India Sri Lanka 1st ODI 2009 quick observations

So really close game, India just good enough to outlast the Lankans.

A couple of points regarding the finish. When Nehra bowled a yorker to Kandamby and Nehra threw the ball towards the stumps, Kandamby took a run with the ball deflecting off of his body.

Most teams have a policy which is generally accepted that you dont run if the ball hits you or your body. We had Brad Hogg in commentary praising Kandamby for taking the single. The argument being if the ball hits your body and deflects onto the stumps you are still run out if you are short.

A few overs later Angelo Mathews hit a drive down the ground and was coming back for the second run. He ran right in front of the stumps to prevent the fielder from being able to get the ball back to the keeper to affect the run out which is an acceptable thing. Except Hogg was fine with that too.

So in his rule book you should run in front of the stumps when taking a run and when the throw hits your body and deflects off you should take over throws as well. What a beautiful strategy. Why not have the batsman look at the throw coming in and hit the ball on its way to the stumps with his bat and collect extra runs. After all its all allowed right.

It was only deserving to see Kandamby run out a bit later on.

Highlights of the game if anyone is interested.

Best Facebook Privacy Settings

Privacy is not something I am usually too concerned with. Since you can usually rely on engineers at large corporations to make the right choices regarding what kind of information of a person should be made public and what kind of information can be analyzed to make money on through advertising.

Google does it, facebook does it and every other email/web service provider does it.

But with the recent changes to the privacy policy and default settings on facebook it made me wonder if facebook has their heart in the right place. Before you could leave all the settings untouched and be reasonably comfortable that only your friends and perhaps friends of friends would be able to access your information. And most people wont mind that, after all the way to grow your network and find new people is through letting a subset of facebook users see you.

With the new settings most if not all of your information on facebook becomes viewable by everyone on facebook. And to top it off there are things on your profile/status updates/notes/fan pages which will show up on any search engine as well.

So rather than going through all the details, here is a quick summary of what I have got on my facebook privacy settings to keep almost all the information on and about my profile limited to only my network.

To get to the privacy settings click on Privacy Settings under Settings. Top Right of the screen.

Profile Information. -> Photo Albums

Contact Information.

Applications And websites. -> What your friends can share about you

Search.

If you are making any changes click on the preview my profile on the top right to ensure your new profile page is acceptable to you.

Even with all these changes your friends list is still visible to everyone. This has been a bone of contention across the web. A simple way to make it invisible to strangers is to click on the small pencil at the top right of the friends box and UNCHECK the "Show my friends on my profile". Doing this makes sure no one sees your friends list if they stumble upon your profile.

It might seem a little paranoid to go through all these steps to hide all this information, but the information hiding is only from strangers, not friends of friends, Pure strangers.

Sehwag and his uniqueness

Absolutely brilliant breathtaking batting by Sehwag on the 2nd day of the 3rd Test match at CCI in Mumbai. In the first session of the test match the pitch looked like it would assist fast bowlers and spinners alike and what does Sehwag do? Gets India in the lead by 50 by the end of day 2.

The brutality of this innings was mind blowing. To bat the way he did for a session is difficult enough, he maintained his batting tempo for 79 overs except for a spell towards the end of the day and a couple of overs after tea.

During the 90s teams used to struggle to make 270 in a day. That gives a yardstick to compare the scale of Sehwag's achievement. And India did not even bat the whole day. Given another 11 overs he would have easily got the record for the most runs in a day which currently belongs to Sir Bradman against guess who, England, 309 runs.

If this was an ODI and Sehwag was the opponent SL would have still lost this match as I am sure if he plays 300 deliveries he will score around 350 runs.

Enough of stats. Coming back to the quality of the knock and the sheer brilliance of it. I dont think there has ever been any cricketer in the history of the game who bats as aggressively as Sehwag and for such an extended duration.

What goes into such an inning:

Talent

Hard work and practice

Physical strength and stamina to bat for so long.

Batting technique to survive international bowling

The sheer audacity to not give into the norm of bating for time in a test match. Following and trusting your gut instinct each and every delivery.

The first 4 any number of international greats have had over the history of the game. Sachin, Ponting, Dravid, Hayden, Viv Richards, Kallis, Border, Gavaskar..... Long list

But none of them have had the daring to have utter disregard for the classical mould of scoring runs. All of these players would have batted for the length of a day and longer. But none of them would have even thought about keeping their scoring pace for the entire duration of a day. Dont get me wrong I am a fan of each one of these players and they are all very very special batters. But the way Sehwag has batted for the last 6 7 years you just have to stand up and admire his style.

Here's hoping he gets to 500 by the end of the day, provided he doesn't get bored from the Sri Lankan bowling.

On a side note: I am really hoping Muralidharan gets a few wickets. It would be an absolute shame to see a legend like him playing his last game against India and abroad bow out being treated like a 2nd grade net bowler. He deserves better. Have to admire the man's spirit. The final ball of the day he bowled a straighter one to Dravid which Dravid didn't pick and there was a huge appeal. The ball was missing leg but the look in the eyes of Murali was worth staying up all night. Toiling for the whole day the man still had the energy and the determination to plot for a wicket and the sheer disappointment on his face at not getting the wicket was really sad to see.

Facebook: Changes to the newsfeed filter

Just came across a neat little change on the newsfeed. Previously whenever you would get these annoying updates from spammy applications like "farmville" or "bestfriend" and the likes you could hover your mouse over to the top right corner of the message and a hide button would appear. Clicking on it would allow you to hide that application or hide that particular friend completely.

Now what you have is a hide button, clicking which you get the message " _____ has been hidden from your News Feed..." with an Edit options link. On clicking the Edit link you have options to customize your newsfeed, remove or add friends change the maximum number of messages you get in your feed etc.

This is a step in the right direction. As before there was no way to reduce the number of messages received from some friends with whom you weren't necessarily in touch with. This could lead to further narrowed down filtering options for users to customize the feed. Maybe even to the extent where messages from particular friends which contain certain words should be filtered out. A scenario where this could be useful would be if you have a certain friend who you follow but he msgs excessively about girls or computers then his messages could be filtered by these words.

Hopefully some day there would be an option to export your newsfeed to view it in an external rss reader :P

Spare External HDD

So my Compaq C700 died on me last week. The lcd was dead and the vga port didn't send out any signals to the external monitor. So I ended up ordering a Lenovo G550 from Newegg. Got a great deal, 395$ !!

Now I have the problem of moving stuff from my old 500 GB drive to the new laptop. I have an external drive (Western Digital passport portable 320). So my thoughts are to open that one up and replace the drive with the 500 GB drive. I am not sure how or if this would work.

The other idea I had was to somehow connect the HDD to my router so I could access it without connecting it to the computer with a USB drive. Looked at various USB to Ethernet adapters. But these seem to be solutions built for old computers with no network card installed and wanting to connect to a router. And none of these could be connected to the HDD as it takes in a micro USB.

Even if I could find a micro USB to Ethernet adapter this idea won't work. The problem is to work as a network drive the hdd needs to be a mini computer on its own. Hence there are these expensive NAS boxes and enclosures available online.

So now I have landed on Addonics NAS Adapter which is an enclosure in which you can put in your external 2.5" laptop drive and make the necessary connections and connect it to the router. With some additional software installed (the install guide is provided on the site) you have a cheap NAS solution.

The other option is to go for a customer product from DLink (DLink2). There are pre-built NAS boxes you can buy from Buffalo or Western Digital, but these are expensive solutions.

Will update this post once I have executed either of these strategies and got my old data on the new computer

Free Google wave Invites!!

Got 18 invites, anyone want one leave a comment with your mail id.

android 2.0 and google's navigation app

Just a quick note on a possible flaw or feature of this app in combination with google latitude (Latitude allows users to sign into google and show their current locations to their friends on google maps, uses phone's gps or a fancy google gears app to get your location on a laptop) You could have users stalking others friends of theirs via latitude and using google's navigation app to guide them get to their friends current location. Now depending on how current the data is or how often google refreshes this data users could possibly have a nightmarish situation.

On the other hand people could play games using latitude and navigation. Catch me if you can!