Good News !!
Not for Fox though...

Futurama is back , and now we know in what form. The hilarious show will be returning back as a full blown movie. Frankly speaking its a first day first show for me, although it could turn sour due to the length of the movie, we are quite used to watching 20 minutes of fun packed Futurama, but sounz very exciting anyways. Seeing the sheer anxiety in the market for the movie which is due for release in November ( hope its a world wide release ), Fox would be cursing itself for taking the show off air, although Family guy was not a bad substitute but it was a bit harsh to remove such a series.

Cant imagine characters like Fry, Bender, Zap and others ( and guess there will be some new characters also ) packed into one movie. One thing for sure is loz of other guys have rolled up sleeves to roll out similar productions, would we see Family guy getting rolled into a movie, only time will tell, for now if you are a futurama fanatic you have exciting times to come.

You can lay your hands on the trailer here ....................



Wait on .. for the actual show..

Nothing against Sony, they manufacture product of amazing quality, but there are certain things that don't go down too well with the sony consumers. One being arrogance with which the company operates. Take this, a company recalling its laptops and says the the reason is a minor glitch, well as we came to know much later the minor glitch was related to batteries exploding.
There is always someone from Sony, who will always be ready to create more dilemma when you are looking for assurances. The rootkit episode where they secretly installed scripts to monitor consumers, the spokesperson from SONY justifies it by saying "most consumers don't know what a rootkit is, why care for it". Imagine a company suing other, you would believe there must have been grave infraction committed by the company being sued. Now take this, SONY sues Lik Sang ( heaven for Gamers all over the world ) for selling PSP's in Europe. Sony sues people for selling its products, yes that seems to be the case.

Question for SONY lovers, Why would any company relying on customer satisfaction and brand recognition do something like that. Making a portable device sounds good, loading it with your proprietary hardware devices no that good. Who would waste 1500 bucks for a SONY movie disk for his PSP, when he can buy the same DVD for half the money. Thanks for APPLE we dont have a proprietory music format for SONY music players.
Its like rolling out a car that runs on SONY fuel, a Operating System that runs on SONY machines, the days are long over, and people have started embracing Open Source. Probably SONY should take a leaf out of MS, long gone are the days when you can force issues on consumers, they want there freedom and if you are good they we will keep coming back to you.

Numbered days to go for 20/20 world cup and very little is being written in Indian media about the event, showing the interest the event has generated in Indians. Though the event could be seen as a blessing for two players. The two who were decisive in Indian team fortunes till some time back, till the selectors turned backs on them.

One went on to become the vice captain, famous for his quote "If the ball is there to be hit, I'll hit it", until of course the ball started going straight to fielders or hitting the stumps. Virender Sehwag seen as the answer of all Indian worries is struggling these days, and struggling big. While most of the players have started playing in county cricket, Sehwag has not been able to do so. The only cricket he has played in all these days is for his company. Real big tournament for him and he will have to perform big for having any fancies whatsoever of returning to Indian team.

The other player who seeks a solid performance is Harbhajan Singh. Well the 20/20 format wouldnt particularly suit his kind of bowling, but his experience with English 20/20 circuit should prove critical. Unlike Sehwag this lad has been in touch playing in county circuit, so has better chances of adjusting rather quickly in similar conditions in SA.

Both of them have the talent with contributing with both bat and ball and have the right aggressive attitude much needed for the shorter version of the game.

And India finally wins ........ After a long ( and I mean real long ) a performance worth remembrance from Men In Blue. Kartick deserves all the accolades for his wonderful achievements. Though it would be juvenile discussing about all the sledging that happened in this match, it would be remembered by many because of that. Sledging was believed to be big and hard boyz .. when palyers like prior, kevin, kartick etc etc .. it turns out to be rather comical.

Andy prior prompting from behind stumps to Kartick, mate Dhoni wouldnt have played that shot. Well Andy has got all the right in world, but the one thing he forgot was, to have a glance at the score board. Andy was least embarassed giving batting lessons, taking into consideration his dismal performance.

And yeah about Kevin, there is a very fine line between sledging and being human. What Kevin did, well the whole world saw that saw that from this side of the line. Throwing gums is okay Kevin, but then you should have guts to accept what you did. You are a wonderful batsman, but yeah you are also a blot on English culture of handling situations. No wonder then, how many countries you have played for. But trust me on this Kevin, no country is gonna teach you how to be a human. Sreesanth was far better in accepting what he did and having enough balls to apologise for that. Kevin, anyways forget lemme not write about a moron looser anymore.

India has got a huge challenge up their hands to pull off the next one, or atleast manage a draw. No doubts English would come all guns blazing ..

Waiting for the big clash, England vs India. Well so much has been talked and written about the fixture, would be sad if rain washes it out. Sticking to the optimistic line lez hope it doesnt rain and we get to see quite and interesting fixture. To start Michael Vaughn would be cursing rain gods for the outcome of the last fixture, but does he has any right to do that ? Looking at quite an mediocre play that was put by the English side ( except of course by Kevin ) the result was quite apt.
Same performance against any other formidable team and Michael would have ended up on the loosing side, no wonder last ashes was a 5-0 whitewash for aussies. India on other hand didn't performed that badly, yes they ended up on the verge of loosing, but that was no surprise for the Indian cricket followers. There are a lot of positives for Indians from the last fixture and Kartick is definitely the biggest. Oozing with confidence and determination , has shielded the fragile Indian middle order very well. The moment of the match was definitely the wicket of Collignwood , the way he was dismissed exposed that Ganguly is not the only one whom you can bounce back to pavilion.
Another positive was the way big four played, agree they didn't managed any runs but they looked quite positive and confident in contrast to jaffer and probably all English batsman who managed big scores but were edgy throughout. So expect some runs from willows of Dravid, Sachin, Laxman and Saurav next time they step in to bat.
Yet another positive was the exposure of the English bowling. Indian were fresh and generally loose out their tour initial test matches within 4 days, that exposes lack of a bowler on english side who can run through the oppositon. Sidebottom and Anderson are fantastic bowlers but dont have the steam to last long. Monty, well he is a talented bowler and demands attention and respect of Indian batters but they are quite used to this quality of spin bowling.
Dhoni seems to have found his lost touch back and is all set for yet another big knock.

So in all we are in for a nerve wrecking match.

England
positives ...
Home Ground ..
Kevin .. and Paul Collignwood ( the FIGHTER )
negatives ...
Michael under presure ..............

India positives ...
Kartick and Dhoni back in form.
Bowling which has prooved to be handful.
The big four itching for runs.
Momentum
negatives ..
Bad record in english conditions ...

Anathema for Stored Procedures .....

Those in IT industry writing financial softwares know how evil yet useful stored procedures can be. Have you been in a situation wherein you have to improve the response time of your application involving execution of complex queries, but your manager says .. "No SPs here please". Although stored procedures are often viewed as the anathema of the “Write once, run anywhere” goal of Java, I have seen cases where an application that took 10–15 minutes to run as pure Java ran in well under 10 seconds with a stored procedure. The users of that system do not care about the purity of the application; they care about being able to use it to get their job done.

The question is how bad a situation has to be to force the use of SPs. SPs are useless or can even degrade the performance if used used for firing some simple queries, but can be an asset for handling any complicated business process, involving large number of complicated queries.

Guess experience comes in handy while identifying justified use of SPs, and considering how SPs behave on different platforms doing a bit of testing comes in handy before jumping into the final implementations.

McGrath has retired .. sigh of relief for many around the world who were at the recieving end of his immaculate bowling.

Most of the cricketing world would miss a supreme bowler, who always let his performances to be a defense against critics of his falling pace and age. He made us believe that you don't have to be in Shoiab's and Lee's class to run through the opposition. Surely the fans would miss the modest looking ferocious fighter of all times. His achievements for the Australian cricket are second to none.

Retirements on such a high, particularly by McGrath and Flemming sends a deafening message across and particularly to a team like India. Surely when you achieve a stature like these players have, no selector can drop you, but the inner conscious always reminds you that now is the time to retire gracefully, before you become a burden on the team by repeated failures.

Retiring cricket is such a huge challenge for Indians that most of them have to be shamefully dragged out of it, we all know the names of such Indian cricketers. Well no such challenges for McGrath as is reflected from his interview prior to finals, "Just another day
in office".