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For those of us who were lucky enough to be stuck in the Blackout of 2003, the Power System Outage task force has released their report with the causes and the resolutions. If you did not know about the Blackout, here is an excerpt from the report “ … on August 14, 2003, large portions of the Midwest and Northeast United States and Ontario, Canada, experienced an electric power blackout. The outage affected an area with an estimated 50 million people and 61,800 megawatts (MW) of electric load in the states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and the Canadian province of Ontario. The blackout began a few minutes after 4:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time and power was not restored for 4 days in some parts of the United States. Parts of Ontario suffered rolling blackouts for more than a week before full power was restored. Estimates of total costs in the United States range between $4 billion and $10 billion (U.S. dollars). In Canada, gross domestic product was down 0.7% in August, there was a net loss of 18.9 million work hours, and manufacturing shipments in Ontario were down $2.3 billion (Canadian dollars)…” ...

Many people have come to me asking what the heck does the Blog name mean? I have the same as my handle on MSN Messenger also and I get the same question there. For the non-techy folks, it is quite interesting that the first thing that comes to their mind is that there is a virus. Hmm, have we rooted this fear so deeply in them now? If so then probably we have failed, but thats another story. Anyways, if you read carefully my handle reads IUnkown [Deprecated]. ...

Ah, good to see that those “sun” guys are finally coming to their senses, and evolving from the dark side. May the force be with them! Now, which is the next company that Microsoft should save? Maybe the one run by this unintellectual (gotta be PC you see) called Larry Ellison. ;)

Though I have never worked for (or at) a “big” Indian software company this is interesting as more and more Indian companies are taking a shelter under various US tax schemes. I am no tax expert and am not sure the legality of this, but this could be a huge “profit” for the Indian companies if it is upheld in court. Does invite the question, do they pass this onto the average joe working their butts off? ...

I did not know this, but the dean of Kellogg School of business is of Indian origin. I think it’s pretty cool. Check out the story here .

A bunch of my friends asked me, what is all the “gibberish” on the test posts that I had submitted to ensure that everything works. I was quite surprised to hear these - especially these are friends who are into custom development on various platforms and technologies. The thought that they have never seen this “gibberish” was quite astounding. So, the “gibberish”, is basically Lorem Ipsum which is sample or dummy text originally of the printing and typesetting industry, but now is used by the Information Architects in all product companies (that I know of). I did not know this, but Lorem Ipsum is from the 1500’s and is not just random text (or gibberish if you prefer that). On the contrary, it has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. ...

A good friend, pointed me to the “The Singhsons” found here who are right out hilarious! I just fell out of my chair laughing. There is sound so be careful if you are listening to this at work. The first person I could think of while seeing this is my dear friend Karan - and I think that is a compliment. *grin* You can read Karan’s blog here . ...

These guys show you how to fit a fully functional PC based on a VIA M10000 EPIA board . They went onto fit it into a Red Hat box and then using a sensor told the boot-loader which OS to run based on which box it is in. Now thats cool! Also check out the other neat projects they have done. ...