A friend of mine send me this inspirational quote by Mark Twain
Dance like nobody’s watching;
love like you’ve never been hurt.
Sing like nobody’s listening;
live like it’s heaven on earth
— Mark Twain
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Google : Earth Day
Screenshot of the Google homepage showing solidarity with the Earth Hour effort. To quote from the Earth Hour website
“On 31 March 2007, 2.2 million people and 2100 Sydney businesses turned off their lights for one hour – Earth Hour. If the greenhouse reduction achieved in the Sydney CBD during Earth Hour was sustained for a year, it would be equivalent to taking 48,616 cars off the road for a year. ”
This year, a lot more people signed up and it was a global event. The stats are yet to be calculated, but I am proud that Chicago played a big part in this :). I did my part by turning down the heat :).
A case of reverse engineering
As I noted in my last post, I recently ran the Shamrock shuffle 8K. The official pictures for most of the races in US are taken by Marathonfoto. You can go to their website after the race, put in your Bib no and get a preview of the photos that can then be ordered from them. In previous years, I was happy with just taking the thumbnail of the picture and sharing it with my friends. Looks like the Marathonfoto folks decided to “beef” up their security this year and put a annoying “Proof” across the picture. When you log into the site, it shows a list of all the pictures they took of you.. the list looks like this
Clicking on any of the thumbnails brings up a popup looks like
Here’s what I did to get rid of the “Proof” text
- Checked the page source of the popup and figured that it was a flash application. Clever way of obfuscating the link to the source image..
- Knowing that the flash application would use generic HTTP connections in the background, I fired up “WireShark“, a traffic capture and analyzer tool, and clicked on the thumbnail again to fire up the popup.
- An analysis of the traffic showed that the flash app was calling out a particular URL to get the image. Here’s a screenshot of the analysis by Wireshark.
- Fire up a browser window and directly access the image with the URL from the traffic capture to get it without the “Proof” text :).. The original image looks like this.
First run of 2008 : Shamrock Shuffle
Successfully completed the first “official” race of the year :-). Completed the 2008 Shamrock shuffle in 49 min and 46 seconds. That’s roughly a 10 min/mile pace. Hope the next one, will be better.
The Few..The Smart.. The Kudithipudi's
Alright.. I blatantly stole that tag line from the US Marine Corps. But for the folks that know me, you know that I am extremely proud of my family name, even though it is so difficult to spell :). Here is a scan of an article from the 26th Feb edition of the “Border Mail“, a Australian local news paper. It is an article about some local high school kids that got a scholarship for their college education based on their overall merit. And right in the middle of them is my niece, Kavya. Congrats kiddo..
Restrooms and subliminal messaging..
On my recent trip to India, I had a layover at the Schipol airport in Amsterdam. We had a long layover and while we were whiling away the hours, my friend Hareesh asked me, if I noticed anything about the restrooms in the airport. I told him that I thought they were unusually neat for a public restroom. He went on to explain that this “neatness” was the result of a fake “fly” in the Urinals.
Here’s a long shot and a close up of the fly.
Apparently, the Airport administration got a lot of complaints in late 90s about the state of the restrooms and did a study on how to improve the cleanliness. And lo and behold, they came up with this idea of a “fake” fly. Apparently, when people see (on purpose or subliminally)Â the fly, they try to “clean” it up :).. I think the real reason is a that men just need a target to piss on :). So there are less spills and the restrooms end up being cleaner.
I noticed the same thing at the MindTree offices in Bangalore. But here the message was a bit more direct and blunt :). But it got the job done. The restrooms in that office were also spotless.
On a larger scale, subliminal messaging can be used to bring around huge changes. There is a whole wing of the US military (and am sure in governments around the world) dedicated to Psychological Operations. Check out the WikiPedia link for some interesting projects this unit worked on.
Overheard : Comment about computers
Computers are good at two things..Crunching numbers and Generating heat.
YouTube : Funny error message
I was doing a query on youtube and ran across this funny “500 error message”. I like it how they call their engineers highly trained monkeys 🙂
