Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Password Retrieval tools

Nice site! :http://www.nirsoft.net/ lots of code examples and compiled utitlies to help in retrieval of passwords from all kinds of programs from instant messengers to web browsers

Geek Books

Picked up from: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/technology/archives/2005/11/09/top_20_geek_novels_the_results.html in a hope to read some of them and gain more geek knowledge

So far, 132 people have voted for the best geek novels written in English since 1932, in spite of Survey Monkey's rubric saying free polls were limited to 100 responses. The top 20 is therefore as follows, with the numbers in brackets showing the number of votes.

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham 21% (19)

There are two surprises for me. First, I'm amazed Neal Stephenson didn't do better: he is probably the ultimate geek novelist, being a bit of a geek himself. Second, I'm very impressed by the support for Watchmen, the graphic novel. And while I'm not surprised The Illuminatus! Trilogy didn't do better, I think more of you should read it -- or at least the first book, The Eye in the Pyramid!

The following five books attracted the most votes against.

Dune -- Frank Herbert 17% (17)
Neuromancer -- William Gibson 13% (15)
I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 12% (13)
Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 13% (13)
The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 12% (12)

Finally, the saddest statistics for me were the ones for John Brunner's books, which recorded high scores in the Not read it/Don't care category, as follows.

Stand on Zanzibar -- John Brunner 85% (77)
The Shockwave Rider -- John Brunner 88% (80)

I really enjoyed these books when I read them, though that was a long time ago. The sadness comes from the fact that Brunner was a British novellist, a good bloke, and used to drop me the occasional note (usually askng for advice about computing) in the days when I edited Computer Guardian. He died of a stroke during the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow in 1995.

Footnote: The short-list was drawn up based on comments to What are the top 20 geek novels on October 26, with voting at Survey Monkey.


Sunday, November 06, 2005

FTP TOOls

http://www.snapfiles.com/download/dlftpscheduler.html
http://www.snapfiles.com/freeware/network/fwftp.html -- all fewware...good
winscp

Friday, November 04, 2005

SoccerNotes:: ManU

Roby Keane blamed Rio Ferdinand, Kieran Richardson, John O'Shea, Darren Fletcher and Alan Smith

Van nister loy
Chritiano Ronaldo
Wayne Rooney



Great Freeware DVD ripping

check out http://www.mrfreefree.com/free_software/dvd_rippers.html#
my reccomendation is eazy DVD. Has a very nice step by step UI...and a powerful advanced tab...
However I coulnd quite manage to get the video resolution to 168*128@15fps required by my new samsung mp3 player..
one more thing I wonder is how is 168*128@15fps=200kbps? simple multiplication of 168*128*15/1024 works out to 300Kbps!..