India beat West Indies in the 4th and final ODI

India beat West Indies in the 4th and final 1-dayer, played at Baroda, by 160 runs, thereby winning the 4 match series by 3-1.

India were 341 / 3 with Tendulkar making unbeaten 100 runs in 76 balls, Dravid making 78, Ganguly making 68, Dhoni remaining not out on 40 and the centurian of the previous match Robin Utthappa making 28 before being caught by Gayle off Powell.

In reply, the Carribeans were bundled out for 181 in just 41.4 overs. The highest scorer in the WI innigs was M. Samuels with 55 off 63 balls.

This was Tendulkar's 41st ODI Century, comming off 76 balls and including 10 fours and a towering six.

This was Tendulkar's 1st Century after the one he hit in Malaysia against the same opponents in September 2006.

Shilpa is the winner!!!

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Shetty wins Celebrity Big Brother:

Shilpa Shetty has won the Celebrity Big Brother this year. Hats of the British voters who have collectively stiffled the voice of racism and shown to the world that they are truly multi-cultural.

Fix a Dead Pixel on an LCD

Daytipper: Welcome to Daytipper:

Technology
Fix a dead pixel on a LCD screen
Brought a new laptop home just to find a stuck pixel glaring back at you? Don't panic! Quite often, these pixels can be fixed with a bit of gentle massaging. Using a soft material (such as a lens cleaning rag) to protect the screen, gently rub the dead pixel in a clockwise motion for 30 seconds.

This is how city looked from my terrace around 7:30 in the morning today. It was unusually hazy. I haven't seen fog this thick in Hyderabad in my whole life.

The Electric Man

The Epoch Times | Chinese Man Invigorated by 220 Volts of Electricity:

This Chinese gentleman can withstand 220 Volts of electricity. Not only can he withstand the electric shock, he feels invigorated by the current flowing through his body.

Ma Xiangang feels no pain or convulsions when current flows through his body. In fact he can control the voltage flowing through his body.

He has undergone a series of tests at a Physics Lab at Haerbin Industry University, wherein it was found that his body's resistance was seven to eight times higher than a normal person' resistance.

Analysts: Al Qaeda has safe haven in Pakistan frontier - CNN.com:

This news item quotes U. S. intelligence analysts as follows -

Pakistan's tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan have become an accepted haven for al Qaeda leaders such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, a senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Wednesday.

The official is quoted to have said that this area has become a safe haven for not only the Taleban but the Al-Qaeda as well.

Kaun Banega crorepati

KBC III season began today on Star Plus at 9:00 pm. Shahrukh Khan, who is hosting the show this time, is doing a good job. Hope he is able to stabilize the sinking ship of Star.

Amitabhji we are really missing you on KBC. I hope this time round you take part in it as the Celebrity Contestant. We want to see you in the Hot Seat.

As for who is a better host? Of course, who else but Amitji.

Charge your batteries with tiny bacteria

Wired News: Power Up With Magnetic Bacteria:

A 16-year-old high school student has invented a new way of producing electricity by harnessing the brawny power of bacteria.

Kartik Madiraju, an 11th-grader from Montreal, was able to generate about half the voltage of a normal AA battery with a fifth of an ounce of naturally occurring magnetic bacteria. And the bacteria kept pumping current for 48 hours nonstop.

India beat West Indies

India West Indies by 14 runs in the first one-day match of the series, played yesterday. The match was played at Nagpur. However it was telecast live by Neo Sports, a channel that was not carried by TataSky, hence I could not watch it.

Ganguly and Gambhir   opened the India innings and thanks to a sparkling 98 by Ganguly, India could reach an intimidating total of 338-3. Gambhir with 69, Dhoni with 62 and Dravid with 54 also chipped in.

Shivnaraine Chandrapaul's valiant knock of 149 off 136 balls, which included 15 fours and 3 towering sixes could not save West Indies. Zaheer and Harbhajan took 2 wickets each and Sreesanth, Agarkar and Tendulkar took 1 each. Tendulkar again became Lara's nemesis when he had him stumped for 31.

So now India is 1 up in the one-day series. The next match is on Wednesday at Cuttak.

Jade Goody Eliminated from Big Brother

Jade Goody, the main tormentor of Shilpa Shetty on the Big Brother TV show has been eliminated from the TV show. Nearly 80 % of viewers voted in favour of her elimination from the TV show.

Shilpa Shetty in "The Celebrity Big Brother" TV show

Shilpa Shetty is taking part in the Big Brother TV show on Channel 4 in England. She seems to be very unpopular among the contestants who absolutely hate her.

The other lady contestants have gone to the extent of racially abusing her and calling her 'dog', 'c**t' among other profanities.

Thousands of people in the U. K. have complained to the authorities about the racial discrimination and abuse being meted out to Shilpa Shetty in the said TV show. This question was raised in the House of Commons as well.

Back home, politicians of all hues and colours have severely condemned the behaviour of the co-participants of Shilpa Shetty.

This is what Germaine Greer has to say about the whole episode -

The Guardian

"What no one seems to have quite understood is that Shilpa is a very good actress. Everyone hates her because she wants them to. She also knows that if she infuriates people enough, their innate racism will spew forth."

Further Ms Greer adds -

"The brouhaha about racism in the Big Brother house is a smoke screen that conceals what is really vicious and corrupting about CBB. Plain, everyday, common or garden bullying supplies the motive force for everything that happens in the Big Brother house. Big Brother disorients the housemates and disrupts their perceptions so that they become literally unbalanced. They have nothing to gain but their fee for enduring this destructive process, and so far three housemates have decided that if they remained in the house they stood to lose more than they had to gain. Although their behaviour seemed irrational at the time, because they were forced "greatly to find quarrel in a straw", it was actually supremely rational. So far none of the women has been that smart. Except for Shilpa. Shilpa's enjoying herself. Ladbroke's are quoting her 10/3 favourite."

No doubt Shilpa being an actress of unquestioned caliber, knows how to rouse any particular emotion in her audiences, in this case, her house-mates on the TV show. By taking on the racial abuse of her house-mates, she has succeeded in winning over not only the sympathy of us Indians but of may British people who have sent complaints to Ofcom in thousands and even directly to Channel 4.

The odds seem to favour Ms Shetty to come out the winner in the TV show.

Here's what I found in today's "Deccan Chronicle" -

DISCOVERY - Found: Fully functional man with female genes:

A person with XX chromosomes is a woman, while XY chromosomes mark out a man. But scientists have come across a man with female XX chromosomes who is sexually functional. This is rare since men with XX chromosomes, who are one in about 25,000, do not have male characteristics.

Scientists speculate that an unknown gene could have mutated and lost its sex-determination function, or from a mutation in a gene in the Sex-determining Region (SRY). SRY however is not the only, or even the most common sexdetermining gene.

Mr XX, whose identity is being withheld, turned up at the genetic clinic of the Institute of Reproductive Medicine, Kolkata, with complaint of infertility. He is 156 cm and weighs 64 kg. He had fully mature normal male genitalia with no symptom of undervirilisation. Among others, he had normal levels of testorone hormone, smaller testicles but elevated levels of serum concentrations of reproductive hormones.

No one knows how Mr XX could be a fully functional man with a woman’s genes. Kumarasamy Thangaraj, senior scientist at the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), where Mr XX’s data landed up, said, “Despite the identification of SRY almost 15 years ago, the pathway downstream to SRY remains largely unknown.” According to the CCMB study, an increasing number of reports suggest that the male trait can develop even in the absence of SRY. Such persons exist in three categories: XX males with normal genitalia; XX males with ambiguous genitalia; and XX true hermaphrodites with ovarian and testicular tissues.

Dr Thangaraj says the existence of SRY-negative males ruled out the notion that mere presence of SRY determines maleness.

The most common observation that the individuals are male shows that it is the presence or absence of a normal SRY gene which determines maleness, provided all downstream genes are intact.

In majority of the cases, XX maleness should result either from the loss of function mutations in a gene normally inhibiting testes formation in females or from the gain of function mutations in a gene downstream to SRY in testis determining pathway.

The hypothetical gene may be X-linked or autosomal (non-sex chromosome). If the gene is autosomal, the degree of the male trait will be dependent on the extent of the loss or gain of function in the mutant gene, Dr Thangaraj says.

Nifty use of grep!!

GREP:

Suppose you want to search for lines containing a line consisting of white space, then the word hello, then the end of the line. Let us start with an example.

>cat file

        hello
hello world
       hhello

>grep hello file

        hello
hello world
       hhello

This is not what we wanted. So what went wrong ? The problem is that grep searches for lines containing the string "hello" , and all the lines specified contain this. To get around this problem, we introduce the end and beginning of line characters

The $ character matches the end of the line. The ^ character matches the beginning of the line.

Examples
returning to our previous example,

grep "^[[:space:]]*hello[[:space:]]*$" file

does what we want (only returns one line) Another example:
grep "^From.*mscharmi" /var/spool/mail/elflord searches my inbox for headers from a particular person. This kind of regular expression is extremely useful, and mail filters such as procmail use it all the tims.

Sehwag dropped!

After his dismal performance in South Africa, Sehwag must have been expecting this. He has been dropped from the Indian cricket team for the West Indies Series to commence shortly.

He can not claim to be a technically sound batsman. And his luck is running out fast and so is the patience of the selectors and the Indian public.

Saurav has been picked up for the same series. His almost year-long forced hiatus has beneficial to him as can be seen from his performance in the domestic as well as in the international arena.

A really chill Winter in Hyderabad

Winter this year has been really cold (by Hyderabadi standards). With the temperatures dropping to 16-17 degrees Celsius, we Hyderabadis, unaccustomed to such low temperatures are enjoying the season.

Normally winter doesn't extend into mid-January. And Sankranti is usually not this cold. However, this  year, the mornings are extremely cold. Yesterday we have seen dense fog right upto 10'o'clock in the morning.

Emergency in Bangladesh!!

Bangladesh President declares emergency:

President Iajuddin Ahmed of Bangladesh, proclaimed a state of emergency in Bangladesh, suspending fundamental rights as described in the Constitution, a day after thousands of army and paramilitary troopers were deployed across the country to maintain law and order and aide the civil administration in the smooth conduct of elections to be held on Jan. 22nd.

This was done to forestall any violence in the wake of the Awami League's decision to boycott the elections.

A Country For Sale

SAMACHAR -- The Bookmark for the Global Indian:

This is the strangest news item I read in long time. I quote -

A former World War II fort in the North Sea, which was settled 40 years ago and declared a state with its own self-proclaimed royal family, is up for sale, The Times said on Monday.

The tiny Principality of Sealand, which began life as Roughs Tower in 1941, is a 550 square metre (658 square yard) steel platform perched on two concrete towers 11 kilometres (seven miles) off the coast of Harwich, eastern England.

It is accessible only by helicopter and boat but according to its owners, who want offers of eight digits or over, boasts uninterrupted sea views, guarantees complete privacy and is a tax haven.

Although its nation status is disputed, Sealand boasts a military past like any other country, defending its sovereignty from outside threats.

Former British army major Paddy Roy Bates began occupying the island with his family in 1967, declared it a state in international waters and gave himself the title "prince".

Britain's Royal Navy attempted to evict him the following year but were unsuccessful. As they entered territorial waters, Roy of Sealand fired warning shots from the former fort.

A judge then ruled in his favour that Sealand was outside British government control as it was beyond the three-mile limit of the country's waters.

Inhuman Police

Mothers of dismembered children demand answers - CNN.com:

"Is your son in my pocket? I don't know where your son is,"

- this is what the police of Nithari are quoted to have said when the mother of one of the missing children first approached the police two years ago

Screen capture from command line

Slackware peculiarity - LinuxQuestions.org:

One can take a screenshot by issuing the following command at command prompt in Linux -

$import - frame image.png

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Inventor of instant noodles dies:

The inventor of instant noodles, Momofuku Ando, has died in Japan, aged 96, of a heart attack.

Unsung Genius!!!!

Skull-man has VIP Links

The bastard has more than 17 young lives on his conscience. How could he even think of snuffing out not 1 or 2 but 17 young lives. He and his accomplice in such a heinous crime, Surender, must be hanged without any remorse.

The alleged serial killer now in police custody for the sexual assault and murder of a series of young victims in Noida, Mr Moninder Singh Pandher, has close connections with Congress politicians in Punjab.

Mr Pandher belongs to a very affluent and well-connected Punjabi family that originally came from the holy township of Paonta Sahib in Himachal Pradesh. He is closely related to several senior Congress politicians, including the present Jalandhar MP, Rana Gurjit Singh, former Punjab Pradesh Congress chief Mohinder Singh Gill and Mr Sukhpal Singh Khaira. His wife Devinder Kaur is a niece of Mr Mohinder Singh Gill.

Pandher runs a lucrative business supplying earthmoving equipment in Uttar Pradesh.

Man Eaters of NOIDA

Man-Eaters of NOIDA

Businessman Moninder Singh Pandher and his domestic help Surender are accused of murdering 30 children in Nithari, a village in Uttar Pradesh. So far, skeletal remains of 17 children have been unearthed.

It is being suspected that the children were sexually abused before being brutally murdered.

It is being suspected that Surender was into cannibalism also, as the skeletal-remains of the children show that they were dismembered with clinical precision. In all the 17 cases the torsos were missing.

The police, as usual, was sleeping as the complaints of the villagers whose children went missing, were conveniently ignored by the police of Nithari.

It is election time in UP and if Mulayam Singh Government and I think even Amitabh Bachchan can not bale out Mulayam Singh from what seems to be Samajwadi Party's Waterloo at the hustings.

DataOne Broadband speeds upgraded from 256 kbps to 2Mbps
BSNL has upgraded the DataOne speeds from 256 Kbps to 2Mbps effective from 29th December, 2006.
The difference is too much. It is now a pleasure to watch video over internet. Earlier it used to be a very jerky experience.
Browsing doesn't seem to have speeded up but downloads have become lightening fast.
Three Cheers to BSNL