Google News crapping out on spidering errored news hits

Can Google News spider get some more intelligent on figuring out whether it is seeing an error or a valid news item ? I have seen this happening a couple of times in past .. and knowing that one of either the content or the heading is wrong (but not both) makes it a bit more interesting..

May be building some intelligence in the news bot (or) main Google News page generator to make semantics and commonality checks to prove associativity of the headline and the summary contents would solve this simple issue.

This issue brings an important aspect of testing to light for any service oriented application. Here, certainly, news (FOX) site being the service provider and the Google News bot being the service consumer, which are loosely connected.

What does this piece of code mean ?

if ( strlen( tmp ) )tmp[strlen( tmp )-1]='\0';
if ( strlen(SyndSectList ) )SyndSectList[strlen( SyndSectList )-1]='\0';

Unit testing gaining momentum

Looks like finally unit testing is getting big among C programmers/enterprises. It has been sometime when unit testing started gaining in general software development, but mostly among object oriented languages which provide better mechanismms for unit testing... finally we are on similar path even for procedural language, which tend to be a bit difficult than their OOL counterpart.

There are many unit testing packages for C and I have been involved with one .. ie 'CUnit' [http://cunit.sourceforge.net/]. Most of the people that i usually get queries from are from embedded space. I would be happy to see that audience diversified to other areas like systems programming and kernel programming.

Intersting SQL Query

SELECT @unique_key = (SELECT keyvalue FROM XXXXXXX)

Well, Any person with basic SQL knowledge would be able to say what it means, but would also be annoyed to know that this type of the queries are quite common and very easily visible in some of the SQL code in many financial production systems.

Are you surprised at what you see ? Well, if your are planning to move from west to east coast, and are being put into some existing system, be ready to see this type of code.. This is just a sample and be ready for any thing which is of similar quality and worse than this for other languages too.

Having worked in some of the big financial firms, this is not very surprising, and quite frustating to work on any of these older systems, specially when people sitting on those products are not willing to either enhance the product quality or even share the information about the product functionality. I am involved in one such mess, although first in financial world.

Let's see how far can I sail through this mess, and make some improvements to the system or refactor or create new systems for replacing existing systems.

Wish Me Luck!!!

Who is American ?

Is there a genre born called 'American' or is it people who live in America.... as the essay http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0720-24.htm says, americans are born everyday , everywhere in the world. That is absolute true, this country has a great history of immigration, with people all around the world coming here with a few common dreams.. I would co-relate it to some form of Dream Patterns, that are shared by a lot of us. And most common of the dream pattern being "Earning Good Money", "Having/Living a Higher/Better Quality Life" or having a professionally better work (Which nowadays doesn't seem to be very true anymore....). I consider one of those who cam here for the third factor, however felt a lot disappointed on that factor.

However to be on the positive side, there are other things very good here, which I have tried adapting myself.. to some success. Every country has it's own history, culture and language. What does America offer us in these dimension ? It has a history, which has been created mainly by immigrants, first from Europe, and later from other parts of the world. It has a culture that is mix of many cultures.. and as such nothing like American Culture.. It's the corporate culture of this place, that is more prevalent even in people's lives. Language is again, as earlier two dimensions not original of this place, even language immigrated to this country along with Europeans.

Now having all this knowledge, I am sometimes agonized as to why people make (Specially ones on Radio Channels) fuss about non-english speaking people in public places....

There are Too Many or No matches for this criteria

"There are Too Many or No matches for this criteria", what does someone understand by this type of ambigous error message.... It's an open ended message, without pin-pointing one side of the boundary.

Some would argue, that it does convey that the result is not in a valid range... but naive person like me cannot make out, what the valid range is specifically, when I search say on an application by certain criteria/terms, and it comes back with this kind of error message, without any actual result or limits being displayed.

I'am not sure, whether I need to narrow my query or need to expand ?

Big security risk for Indian Tax Payer's Identification

I was recently browsing the NSDL website for exploring options to get a PAN card, which I never received and thought of searching for what my online status was. Tried their search interface, which, to computer user would be quite amazing to know that you can search by combination of name/date of birth. And after entering my credentials... I got result for someone that was not me :))... with his PAN.


Wanna see if someone else with your name and DoB exists in PAN registry.. search for it, probably you'll hit someone other than yourself.. as did I.

Now, after having someone's PAN number and name and DoB.. how difficult would it be for me to open an account .. say a bank or DP trading account and do all sort of funny things... probably get involved with Money Laundering ?? All I need is my own one of utility bill, which in this age of internet I can scan and generate a fake one.. along with a fake photo-copy of PAN card.

I haven't included the search URL, however any average Joe would be able to figure that out from any helpful search engine.

I have already sent an email to the authorities about this, however I believe some guys out there may already have faced the same situation.. and some of them may be bad.. trying out all permutations....

Wake-up India..