A computer language with English commands

About eight months ago, Aasis Vinayak, 20, a hacker and prodiguous programmer, realized he had a memory problem. Of the multitude of computer languages that he was learning, he could not remember much of the codes or what programmers call syntax. He could as well be learning German and Japanese at the same time and understanding neither.

Games I played

Mario, Wolf, Doom, Need for Speed…What was the first computer game you ever played? When did you first lose time consciousness to a programme?

When I was about 14, my dad’s bank got computerised. Which meant that the top management send them early versions of the home computer – 286s and 386s – and my dad and a few of his colleagues were packed off to Chennai from Nagercoil to study COBOL. When dad came back, naturally he was excited. So he decided that his son – that’s me- should also be well-versed in computers. So he send me off to study BASIC in a fairly good institute. It was a three storeyed building I remember getting lost in. I did it over the summer between my eighth and ninth standards.

Those guys had four games: World Space Commanders, Chess, and two games I don’t remember the name of, but let me describe them to you. In one of the games, you get a bat which was flat 2cm long thing and you had to keep hitting it on the sides of the screen. After you play a while, two balls appear in the screen and you will have to hit them. In the other one, the computer screen was a grassy surface through which you send this cylindrical eating tiny monster that eats points as it is chased by the system’s monsters. All the four games ran on MS-DOS. Nagercoil had not heard of Windows yet. I am not sure if Windows 3.1 was released by that time.

I don’t remember a darn thing about BASIC anymore. But I have not forgotten anything about the games. Even today, I kinda know what keys I pressed to do what, etc.

The next games were played when I went to learn windows and word at Brilliant’s Tutorials. Guys preparing for competitive exams must remember this institute as a drab place. I had fun there.

Later, at the insistence of my brother, dad finally bought a run-down, assembled, second hand PC. I don’t remember what processor ran on it. But it wasn’t very fast. And Nagercoil in the mid-90s still had not heard of the Internet. By brother and I used to play Wolf on it. But the game that really we obsessed over was Doom. You may have played it. I have often wondered if that game made kids more evil than they were.

Today gaming has come a long way from those early days. A couple of days ago, I was reading the two links given below. Thought I will write about what games I have played.

BTW, what games do u play?

Here’s a link to a Guardian blog on PS3.

Read about LittleBigPlanet here

Perks at Google

Pic: NYT

In the picture, are Googlers travelling to work on a shuttle service the company is organising for them. Read more here. Any comparisons to Sutherland should be immediately done away with. Do you think journalists like me would ever be pampered like this?

Yahoo!

Did anyone try the Yahoo Mail beta version? I am liking it. GMail recently put a fullstop to new products so that it can better develop the existing ones. They will have to do that fast now.

Dictionary.com, a site I regularly use at the office, seems to have undergone a much-needed revamp. It looks more accessible and easy to use now.

Orkutters-what do they do?

What do people do on Orkut? I mean seriously, What do they do?
I have a friend who has Orkut open on her computer all day long. I ask her and she shrugs. Do you have a better answer? Please use the comments section if you do.

The Magic of VPN

With the growing popularity of the Internet, Virtual Private Networks (VPN) have gained acceptance as a way for companies to communicate with each other,with their distant offices or with employees working remote.
Expected to replace the traditional Wide Area Networks (WAN), VPNs have today become popular and for many in the West synonymous with using the Net.
WANs typically used ISDN or optic fibre lines through which companies expanded their network beyond their immediate geographical area. This was reliable and secure, but was expensive because of the physical costs involved, particularly if offices and employees were in distant areas. VPNs became a low-cost alternative to WAN. By using the intermediate network of the Internet, it saves costs on long-distance phone service and hardware costs associated with dial-up or leased lines.
VPN is a shared network where private data is segmented from other traffic on the Net, which only the intended recipient can access. Supposing Joe is an employee who is working from a remote city in Tamil Nadu, he can log on to his Chennai office’s Local Area Network (LAN) from his laptop using VPN. The data that he sends to his company is encrypted and secure.
In a typical VPN deployment, a client initiates a virtual point-to-point connection to a remote access server over the Internet. The remote
access server answers the call and tranfers data from the VPN client to the organisation’s LAN after authenticating the client. VPN connections can also be between two office sites linking two portions of a private network.
Three of the properties of VPNs – encapsulation, authentication and data encryption – are worth remembering. VPN technology provides a way for data to be encapsulated with a header that allows data to traverse the Internet.
Authentication could be either in the form of digital certificates or the usual user name-password format. Encryption is when data is coded so that only the intended recipient computer can crack it. For example, let’s say that the code is A is C and B is D and so on and only the sender and recipient are privy to the code, then the encryption is successful.
Another aspect of VPNs are the protocols that they use. Point-to-point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP), the most popular one, is heavily reliant on the older and popular Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) designed for dial up and dedicated Internet connections.
In India, companies like Airtel and Reliance offer VPN service to their clients. Airtel offers VPN connections with a bandwidth between 2 MBPS to 155 MBPS to many of its clients that include software firms and banks.
Reliance offers a carrier-grade, MPLS-based VPN service in 172 points-of-presence (PoP) of bandwidth that can be anywhere between 64 KBPS to 1 GBPS. “In the last six months, over 100 customers that include many multi-national companies have chosen Reliance for their mission-critical tasks. They have even preferred our service to those in countries they are based in,” a Reliance spokesperson said.
He also asserted that in situations where offices from multiple locations have to be connected, VPNs are at least 20 percent cheaper than leased lines.”
Both Reliance and Airtel offer service level agreement-based services to their clients. The service provided is end-to-end, which means that companies with the dough can actually avoid the infamous last-mile restriction. If Joe has a laptop and a mobile phone, he can use his
company’s VPN service to send data over a secure line instead of just using the unreliable, insecure medium of the Internet. And that is the allure of VPN, which companies and remote employees are falling for.