If you think MS Windows sucks compared to Mac OS because windows needs anti-virus software, its like saying President Barack Obama sucks compared to you because he needs security guards.

I know, the video is very lame, this is what happens if you are bored on Sunday afternoon.

Have you seen the movie Terminator? Ever thought it could be real? Well, it is real, the day has come. Its not in the future, its happening, right now.

Robot war has already begun. There are UAVs flying over our head daily. UAVs are planes without human pilot. They can create mission on their own and destroy target. Right now, this second, there are at least 35 Predator drones in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan. Around the world, robot prototypes exist that are mobile, armed and operate without human control. Living insects are being combined with machines for military use which can carry biological weapons. Watch this interesting small documentary with P. W. Singer (former coordinator of the Defense Policy Task Force for Barack Obama)

This is not a movie, this is happening, now.

See also: Big Dog, TOTO, High Speed Hand, Iron Man suit

Do you love spam emails? If you answered “Yes” to the above question, stop reading here. There is 99.99% chances that you answered “No” (Other 0.01% people are spammers).

In this post I will talk about how I effectively get around with email spam. (May be I will post about how to get rid of the snail-mail-spam in another post sometime)

The main key to get around with spam is to hide your email address. This is very difficult if you use only one email address for all your needs. Because no matter how hard you try to hide your email, it will be exposed to the spammer. I have split all my email traffic between four email accounts. Here is a summery of what email traffic goes to what account and what email is to be used for what audience.

1) Email 1:

This email account is used for your important stuff. It is mainly used for

• Job inquiries/Resume/Job search websites
• Online bank accounts/Credit card accounts
• Car Insurance/Phone company login
• Anything involving your finance login

As you can see, this email account is used for your important emails only. And the key here is NOT to share it with any humans. So you are sure that none of your friends are going to email you on this account. You don’t have to check this account frequently, once in 3-4 days is enough. Make sure that none of your friends/family/colleague  knows about this account. (Why? I will tell you later in the post) This account will not be spam-proof, as all the job-search-website will share your email with their partner site, your credit card company will share it with other credit card companies for those pre-approved-credit-card emails etc.

Account affected by spam: 40%
Frequency of checking this email: Once in 3-4 days

2) Email 2:

This email account is only to be give to humans. Humans include all your friends, family, colleague etc. Don’t use it for any online account/website/registration. If you share it with any website, there are likely 100% chance that they will spam you by one way or other.

This will be your personal account. And it will be 100% spam free for as long as you keep it. You will only receive emails that matters to you. And most of us use email for this purpose only.

Account affected by spam: 0%
Frequency of checking this email: As often as you like

3) Email 3:

This email is used for

• Social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, YouTube, etc)
• Your online registration to sites (Forum posting , Subscription, Netflix, etc)

Most of the email that you receive in this account is not even worth reading. It will be something like “Your friend has commented on your photo on facebook”. And you will receive a lot of social networking website invitation-to-join emails on this account. What really happens is, lets say you have added Mike as your friend on facebook. Now Mike is not so internet savvy so he ends up creating account on all social networking sites like Tagged, Xanga, Bado and what not. Now this websites will ask Mike to import his contacts from facebook and send them invitation to join. So you will eventually receive lot of these invite emails.

Account affected by spam: >50%
Frequency of checking this email: Once in 3-4 days

4) Email 4:

This account is used for one time use registration and all known spam. None of the emails in this account is meant to read. You will use this for websites that you just want to check out or want to have one time access.

Account affected by spam: 100%
Frequency of checking this email: Never

So now that you have four different emails for your different needs, you are sure that you never miss any important email between those spams. As you can see, the key is to separate human-generated emails from the auto generated emails and the auto-generated emails are further divided into important-auto-generated emails and unimportant-auto-generated emails.

The reason I told you to not share Email no 1 with any humans is like this: Lets say you are geek and you hack other people’s emails and people want to take revenge on you. They will try to reset your password and try all those crazy things. They wont be able to retrieve your password but it can lock your account for some time, like yahoo does that. And you don’t want your important email to lock down. So the best strategy for hack-proof email is not to share the email address itself.

Let me know in comments what is your method to get around with spam and what do you think about this method.

Here is one of my favorite  TV commercial of Porsche 911 977. It is old and low quality, but that doesn’t get in the way of make you dream about it. If you love Porsche, you will know what I mean. It is, quite simply, the purest expression of who we are.

We all know how to create a good password. There are zillions of article on tips of creating strong password. We know it is necessary to choose long password which includes numbers and special characters and its better not to choose a word from dictionary as password. Also, if you are like me, you have hundreds of online account on different websites and its best practice to choose a different password for each account. This will ensure you if someone got (read: hacked) your password for one account, your other accounts will still be safe.

But there is a case when someone can trick you to ‘social-hack’ your password. It is very easy to spit out your password when you are drunk. Someone can just ask you for your password and you can just say it to them. How do you prevent such a situation?

Here I will discuss a method to make your password drunk-proof. This method will not only ensure that no one can take password from you when you are drunk, but it will also obey all the advanced rules of creating a strong, brute-force-proof password. This simple method will also create a different password for each of your accounts. And the biggest advantage of all – you don’t have to remember a single password nor you have to use any other tools like password manager. Yes, that’s right, you don’t have to remember a single password nor you have to use any other tools. And that is the main funda here, no one on the earth knows your password, not even you.

So here is how to create one. We will take example of creating a password for www.yahoo.com

1) Get the string: So we are creating a password for the site www.yahoo.com. We will truncate ‘www’ and ‘com’. So our string will be ‘yahoo’.

2) Get the formula: Now all you need to do is create a formula for your password. A simple formula for example would be the “+1″ formula. So for ‘yahoo’ it will be,

y + 1 = z

a + 1 = b

h + 1 = i

o + 1 = p

o + 1 = p

So your password for ‘yahoo’ using the formula ‘+1′ is ‘zbipp’.

But ‘+1′ formula is not enough, you need more complex formula. An example of more complex formula would be “Reverse – 1 interleaved with Date of Birth”.

yahoo reverse = oohay

oohay - 1 = nngzx

nngzx interleaved by Date of Birth = n19n84g15z06x

So it will give you “n19n84g15z06x”. You can make it more complex by replacing numbers with their respective special character, which will result in “n!(n*$g!%z)^x”. You can modify your formula anyway you like. Instead of +1 you can have incrementing pattern or any other pattern. Instead of Date of Birth, you can have your car VIN number or your driver’s license number or anything.

Now you can use the same formula for all other accounts. For www.gmail.com, simply replace the string from ‘yahoo’ to ‘gmail’ and you have completely random password for gmail without remembering it.

The randomness and complexity of your password is only limited by your imagination of creating the formula. Once you create your formula, you will have totally random password for all of your accounts.

That’s it. Just remember your formula and it will create a random password for every account that you have. And no one in the universe knows your password, not even you. And that is why the password is drunk proof. Try to speak “n!(n*$g!%z)^x” after you are drunk and see it for yourself.

It will be time consuming to enter password by this method initially for a week, but once you master the trick, you are invincible.

So I bought new BlackBerry 8900 on AT&T. I was happily using my Sony Ericsson w810i from last 2 years and I was very satisfied with it. But I finished two years with AT&T and it was a time to upgrade my phone. Today its been around 60 days I am using this blackberry and here are my thoughts about it.

1. No call record function

Every phone that I had in past had the call record function, even very basic phones. It is very helpful when you want to record your phone call. Lets say you are driving and you want to note down a number that your friend is speaking from the other hand. You just hit the record button and your call gets recorded. You replay the recording when you want to use that. Very simple and powerful.

But blackberry don’t have this. They even restricted their API so other developers can’t create an app for that either. So I am just waiting for RIM to realize that this is a necessary function.

2. Trackball problems

I liked the track ball for first few days. But after around a month the trackball started developing problems. It will scroll up, right and left, but scrolling down was a problem. It was getting stuck and every time I had to try 2-3 times to make it scroll. I called up AT&T and they said they can only replace with refurbished phone and not with a new one. So now I am stuck with faulty phone with an option to replace with refurbished one that I doubt, will have the same problem.

3. Can not mute the camera

There is an annoying ‘capture’ sound every time I take the picture and there is no way to mute it. The closest you can do is call your voicemail and take picture while the call is still on. This is the work around. And you know why RIM hard-coded this to Blackberry? Because they think this will prevent you from taking candid pictures. Son of a gun.

4. Alarm did not go off that morning

I have setup the alarm to go off at 7.45 AM every morning. I was up at around 7.30 by myself that morning. I was just lying on bed waiting for the alarm to go off so I can get up from bed. But alarm never went off. I checked the time on BlackBerry, it was 7.50AM. I checked all the alarm setting, all profile setting but all of it was configured as it should be. I googled it and many other people had the same problem. I am really really upset after this incidence. Atleast the simplest apps like alarm clock should work properly on this business class device.

I will keep updating this post for my experiences/adventures  with this device. Comment on this post if you had any such experience with your BlackBerry.

(Update 09/17/09)

5. No auto keyboard lock..!! (really)

Can you believe this? This 21st century business class smart phone has no auto keyboard lock function. You have to manually lock your keyboard every time after you use it. And if you forgot to do it, remember it has a trackball and it sticks out from the phone, so it will for sure do something weird when its in your pocket. But fortunately, some developer thought about this and created an app to auto-lock BB keyboard. (Thanks to RIM for making this API available, otherwise they will lock this one too for security reasons.) But seriously, do you expect your smart phone to lack basic functionality like this?

You might know this guy from Apple’s “Mac vs PC” ad campaign. He gave a great speech at Radio & TV Correspondents’ Dinner. Just listen to his video, you will feel your inner geekiness coming out of you.