DeeKaying @ Nettle

Check out the image below. A rare bug in the GMail interface.

On the sidelines of the PanIIT Alumini meet being held at IIT Madras , Vishwanathan Anand - World Champion of Chess put in an appearance and played 14 boards of chess in a rapid mode of play. This was the sequence of moves played at table 4 by Narendranath (a 2000ish rated player and captain of the IITM chess team whom I met while playing chess at the InterIIT sports meet held earlier). It was real fun. Have a look. White: Vishwanathan Anand Black: Narendranath (IITM)/Divye Kapoor(IITR) Match abandoned due to lack of time. 1. e4 c5      ; Sicilian Defense 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6     ; push the bishop 4. Bxc6 bxc6  ; have a doubled pawn 5. O-O d5     ; try opening the doubled pawn 6. d3 Bg4     ; try pinning the Knight 7. h3 Bh5     ; push back the bishop 8. Nc3 d4     ; push the Knight and block the center 9. Na4 b3     ;...

For those of you who have been regularly using GMail , the recent arrival of unexplained chats from your friends might have piqued your curiosity. A chat lands up in your GMail Inbox claiming to have been sent to you by one of your friends bearing some sort of cheesy one liners and that you should click on the link to view them. Something like this: Though usually I'm highly suspicious of these sorts of clicks, I went ahead and clicked it. (After all, Firefox, my favourite web browser has quite a decent track record as far as security is concerned).The site that opened up looked like: Now, I'm not going to be giving up my Google Account password to any site that just asks for it. No Way! Not a Chance! Not even if it boasts of the Google Talk logo. But then, there are all kinds of people in the world and some are likely to enter their Google ids and passwords due to ignorance. In my opinion, this site is a fraud that is directly and obviously obtaining access to userids and pas...

Update : This is part 1 of a 2 part series of posts that discuss generating all possible permutations/anagrams of a given string. This post discusses how to use the next_permutation function provided by the standard C++ library to generate the anagrams iteratively. The next post discusses a custom recursive implementation of how to achieve the same thing. See:  Recursively printing all permutations of a string containing duplicate characters. Have you ever thought of how to generate and display/print all possible permutations of a string (containing duplicate characters) such that every legal permutation appears atmost once in the final output, without taking a humungous amount of memory to keep track of all the permutations you have generated? This particular function utilizes a cool STL algorithm and generates all possible permutations of a string only once (whether the original string contained duplicates or not). int dup_permute(char *str, size_t length) {   ...

After 5 hours of mind wrenching tension and reams of code later, I've finally been selected for the internship programme at the Microsoft India Development Center (better known as Microsoft IDC ). The internship is going to last for atleast 8 weeks and I'll be getting accomodation for 15 days and travelling expenses in addition to my internship stipend. Looking forward to going to Hyderabad, anybody going to meet me there?

I came across this cool piece of text on a patents website. "The computer-readable medium of claim 23 wherein said workspace is used by a database system to create a plurality of run files, each of which contains a plurality of variable length records from said set of variable length records, as sorted by said database system using said workspace, said step of selectively removing comprises writing a next of the plurality of variable length records that are stored in said workspace out to a run file in a predetermined order, said method further having computer-executable instructions for performing steps comprising: determining that said set of variable length records is greater in size than said predetermined fixed extent of said workspace; creating one or more run files on a data storage medium; and writing out to said run file only those variable length record selected by said step of selectively removing subsequent to determining that said set of variable length...

Try typing about:crash in the title bar of Google Chrome and see this cute cross eyed robot! :-) Of course, you do know by now that Chrome is hottest new entrant on the browser block, don't you? Well, now you do. :-D Have a look at this review of Chrome on ZDNet.