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Kiwis will win the Cricket World Cup 2003 – Narayanan Predicts !!

Heard that Nambungal Narayanan has predicted the New Zealanders will snatch away the world cup. India is sure to sneak into the super six but it is the kiwis who will kidnap the world cup.

The Chennai-based astrologer predicted Indira Gandhi’s return to power in 1977, Gen. Zia ul Haq’s fall from grace Also more recently he predicted Jayalalitha’s return to power and also predicted the exact number of seats which she will win in that election. Named by MGR, as Nambungal(someone who can be believed), Narayanan has been the consulting astrologer for both BJP and Congress(Unity atleast here!!).

At this point not many want to hope he is right including me because destinies can be changed. Calling Sachins, Dravids and Sehwags…

Of Pawns, Knights, Bits, Bytes

Legendary Garry Kasparov’s new oppponent Deep Junior is all said to be better than the Deep Blue which was retired by IBM earlier in 1997.

The latest news in this is that Kasparov won the first game last sunday; the second on tuesday was a draw. The next game is on sunday. Read it here.

Steven Spielberg‘s latest flick Catch me if you can, which is based on the true story of Frank Abagnale, Jr promises to be a good weekend movie. Let me just peek into it before I could write more on this.

I need to get in to theatre before the show starts, ’cause it seems like the credits is one of the highlights of this spielberg’s outright comedy masala.

Extremities are my destiny, I think.

Weekend was fabulous. Went to Anbe Sivam with friends to a faraway suburb and had tasty’n’filling lunch in an Indian restaurant called Madras Palace. You get better sambar here than Saravana Bhavan in Chennai. Will write a writeup on Anbe Sivam soon.

Chicago was warm on the weekend, today morning it was freezing rain where you find small droplets of snow falling down and melting the moment the hit the ground. Now, it is snowing like nobody’s business and its already more than 2 inches of snow and all I could see from workstation is nothing but snow capped skyscrapers and hundreds of all-look-white cars flying (rather skiing).

My lovely spring, where are you?

Bill Gates spammed me…howbout you?
[ Whom do you want to spam today? ]

Last week, I received a mail in hotmail mailbox which read the sender’s name as Bill Gates with a e-mail address of BillGates@chairman.microsoft.com. But then I isolated in to last degree, throwing it as one of the hundred spams that I receive in my hotmail inbox, everyday.

At once I thought it could be a proper mail because I am a mcsd [Microsoft Certified Solution Developer] and probably it was a mail in connection to that. It wasn’t. It wasn’t a spam too. A true mail from Bill Gates which said, it was sent to me( and a million others) in connection to security measures taken by MS in the last year and in the current year.

The gist of the mail is to avoid security loopholes in Microsoft software and the list of measures taken by microsoft in the near past. But then whats the reason to send a email, NOW. Frankly, I don’t know. Maybe microsoft just predicted the slammer attack on Friday the 24th Jan ’03.

The Slammer worm, also known as “Sapphire,” began to spread shortly after midnight ET on Saturday and quickly slapped many computer systems around the world offline. Slammer targets Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000 as well as applications created with the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000). Any application using this codebase is open to the exploit unless it is patched.

This is what the Internet Storm Center has to say on this:

Up to now, this worm has been named ‘Sapphire’,’SQL-Hell’ and
‘MS-SQL Slammer’.
The worm is sending a 376 byte long UDP packet to port 1434 using random
targets at a very high rate. Vulnerable systems will immediately start
sending identical 376 byte packets once they are infected.
The worm is sending traffic to random IPs, including multicast IPs,
which may improve its Denial of Service (DOS) capability.

The entire transcript of the Bill Gates mail could be read from here.

Tail Piece: I googled Bill Gates and got a whopping 1,600,000 results.