Mahiya

Watch, listen and enjoy the music in this song sung by and performed by an indian version of Shakira :D

iit divas rocking performance

If anyone happens to find out a way to download this song, please let me know.

Virtual Barbershop

This does not work with Speakers ... you HAVE to have your headphones on .. that too in the right alignment .. the speaker that reads "R" should be on your right ear !!!

If the above thing doesnt work .. well then try downloading from here

You have been Tagged

Here's my small attempt at explaining what tagging is all about.

In the World Wide Web, we come across plenty and plenty of webpages which give us the information we seek. Humans cant remember the IP addresses of the machines. so we have hostnames. From here comes the URL. To remember the webpages that we visit, we "bookmark" these URLs. Now, since we keep on bookmarking a huge number of webpages, we start clubbing them together into categories.

These categories have a small problem. I can have categories like, "blogs", where i bookmark all the blogs that i often vist and categories like "technical", where i store my bookmarks that link to webpages discussing technical stuff. The problem occurs when we have to bookmark a page which is a mix of both the categories. Like for example, this post of mine. Do you want to bookmark it under "blogs" since its a blog, or under "technical" since it talks about some techy things ?

Most of the times, we end up wasting a lot of time digging through the various categories of the bookmarks to find the link we bookmarked a couple of months ago. We try to decipher the possible webpage the bookmark points to by reading the text that forms the URL. Not the best thing to do, but then thats the only choice we have. This basically boils down to the fact that, just plain categories of bookmarks doesnt help us.

This is where tags come into picture. As you must have tagged a single conversation in gmail with multiple tags since those tags describe the contents of the conversation, in the same manner, when we bookmark a webpage, we can give it tags that would be like some meta-data or "indexes", that would describe the contents of the webpage the bookmark points to. So, the next time you want to dig up a bookmark you saved a couple of months ago, you simply use the tags to "index" through your bookmarks thus increasing your chances of finding the bookmark you were looking for in quite less time than earlier.

Now, if you store your bookmarks on your browser, you have the problem of not being able to use those bookmarks on a machine where you did not save them. If you use a workstation at office and another one at home, you need a mechanism to be able to synchronise the bookmarks on these 2 machines. To solve this, there are websites where you can login and save your bookmarks online. some of these sites provide you the flexibility of storing these bookmarks personally for your use, or you can share them with the public.

Websites like del.icio.us, bring together these 2 thoughts of "sharing bookmarks" and "tagging bookmarks". Once you login and create an account for yourself, you can install a button on your web browser, and everytime you come across a webpage you want to bookmark, you can click on that browser button, and it will save that bookmark into your account. While doing so, you can give this bookmark some tags that would decribe the contents of the webpage. The main intention being to create useful "indexes" that will help you in searching through your own bookmarks at a later point of time.

Things start getting a bit interesting when you start bookmarking and tagging blogs. People write blogs and there are very few ways in which they can publicise their blogs so that more and more people on the World Wide Web can read through their blogs. When you visit an interesting blog which you want to bookmark, more often than not you would give the name of the person who owns the blog as a tag for this bookmark. This is called "tagging the blog". Websites like del.icio.us, have a public list of these bookmarks and tags. People can surf through these tags and thus increase the chances of them visiting your blog. So, tagging of blogs can help you popularise your blog !!! I have already "tagged" the blogs of my friends whom I visit so very often :)

The confusion about tags starts creeping in since lots of blogging sites provide you a feature where you can add tags, or labels to your posts in the blog. There is no easy way of linking these labels with the bookmark tags :(, well atleast for blogspot. Guess, this is another thing just waiting to happen in the near future ...

Cometh the hour, cometh the man

149 of 107 balls with 13 fours and 8 towering sixes. The innings of his lifetime. It was a delight to watch Gilchrist come back to form and play his usual game. He was struggling the whole tournament, especially the later half. And boy, what a time to regain your confidence and touch !!! It was his last innings in the World Cup and he definately is gonna cherish it for his lifetime. I guess, not just he, but every person who saw him butcher the Sri Lankan attack would cherish his innings. There was no slogging, pure timing in his shots. I was very delighted to watch his innings. And it was even more crucial, since none of the in-form Aussie players were able to find their usual touch. Hayden, Ponting, Symonds were all out of nick on the day it mattered all. Thanks to Gilchrist's beautiful strokeplay, Aussies had it easy third time in a row in the finals.

Gilly scored a boundary or a six of each of the Lankan bowlers. Not a single one was spared. His six that he scored of Murali was his best. But, the best six of the match was not from Gilly's bat. It was the captain, Ponting who scored the most beautiful six of Malinga. It wasnt a bad ball, but the six was shot from the middle of the bat and was struck with great force. It was a classic shot. Malinga was the best bowler among the Lankans on that day, and to score a six of his bowling speaks a lot in itself.

Its funny to see that in all the 3 World Cup finals that Australia have won, its been one of the sub-continent countries whom they beat. All the time, the team that reached the finals was the best in that tournament, and once they played the finals, you felt like they actually handed over the trophy to the Aussies in a plate, knealing down on their knees. Thankfully, it wasnt such a bad match after all with the Sri Lankans giving them a good fight. In fact, the match could have gone either way when Jayasurya and Sangakarra were at the crease. It made the match interesting and not a one sided event as most of the matches in this tournament have been. If it was not for Clarke's fluke dismissal of Jaysuriya, we certainly had a tight match in hand.

It was Jaysuriya's, Arnold's and Murali's [ is it really ? ] last World Cup bout and they definately gave their best. But, it was Glenn McGrath, playing his last one-day match, who got the most attention. He was the highest wicket taker in the tourny and was bowling his usual immaculate line but was not finding the wicket. In fact, he got hammered a lot too in his bowling. I was doubting if he would even get a wicket in this match. His first wicket that he got in this match was from a runout !!! But, then it doesnt count as a wicket on his name. And as it was with the Test matches, he got a wicket of his penultimate ball in his one-day's too. He is probably the only player in this tournament having a fairy tale retirement

Russel Arnold c Gilchrist b McGrath 1

All the 3 players involved in this wicket were playing their last match :), well atleast the last match in a World Cup.

I dont know about others, but I am really gonna miss watching the immaculate McGrath and the entertaining Gilchrist ...

Boring

It was a very boring game of football. Ofcourse, both the teams were attacking well but both lacked the finishers. The match was very boring to say the least. Damn it. I spoilt my sleep over it ... yyyyaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnn

Kaka's attack

Its often said "Attack is the best form of defence" and Kaka proved it right, when he scored 2 goals on a counter attack beating the out of place Manchester United defense.

This was the first time that i saw Kaka in action and for my luck, he scored 2 good goals. The precision and the ease with which he scored the goals made me realise why people talk about him with so high regards. The first goal that he scored was simply amazing. It was a simple flick with his right heel to the far end of the goal and all the goalkeeper could do was to watch it pass by him. Probably he thought that the ball would not go inside the goal. What struck me was the confidence with which Kaka hit the ball in that far angle. I tried to catch some clues as to how he figured out the angle in the replays, but it seemed like he never moved his eye from the ball. Wonder when he calculated the angle and decided to strike the ball. Guess its the practice of scoring goals from such angles that gave him the confidence to shoot it.

This was the first leg of the first semi-final of the UEFA Champsions League 2007. It was between AC Milan and Manchester United. Thanks to Kaka, AC were able to score 2 away goals which might come in handy in the next leg. ManU won the match 3-2, thanks to some silly errors by AC goalkeeper Dida. How strange that the land that produces so great football strikers has never produced any great goalkeepers !!!

It was a high pressure match. But the first half was more interesting than the second. ManU were lagging behind AC by 2 goals to 1 at the end of the first half and it was Rooney who came to their rescue. He scored the equaliser in the first 10 minutes of the second half. But the best goal came in the dying moments of the match, 91st minute to be precise, when Rooney struck hard from the right corner of the D, to score the winning goal. The power with which he struck the ball was amazing. Though Ronaldo, being crowned the PFA's Player of the Year just a day before this match, played some very fast and I should say a bit selfish football, it was Rooney who won the hearts at the end.

Its been a really long time since I had a chance to follow things on the EUFA Cup. Another 4 more matches to go now. Hopefully, I get to watch all of them ... and they are of the same quality as today's match :)

More Movies

Forgot to write about a couple of other movies I saw in the past couple of months...

Monsoon Wedding

For a change I saw this movie on DD !!! Yeah, was surfing for anything good on TV and surprisingly found that only DD had something good going on at that time. Its been almost a decade since I watched a movie on DD. I cant believe how I was able to spend my time in front of the TV with just one channel playing on it !!! Those days, watching the Sunday evening movie was nothing less than a party. Buy some snacks, close the curtains, make yourself comfortable and wait for the movie to start. Sometimes, less is good :D

Coming back to the movie .. I liked the movie. There were atleast 2 tracks of stories in the movie. And definately, it was the पी. के. दुबे who steals the show from all. The way he introduces his name as 'drank and drowned' [ thats the literal meaning of his name when read fast :p ] is really funny. Its his expressions that make the scenes more cute. the ups and downs of his new found love and the way they both communicate just with their eyes and so few words is marvelous. It was this story that kept me interested than the main story. The main story was a bit out of place. It wasnt the groom who looked like American, but the bride. Even the characters that they portrayed were not in line with their background.

The screenplay was also good. Especially since it never felt that the actors were speaking on cue but as if they were actually preparing for the wedding and talking impromptu. The guests being welcomed in colorful umbrellas in the rains was fun to watch. Shefali did a good job and she is definately a very good actress who unfortunately never gets any "main" roles to play. The pick of the actors in this movie though is Naseerudding Shah. His role is very central to the non-main theme of the movie and he makes his role look so very natural. No over-acting, just plain simple things done right.

गंग्स्तेर [ Gangster ]

Heard a lot about Kangana in this movie and wanted to watch it since long. Watching the first 15 minutes of the movie, where she gets the meaty presence on the screen, I was shocked to see her speak so broken Hindi. I was shocked to see that they were talking so much about this actress who could not even speak Hindi properly. But, later on as the movie progressed, I realized that what she did in the start of the movie was part of her role. She was trying to portray they she was drunk !!! It was a good try I should say. Shiny too got a good role in this movie, but was not allowed to utter a single word for almost 80% of the times he is seen on screen. I dont know if it was for good or bad :D ... His character steals away the show from all, when he reads out these words in the letter that is sent to Kangana. "I now know why I came running to your house on that rainy day ... " Kudos to the guy who wrote this script and the dailogues ...

सिनेमा का भूत उतरा ॥ अब चलो कुछ काम कर लेते है :p