Challenge to 'Free Will' on steroids

I am an avid follower of Scott Adam's blog ... and since the begining, he has been baiting nearly everyone : but his favourites are the religious nuts and the hardcore atheists.
Two of his most controversial topics are theory of evolution and free will.
In today's post, he has added a new dimension to mucking up peoples brains : check it out here - it is a classic case of Grey Walters's tortoise (refer "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose) - only thing is, Scott Adam's deviously uses it to argue that there is no free will :-)

I am going to follow this discussion with interest !!

Black Adder

In spite of most of my friends totally adoring this show, I have never had a chance to see it.
Until yesterday night that is ... oh boy, isn't it rib tickling funny !
Currently into last episode of season one and boy Rowan Atkinson is just amazingly hilarious :-))

Busy bee !

Been a busy bee since I got back from the xmpp interop event all those months back - hence the paucity of updates.
For one, we had a bunch of things to fix and for another we decided to redesign parts of the server in light of what we learned so that future changes become easier. This week, checked in a huge tonne of diffs and a whole bunch of new files - the total change around 1 Mb or so :-)
Does the server still work ? It does :-P We will see how much regressions when QA gets their hands on it ... *shiver*

In other news, started working on a new incremental attacktable based chess engine (ya, ya, god knows how many I have written by now !) : this time focus is on trying to find out how much of info can be leveraged from an attacktable in different facets of the engine, and surprisingly - it is extremely useful in a whole bunch of places : even places where I did not initially expect an impact.

And if you want a good laugh, take a look at the REST Dialogues 1 , 2. Its a nine part series, but the first two have been really good :-)

I was reminded of something strange today btw : A long time back, I posted this and this. In response to my first post, Kousik had actually commented about using xmpp as the backed (damn Haloscan - all the comments gone , gone :-( ).
At that time I did not know about xmpp - and yet today I was reflecting about something similar of how things like this could get retrofitted into xmpp if we solve the issues of scale (eg: 3, 4) with the xmpp federation (at the extreme ends so to speak).
The addressing/routing, authentication, privacy, server to federation, etc considerations are already handled within the protocol itself, and there are extensions on how to publish/subscribe, multicast on top of this network : along with alternate forms of connectivity like HTTP - not just direct tcp/ip - damn, someone using this to make an online marketplace can make a killing ! VC anyone ?!

*Update* Take a look at this post - embodies most of what I totally dislike about SOAP, other than the fact that it is so un-HTTP like and is essentially fancy rpc tunnelling on top of HTTP.

"Hot Blog !"

This would last only for a few hours today, but what the heck :
Currently (as I post this), my 'work blog' is in the "Hot blogs (today's hits)" sidebar at blogs.sun.com :-)
This is a first for me, and though fleeting fame, feels nice :-P

Lololololol

Scott Adams is amazingly hilarious and bitingly sarcastic - check out his latest post here : I am still laughing my heart off as I write this :-))

Cynics of the world - UNITE ! (ya right :-P)