really delete sensitive info without a trace, try shredding.