The Wii experience

To break the 'lull' surrounding 3 months of my inactivity, lets start with the blast i have been having playing the Wii. I have never been a serious gamer and gaming consoles have always ranked low on my wish list. But the Wii changed all that in an instant - zap!

I almost bought a PS3, partly for its next-gen blu-ray player. When the Wii was launched last November, the whole internet was abuzz with its distinguishing, motion sensing wireless controller.

Some of my colleagues who are early game adopters were all praise for it. Did a couple of back and forths, as i always do, and was ready to jump on the Wii bandwagon.

...and after that determination can you guess how long it was before i could wrap my hands around a Wii - 3 whole months..no kidding.

Countless late night trips, early morning calls and frustration ended when a Best Buy store 45 mins away had 10 in stock. My excitement was that of a one year old who had just received his favorite candy...ahh...so long.

With the Wii, its a whole new world. Everyone who picks it up is an instant expert. It's as close to having pure fun as it gets...hours of addictive play and tons of simple pleasurable joy.

Along with the bundled Wii Sports, I have been playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy and my only complaint - 24hrs in a day are sufficient no more !

Nintendo's vision of reaching out to once disinterested gamers is all but accomplished and a whole year after its release, you still see people complaining about not being able to find the Wii - a true testament to its reach and popularity.

Such is the power of an idea.. a 'revolution' in the true sense of the word.

Kino Na Tabi

At lunch time, we have the habit of watching a TV series episode on one of the projector room big screens. We usually get a carry-out from some food joint and lock ourselves up for the next hour.

When we finished the second season of The Office, my friend popped-in a (Japanese) anime, Kino No Tabi , supposedly to act as a filler before we could find something else.

But after watching just two episodes I was hooked. I have never watched anime before and I am impressed, to say the very least.

Kino Na Tabi(Kino's Journey) is a deep, thoughtful, character driven anime. It is the story of a girl named Kino who travels the world with her talking motorad Hermes.

In the series, we come across countries with some very strange customs and traditions. As we watch each country through Kino's eyes, no viewpoints are forced on us. The information is there for each one of us to interpret and assimilate.

It just tells you the story without necessarily giving you all the answers...very very thought provoking!

"The world is not beautiful; Therefore, it is." rings deeply in my heart.

The sky is boundless, because it's the mirror of my soul.It changes colors everyday, as if it's reflecting my heart.

Sooo poetic and sooo surreal...

Words can't do this beautiful anime enough justice. Watch it and get a whole new perspective on life.

July 4 Roap Trip

I am a long drive freak - Big Time. Going places is something that really excites me and if its a road trip, helluva lot better. Be driver or passenger, I am always ready to hop on.

So when plans for this July 4th were up in the air we decided to take 2 days off before or after and cover the Midwestern US.

After a lot of brain storming, this is how the trip was like. The best part is the trip is a LOOP.

As I already said, I LOVE road trips and here are the Top 5 by distance not counting the one I just had. Any place I stopped as part of site-seeing or visiting friends is mentioned. If I made berth just to rest, its not in there.

Dallas,TX - Colorado Springs, CO - Denver, CO - Dallas, TX
1,677 mi – About 1 day 3 hours

Dallas, TX - Cleveland, OH
1,181 mi – About 18 hours 11 mins

Dallas,TX - Memphis,TN - Nashville, TN - Greensboro, NC
1,127 mi – About 17 hours 19 mins

Phoenix,AZ - Las Vegas, NV - Grand Canyon, AZ - Phoenix, AZ
805 mi – About 13 hours 28 mins

Cleveland,OH - Louisville,KY - Cleveland,OH
697 mi – About 11 hours 14 mins

I have done so many other 300-600 mile trips, I cannot even start counting. I intend to undertake many more of these as time goes by.

Before I take leave, I should say Cloud Gate-Chicago , F1 Race Track-Indianapolis and Elevator System in the Gateway arch-St Louis were really marvelous and deserve a special mention.

Must See !

Who Owns The Strip

In Vegas, the house always wins.

Many of the largest hotel, casino and resort properties are located on The Strip - MGM Grand, Caesar's Palace, Bellagio, Paris, Luxor, Newyork-Newyork, Excalibur.

It is more than likely that your squandered money goes to fill the pockets of just two.

Wondering how?

You will be surprised to know that despite so many different casinos and varied building themes, most of The Strip is owned by just two companies - MGM Mirage and Harrah's Entertainment.

Harrah's is in fact also the largest gaming company in the world followed by MGM Mirage.

Here is an image from Wikipedia edited to contain what these two big guys own on The Strip.

BTW in my case, the house did not always win. In Atlantic City, I won $900 on slot machines. Sweet huh!

However in Vegas I lost around 200 bucks at the end of a 2 day gambling frenzy.

So when you go to Vegas next time, you will know who is exactly taking your money.

Cruelty and Kitchen

With the International Whaling Commission(IWC) annual meeting underway last month, questions about whaling and animal rights in general surfaced again. Whale meat is a picky issue and demonstrates the schism that exists in todays world.

If you are meat eating or just don't care, you might be inclined to think what's all this fuss about. Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion, a different outlook towards life and I respect that. Be what suits you best.

This article on BBC explores how culture, religion and customs influence what's acceptable and what's not as food and how we have evolved to be so different from each other. The original article is embedded in an iframe here.

I know its kinda hard to read it here, but my site template seems to be restricting the width of the iframe window.

So what is your friend browsing

Curiosity is a good thing. It makes a creature question the how,why and what of its surroundings and as a result increases awareness and understanding.

So how many times have you wondered what your friend sitting across the couch(or in his room) is doing with his head buried in his laptop.

This is intended to be just an experiment and not invade some else's personal space. I wanted to prove to myself that this is something simple to accomplish. Organizations do this all the time but they have more resources, equipment and money.

So I embarked on my research and a possible implementation.

I figured that a network protocol analyzer and a little tweaking on the router should do it for me. And the right software turned out to be Wireshark (formerly known as Ethereal). The best part is Wireshark is free.

The fundamental thing that needs to happen to capture packets that are not addressed to your NIC is to run it in promiscuous mode or monitor mode. And not all cards support this feature. Luckily my LAN Adapter supported promiscuous mode.

When I put my NIC into promiscuous mode, I wasn't seeing any packets not addressed to me. Strange I thought.

Researched again and found out all routers are by default switched. What that means is to improve network efficiency(prevent collisions), the router sends only the traffic that is addressed to you on your CAT5 cable. So the router also acts as a filter and to be able to do anything, you will have to capture traffic before it passes to your router( between your cable modem and router )

I then thought"How about my wireless network. By its very nature, it should be amenable to promiscuous capture."

Tried that and no luck there as well since my Wireless NIC did not support promiscuous mode.

Hmm... so much for my sniffing experiment. But I was adamant to get this thing working.

Again researched...and the answer turned out to be the good old Ethernet Hub.

Hubs were the norm once upon a time when switches were still expensive. A Hub is basically a repeater and any packet entering any port is broadcast out on every other port (every port other than the port of entry).

"Thats it !. That's what I need to get going."

Turned out, not an easy thing to find a hub these days. No one sells them anymore. Circuitcity, Microcenter, Staples, Compusa, Frys, Buy.com, JR.com, Amazon(new ones) no where.
At last I found one at BestBuy - Dynex 4 port Hub.

Armed with the hub, I started tweaking my home network again.The key is to plug your hub between the cable modem and the router. And run the LAN cable from one of the ports on the hub to your laptop.

..and viola ! It worked like a charm. The software was capturing all sorts of traffic(URLs) on the network.

Now, I was the God of my home network. I was seeing everything my friends were browsing. So much for their corner seat...

A few hours into the experiment, the network started showing sluggishness because of collision problems. Since hubs are unsophisticated broadcast devices,only one device can successfully transmit at a time and each host remains responsible for collision detection and retransmission. So I had to take the hub out.

In the end, I was happy to achieve what I set out to do and learnt a lot about networks and networking equipment in the process.

May my curiosity rest in peace now, until something else awakens it... AGAIN.

Orkut - Don't scraps bother you

Orkut does an amazing job of networking you with long lost friends. No wonder, According to Wikipedia, Orkut is the second most visited website in India. But your amusing fun scraps and pomp-pomp actions lead to consequences that you will have to face one day.

Orkut should really be commended for making its appeal work at such a personal level. Be it the soothing theme color, ease of use or lack of advertisements on personal profiles.

In this era of web notoriety where people have second thoughts divulging personal information, the scrapbooks at orkut are filled with many intimate, not so public comments. Insanely large number of people have in excess of 1000 scraps. Do they realize that a part of their private life is now public, accessible to everyone.

I do realize that scrapping is a quick way of keeping in touch. Nicely fills a niche between messaging and emailing. But how can people be so naive as to make comments that are not intended for public consumption.

... and I have seen friends (ab)using this information.

Scrounge through the scraps, conversations and you will be surprised as to how much information you can garner.

Its akin to building a missing person profile or a terror-suspect case file for the FBI or Interpol. Analyze the scraps, friends, communities, follow conversations if you find them informative and you have got yourself a plethora of clues.

The more time you are willing to spend, the more of the puzzle you can solve and deduce what kinda person you are looking at.

What better use for this than to clandestinely know about your potential life partner. If you can narrow down a profile based on the information available to you via a marriage proposal, its just a matter of time and patience before you can piece together his/her life.

How about this for marketing tag line - Orkut : The Unofficial Marriage Proposal Search Database.

Doesn't this invasion of privacy alarm you. You better be because you never know who is looking. Friends who have taken note have since then deleted scraps, removed testimonials and altered their profiles. Believe me, I have seen enough negative consequences of profile portrayals in Orkut.

Its never high time to do the right thing. Make the right judgment call and be the boss of what the world knows about you.

Happy Orkuting !!

Google can't satisfy ...

This is really funny!. Copied from Matt McSpirit's blog. Another funny one is on Steve Clayton's blog.

Spidey spins his web again

gatorIndex: 3.5/5.0

Spidey-3 has officially(finally) arrived, shattering an assortment of records on its way to worldwide box office dominance.

But was the movie really that good Or did the success of spidey-2 make fans(like me) flock theaters in anticipation of yet another fantastic flick from Sam Raimi's stable.

Well if my opinion counts, the movie was not half as good as the second installment. And the ratings say critics agree too. It has a lowly 61% on RottenTomatoes and a B- on yahoo movies. Seems like I am not alone here.

My initial intention was to go watch the premiere show as I did for Spidey-2. Alas! sold out at AMC Mayfield, when I checked the Tuesday before release. So I advanced booked myself a Friday night 10:15 @ Fandango and eagerly awaited the weekend. BTW the premiere show for spidey-2 two yrs ago was a sell-out too. Back then, having arrived at the theater a little too late, I found myself staring at an unbelievably big screen. Proximity perhaps, first row to be precise. I mean honestly, who would expect such huge crowds for a Thurs night 11:59 show. I had to move my head around to capture all the action. In the end, well worth every penny.

The 10:15 show this time wasn't exactly a sell out. I could still see considerable empty seats from the view above.

After 2.5 hrs, I walked out the theater with a eerie feeling...did not enjoy the movie as much as I would have wanted to. Sammy as I see it, tried to cover too much ground, too little character development, lack of smooth flow in story, cheesy fan cheering and bash parties, convenient insertions(the kiss,butler). I think the kiss scene was inserted to just precipitate things a little faster, so that more of something else could be covered. Bad choice sammy!

Still the movie wasn't really that bad. Just that, the expectations were so high, It could not deliver at that level. This is one of those movies that I would have watched nevertheless. Giving credit where credit's due, the special effects were amazing.

Lot of sequels coming out this summer and these make my must watch list : Shrek the Third, Pirates of the Caribbean : At World's End, The Bourne Ultimatum, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Watch out for these this summer!

Firefox is recommended browser

Videohybrid displays this message when you visit them on a browser other than Firefox. I have come across numerous websites that are the other way around. Never have I seen anyone put up a banner like this in support of Firefox. Amazing!

If you have ever read my previous posts, you know I am a big Firefox fanatic. There is so much value added stuff in Firefox that is glaringly absent in IE7. But If you are using IE7, this Find As You Type extension is a MUST HAVE and takes a lot of the pain off your surfing experience.

My browser right now is Grand Paradiso Alpha 1. Contributing my 2 cents to the Firefox community with user testing and crash reporting.

If you are wondering what Videohybrid is, it is one of those next generation video aggregators that make it easy to find you favorite shows, movies. It is illegal though as it streams videos from other websites that house illegal content like dailymotion. A post on techcrunch made it highly visible and brought with it unprecedented load and traffic that has seen the site go down more than once.

The point here is, I am happy to see such a banner, but would truly love to see a day where all browsers follow and implement common standards. Well, Thats still a long way away, made even harder by IE's majority share and Microsoft's own way of doing things.

Have you tried Coke Zero yet?

I am one of those guys who needs a constant supply of coke to keep going. I used to gulp down as many as 8-9 a day. I ABSOLUTELY love the taste !. But over time, all those calories and carbonated water started making me feel stomach heavy.

I unsuccessfully tried switching to diet coke or diet pepsi to at least cut down on the calorie intake. Ho diet coke is horrible and diet pepsi I can do with, but not for long. So I found myself coming back to coke again and again. Something in it.. the taste .. may be the caffeine.

With some restraint, I can now get away with 2 a day. Trident has really been helpful in this regard. I realized chewing Trident brings down my urge to grab myself a coke. So I find myself chewing Trident all day, spitting it out only to have lunch.

One of these days I watched the sue-coke-zero-for-taste-infringement commercials. They are really funny. Given the diet coke experience, I wasn't really looking forward to a rich taste...but to my surprise it was real close to coke classic. Well, you can't make it taste exactly like coke classic when it has only zero calories. It was close enough that I decided to give it a chance. So I have been training myself to Coke Zero and am officially switching from Coke Classic to Coke Zero, AT LAST.

Eventually, I would love to get away from the urge to drink coke anymore. So If you are looking for Coke-ness without the calories, Coke Zero is worth a shot.

Off to another Coke Zero and wilfing !

SQL Short-circuit

This post looks at short-circuiting in SQL Server 2000/2005 and its caveats.

Consider a simple product search scenario. If the user enters something in the search box, you want to retrieve product results pertaining to the search text, otherwise you want to bring in all the products, effectively ignoring the parameter.Ideally you will page the results.

This is a typical example of Optional Parameters, requiring a Conditional Where Clause in your translation to SQL.

A simple SQL statement fails to capture this essential part of the problem domain and there seems to be no easy way to accomplish this. Most of the developers resort to using dynamic SQL, table variables with joins, If expressions or CASE Statements to accomplish this. Short-circuiting can come in handy in these situations and gives a performance boost that is worth investigating.

To illustrate that SQL does indeed support this feature, execute the statement below as indicated by Mark Cohen on his blog.

Select 1 Where 1=1 or 1/0=0

We indeed don't get a divide by zero exception reinforcing our claim that SQL Server does have short-circuiting support.

As Jeff points out, many of the CASE expressions can be converted into boolean logic and hence take advantage of short-circuiting.

Assume @CustomerID = -1 is the default value, indicating that nothing was passed in. Optional Parameters would generally be coded as one of these

Exec sp_executesql @YourDynamicStatement

(Or)

If @CustomerID = -1
Select * from Sales.Customer
Else
Select * from Sales.Customer Where CustomerID = @CustomerID

(Or)

Select * from Customer
Where
Case @CustomerID
When -1 Then 1
Else
Case When @CustomerID = CustomerID Then 1 Else 0 End
End = 1

(Or)

Select * from Customer
Where CustomerID =
Case
When @CustomerID = -1 Then CustomerID
Else @CustomerID
End

The equivalent boolean logic(with short-circuit) would be as below Where (@CustomerID = -1 or CustomerID = @CustomerID)

When @CustomerID = -1 , indicating that nothing is passed in, the right side expression is never evaluated.

As you can see, this is easily readable as well as maintainable.

Now if you look at the comments in Jeff's blog, a user complains that his short circuit doesn't work.

Select * from Northwind..Orders
Where CustomerID = CustomerID and OrderID > 1/(0*year(getdate()))

You would expect this statement to not generate a Divide By Zero exception, but it does. So Whats wrong here.

We found out, the short circuit works only if the expression is DETERMINISTIC. That is, if the engine can look at the expression and determine its truth value without having to run the query, then the engine short-circuits the statement, effectively ignoring the entire expression.

Eg.; The truth value of @CustomerId = -1 can be determined before hand and hence is deterministic.Similary are

Select 1 Where getdate()=getdate() and 1/0=0

Select 1 Where 1=1 or 1/0=0

Select 1 Where 1=1/0 or 1=1

So as long as the expression is deterministic (truth value can be determined), you can take advantage of short-circuiting.

Though CustomerID = CustomerID seems deterministic in a fleeting glance, it is NOT DETERMINISTIC because in SQL by default null IS NOT EQUAL to null. So the engine cannot determine before hand the value of the left side expression and hence cannot short-circuit and fails.

So the next time you are doing Conditional Where clauses, convert the condition into boolean logic and take advantage of short-circuiting built into SQL Server.

Layman Web 2.0 Video

Micheal Wesch at Kanas State University created this amazing layman Web 2.0 video The Machine is Us/ing Us.



It illustrates the concepts that are shaping today's web in a surprisingly simple way . And to think that he is a cultural anthropology professor amazes me. XML, RSS, Content sharing, Tagging, Social Bookmarking, the idea that the machine is learning a new idea with every click and the creation of a database-backed web are all showcased.

My favorite part is when content from disparate sources seamless blends into the sections of the page where dropped. Drives home the powerful concept of form and content separation.

There is nothing geeky about the video. Must watch for everybody. Repeat after me : We are the Web

Transatlantic with Google Maps

Ever wondered what Google maps would do if your route spanned water bodies. That's what we precisely did today and discovered some amusing things. We entered Cleveland,OH to London,UK and Google Maps did plot us a route across the Atlantic.

And how exactly were we supposed to cross the Atlantic. SWIM ...LOL
And how long was this going to take ... Only 29 days 17 hours.

Afer a hearty laugh, we sat down to dig a little deeper. It seemed to work only from a destination in US to select destinations in Europe across the Atlantic. We tried South America, Europe, Australia, Asia with no luck. Another thing we observed was, a transatlantic "swim" would always take you along the same path in the Atlantic as shown by points 36 and 38, irrespective of the source and destination. Thats how the algorithm seems to work.

This means a traveler from Miami,FL to London,UK will have to go to Newyork, swim across to France and then cross the English Channel. haaa haaa.. God help the guy !

BTW, have your swimsuit ready to plunge into the frigid, shark infested Atlantic waters with Google Maps.

Life Savers [ Google Bookmarks ]

With millions of sites and gazillions of web pages, it is sometimes hard to land on the perfect page you are looking for. Once you find it, any sane user would be sure to bookmark it(add to favorites).

But the increasing dilemma users like me are facing is how to consolidate everything that has ever been bookmarked. Most of the time I end up emailing myself all the links I have discovered so that they are accessible to me at a later time.

Enter Google Bookmarks... and life is a lot better
Login to your google account and viola all your bookmarks are there . BTW you have to have Google Toolbar installed to access the bookmarks feature, which takes only a couple of minutes to download and install.

You can create labels to organize your bookmarks.It will also allow you to import you exising browser bookmarks. The bookmark organization page allows you to save some comments for each of the links which is kinda cool.

But the last time I checked, It was still missing a lot of good to have features which might be coming in future upgrades of the toolbar. You cannot nest labels right now. Once you add a bookmark, you cannot push it to a different label without actually removing it and re adding it. The online organization page is also rudimentary at best. Given google's fixation for drag drops, may be the page should feature a drag drop interface to reorganize bookmarks.

del.icio.us is another great place to store your bookmarks and extensions are available to use it from the comfort of your toolbar. A lot of other websites have popped up with similar concepts but I believe we still have a long way to go...

Sand Dunes : Namibia

Nature never ceases to amaze me. Look at these 12000 feet vistas of sand in Namibia. You are sure to gape in awe and wonder at the wonderful artwork of nature.


I first took notice of the mammoth size of these in the Where the hell is Matt? video. Then yesterday a photo of the dunes popped up on BBC photo section.

if using firefox, google map image of Namibia will be displayed
in the div below

la natura, li saluto !

Image Courtesy : Wikipedia and BBC

Life Savers [ BEGIN TRAN ]

Starting with this post, I am planning to do a series titled 'Life Savers' ... tips, tricks, helpers that I learn over the course of my life that are simple, small and yet powerful. I use them day-in and day-out..make my life so much more efficient and managable.

Simple Problem Scenario :
You are to run an UPDATE statement in the Query Analyzer to change the address of a person with AddressID = 1

You try to craft the UPDATE query. Before you do that, it is always a good practice to do an equivalent SELECT statement. So our SELECT query is going to look like this

USE AdventureWorks
GO

SELECT *
FROM Person.Address
WHERE AddressID = 1

(1 row(s) affected)

Now for the UPDATE query

--SELECT *
--FROM Person.Address
UPDATE Person.Address
SET AddressLine1 = '6553 MapleWood Dr '
WHERE AddressID = 1

You run the update and the result window shows
(19614 row(s) affected)

Oops! You were expecting only one row to get updated. To your anguish you realize you forgot to highlight the filter part when you ran the update. Alas ! you are in a big mess now and potentially looking at a long day ahead of you.

Now for our little trick that would have avoided this pitfall.

Before you do any database UPDATE from Query Analyzer, ALWAYS ALWAYS start it with a BEGIN TRAN

BEGIN TRAN

--SELECT *
--FROM Person.Address
UPDATE Person.Address
SET AddressLine1 = '6553 MapleWood Dr '
WHERE AddressID = 1

-- COMMIT TRAN (Or) ROLLBACK TRAN

If the number of rows affected are equivalent to what the SELECT statement gave you, go ahead and do the COMMIT TRAN.

If you see unexpected results like above, do a ROLLBACK TRAN instead.

These 3 simple, amazing lines prevent accidental UPDATEs and can save you tons of time and headache.

Always Recommended.

Update 2007.04.07 : I re-thought about the 'Life Savers' title and in retrospect it seems a little too intense for the topics I am planning to cover under this series. So I will probably be dropping the naming convention in future posts and use something of a milder nature.

Message Archive

As Life moves forward, memories fade away into oblivion ... and everything you once cherished and held close to your heart are lost forever in the deepest chasms of your brain. You will need the equivalent of bread crumbs to track back and tie the intangible to the tangible to relish those moments once again. And I'm hoping this message archive will make some of that digging easy for me when I am too senile to recall . Lets start with archiving my Orkut profile messages and I intent to archive anything and everything over time. Seems like stupidity right now...but you never know, especially when it involves me!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Fiesta Bowl : What a game it was.
Broncos win in OT 43-42 with a gutsy 2 point conversion. College Football cries playoff..playoff..
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Final Potter book's title is out ..called..'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
.... and we are going to Glendale to play Ohio State ( Go Gators !! )
Sorry Michigan, but you had your shot !!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
With USC losing, you got to be retarded to leave out the Gators from the Championship Game.
(SEC Championship) Gators top Hogs : 38-28
Gators down Seminoles : 21 -14
Gators rip West Carolina : 62-0
Man this game was soooo close, I was going to cry... Gators escape the "Ol' Ball Coach" : 17-16
Gators survive Vandy : 25-19 ( Headed for the SEC Championship Game )
Gators take care of cocktail party business : 21-14 ( ... and USC goes down )
Error-prone Gators go down at Auburn : [17-27]
LSU Tigers are Gator meat : 23-10
Sweet revenge over the tide : 28-13
20th straight over Kentucky : 26-7
Gators swamp Volunteers with late comeback : 21-20
Gators vs UCF : 42-0
Gators vs Southern Mississippi : 34-7

Year Of The Gator

Today was the National Signing Day and the Gators landed another Title - The Nation's Top Recruiting Class.

1 Florida
2 Southern Cal
3 Tennessee
4 LSU
5 Texas
6 South Carolina
7 Auburn
8 Notre Dame
9 Georgia
10 Alabama

There were six SEC teams in the top 10, testament to the toughness and recruiting acumen of the South Eastern Conference.

Come football season and the Gators are going to do another chomp. You can bet on that.

College Football Pick'em

The new year is upon us and so are the BCS bowl games.

As I write, USC dominated the Rose bowl bombarding Michigan 32-18. This should silence all Michigan fans.

No more bickering on how the second best team was denied a chance to play for the national championship and how Florida sneaked in and blah blah blah ...

Imagine the backlash that would have been if Michigan beat USC and Florida lost to the Buckeyes by more than 3 points. Thank God we don't have to see that day.

This year, like every year I played the College Football Pick'em. Though I was intent on being more serious this year, I still missed Week 1. It's fun to do the predictions every week. The point spread makes it tough though.

I did ok this season. Could have been much better. I am planning on doing some betting starting next season. Wish me good luck.

College Football is real fun. Looking forward to the next regular season and of course pick'em.

Phishing Protection

IE7 and Firefox 2.0 have good mechanisms built into them to protect the unwary/casual user from phishing attacks.

Whenever I receive emails from financial establishments, I am extra cautious on what I do with them. I would rather type-in the url than click on some link in my inbox unless it has some state information on the url. In those circumstances, I double check to verify where the link actually takes me.

One of these days I received an email in my yahoo inbox supposedly from Chase. I recognized it right away as a phishing email.

I would generally delete the mail. But with the advertised phishing protection mechanisms of both the browsers, I thought may be I should test to see how these fare.

.. and both of them already had the link in their phishing databases. Responses are below.

FireFox


IE


I submitted the link to Phishtank some days later, but the site had already vanished and was unverifiable.

So guys, always beware. Help yourself by being cautious.

To learn more about the actual implementation, click here for IE and here for Firefox