Twist and tear and boogie woogie

Twist and tear and boogie woogie

Happy Birtyday. Google turned six. Have more wisdom than a 60 year old.

Google Code Jam

Google is organising international coding contest in collaboration with Topcoder (http://www.topcoder.com). With a total prize of US $50000. Registration for the same has already started and will end at September 15. For more informatio visit http://www.topcoder.com/googlecodejam

Solutions for the practice room questions can be found at http://codeing.blogspot.com

Exclusive blog for codes

This blog is deviating from its theme. I have created a new blog where I will only post code and related stuff. Only opinions here :). New blog is

http://codeing.blogspot.com

Google Strategy on Gmail

Have you ever asked question to yourself, why Gmail is so popular?
Before even its official launch there are tons of pages and numerous sites dedicated to Gmail. E-commerce sites were used just to get a gmail account. Which is free. People not affiliated with Google has already created Gmail compatible software components. You can see how desperate people are for Gmail after reading some messages at http://www.gmailswap.com.

So what are the reasons behind this hoopla!!!

Is it just because we love Google or is it 1000 MB quota. Answer to first question is definitely positive but it can't be the reason for Gmail's popularity. Also 1000 MB quota is being offered freely already by http://www.rediffmail.com and that has not even slightly decreased Gmail's popularity. And again I would like to remind you that Gmail is beta still.

Answer to all above conundrums is following two factors-
1) People's biggest shortcoming and inclination is to become distinguished from others around them.
2) Google's PhD folks really know great things about complexity of human behavior.

Google very cleverly made Gmail ELITE only by inviting some hardcore techies for beta testing. But Google also provided them with INVITE feature. What that means that these chosen few can invite anybody they like to test Google. Really a great strategic move by Google.

Can you imagine techies to change there email-id which they are using for years for all there contacts for any new service. But Google did it because invited people enjoyed being elite, being separate from others. And therefore they changed their email-ids quickly to @gmail cause it can very easily act as a show-off.

I do not know the exact numbers but I am sure by millions must have signed up for Gmail. A exact-match search at google for "@gmail.com" returned 377000 results.

So even before its launch Gmail is 1/16 of Hotmail. As "@hotmail.com" is returning 6,290,000 results.

What say?

I got Gmail

Finally got invite for gmail. I am very happy. I will write more about it. Google's business sense is making be astonished.

Topcoder Competition

I been taking part in topcoder's competitions since last few weeks. I think I should start posting my solutions here. I am still in DIV 2. :(

Western Hemisphere in Real Time.

B - 52s are scattered as toys of a 2 year old.

Party is Over!!!

Before Defragmentation - Some Tips to Speed Up

Defragmentation is a necessary evil. You can't escape from it. How much you dislike the fact that you need to getaway from your computer while some other program has completely overtaken its activities. Upto the point you can't even play music.

You can play music if your music files are on some other partition other than which you are currently defragmenting. But it will certainly degrade performance.

Execute the following steps before starting disk defragmentation. It will save lots of time.

1) Empty Recycle Bin
2) Empty Recent Files Folder
3) Empty Temp Folder
4) Empty Temporary Internet Files Folder
5) Move all big files to some other partition which you don't use frequently. For example I move my Downloads folder because all it contains is setup programs. Which do not required access once the program is installed.

On Windows 9X folders 2-4 can be found in C:\Windows and on 2000 and XP they are in C:\Document and Settings\%LOGIN_NAME%

Where %LOGIN_NAME% is your login.

If you had never done the above you will be surprised by the speed gain.

Port 445 mystery

Since last few days I was wondering why port 445 is open on my computer. This fact is scary that not only it was open all the time it is also a TCP port. Due to load of other concerns I ignored this behavior after conducting a Trojan scan and updating my firewall. Today I searched on Google for reference and awestruck by the fact that this is a NetBIOS port. I quickly checked my logs. Got some relief after finding no misadventure there.

Reason being, few days before service engineer came and he ridiculously changed settings to enable TCP/IP over NetBIOS. So heres a link from which I obtained information to disable the above.

http://ntsecurity.nu/papers/port445/

I know a shortcut though. Simply double click the blinking two-computer icon in your system tray. Yeah which shows the network traffic :). Select properties -> Select Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) -> Click Properties -> Click Advanced Button in new pop-up -> Select the WINS tab -> Select radio-button disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP.

One more thing uncheck Client for Microsoft Networks and File and Printer Sharing. As these two were also enabled.

To check above procedure worked or not. Go to command prompt and type netstat -an. I am relieved by seeing 445 is not in front of my IP.

What would be the material used for making balls at that time?