The National Science Talent Search Examination (NSTSE) 2006 was conducted on 29 January 2006 by the Unified Council. Well, it does try to be a sort of an imposter by naming itself similar to the National Talent Search Examination conducted by NCERT, but it too is prestigious. I have noticed one thing about this olympiad; the biology, chemistry and general knowledge sections are easy but the physics and math section can be from higher classes and requires LOTS of calculation. Since you get 90 minutes to answer 100 MCQs, it’s better to go according to instinct and elimination rather than start solving everything. Actually, this exam is just a farce by the Brain Mapping Academy, the parent owner of Unified Council, who conduct this basically to sell their books. They would ask you to buy past years question papers and special Brain Mapping Academy books but believe me, I bought them last time and not a SINGLE question came from those. So you are better off preparing on your own. Just brush up the basic concepts and apply your knowledge to the application based questions that are asked. After all, it’s sponsored by Britannica India, and who doesn’t want a free Britannica CD.

One advice though, do take the Student Performance Report (SPR); it has useful analysis. Also, if you are participating on your own and you don’t get your admit card, contact them by email IMMEDIATELY since they don’t check it regularly. Once you get a reply, do print it out, it comes handy when you go to the exam centre. You could get to know your registration number on the phone (if they pick it up, that is), but you won’t have any supporting document to gain an entry on exam date then.

Thw wind was howling over the great eastern sea.Christ Cameroon the discoverer sat in his cabin observing the storm. It was raining fishes and frogs.The rain didn’t seem to stop.It had been raining for more than two days now. The sky Pitch black lighted up now and then with a stroke of lightning. Suddenly there was………………………..

You gotta wait till i finish my book and find a publisher. the name’s Incarnation

part 1 of the Life Trilogy

New to the Big Bad Wild West Internet? Are you prone to drowning frequently in the tsunamic waves while surfing the World Wide Web? Don’t know why the heck some media files ask for their buddy Real Player? Well, here’s the answer to these headaches.

Google has recently launched another freebie service for download, Google Pack. In essence it is a marketing ploy to distribute loads of Google software, but the sweeten the package by allowing you to add your own software from a list. Here’s what they have to offer:

1. Google Earth: This must-have app will literally make the world your oyster.
2. Google Desktop Search: Haven’t tried it out since I like Yahoo! Desktop Search better. One problem is that it stores the index online, while Yahoo! does it offline. So a lost connection means goodbye to desktop search. The benefit of both over normal Windows search facility is that it is ’search-as-you-type’, i.e., results are displayed instantly.
3. Picasa: Google’s photo organizing software that allows you organize and edit photos. It also gives options for publishing online. For starters though, I would advice Adobe Photoshop 3.0 Starter Edition; Picasa is damn to cheery (like the doors in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) for me to like it.
4. Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer: Nice toolbar, but I like Great Quizzard’s Toolbar more.
5. Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar: Another must-have. There’s a link for this at the starting of this blog.
6. Ad-Aware SE Personal: Award-winning spyware and adware removal app.
7. Norton Antivirus 2005 Special Edition: A 6-month subscription to that crap. OK, fine it works for beginners, but I use avast! 4 Home, although it’s not advisable for first-timers.
8. Adobe Reader 7: Useful to read those PDFs.
9. Google Talk: THE app used by Gmail user to, well, talk and chat.
10. RealPlayer: My favorite media player. Believe me it can play EVERYTHING, except ‘.ogg’ files. Good for playing streaming video/audio.
11. Trillian: A product of Cerulean Studios, this can connect to every IM account, like AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Google, ICQ, etc.
12. GalleryPlayer HD Images: Never even heard of it, but sounds fun if you own a broadband company.

Remember, you have the option to select the ones you want, or don’t. Also, this would take a very looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time to download if you have a slow connection. Also, download it as a pack only if you are in a jiffy to join the cyber community, I like to search and hunt down software the old-fashioned way.

The ‘C’ programming language was designed and developed by Brian Kernighan, and Dennis Ritchie at The Bell Research Labs. ‘C’ is a language specifically created in order to allow the programmer access to almost all of the machine’s internals- registers, I/O slots and absolute addresses. However, at the same time,’C’ allows for as much data hiding and programme text modularisation as isneeded to allow very complex multi-programmer projects to be constructed in an organised and timely fashion. During the early 1960s computer Operating Systems started to become very much more complex with the introduction of multi-terminal and multi-process capabilities. Prior to this time Operating Systems had been carefully and laboriously crafted using assembler codes, and many programming teams realised that in order to have a working o/s in anything like a reasonable time this was now longer economically feasible. This then was the motivation to produce the ‘C’ Language, which was first implemented in assembler on a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-7. Of course once a simple assembler version was working it was possible to rewrite the compiler in ‘C’ itself. This was done in short order and therefore as soon as the PDP-11 was introduced by DEC it was only necessary to change the code generator section of the compiler and the new machine had a compiler in just a few weeks. ‘C’ wasthen used to implement the UNIX o/s. This means, that a complete UNIX can betransported, or to use the simple jargon of today; ‘ported’ to a new machine inliterally just a few months by a small team of competent programmers.