Being in my second year of college, i certainly expected more out myself. I thought i would be spreading my wings in different directions in life and going crazy. Instead I am tied to my chair in a 9to5 college where the only thing that is being trained to fly is my imagination. Its so ironical that people feel Design Colleges are supposed to be a battlefield where your imagination clashes with reality and run wild galloping and conquering the unknown. Is it weird then, that feel stuck in a cog machine being ground in monotony? Its been a while since i lived my live without fear, burden and the blanket of suffocation. Without thinking about that semi-solid platform and taking a leap of faith.

I stand in the mirror and I find myself Lost in my life. I wish i could step on a plane crash land on a remote island and understand myself better. I want to break free. Like someone once said, when you get addicted to drugs - blaming the drug or the creator of the drug is pointless

Feeling lost in life, I want to travel and be free like a bird

All credits to elsakawai™ for the photograph

Since our existence we have unraveled mysteries spanning few years before and few years after. And with each year we continue this bi-directional growth of discovering the unknown. This phenomenon can be compared with Bilinear Interpolation. In simplest terms, If we are to assume our existence with respect to time is somewhere on the horizontal X-axis, then we progress each year in both the negative as well as the positive direction.

Coming back to our human mind, Who controls the human brain? Doesn't our brain control the interaction between various body parts. A common example, If we wish to lift our arm - we tell our brain that we want to lift our arm, which triggers nerves and activates muscles to generate a moment in our arm, to which our eyes register and sends a notification to our brain that the arm moved in a direction. The brain then inspects this direction and tally's it to a previously trained colloquial terminology called UP. So, our arm moved up. Its kind of is a full circle originating at the brain and coming back to it. If our arm were to move down and our eyes registered the opposite movement, imagine how we would be living today.

Now lets talk about a highly debatable organ, much loathed by the brain, as it tried to steal its thunder. I am talking about the heart. Over centuries this debate has been dragged on. Does the heart 'think' ? Is it capable of influencing actions and decisions of our brain? Is our heart our soul? Is it our conscience? Scientifically, its a slave to the brain, providing it the basic necessity of blood. The relationship is highly interesting though and it will reveal a common link to lots of relationships both superficial and natural. The brain is made up of tissues and other biological components that like every other organ needs blood. The brain however does not produce blood. The heart functions to produce blood, independent of the brain at least on a voluntary level. Involuntarily the brain maybe controlling that too, maybe the brain does secretly produce blood in a sense.
We dont know what the brain is capable of involuntarily. Maybe its beyond our control, but then we would have to define 'control' for that. So by stating what is not true we are trying prove a something false. So if it did control everything, why would it let the body deteriorate with diseases? Maybe it shares a symbiotic relation with another organ, maybe the heart.

When in a dilemma, or a choice we often say that we can listen to either our heart or our mind. Almost often they are different. Perhaps another reason to disbelieve the supreme authority of the brain. Now what if we were able to artificially influence the brain. Our brains would be working to develop a means to counter itself. Kind of a paradox situation? Will our brains allow us to ever do that? Or is it not under our brain's capacity to do so. Is it why we still dont know about the existence of the universe? Why does a brain end its own life? Why do we commit suicide?

The author wishes to convey that he is depressed and of highly unstable mind. Here is wishing him a fast recovery and hope he feels better soon

Lets take a look at how most of these viruses/trojans work.

1. It usually begins by a machine getting infected via the internet (cracks, keys, porn dialers, exes etc)
2. Upon inserting the USB drive in a infected machine, the virus copies itself to the USB drive(in a sstem hidden folder) and overwrites autorun.inf with a malicious one (which will auto execute the virus)
3. When unplugged and plugged into a fresh machine, Autorun.inf is called by Windows(yeah Windows is that stupid) thus self executing the virus, which then infects the host machine.

In recent times Microsoft has asked users to disable Autorun, although not released as a patch, You need to download TweakUI to do so. Windows 7 however disables Autorun for removable drives by default.

The next hurdle is the quality of virus themselves. They have grown so wild, are known by a million names, thus making it almost impossible for even the most advanced Anti-Virus to catch them. I ll explain this best with my personal example, something that happened just a week ago. I borrowed a friends hard drive to install a game. At that time i was testing Panda CloudAV. As soon as i plugged in the HD, Win32/Sality (ah you wile sonofabtch) infected my PC. And before i knew it, half my EXE's were already infected. For those who dont know Win32/Sality..well its a rampant exe affecting virus which is very hard to remove. Spent 2 sleepless nights trying to manually remove it and did succeed to a great extent (sans few registry entries and corrupt drivers). I tired all Anti Malware (Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware, Spyware Doctor), AntiVirus products, the free ones though, none of them could repair it. They only offered to Quarantine or delete the legitimate EXE files which were infected. Manual removal : here here
Also helped was the forums at Majorgeeks. So after the virus was partially removed,i thought i should invest in a premium licensed copy of a AntiVirus. Although i have always used Avira Free AV, i was intrigued by eScan's malware detection scores. So i went for it(i had not slept for a day and half) The next day, the guy running the server offers me McAfee saying it will get rid of Sality. I was surprised, but later realised it was a corporate trial. Ran the scan it didnt detect anything. So i uninstalled that and then installed my bought copy of eScan. The website link was of an older version, so had to hunt around for the latest version, which i got it on the eScan Wiki. Very disappointed at the somewhat armature approach of eScan. Ran that scan too, again no detection. So finally safe!

To test now, i took my pendrive and plugged into a friend's machine which has a trojan thriving happily. Plugged it back in my computer, hoping escan will auto scan the removable drive. It did not. Only corporate edition does that. Shit Not feeling too bad i ran the on demand scanner. It found nothing ! Oh my god! Fired up command prompt and did did a directory listing
F:\ dir /a /s
Aha, the exe is siting there smug! Baffled i ran more scanners on it. Nothing. I tried to copy that exe and rename it and then test it individually , couldn't do that. Not even via command prompt, its like that file does not exist! Most AntiVirus couldn't determine the contents of the exe and just skip it. I then pulled out my Laptop, which is running Ubuntu 9.10. Plugged in my removable drive, whistled whilst i copied the "system hidden" exe's (sitting ducks on Linux!) on to a another Removable drive and renamed it. Before plugging it back, I intalled Panda's USB Vaccine on the Windows workstation. Then plugged the USB drive in it. Hmm no Autorun, good. Navigated to the folder, Aha! The virus folder exits, seemingly empty but i know what lurks there! Again ran a dir command to confirm. Yep it was there! Then i ran a online scanner (Virus Total and DrWeb) on the exe file. It got deed by DrWeb and 4 out of 41 AV on VirusTotal. Wow. Pevex detected it as High Risk Cloaked Malware. The others which detected it were Microsoft, Prevex, Sohpos and Nod32. Guess i should have bought Prevex instead of eScan (almost the same cost). Sure eScan is good but it wont remove the ever persistent Malware which is on every machine in the Lab. Well guess there is just one way to fix this problem - before inssetig any Removable Device, just plug it to my netbook, navigate via Linux, handpick the smug Malware, and Shift+delete! Poof!
Oh did i mention, i am a Linux user

(will add pictures soon, keep checking this page, as of now, my eyes wont stay open any longer)

1. Why did the Chopper take off in bad weather?
2. Was the Helicopter airworthy?Why did the Emergency Locator Transmitter(ELT) not get activated upon crash?
3. Why is the communication framework in India still so poor that many parts of our country are inaccessible and have no means of communication

But probably the most bizarre and shocking question raised by a journalist put serious question on the credibility of Journalism and Journalism ethics. Vikram Sharma of expressbuzz.com (Part of Indian Express group) has written a blog entry asking if the Pilot was in a peaceful mental condition. Baseless and written in poor taste this article raises a finger on a highly qualified Pilot who has served in the Indian Air Force for 25years. He has commanded a squadron under high pressure situations and has over 7000hours of flying experience under his belt. The 2nd of September was just an unlucky day for him and others on board. Its a risky job and daredevils like Gp Capt. SK Bhatia face this challenge everyday as a routine. Writing such thoughtless and surreal articles without having concrete proof and accusing such a great personality is something the Journalist and his organization should be ashamed of. Have some compassion for what the families of the departed are going through. I do not say, burry the matter. Enquire, ask questions , demand to know the truth - but do all this before pointing fingers and accusing a professional of amateurism. Forcing his Son to come and defend his father is not something the Indian Express should be responsible for. Have some sanctity for the departed and not cloud his character by cheap publicity.

There are many ways to define our fragile existence. Many ways to give it meaning. But it is our memories that shape its purpose and give it context. The private assortment of images, fears, loves, regrets. For it is the cruel irony of life that we are destined to hold the dark with the light. The good with the evil. Success with disappointment. This is what separates us. What makes us human. And in the end, we must fight to hold on to.
-Heroes : 2.08

Written in memory of Gp Capt. SK Bhatia , may your soul rest in peace

1. Day 1 : PCLinuxOS 2009.2
   Claimed to be the closest-to-windows Linux distro, PCLinuxOS is quite a popular Linux distribution. Its built on Mandriva Linux with RPM(apt) as its pacakge manager. It comes with a good range of softwares pre-installed. Multimedia codecs, Flash are amongst the packages included to give runs-out-of-the-box use. However open-office is missing, installable just one click away. With KDE 3.5 as its default; it prefers to stick to the older version of KDE-perhaps new users find KDE 4 intimidating. Installation was not very smooth though. The partitioner was very ambiguous about which partition it has selected. I selected a spare windows partition and asked it to delete. On hitting delete nothing happend. So i hit delete twice. Still nothing. After some hunting i finally manged to delete the partition. Selected / to be formatted as the new ext4. Clicked next. Error: Could not mount the partition / (Not exact words). Quit insaller, started again. This time in the partitioner i selected - Use existing partitions. I thought it would automatically detect the existing Liunux partition and install on that. It understood as : Delete D and C drive. WTF! It swiftly deleted both partitions before i could do anything. Oh bugger! With no OS left i installed Linux with a heavy heart. (Of course at this time my dad was busy admiring his son hard at work on the laptop drinking tea ) So the first thing i googled after installing the OS ( Oh after that the installer was smooth - already having done the damage! These Linux developers really hate windows!) on how to recover lost partitions. Popular links suggested Test Disk. I ran a preliminary check to see if its already installed on the system. It was! and After installing this distro i was pretty happy. Using it for about 2 hours it seemed to fade away the transition-gap between windows and linux. Firefox ran fast with all codes and java support.
2. Day 2: PCLinuxOS 2009.2 Still running smoothly I thought i had found the perfect newbiee Linux Linux OS. Another day where linux Just works!
3. Day 3: PCLinuxOS 2009.2 3rd day is a bug! The PCLinuxOS dream crashed. Firefox was acting strange. PDF files even though associated with KPDF in Konqueror kept opening in GIMP when double clicked from the Downloads section of Firefox. After a lot of googling and repeated instructions to Fx to open PDF in XPDF i gave up. And suddenly more problems came to light. They were all there, we just never noticed it. KDE 3.5 is painful at doing simple tasks. Just simply the fact the Konqueror wants to open all files inline was getting on my nerves. Fx crashed thrice that day. The PCLinuxOS 2009 dream had crashed. It was time to get rid of it.
4. Day 4: openSUSE 11: A quick test on www.zegeniestudios.com reveled i should try this popular Linux distro. I had a live CD iso file lying on my external harddrive so i went ahead and put it on a USB stick(instead of wasting a CD) using UNetbootin. However openSUSE handles live ISO differently. Spent 10 minutes figuring out how and why. Googling revealed this : http://en.opensuse.org/Live_USB_stick
   Sadly it required a pre-existing openSUSE installed. Sad. I thought i should be able to tweak the pre existing ISO dump on the USB stick to make it boot. Yes there was a way! Thanks to this link on a blog i managed to tweak some files and boot the Live CD. Once in it i manged to start install. Install blazed through rapidly and i had a installed Linux distro ready. The first thing i did was of course make a backup of the 'D Drive' which contained all the important files. Also put all recovered images and files in the external harddrive. Next hurdle was the Nvidia drivers. While openSUSE offers a magical one-click install system it doesnt work all the time. So when i installed the restricted Nvidia modules X crashed on rebooting. Struggled for some more time to get the resolution right. Removed resintalled and removed again. Tried some more futile attempts but nothing worked out. Several hours later it worked, magically! Well once that was done, i started installing the multimedia codecs. Took me a while to figure out how to do that. Being a 2year Ubuntu user i was little confused. Something didnt feel right. You know how they say that the person who really loves you knows exactly how to make things right? Who says that, Uhm People do, People say it! Well so when i would not take my girlfriend;s call and talk garbage (Xorgs and Kernels) while talking to her, she mailed me a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 Live Disc. Lifesaver she is i tell ya!
5. Day 5: Ubuntu 9.04! I dont know why didnt i do this before. I took all of 10minutes to get this bad boy installed on the laptop and another 5 to get the resolution right and codes installed. In 1 hour this OS was merrily running with perfection. With a rich creamy blend of brown and red, Ubuntu is my perfect Operating System. I wish all Ubuntu developers good luck with the 100 papercuts drive and I will contribute to my best extent.