S Anand

Pickover’s site is always a pleasure to visit. His puzzles are great, but you really go there for a blend of art, computers, mathematics and science.

First and second looks much cheaper than Fabmart or Rediff. Compare Archer’s “To cut a long story short”, for example. Rediff: 167. Fabmart: 127. First and second: 105. Or “Built to last”. Rediff: not available. Fabmart: 354. First and second: 274. Oh well, I’m going to need a bot. Why can’t I make one?

Kjell Sandved goes about taking photographs of plants and animals that have strange patterns. You have to see the moth with a ‘Hi’ written on it to believe.

This site has a menu of messages that have been forwarded many times over. I never saw the point in forwarding jokes in the first place. You can always catch up with the good ones at rec.humor.funny.

Microsoft dumps Java. Doesn’t worry me to much. I’ve never had much use for Java as a user. They’ve ‘adopted’ Perl, though. And I was always a Perl fan.

CNet has a comprehensive outline on what’s happening all over the world on digital signatures. Frankly, I’m won over by CNet’s “Big Picture” concept.

First and Second claims to be the largest bookshop in India. It’s possible. They’re the only ones that stock The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I ordered them instantly, and it came in 2 days! I’m sold.

I’ve scanned the photos I took at Lehman Brothers during summers. Comments Praveen 10 Jul 2000 12:00 pm: I would really like to see some photos of LB Mumbai.

Whose sites are the most popular on this server? Last month, the top 10 sites were admissions, placement, Prof. Srinivasan’s, and Prof. Bandi’s. I ran http-analyze to get these results.

A paper at eLab talks about how CDNow prices its online advertisements. It argues that CPM is an archaic model, and measuring advertisement performance is more important.

Apps.com is a directory of Internet applications.

An behind-the-scenes report on a hacking attempt. These guys set up a trap and waited for it to get hacked. Once it did, they recorded the conversations of the hackers. If you’re UNIX savvy, it’s a must read.

The Internet Law Journal has a lot of stuff on legal issues on the Net. It’s going to come in handy for our dot-com project. So is dotcomfailures.com, which has details on failing dot-coms.

I bought Built to Last, Archer’s To Cut a Long Story Short, Crichton’s Timeline, Best Practices, and Handy’s The Age of Unreason at Fabmart. It was delivered in 5 days as promised.

Prof. Apte mentioned that the currency forward is not an unbiased estimator of the future spot rate, but is the certainty equivalent of it. The Kelly FAQ gives a good description of what certainty equivalence means.

Clinton signed the e-signature law. To be implemented in October, it’s an interesting contrast to our IT Bill.

The new Emerging Digital Economy report is out. I found the second and first extremely informative.

The Humane Genome Project maps what each of our genes do. You could spend hours exploring genes. It’s implications are quite interesting.

The IT Bill has been passed. That means digital signatures are the same as written ones. We’re hoping to make money on that! We wrote a first-draft proposal for our Business Modules in E-Commerce course.

There were 22 vacancies, and 45 were shortlisted (out of less than 70 applicants). We were interviewed by 5 panels, each with 2 professors. We had submitted our resumes, a writeup on why we were applying for the programme, various declarations and our grade sheet. Though it was rumoured that grades played a 50% part in shortlisting, it was not so. Each panel ranked their candidates independently (in which grades played only an implicit part) – so it was the interview that really counted. After ranking, they pooled the rankings across panels (this is probably where grades might come in) and allocated the first available preference by rank. If the universities you opted for are not available, you would not be considered for other universities even if your ranking is high. So it makes sense to fill out all the universities of your choice if you’re keen on going. ...