I’ve been a Batman fan since the time my father took me to watch the first Batman movie starring Michael Keaton. The latest addition to the Batman series is Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. The film is an excellent depiction of Batman and his rise as the caped crusader in Gotham City. The story is a prequel to the Batman movies which we have seen in the past.
The remaining cast is also well studded with some of the best actors of Hollywood like Michael Caine (Alfred) and Morgan Freeman. Katie Holmes also has done a good job of acting. But I still think that Michelle Pfeiffer is yet to be beaten in looks in the entire Batman series.
Overall, the movie is excellent with everything about Batman being explained and I think it’s a must watch for any Batman fan!

Yosemite National Park located in Northern CA, USA is like a heaven on earth, as I found out this long weekend. From LA to Yosemite, we started our trip in early hours of morning at 12:30 am in a Dodge Caravan rented from Fox Rentals.
The trip was more like serendipity of fortunate events (not that this means anything ;-). 14 of us lonesome souls set out for an adventure of the hitherto unknown. The reason I say unknown is we had no clue as to what we were doing. We set out with no reservation for campgrounds with the free spirit of desis! Reached there at around 7:00 am and noticed a huge line to get the campground reservations. Well, patience eventually paid off, when Nimesh and I got our name in the waitlist for campgrounds we saw our window of opportunity. Our name was 32nd on the list and we came to know from other people that they generally released around 10-15 campsites daily. We went off to glacier point (After loads of arguments)….will be continued in later blogs!

Days of hard work seem to be over…or not quite…may be…
Graduation was wonderful and so were the trips with daddu and bhabhi to San Diego, Las Vegas and Grand Canyon and not to forget the shopping sprees at Barstow (I-40 exit at Lenwood Blvd.) and Citadel mall, Los Angeles.
Then came the trip to New York City which was as always very welcome!
Met up with Ankush at NYC working at Citigroup office at Long Island City. Now comes the time to unleash my sloth-like wrath towards summer!

9 hrs down the line I’m still capturing packets, now comes the challenging part-to make the hash tables of raw data! My Rabin’s hash algo seems to be working but the only hiccup that could happen was when the negative hash values are obtained. I don’t know whether it is a bug in my code or what but I got negative values for Rabin’s Hash when I gave the string “this is test”! This is gonna test me for sure.

Come end of semester and the project deadlines start impending! The situation I am in is one of great thrill and rush! For the CS558L I’m doing this project in which I have to implement an automated worm fingerprinting mechanism but not only that combining it with ITrace I want to make Worm attacks and DDoS attacks a thing of past!
The scheme in plain English is to detect automatically if your network is being attacked by looking at the traffic and if so communicate this information to whoever you are forwarding this packet to! The ICMP messages that will be forwarded will carry information about who sent this traffic and other such information (including the signature of attack traffic). The receiver with all this information could gather the source of attacks. If all the routers followed this scheme then we will be able to reconstruct the entire path of the attack so the entry point of the attack could also be sealed….(hopefully leading to a Worm and DDoS attack-free internet)!!!
Really hopeful…aren’t I??? 😉
But again this technique has the same single flaw as the other techniques in that it needs co-operation between ISPs.
I am currently coding this scheme in the Linux Kernel 2.6.11.7 and this is my first tryst with linux kernel programming…let’s see what future holds for me!

Finally, the CSCI 599 course on Search Engines concluded. The presentation went off pretty well.
The worst part was that an effort of 5 straight days went down the drain trying to go through the Nutch code. I think the Nutch developer community needs to get a little more matured and help newbies like me else new people would not join the movement! Eventually, I had to make my own focused crawler, query interface web data crawled and query interface.
I also got my CSCi558L scores which were ok…94,99,100 so things look ok so far but now the main effort is just starting off to get the Worm fingerprinting with ITrace going. Let’s hope things turn off well.