Today, 23 February 2009, all Hindus in India are celebrating Maha Shivratri, Maha Sivaratri or Shivaratri or Sivaratri (Night of Shiva or “Great Night of Shiva”). It is a Hindu festival celebrated every year on the 13th night/14th day in the Krishna Paksha (waning moon) of the month of Maagha (as per Shalivahana or Gujarati Vikrama) or Phalguna (as per Vikrama) in the Hindu Calendar (that is, the night before and day of the new moon).
There are various Mythological legends explaining the origin of this auspicious day. Some say that….
…..during a mythological era Gods (Devas) and Demons (Asuras) organised a Samudra Manthan (the churning of ocean) to acquire Amrita (the nectar of immortality), but before its appearance, haalaa-hala, a poison came out of the ocean, which was so toxic that it could wipe out the entire creation. Both the parties were in gave danger, so on advice of Lord Vishnu they prayed Lord Shiva. Pleased with the prayer and love for living beings Lord Shiva drank the poison but due to its intense effect something was required to cool it off so help was taken from Chandra( Moon God ) and finally a snake was placed around his neck which cooled the effect of the poison and the throat became blue, thus he got the name Neelakantha.This saga is the most common of all.
Yesterday, 22nd Feb 2009, as we all know, the 81st Academy Awards ceremony was held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California. In this event the much talked about movie “Slumdog Millionaire” which had 10 nominations in it and swept off with 8:
Best Picture - Christian Colson
Directing - Danny Boyle
Music “O Saya..” - Music by A.R. Rahman; Lyric by A.R. Rahman and Maya Arulpragasam
Music “Jai Ho” - Music by A.R. Rahman; Lyric by Gulzar
Music (Score) – A. R. Rahman
Film Editing - Chris Dickens
Sound Mixing - Ian Tapp, Richard Pryke and Resul Pookutty
Recently my PC was infected by a deadly virus, actually not so deadly enough, just said that to lay stress on the topic. The virus was detected as W32/Virut.Gen (a generic detection for the W32/Virut family of polymorphic, entry point obscuring (EPO) file infectors with IRC bot functionality) by my antivirus Avira Antivir Personal Edition (which is actually free thats why I’m using it instead of downloading cracked versions of well known anti-viruses as I hate piracy ). Till date it has detected every virus (even if it wasn’t one ) which came in contact with my PC but yesterday was that unfortunate day when I had turned it off for some dire reasons and thanks to this generous virus the antivirus program itself got infected.
As far as McAfee claims, this virus when executed injects it’s code into running processes and open a backdoor on compromised machine at port 80 (HTTP) but uses it for IRC communication. So, now I know what happened to my PC as my antivirus was detecting every running EXE file as a virus.
Few months back, 11 December 2008 to be exact, the most awaited 3G service was announced in India by MTNL under its post paid mobile service named Dolphin. Initially it was only for corporate usage and for individual usage its been launched few weeks back. Right now the service is only available in Delhi and that too in NDMC areas, work in rest of Delhi and NCR region is still in progress.
With this service MTNL boasts of offering few data related services as well:
). Till date it has detected every virus (even if it wasn’t one 
