What a Surprising Start!!!

T20 cricket is home for surprises.The opening match in T20 worldcup 2009, between England and Netherlands, once again proved this.

The Netherlands pulled of a stunning 4 wicket victory over a shell shocked England team to launch this years Twenty20 World Cup in spectacular fashion.

Thanks to contributions from de Grooth(49), Borren(30), whose brilliant knocks led their team to a very surprising victory over the hosts, England.

It doesn't seem that they have won just by luck. The scoreboard statistics of their innings reveal this. Except for the first couple of overs, they could achieve required runrate each and every over. They were also aware of the possibility of Duckworth-Lewis method, hence maintaining the required rate.

Earlier, England's middle order failed badly. The brilliant knocks of Luke Wright and Bopara, appeared to guide England to a huge total. But the next batsmen couldn't utilize their best opening partnership in T20 (102), contributing only 73 in the second half of their innings. This might have given confidence to Netherlands, who could achieve the target.

This game serves as a warning to all leading teams, not to take the opponent lightly. Especially India should not underestimate Bangladesh, who upset India in 2007 worldcup and Ireland, who upset pakistan in the same worldcup.

With teams like Netherlands performing well, this T20 should be very interesting.
Hope to see some thrilling matches.
Cheers :)

Restore Linux Grub

Hi all,

Did you install Windows after installing Linux? Are you unable to get the Linux boot menu? Then, this post is for you.

When you install Windows, it overwrites the Linux grub with that of Windows. Hence, when you start the system, it will directly boot Windows, where you had options to boot Linux or windows. In order to restore Linux grub, you should follow the procedure given below:

• Insert any linux live cd and boot from it.
• Go to terminal, type 'sudo grub' (or just 'grub' if you are in root terminal).
• Then type 'find /boot/grub/stage1'. This should retrieve your linux partition info. (It should be like (hdx,y)).
• Then type 'root (hdx,y)' (Replace x, y with values you get).
• Type 'setup (hdx)'. This will give a successful message if grub is restored.
  
• Then 'quit' and 'reboot'.

You can enjoy both Linux and Windows as before :)

I consider this as my best discovery in Linux commands because I have used this no. of times. It is very useful and simple method to restore grub.

You can also use 'Restore Grub' image to restore both Windows or Linux grub.

Bing - Competition to Google?

Microsoft has announced its new search engine - "BING". The company describes Bing as delivering more answers to your search queries directly on the search-results page, so you don’t have to keep hunting around for what you want to find.

There are some interesting features which most of the users would like:

• A feature called Hover displays a brief summary of each Web page when your cursor is hovering over the right edge of a link, and this can save you from visiting a useless page.
• Videos on Bing start playing when you move your cursor over a thumbnail still image from the video, without requiring you to press play or go to a new page; the videos stop when you mouse elsewhere.
• A query about a company usually returns its customer-service phone number at the top of the results page.
  
• Shopping, restaurant reviews and travel are also significantly enhanced by Bing.
• Shows related searches on the left side of the page.
• During image search, when cursor is moved over a thumbnail, shows details of the image like resolution and website.
• Also provides various filtering options like size, layout, colour, style for image search.

For some of the searches, Bing appears to provide more relevant results than Google.

Though it appears to be imitating Google in its looks and options, Bing seems to be one of the best search engines. But I wonder whether the users who are very much used to 'Googling' are going for 'Binging'.

Some screenshots of Bing:

Homepage:












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Some Jokes

Bad temper problem

Patient: Doctor, you must help me. I'm under such a lot of stress, I keep losing my temper with people.

Doctor: Tell me about your problem.

Patient: I just did, didn't I, you stupid fool!!

A very interesting fact

Doctor: Did you know that there are more than 1,000 bones in the human body?

Larry: Shhh, doctor! There are three dogs outside in the waiting room!

Driving exams worry me

Liz: I get so nervous and frightened during driving tests!

Doctor: Don't worry about it. You'll pass eventually.

Liz: I'm the examiner!