The FedEx gets one over Rafa, but only just...

Wimbledon 2007: The FedEx equaled Bjorn's record of five championships at the All England Club by overwhelming the challenger in Rafa but only just.Rafa made the FedEx run for every point. The FedEx had to bring out his best tennis before he could get pass..It was a good match up and for a change, the rankings (No 1 and 2) appeared befitting to the two players.

I guess, we can look forward to some interesting duels in the future.

Sometimes you have to lose, to find what it takes to win

The scoreline 6-4,6-1 doesn't really say it but I just saw one of the toughest fights by an under dog.Marion Bartoli won the crowd over at Wimbledon but could not win the championship. It was not the lack of effort that killed her chances but the lack of chances that the experience of Venus Williams fed her with. Marion fought hard, taking serves at 200 kmph well inside the base-line but there wasn't much she could give that Venus had not seen.

But all said and done, I feel that this defeat will make Marion a better player. She took out world number 1 and world number 3 on her way to the finals and lost to a player who had won the championships 3 times before. There is no shame in this loss , after all sometimes you have to lose to find what it needs to win.

In the men's, Rafa is playing the FedEx again and Wimbledon is not a clay surface.Can Rafa stop the FedEx from equaling Bjorn Borg's five championship titles? Maybe..

Jumping Folders : A new security paradigm

I believe that

• 'Every object should be able to secure itself against malicious access by another object.'
• 'Randomness in object behavior can be an effective approach in securing themselves against malicious manipulation'

Jumping Folders is a proposal to secure folders and thereby contained Files from malicious access by introducing a default security behavior at creation time. The 'security behaviour'proposed is based on the premise that all objects exhibit a set of repeatable patterns in response to certain pre-defined stimuli. For example : If you double-click on windows based file or folder, it is 'normally' expected to open up.

What if I want to secure the folder or a file? The 'normal' (I keep emphasizing the term 'normal' for a specific reason,

which I will make clear shortly) options available to me could be :
1. Hiding the folder.
2. Preventing access to the folder by encrypting it with a password or even better encrypting the contents of the folder.

But what are we doing here:
We are using some well known and defined services available to us to 'seemingly' secure the contents of the folder. These services are provided by the OS (windows) and can be configured at different levels (users, groups, roles and all that)

Perhaps you must be thinking.Is there an option? The OS is the RingMaster. He or She cracks the whip and the performers jump but what if someone kills the RingMaster or even worse uses the identity of the RingMaster to manipulate the performers. You would perhaps say "Too bad" or "who cares about petty performers, get another one" and that is how Life goes on. An object is destroyed and we create another one to replace it.

Isn't that just what humans do.People are born, they multiply and then they die and sometimes die due to unnatural causes.

Jumping Folders is a proposal to inject a security element within an object (in this case, a folder) at creation time. The security element enables the folder to 'use' the services offered by the OS and behave 'abnormally' on certain stimuli.
Services in this case is refers to the windows cut and paste operations. stimuli is a mouse double-click. The 'abnormal' behaviour in this case would be 'cutting and pasting itself' at a different location on the file system.

Ahh..now we know, the reason for my stress on normal and abnormal behavior of objects.

Thus, we have an object (the folder) that is intelligent enough to recognize a malicious intent (double-click) and protect itself by copying itself to another location.

So what if you want to see the contents of the folder.

Well, you could use a combination of a certain sequence of mouse-clicks and key-strokes to override the abnormal behavior. Why mouse-clicks? so you can get over a key-logger that is monitoring your keyboard operations.

In conclusion, Nothing is secure and we don't really need to be paranoid about security. Jumping Folders is a project proposal that give secures objects based on their randomness, so now don't let anyone tell you that randomness is bad :-)

The Lord of Hosts is With Us

I was watching the 1964 classic Zulu last night and as the story goes 4000 Zulu warriors attack a post manned by 149 British soldiers. One of the Christian missionaries living with the soldiers asks the sergeant to call upon the Lord for his own salvation and the sergeant responds with a rendering of the Psalms 46:8-11.

8 Come, behold the works of the LORD,
what desolations he hath made in the earth.

9 He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth;
he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder;
he burneth the chariot in the fire.

10 Be still, and know that I am God:
I will be exalted among the heathen,
I will be exalted in the earth.

11 The LORD of hosts is with us;
the God of Jacob is our refuge

Some very strong verses indeed.

The sergeant remarks, 'it might have been written for a soldier'. Very true and as I feel, very relevant to our times even though they were probably written " on the occasion of the invasion of Israel by the Assyrian King Sennacherib and his 185,000 veteran troops." [Ref]

The first line of every verse in the section is fascinating and has a message.
Come and behold the works of the LORD.
He maketh wars to cease unto the ends of the Earth.
Be still and know that I am God.
The LORD of hosts is with us.

The verses call unto us to leave what is holding our attention and to focus upon the works of the mighty One. He has the power to stop wars, He has the power to give us what we need, He has the power to lead us from a falling World Trade Center tower to safety [Ref]. He is the God of Hosts and He is with US.

There is only one question and it can be asked in many ways. Do we really want to be led unto safety? Do we really want to experience real life? Do we really want to know God?

According to 2007 Australian census data [Ref], one in every five people is an atheist and the fastest growing religion in Australia is not Christianity.

Makes me wonder.

The question that bothers me is not the number of people that are atheist but the number of people who have not yet bothered to find out about God through the Holy Bible and claim to be atheists, because they are the ones losing out when the answers are so close and so near.