Yello! I have been busy searching through the archives of my yahoo group which I started way back in 2003. And guess what? It has a wealth of information. It is quite amazing to see how I have evolved in my art of writing and thinking. Feels a little bit nostalgic to start talking about MS DOS, Windows, etc. Now that I have been almost exclusively working with Linux on the system level and have kept myself confined to application layer on Windows, it really is fun to go back and look at my article on Windows System Programming from 2003. I talk about a lot of stuff including message queues, context switching, semaphores and mutexes, BHOs, TSRs, etc. I doubt if people use them application layer programming anymore (atleast I don’t). It is long and quite interesting. The unedited article follows.

I almost forgot about it. Yes, I had my own embedded developers yahoo group. Since the last 5 years it has fallen into decay and I was thinking of deleting it from the face of earth (I mean Yahoo!). I was going through the list of messages and realized that I had started my blogging career way back in 2003. I will now start with rejuvenating my old articles and publish it here. And maybe I am not going to delete that group but will just purge it of useless members. Below is my article from way back in 2003 and I think it is still relevant. Also note the use of the word “Floppy”. I know, I was still using it back then. Nowadays, “Floppy” and “CD/DVD” would attract the most hilarious article ever award!

I am very disappointed in the manner Indian public has been led astray over the whole JLP bill. All the people more or less wants to bring a collective end to “Democracy” in India. Introduction of JLP is handling over of all our secular organizations to an entity which does not hold any accountability to anybody including the Supreme court, Prime Minister or President. Before turning on the flames, lets discuss a bit about JLP. I am 99.9% sure that most of you haven’t read a single letter in the proposed JLP. Before I proceed, let me tell you that the current constitution and the laws proposed are fully capable of tackling the corruption that India is facing. Creation of a new extra-constitutional authority will not bring an end to corruption. Infact with the proposed JLP, it will bring in a new era of super dictatorship, an era where the ruler can crush his/her opposition very easily, and an era similar to the emergency that was brought in by Indira except that it will not be called emergency. All voices which would be raised against the Lokpal will be effectively annihilated. Lets read and understand how. A simple Google search will reveal the proposals in the JLP. Without copying text from that bill, I will jot down the main points proposed and how it will manipulate democratic behavior.

I know I am going to be widely criticized and will have to face a lot of flames from my fellow Indians after having written this article, but as Lord Krishna says, “Karmanneva dhi karaste, ma faleshu kadachana”, I will do my duty and jot down my thoughts on the whole drama that is going on since February 2011. I have been closely following the events and have been exchanging a lot of information with fellow bloggers. Some of my tweets also reflected my doubts. But until now, I did not think the whole political drama needed my own words and thoughts since quite a few bloggers have already discussed and brainstormed on various aspects of the bill and the “Jholawalas” who are promoting it. But today, I do feel that I need to chronologically list the events that have been happening since February 2011, put my own thoughts on what is the motive behind those events and also induce my readers to think a bit more and not be taken as a “mere sheep for the spin”.

It is almost 2 months since my last entry. And believe me, it is quite a busy season these days. Nokia’s announcement on MeeGo was definitely a shocker. Though my interest in MeeGo continues and deep down in my heart, I still do hope to see MeeGo on my HW soon. Typical summer approaching here in Sweden. And everybody knows that Swedes take a long “semester” (vacation) during summer. So all my old and new customers are lining up trying to get things straightened out beforehand. It is quite amazing on the level of renewed interest in new gadgets this year.

Today, 11th February 2011, is an unfortunate day in the history of mobile computing. Microsoft and Nokia has announced partnerships for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) as the primary smartphone platform on Nokia devices. Besides WP7, Nokia will also run Bing and in turn Bing will use the Ovi Maps for their backend. Nokia will also get X-Box live and Office services up and running on their devices. But above all, Nokia’s primary smartphone platform will be a closed source platform. If one reads the press release, it is but natural to see that the deal is real good for Microsoft. It gives WP7 a chance to survive in the already competitive market. But it does not bring anything new for Nokia (except that they could probably be getting a WP7 phone in the market in 6 months)! WP7 seems like the last straw that Nokia will ever have to survive and in the sea of already selling OSs like Android and iOS, it would be hard to barge in with just the HW and expect greater sales then other HW providers like HTC, Samsung, etc.

I have in my previous articles written about denial and reasons for denial. I have also written about people who live in constant denial either because of their overtly optimistic outlook or downright stubbornness to accept the facts. Most of these people have strong beliefs in one thing or the other. Religious people have the most “weird” views in my opinion and they also have no logical alternatives to switch or re-consider their views (especially the monotheistic ones). I do respect those views as long as they don’t hurt anybody else but such people also have a tendency to exert their views on others which lead to death and destruction. The 2000 year history and ongoing occurrences all around the world is all that one needs to go through to look at the destructive tendencies of these religious people. However it does not mean that religion/religious people have done no good. Most of the world, I would say is still a relatively good place to live because of these people and the moral values that a religion builds its frameworks on.

It was quite some time ago, I think in the beginning of this year when I had to pass through my corporate proxy which used a Basic HTTP Authentication scheme. In short, it means that all my HTTP requests will need to have a parameter Proxy-Authorization : Base64_Encoded_Username:Password. But before going further, I needed to use a local proxy since my passwords generally have a lot of @ symbols to make it more secure. In Linux, one can use proxy authentication using export http_proxy=http://username:password@proxy:port. As you guessed, my password would break this simple mechanism of defining proxy tunnels with authentication. The easiest solution would be to change my password but then I am not an engineer who goes for such simple workarounds.