Tremors, Updated

The earthquake that just occured, was 5.1 on the Richter Scale, with it's epicentre at Koyna, 200 kilometres south of Mumbai. Koyna was previously hit by a 7.0 earthquake in December 1967, causing about 200 deaths.

MSN.co.in had this news on their front page.
Yahoo.co.in had this inside their news page.
Indiatimes.com apparantly thought this wasn't worth reporting, for neither was it on their frontpage, nor under their top stories. It was tucked away somewhere inside the news page.

Tremors!!

Wow, we experienced some tremors here about 30 minutes back. It was wierd. I initially thought it was just my stomach rumblimg for food, but it was waaay too widespread for that. We felt about three different distinct tremors. It hasn't registered on a lot of news sites as of yet. MSN India news just has a headline, with nothing else as of yet. Will update as news comes in...

Strike Down!!

So the buses are back to normal. Which, is, well, a relative term, for vehicles that are always late, may or may not halt at the stops, are mostly bursting at the seams with people, are ignorant of the existance of road rules, occasionally knock down people, and overcharge as much as possible (Andheri station to Cinemagic is 4 bucks??).

Nearly 3400 buses were off the road since midnight on thursday, when 45,000 employees of the Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) went on strike. I guess the salary that the employees of BEST currently draw aren't enough to motive them to be as roughneck as possible. Maybe Sharad Rao should be commended for his generous and extremely thoughtful decision to hold the strike now, and not during the actualy student board exams. How best do we show our gratitude? With a stick, a noose or a sharp stabbing object?

Sharad Rao, when asked by the Bombay Times on what he thought of the faction that said it would continue to ply - They have no strength. And if they operate buses, we know what to do about it.

P2P alerts and more..

Kazaa is harmful to your health and well-being. Yes. The RIAA uses a modified version of the software to spy on you. Kazaa reports the actual machine IP address behind whatever firewall, as well as the user information, protocol, port number, and a bunch of other stuff, then the router plugs in it's own IP address in the transport header.

On a related note, Ed Felten at Princeton University has written a p2p client in Python, with just 15 lines of code, each line having 80 characters or less.

Google Fight..

Following it up from over at yet another comic blog...

John Byrne vs The Public

Rob Leifeld vs A Pencil

Yeti vs Bigfoot

Tim Burton vs Joel Schumacher

Windows vs Linux

Bart vs Lisa

Calvin vs Hobbes

Siskel vs Ebert

Tom vs Jerry

Aunt May vs Uncle Ben

My personal favourite...
Monkey vs Robot!!

And some office humour...
Tushar vs Tejas

A point to note - the last two have the same number of characters respectively... :D