As of 1028 Hrs IST on Tuesday June 30, 2009 facebook seems to be down in the India region. Its giving its usual

Sorry, an error has occurred.

We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.

Lets see how soon does it come up..

I used the following tips found at
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php
to burn a live image of gparted onto my usb pendrive and to make it bootable..

Extract files and make USB flash drive bootable under GNU/Linux

* Choice 1 (Manually):
1. Prepare an USB flash drive or USB hard drive or external disk which has a partition using FAT (either FAT16, FAT32) file system. If the USB flash drive or USB hard drive does not have any partition, you can use disk tool (e.g. gparted, fdisk, cfdisk or sfdisk) to create a partition with size 200 MB or more, Here we assume your USB flash drive or USB hard drive is /dev/sdd (You have to comfirm your the device name, since it’s _NOT_ always /dev/sdd) on your GNU/Linux, so the partition table is like:

# fdisk -l /dev/sdd
Disk /dev/sdd: 12.8 GB, 12884901888 bytes
15 heads, 63 sectors/track, 26630 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 945 * 512 = 483840 bytes
Disk identifier: 0×000c2aa7

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdd1 * 1 26630 12582643+ b W95 FAT32

Then format the partition as FAT (e.g. “mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdd1″ WARNING! Executing it incorrectly could cause your GNU/Linux not to boot. Confirm the command before you run it.).

# mkfs.vfat -F 32 /dev/sdd1
mkfs.vfat 2.11 (12 Mar 2005)

2. Insert your USB flash drive or USB hard drive into the USB port on your Linux machine and wait a few seconds. Next, run the command “dmesg” to query the device name of the USB flash drive or USB hard drive. Let’s say, for example, that you find it is /dev/sdd1. In this example, we assume /dev/sdd1 has FAT filesystem, and it is automatically mounted in dir /media/usb/. If it’s not automatically mounted, manually mount it by “mkdir -p /media/usb; mount /dev/sdd1 /media/usb/”.
3. Unzip all the files, and copy them into your USB flash drive or USB hard drive (You can make it by the command like: “unzip gparted-live-0.4.5-2.zip -d /media/usb/”). Keep the directory architecture, for example, file “COPYING” should be in the USB flash drive or USB hard drive’s top directory (e.g. /media/usb/COPYING).
4. To make your USB flash drive bootable, first change the working dir, e.g. “cd /media/usb/utils/linux”, then run “bash makeboot.sh /dev/sdd1″ (replace /dev/sdd1 as your USB flash drive device name), and follow the prompts to finish that. WARNING! Executing it with wrong device name could cause your GNU/Linux not to boot. Confirm the command before you run it. (There is a known problem if you run makeboot.sh on Debian Etch, since the program utils/linux/syslinux does not work on that. Make sure you run it on newer GNU/Linux, e.g. Debian Lenny, Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 9…).
5. If your USB flash drive or USB hard drive is not able to boot, check (1) Is there any partition in your flash drive ? It must contain 1 partition at least. (2) The partition must be marked as “bootable” in the partition table. (3) The partition must be on the cylinder boundary

Its the last post from the sunlab. Memories come rushing back. Lots of happiness, a lil remorse. Thank you all. For being with me in this journey so far. I am what I am because of what you moulded me into with your company. Those night-outs, those midnight breakfasts at nescafe, the 7 am dinner in mess, those sleepy last moment entries into class. Those laughters and those heartbreaks. The phone calls and the messages. The juicy and the snacky. The stable brunch at snacky of two chicken puffs and a chocoltae truffle. The innumerous dinners at the gate dhabas and meridian and sangeetha. The shared smokes and the drinks. The rush for Pragyan and Festember. The Nittfest and the symposiums. The delta and the www. The ssh -XCYP and the vncserver. The scp and the su. The delta and the RMI. The movies and the series. Coral and Emerald. Nescafe and Bru. Library and bookbank. SC and Xerox shop. The rem video that was never to be. At another crossroads of life. Where one journey ends and another begins. See you all at some other crossroad of life. Its been a pleasure knowing you all. Bidding adieus is always the most difficult thing of a journey. Only the hope of meeting new friends and seeing the old ones once again is a bit of a solace.

This morning at Google I/O G unveiled a developer preview of Google Wave, a new collaboration and communication product. Google Wave introduces a new platform built around hosted conversations called waves–this model enables people to communicate and work together in new and more effective ways. On top of that, with the Google Wave APIs, developers can take advantage of this collaborative system by building on the Google Wave platform.

Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

G’s five-person “startup” team emerged with a prototype. And now, after more than two years of expanding ideas, G team, and technology, G give developers an early preview of Google Wave.

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

The Google Wave APIs come in two flavors: Embed and Extensions and Embed. With Embed, you’re able to bring waves into your own site through a simple JavaScript API. For example, embedding a wave in a webpage is a good way to encourage a discussion among the visitors. With Extensions, you’re able to write programs, which are packaged as Robots or Gadgets, that provide rich functionality inside the Google Wave web client.

check out on www.waveprotocol.org:

• • Draft Protocol Specification — This is an early draft and will definitely change
  • Community Principles — Understand how this open source project works
  • Architecture Whitepapers — Learn more about the components of Google Wave

Well apart from all this press release and technical jargon, from a layman’s point of view, G Wave seems to be the Giant’s take on social networking in real time, some of the online domains left where it is still not a leader. All these fancy terms seem to be extended towards a creation of a more fancier facebook with more multimedia integration and better chat and other sharing capabilities. On a second thought, G Wave seems more like a conglomeration of existing G technologies (chat, docs and more). Hmmm, too early to say anything. Check out the official stuff over here..

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/

http://code.google.com/apis/wave/

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/05/hello-world-meet-google-wave.html

Mike Tyson’s 4-year-old daughter is on life support after being found by her 7-year-old brother hanging from a treadmill cord, according to police.

Exodus Tyson is in critical condition, according to FOX News , which first reported the story.

Exodus was playing near the exercise equipment while her mother was cleaning in a separate room at 10:30 this morning. The mom sent the brother to look for the 4 year old, Fox reports.

After finding her in distress, he alerted his mother, who found Exodus on a treadmill with what has been described as a cable around her neck, according to police, who call it a “tragic accident.”

She immediately took the cable off her daughter, called 911 and began performing CPR.

Exodus was taken to St. Joe’s Hospital.

Tyson was not at home at the time of the incident.

He was in Las Vegas but flew to Phoenix immediately after learning of the accident.

source: Y! OMG!