India To Teach Brazil The Gentlemen’s Game
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Even If you are an avid follower of cricket, I bet most of you still wouldn’t know that Brazil was inducted as a member of ICC not too long ago.
So when India’s president Pratibha Patil came calling on a state visit to the land of salsa and rumba, Brazil and India inked a deal to swap experts to help each other in the games they play best.
India is a power player in cricket with a ranking of number two in Test cricket in the world. Similarly the exploits of Brazil in football (soccer to Americans) is only too well known.
Although India’s official cricket club BCCI has already decided who will be heading to Brazil to teach them how to whack a ball with finesse, Brazil is still to decide who the soccer coach would be.
Brazil became an ICC member in 2002 and its international debut came in 2006 when it participated in the ICC Americas Championship in Suriname. Unfortunately, the soccer crazy nation lost all its games. This means the Indian coach for Brazil has his job all cut out for him. Win at least one game and all is good!
Hopefully, the Brazilian assist would increase the level of interest and quality of the sport played in India.
This is literally one “field” where both the countries can gain immensely from each others experience.
Wordpress Blog Hacked? Now What
If you still have the old version of Wordpress deployed, remember your site can be easily hacked because of known exploits. The hackers may or may not have a lot to gain by injecting malware or spammy links on your website but if you own the website, it could be your worst nightmare.
A spammed website will most likely be ignored by search engine crawlers resulting in dropped rankings. In fact, Technorati is totally junking the older versions of WP from its system.
Sites like Security Focus are publishing a bunch of hacks possible on older versions of Wordpress. So before you get mugged by a script kiddie, take the necessary action.
Lets say one fine day you wake up and realize your blog has been a victim of such an attack, what do you do?
Startup And What It Takes To Succeed
Interested in quiting your job and building a startup? Here’s an interesting comment I found at a website whose owner did the same and is now spending time reading / thinking / discussing with other about what it takes to succeed.
I respect your long and thoughtful blog post, but to be honest, the first sentence of your blog post tells me that you will fail miserably. Instead of spending “a lot of time reading / thinking / discussing with others about what it takes to succeed”, you need to focus 110% on building a growing positive cash flow and profits.
Trust me, when you’re forced to return to the cubes as someone’s W-2 wage slave after falling into a deep depression due to failure, you will regret having wasted so much time blogging, socializing, facebooking, twittering, IM’ing, and web surfing for “the answer”. I’ll tell you the fricken answer, and it is simple: You’ve jumped off a building and you need to build your plane (profits) on the way down. Any minute you spend not doing this will be to your severe detriment.
Quite an insightful comment. Read the original article from here.
TechBanyan Updated To Wordpress 2.5
I started TechBanyan with Wordpress 2.3.1 and it served me well. No major hiccups or security breaches. That is, I haven’t found myself on the receiving end yet.
Yesterday like I also posted, I came across about various posts where “experts” recommended upgrading asap because of known hacks in the version 2.3.2 and earlier. The fact that Technorati took the decision not to index those blogs as well added to the urgency of upgrading to the latest version.
Blog Hacks - Why You Need To Upgrade
There’s a flurry of reports on the internet about potential Wordpress threats and attacks if you haven’t yet upgraded to the latest release of Wordpress 2.5.
If you are still running Wordpress 2.3.2 and below then your website is at grave risk. From what I could make out after a couple of minutes of browsing various security websites, all the experts are saying this thing in unison - Upgrade ASAP.
What kind of vulnerabilities are we looking at here and how do you know you are a victim of this security breach.
In An Absolut World…
…Things would be Absolutly awry. Below is the recent ad from Absolut for its popular Vodka. The ad was meant for the Mexican audience where it would definitely please its audience.
Texas and California used to be part of Mexico when these regions were lost to US in a war.
I have lived and worked in both the states, California as well as Texas. I can imagine what effect it would have had on both the sides. The chord it would have struck in every chicano’s heart and the consternation it might have cause in a Texan’s mind.
Absolut has already apologized for the ad though but without doubt it proved a big hit among the audience it was meant for. However angry denizens of the state and else where are demanding willful boycott of this brand of Vodka in US.
Computer Commands That Hackers Use
What I am about to tell you should be used primarily for learning and education. Certainly not for any dubious activities. It is possible to connect to another computer through the internet and browse through their directory structure, update and copy the file etc. Before you can connect you are prompted for a login and password so obviously (and preferably) you need the other person’s explicit co-operation and consent.
If you try to login without consent and approval, it is deemed as hacking. Still, if your intention is neat, meaning you just want to probe and not damage, then you are a white hat hacker. But if you want to hold the other person hostage, then you are deemed a black hat hacker.
You Know India Has Arrived…
When a local pub at a nearby village downtown advertises to patrons using the following poster.
The original saying had India and China being used as a bugaboo by American parents who often reminded their kids to finish dinner cuz there were starving kids in India.
Another one more recently had American parents asking their kids to complete the science and maths homework because of high rate of outsourcing and how kids when they grew up were “hungry” for jobs.
What the pub management decided to do with the famous bugaboo is totally different and creative.
The Best Indian Tech Companies To Work For
Indian companies have been making their mark the world over but I knew they had certainly made an impression among a couple of design engineers at my workplace, a German engineering giant, when I heard them discuss Tata’s latest automobile acquisitions.
Forbes recently ranked Google number one employer in US in almost all the criterias, be it the most fun place to work at, to its free gastronomical delights.
Similarly. it would be interesting to find out which Indian software company is ranked top and easily attracts the best talent because of its reputation, perks, cutting edge work etc.
Apple Vs Apple
Actually make that Apple Vs the Big Apple, with Big Apple being the colloquial name for New York city.
The city of New York has launched a campaign to promote green and as part of that, they adopted an apple as the logo. The GreeNYC logo shows a creatively designed apple with a short twig and two leaves on top.
Personally, to me it looks totally different than the famous tech company’s logo but then how many variations of the fruit apple can you have. Its kind of inevitable that Apple corp cried foul and claimed copyright infringement.
However traditionally, Apple has been on the receiving end mostly when it comes to such infringement allegations. Many of you would remember that Beatles was published on Apple Corp records, a totally different company that the Cupertino based tech one. The court feud went on for ages. Similarly Apple got embroiled in an iPhone related controversy when they got sued by Cisco Systems.
At my workplace, which is incidentally in NY as well, they are trying to go Green, started off by offering everybody company logo emblazoned coffee mugs with the hope of weaning them off from using the paper cups.
If you are interested in reading more about New York city’s green initiative, go here.