YAPCP

This weekend we had a heavy dose of gaming - quake 3 demo multiplayer ... and tell you, it is an excellent form of stress buster ! At the end of first session y'day morning, I was fired up to make my previous engine parallel ... and so we have it now : Yet Another Parallel Chess Program - and before you ask, no that is not what it is called :-)
It has been almost 10 months since I did chess programming - that too, last time it was just a quick and dirty engine for the tournament (lost previous sources : dont ask me how) - been a bit too involved with work off late to take my mind off things.

I was mentioning a line from 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' to Anoop today : "Life goes by pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." - I guess I should take a hint here ...

xkcd - 1337 series !

Absolutely brilliant series at xkcd - which starts here.
The 'mom' is allegedly introduced here initially : btw, this is a problem most programs do suffer from :-)

Latest passtime ...

Listen to songs on youtube : the ones which rarely come on tv nowadays.
I spend many a night drifting away to contentment, listening to songs from yesteryears ... when melody, lyrics and music were oh so vital ... like songs from Sargam for instance.

That, and the occasional gem of a video which some friend forwards :-)

World against facebook ?

Check this out.
On the face of it : I have this normal tendency to hate aligning with MSFT; but in this context, I would prefer if facebook won this battle.
For a while now, Google is trying to behave like a school yard bully and often tries to use its marketing muscle and not innovation to drive business ... most of the 'products' that google has come up with of late, have been way too mediocre for use : doesn't this pattern remind us of something from the past ? :-)

Either way, hopefully we will see better products & some good innovation in the offerings : so something good could come off this whole thing !