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Read Robert Ludlum novels

November 25, 2007 – 9:21 pm

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.

Prasad MNR | Novels | Comments (0)

Virtual Desktop

November 9, 2007 – 11:48 pm

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.

Prasad MNR | softwares | Comments (0)

The Gemini Contenders

November 9, 2007 – 11:45 pm

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.

Prasad MNR | Novels | Comments (0)

console

November 7, 2007 – 11:51 pm

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.

Transparent console
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.

Prasad MNR | softwares | Comments (0)

Diwali

October 22, 2007 – 12:26 am

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.

Prasad MNR | story | Comments (0)