Security is a big concern. Most people brush aside security for reasons of having a totally-secure software, being ignorant, overly trusting a network or being indifferent to the issues. I did belong to one of these categories for a short period.

I realized how vulnerable people are on the network. The moment you have an ip assigned and people can see you. I was really annoyed when some time back I received a message from some kid trying to impress with the (mature) message. It easy to nail them but then again its also our duty to be vigil to make sure such things are impossible.

Security is only partly made available by applying patches or by installing a "secure" software. Most important is to realize that nothing is ever fully secure (even in the real world). One has to take necessary steps in ensuring just that. Sometimes this occurs after being "hit". At other times one needs to be a paraniod about security.

Most software are too ready to give out user information just to throw in that added/unwanted "user-friendliness". They just do more harm than good. So the next time you are about to buy some great-out-of-the-world user friendly software ask yourself "At what cost?"

Back
I know Iam Writing after a long time. At times, I would want to type but I may not be online or other times plain bored to log information. But now that interest and being online are both in place I am begun to log (atleast for some time I think);

After a really long time we discussed mathematics. Not that its not applicable but the kinda of theoretical turn the discussion took it questioned our basic understanding of some simple ideas that we often take for granted. For instance, why do we use logarithms, how are numbers populated in the log-tables, why is e=2.71 and how does it relate to logarithms?
Well, Napier's method has a lot of thinking for us to do. The central part that I missed over the past several years is that how do logarithms simplify calculations. I only has a vague idea that it reduces multiplication to additions thereby simplifying calculations. The explanation I gave myself was:

log(a*b) is log(a) + log(b)

Here * is being re-written to a + and this may simplify calculation as most people are good at addition than multiplication.

I hunted around for some information about what logarithms really are. I am surprised how I learnt logarithms without knowing some of this for this long.

Heres a link that gives some details:
http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52469.html

Another question which actually Chandan shot up was how can you be sure that to prove(disprove) that a number is (not a) prime you need to verify the divisibility of the number for numbers 2 to square-root number. Simple ain't it? Something I remember learning in my grade-school. Chandan himself did all the book-searching and came up with the rigourous proof. I'll leave out the nitty-gritty details from here.

Thats it for now.