Biting the hand that feeds.

Google Groups has recently been revamped. It has also been integrated with Gmail. Can't say I really like it. The earlier interface was much cleaner. The only positive thing is that messages posted with the X-No-Archive header are also displayed, albeit for a short duration (six days, I think). Oh, and Firefox doesn't display the new page layout properly, either.

Have to agree with the Rude Pundit: it has been a fucked-up scrotum gnasher of a year.

Quite an eloquent explanation of how foreigners are subsidizing the American economy:

Many of the $100 bills circulating throughout the globe are essentially loans that we never have to pay back. Americans use them to buy goods, services, or other currencies. But many of those bills never return to our shores to be redeemed for anything we make or produce. Instead, they stay under mattresses in Bogotá, circulate in Iraq, and are stashed in bank accounts around the world.

"If you take a brick and drop it in a bath you're going to generate quite a big splash. But if you break the brick up into 10 pieces and drop them in one by one you're going to get 10 much smaller splashes."

- Russell Wynn of the Southampton Oceanography Centre, contending that the threat of a mega-tsunami is vastly overstated.

One Nobel Prize, coming right up...

k3b (KDE's CD burning program) has the annoying habit of converting the file names to upper case (in addition to mangling them). I am sure there is an option somewhere to prevent this, but being too lazy to locate this option, I installed the Gnome version (nautilus-cd-burner). No such problems; works like a charm. In addition, nautilus has the option of zooming in and out using the scroll wheel when viewing images (comes in really handy for porn ;-) )

Continuing my foray into Lisp, I thought I'd implement the Wondrousness Test for a number. Here's what I ended up with:

(defun is-wondrous (n)

  (do ((val n))

      ((eq val 1) t)

    (if (evenp val)

	 (setf val (/ val 2))

       (setf val (+ (* val 3) 1)))

    (print val)))

Here's the (almost) equivalent code in Smalltalk:

WondrousPropertyTester class>>hasWondrousProperty: aNumber

        |temp|

        Transcript clear.

        temp := aNumber.



        Transcript print: temp; cr.



        [temp > 1] whileTrue: 

                        [

                                temp := (temp even) 

                                        ifTrue: [temp / 2] 

                                        ifFalse:[3 * temp + 1].

                                Transcript print: temp; cr.

                        ].

        [Transcript show: 'Yes'; cr]

Chalk one up for Lisp.

Update: Smalltalk code pruned to bring it closer to the Lisp code's behaviour (I had written the Smalltalk version earlier with checks to stop after a prescribed number of iterations; there was some leftover code from this).

Earthquake in Chennai. Never thought I'd live to see the day when the sands of Elliots Beach would be covered with sea water. There were also scenes reminiscent of the doomsday movies where there are traffic jams everywhere and pedestrians are running helter-skelter.

There is a great picture of a 'penguin' receiving an anal probe from a monkey in today's Hindu. I have not been able to locate this picture in the online edition. Some more proof that monkeys are more intelligent than we give them credit for.

Read The Code Book recently. Entertaining read. Simon Singh does a good job of explaining things very lucidly. But I am somewhat skeptical with regard to the future of cryptanalysis (quantum computing). Seems to belong to the realm of sci-fi. Quantum cryptography -- using polarised photons for transmitting messages -- has already been demonstrated to be feasible; it's only the cryptanalysis-using-quantum-computers part that I have issues with.

Interesting tit-bit from the book:

...young lovers in Victorian England were often forbidden from publicly expressing their affection, and could not even communicate by letter in case their parents intercepted and read the contents. This resulted in lovers sending encrypted messages to each other via the personal columns of newspapers. ...On one occasion, Wheatstone deciphered a note in The Times from an Oxford student, suggesting to his true love that they elope. A few days later, Wheatstone inserted his own message, encrypted in the same cipher, advising the couple against this rebellious and rash action. Shortly afterwards there appeared a third message, this time unencrypted and from the lady in question: 'Dear Charlie, Write no more. Our cipher is discovered.'

Quote of the day:

"He shouldn't be on the cover of TIME, he should be doing TIME."
- Comment about Bush being nominated as Time magazine's person of the year.

Is it just me, or is anyone else fed up with The Hindu's saturation coverage of the life and times of M S Subbulakshmi?

While on a rant against The Hindu, somebody should tell them that it is the subject of an article who is more important that the reporter doing the piece. Take a look at any of the Sunday magazine articles and you'll see what I mean; the byline will always be along the lines of -- pay attention to the case -- 'VIP REPORTER talks to Not-so-important Celebrity'.

I have earned the princely sum of $0.27 from the Google ads on this blog. At this rate, I will become a millionaire in 2027 or thereabouts ;-)

Update: The amount is $0.03, actually. The number I mentioned earlier is the Effective CPM, whatever the heck that is. Add another 25 years to my millionaire plans.

Giving as good as one gets.

Why oh why should Windows software need to write stuff to C:\Program Files during installation? I am not talking about system DLLs and things like that, just regular application files.

The network login IDs at work have been set up such that one requires administrator privileges to create files in this directory, making it impossible for me to surreptitiously install any software that cannot be installed in any other location.

Talk about getting ripped off. I spent Rs 250 on a 10 CD-R pack recently at a Higginbothams store, only to find that I could have bought two such packs (same brand) for Rs 210 at the friendly neighbourhood computer store. Meanwhile, the price (MRP) printed on the pack is Rs 550, which is nowhere near either of the prices. Wonder what's going on here...

Walmart is being sued for not placing a 'Parental Advisory' sticker on Evanescence's new album. I would be OK with this if the suit didn't ask for a hefty sum ($74,500) in damages as well, which exposes the suit for what it really is -- a money-grubbing attempt.

My esteem for the American government, as low as it already is, has just gone down another notch (registration required).

Quote of the day:

"Co-founder of AmWay dies at 80. Everyone in the pyramid just went up a level"
- Fark reporting on the death of Amway founder Jay Van Andel

Some good stuff about Amway's pyramid scheme can be found here.

Valencia used to be one of my favourite teams, but not any longer. They thoroughly disgraced themselves by their behaviour during their match against Werder Bremen. A team that cannot handle defeat sportingly doesn't deserve to be called great. Their supporters didn't cover themselves in glory, either, throwing bottles and what-not at the Germans.

This match also takes the cake for the lamest goal celebration I've ever had the misfortune of witnessing. Valdez, after scoring his first goal, ran over to the corner post and mimicked a golf putting shot. One of the minions from his team played the role of his caddy, obligingly removing the corner flag as the imaginary ball rolled into the hole.

At long last, I got around to reading Lila. I had to read the entire book with a pen in hand; there were that many passages and sentences that struck an immediate chord in me. Some of these gems:

So today we have as a result a theory of evolution in which "man" is ruthlessly controlled by the cause-and-effect laws of the universe while the particles of his body are not.

...the evil of disease which the doctor is absolutely morally committed to stop is not an evil at all within the germ's lower static pattern of morality. The germ is making a moral effort to stave off its own destruction by lower-level forces of inorganic evil.

The intelligence of the mind can't think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway, because the intelligence of the cells can't think of any reason to die.

A scientist may argue rationally that the moral question, "Is it moral to murder your neighbor?" is not a scientific question. But can he argue that the moral question, "Is it alright to fake your scientific data?" is not a scientific question?

No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane.

And, finally, my favourite:

A person isn't considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn't supposed to be a communicable disease. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it's a religion.

Found this nugget in a Mises.org article:

...the 27 November Edition of the Financial Times furnishes a telling account published in its letter-to-the-editor section. The writer, who just returned from a business trip to Vietnam, recalls how when a 7-year-old street urchin asked him for money, the child refused his offer of a dollar, instead specifying euros.

Interesting...

Memo to The Hindu: why not wait for a couple of more months before printing this? If you are going to be late in writing about a story, why settle for half-measures? Or, did you guys wait to confirm that it was really Jackie Chan by watching the commercial 200 times?

Lycos' screensaver that targets spam sites is working too well, it seems:

Two of the sites being bombarded by data have been completely knocked offline. One other site has been responding to requests only intermittently as it struggles to cope with the traffic the screensaver is pointing its way.

For some reason, I am siding with the spammers on this one, much as I hate spam. The plight of these poor sites being subjected to these attacks somehow doesn't feel right. My sympathy probably has more to do with my attaching anthropomorphic qualities to these web sites than anything else.

Economics continues to baffle me. To be more precise, it is the part that has to do with international trade. I keep reading that:

A. The American economy is being subsidised by the rest of the world.
B. Some people want a stronger dollar
C. Some people want a weaker dollar
D. Domestic interest rates in the U.S. would rise if the value of the dollar falls.

I have taken a course in economics in college, but I am still not able to grok the above statements. So I decided to devote some time and clear things up once and for all. First, I'll list some 'axioms':

1. Countries need dollars. They need dollars for two reasons: a) to buy stuff from America and b) to accumulate them for buying stuff from other countries (the dollar is the de facto medium of transaction all over the world for various reasons)

2. A country does not simply hoard the dollars it accumulates. It invests these dollars.

3. A country's exporters benefit if the value of the dollar increases because they can earn more equivalent local currency units.

4. A country's importers benefit if the value of the dollar decreases because they need to spend lesser local currency units to import stuff from America.

So far so good. Now I'll see how I can derive theorems A-D from these axioms.

Theorems B and C are polished off straightaway by axioms 3 and 4. In addition, the European Union would like to see the Euro become an alternate medium of transaction for international trade, so I guess they would like to see a weaker dollar, too. (BTW, I am not addressing the desires of large sections of the world's population who want to see the dollar fall simply because they would like America brought to its knees).

Moving on to the other theorems, one of the avenues of investment for a country's dollars is America itself. Since the American government is living beyond its means, i.e. it is spending more than it earns, it floats treasury bonds (which are nothing but promissory notes) to finance its deficit. Other countries use their dollars to buy these bonds, in effect loaning money to the American government. This additional money is pumped into the American economy. The availability of additional money makes credit easier, thereby bringing down the interest rates. Conversely, interest rates would rise if other countries do not buy treasury bonds [*]. This proves theorem D, if we manage to show that other countries would dump their dollars if the value of the dollar falls.

Is it a truism that people will dump dollars if the dollar depreciates? I am not inclined to believe so. There are a lot of factors to keep in mind. A weaker dollar implies that exports become less competitive, which would hurt the other countries' economies. For a country to dump it's dollars, this pitfall has to be counterbalanced by some other reasons. These could be:

a) the presence of a strong Euro
b) overriding fear of dollar-denominated imports becoming cripplingly expensive or
c) the prospect of selling dollars now and buying them back when it falls even lower.

Provided that these reasons provide sufficient motivation, countries would then sell dollars when the dollar depreciates.

Initially I had another theorem in the above list: America uses its military hegemony to reinforce/prop up its economy, but to 'prove' it would lead me into conjecture and/or conspiracy theory territory, so I decided to leave it out. Click here for an intriguing look at this aspect (it also addresses the effect of oil on the scheme of things)

[*] If the American government is really keen on attracting investment in its treasury bonds, it can offer a higher rate of interest for them. But the flip side of this that the higher interest rate will suck capital from local banks, as a result of which regular borrowers (i.e. the public) would be faced with increased interest rates.

The Taj Mahal is going to be opened for night-time viewing. I couldn't be less excited about this piece of information if I tried. In my not-so-humble opinion, the Taj Mahal has got be one of the most over-rated monuments in the world. The reason (again IMNSHO) is that it is so over-hyped that when you see it in real life, it can never hope to match the mile-high expectations that have been set.

Funnily enough, the first thing that comes to my mind whenever I look back on my visit to the Taj Mahal is bumbling around in a tomb in pitch-dark (I don't remember the reason for the darkness, though), banging my knee against one of the tombs and heartily cursing the entire dynasty of emperors and their unborn generations.

Clare Danes added to my A-List.

Some people have way too much free time on their hands, and money to blow as well. And, to top it all off, we are not even sure whether what they have done is accurate; the bozos have not done any validation:

The researchers have not yet tested it on a couple who already have children to see how closely the computer's predictions match the real thing.

From a news item about a mortar attack in Baghdad:

O'Brien declined to provide the identities of the victims, but said that none of those killed were American.

A typical example of how self-centred most Americans are. No Americans killed, so nothing to get excited about, move right along, folks...

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

Considering the number of lost souls out there searching for Miss Jammu porn and wrongly landing here, I have decided to help these wayward brothers: click here to get what you are looking for (warning: you need a throwaway email address to register).

My passion for football has been rekindled somewhat after watching some Champions League matches. I had really lost interest in the English Premier League. As I have mentioned earlier, no disinterested observer looks forward to two less-than-average teams battling it out for a draw (it's especially painful to make an effort to stay interested when you know that one of the teams is happy with a draw and that this single result will not have that large a bearing on the final standings anyway).

In contrast to this, almost every single match in the Champions League (even at the group stages) is critical, considering the depth of the teams (it's not for nothing that it is called the Champions League). You can sense the urgency of both the teams throughout a game. The quality of the game is also much higher.

Bush with his fly apparently open.

My earlier post about a former Miss Jammu starring in porn movies is getting me quite a few hits. It looks like somebody (yeah, I am talking about you, perv ;-) ) on the net is searching for downloadable pr0n starring said former beauty queen and mistakenly landing up here.

Here is a wicked thought: next time you are forced to enter some text into an HTML form (or even a plain old application) because it is mandatory, and you really have nothing to put there, simply type in "null". You will be sure to get the hapless programmer who wrote that code into trouble for not doing proper validation of input data.

(returns to underground lair to resume torturing innocent kittens)

My Gmail account has become POP-enabled. But the port number is not 110; it's 995. The POP configuration page does not mention this (or that we have to enable SSL). Come to think of it, I referred to the Thunderbird screenshots there to set things up; when you enter the details of the POP server in Thunderbird, you are not prompted for the port number (it silently defaults to 110); you have to correct this by creating the account, then visiting the account settings dialog. I guess Thunderbird figures pretty low in the list of email clients the people at Google had in mind when they put up the help page.

The folks at Citibank need to get some pointers from usability experts. I had a query about my credit limit, so I went to their website and clicked on the 'Contact us' link. I was taken to a form where I selected my credit card number (I had already logged in), entered my query and clicked on Submit. No issues so far. But here is the catch: an answer to my query will not be emailed to me; instead, it will be posted in the same page. I just need to remember to periodically drop in there and check.

It's not like they don't have my email address, either. In the very form where I filled out my query, I saw my email address displayed. It was in an editable field, implying that the reply could be sent to another address if required.

Added two more songs to my all-time favourites list: Europe's The Final Countdown and U2's New Year's Day. The surprising thing was that for some reason my attention was drawn to these songs at the same time (both of these songs having something to do with New Year Day was not the reason, BTW).

Whenever I listen to The Final Countdown, while 99% of my mind is enjoying the song, the remaining 1% is directing pure evil towards the SOBs who shamelessly plagiarised this tune for Maine Pyaar Kiya. The saddest part is that if you play this song in Amritsar or Ludhiana, the refrain would be Arre saala, Maine Pyaar Kiya se ek dum lift kiya.

Suse crashed for the first time the day before yesterday. I was tying to configure sound in YaST and tried to re-plug the jack from the speakers when this happened.

1. Army men accused of raping women in Kashmir
2. A former Miss Jammu being forced to star in porn flicks
3. A 15-year-old girl raped by the maulvi in her village
4. A woman turned out of her in-laws' house because they came to know that she had been sexually abused by her father when she was young. On returning to her father's house, the abuse continues; she delivers a baby (whom the sicko news anchor helpfully informs us is both the girl's son as well as her brother). Father arrested.

All these nuggets of information in a single news capsule, one after the other, in NDTV 24x7. In their defence, it might have been a Women Abuse Special.

Another philosophical question: what are the quintessential features of Firefox? What are the things about Firefox that remain invariant across different themes, font switches, window styles and other look & feel changes?

1. Tabbed browsing
2. Extensions functionality (most notably Adblock and Gmail Notifier for me)
3. Popup blocking and find-as-you-type

A pretty small list, I would say. This leads me to conclude that the primary reason Firefox has found such large-scale adoption is that it is based on a solidly built inner core (that is independent of the user interface - reminiscent of another such system). At the risk of sounding like I have a fixation on Firefox (which I probably do, considering the number of posts I have dedicated to it), you might even call this inner core the soul of Firefox.

On a side note, I have realised that I hardly make use of the address bar. Most of my browsing is done either from my bookmarks or Bloglines page, or by following interesting links. One use I do regularly put the address bar to is to copy/paste links in my blog posts, of course.

(No, I was not drunk when I made this post)

The funeral held for Arafat in Cairo was in sharp contrast to the scenes in Ramallah. Though the crowds had been cleared to make space for the helicopter to land, once the chopper landed, it was quickly surrounded by the crowds and the coffin was only removed with some difficulty. I was almost expecting a repeat of the scenes at Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral when his body was manhandled by grievers, but luckily nothing of that sort happened.

Laloo Yadav and Sitaram Yechuri represented India at the funeral, BTW.

Thanks to this story in Slashdot, one more phrase to add to my vocabulary: edit wars. These happen when a Wiki page is edited back and forth in a frenzied manner because the editors have violent disputes. There is even a Wikipedia entry dedicated to the lamest edit wars ever, which promptly got caught up in an edit war itself.

Arafat dies.

Say what you will about the man, but you've got to hand one thing to Arafat: indomitable will. It must have taken a lot of courage for him to have stayed holed up in his compound in Ramallah for so long, enduring so much hardship.

I was thinking that the unseemly spat between his wife and the Palestinian leaders could have been avoided if some agreement had been reached regarding some decent (behind-the-scenes) compensation (say $10 million) to her, but it looks like the stakes are much higher; as much as $900 million from the Palestinian Authority's treasury are missing/unaccounted for.

Firefox 1.0 has been released. This time my favorite extensions weren't mauled so badly. Only Firesomething and DictionarySearch were flagged as incompatible (oh, and WebMailCompose, though carried over successfully to 1.0, doesn't work; it just takes me to Gmail's main page. Update: works fine now, no idea how or why).

It looks like Qute and Firefox have parted ways for good. Since I *hate* Firefox's default theme, and because Qute is not (yet?) compatible, I ended up installing Noia eXtreme. My browser looks like a schoolgirl's lunchbox now. The Mozilla site seems to be straining under heavy traffic, so I cannot try out any other themes, either...

Even BBC is covering Firefox's launch.

Check this out for a (brutal) repartee to the essay I posted about earlier.

Saw a program on TV about how HIV-positive people are treated in rural Tamil Nadu for their illness; all kinds of quackery goes on, with some touting that drinking donkey milk will cure a patient of HIV. But this treatment takes the cake: rather than drink the milk of a donkey, make love to it (I swear, I am not making this up). In one instance, an HIV-positive man was forced to spend six months locked up in a room with a donkey. Needless to say, the man's health did not improve and he died.

People who suggest such treatments must be punished by being raped by a donkey kept in horny isolation for six months.

Having recently started working in Oracle again, on the server side to be exact, I am struck by how unintuitive the syntax is. To query an initialisation parameter, you would have to say 'SHOW PARAMETER <parameter name>'. To determine some other database property, you may have to fire a SELECT statement against a data dictionary view. The point is, there is no universal way of doing things. This may not seem like a big deal for someone steeped in DBA-related matters, but definitely makes the learning curve steeper. Of course, there are GUI applications like DBArtisan that hide this complexity, though I don't think they are very amenable with regard to programmability/scripting.

This got me thinking: why doesn't somebody write a parcel in VisualWorks that hides this complexity? We could have an object model that maps on to the various DB objects (mind you, what I have in mind is different from a typical client-side database package that is used for end-user database applications). For example, we could have a Database object at the top of the hierarchy. You will then do stuff like:

aDatabase := OracleDatabase new.
aDatabase host: someIP sid: someSID user: someUser password: somePassword.
allTablespaces := aDatabase getTablespaces. "returns a collection of all the tablespaces"
allParams := aDatabase getInitParams. "dictionary of init.ora parameters"

I think I will post this to comp.lang.smalltalk.

Looking at all the allegations of vote fraud in the American presidential elections, one thought comes to mind repeatedly: for some reason, Americans seem to have very liberal attitudes when it comes to conflict of interest. There doesn't seem to be any problems with someone belonging to a political party and at the same time overseeing the elections as a supervisor, for example. State Supreme Court judges can also belong to political parties, it seems. When such a judge is presiding over cases involving the party he is affiliated to, it is human nature for him to lean (even if only subconsciously) towards his party. Even if he doesn't, and delivers his judgment with the best of intentions, the verdict may still appear tainted. Why isn't something being done about this?

On a related note, if politicians in India start taking a leaf out of their American counterparts and begin to move back and forth between corporate board rooms and legislative/parliamentary assemblies, what little democracy we have will effectively be over.

Another gem from alt.poltics.usa:

When Bush won re-election, a giant bulls-eye target was suddenly painted on the head of every American.

Bush is the guy you go into a bar with, who is already drunk, and he keeps trying to pick fights with people. And they think you're associated with him. There's nothing secure about that feeling.

Some more great sigs I ran across in Slashdot:

1."I drank what?" - Socrates
2. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
3. Repeat after me, we are all individuals.
4. Lost: Pet sig. Insightful yet humorous. If found, call 555-5555.
5. 404 - Sig not found
6. No man's an island, unless he's had too much to drink and wets the bed.

About 80 million people didn't vote in the current American presidential elections. While some of these people would have been simply apathetic, a sizeable fraction didn't vote because they saw no point in voting; both the choices were unappealing to them. What if this group, say 20-30 million people, took to casting an invalid vote instead of staying away altogether? People would start noticing this (only about 3% of the total votes cast are 'spoiled' on an average). A better option would be for these people to vote for a third-party candidate, but that would presume that their political leanings were towards one candidate, which may not necessarily be true. This way, they at least present a uniform bloc without splintering their vote.

I thought this was a satirical piece at first:

That is why the unthinkable must become thinkable. If the so-called "Red States" (those that voted for George W. Bush) cannot be respected or at least tolerated by the "Blue States" (those that voted for Al Gore and John Kerry), then the most disparate of them must live apart--not by secession of the former (a majority), but by expulsion of the latter. Here is how to do it.

Having been amended only 17 times since 10 vital amendments (the Bill of Rights) were added at the republic's inception, the U.S. Constitution is not easily changed, primarily because so many states (75%, now 38 of 50) must agree. Yet, there are 38 states today that may be inclined to adopt, let us call it, a "Declaration of Expulsion," that is, a specific constitutional amendment to kick out the systemically troublesome states and those trending rapidly toward anti-American, if not outright subversive, behavior. The 12 states that must go: California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware. Only the remaining 38 states would retain the name, "United States of America." The 12 expelled mobs could call themselves the "Dirty Dozen," or individually keep their identity and go their separate ways, probably straight to Hell.

I bet somebody at The Onion is right now saying, "Damn! I wish I had thought of this idea first!".

Andrew Tanenbaum (he of the MINIX fame), the Votemaster behind electoral-vote.com, plugging the Masters program at the university he is teaching in:

If you are a senior majoring in computer science and are seriously thinking of leaving the country due to the election results, you might be interested in my international English-language masters program in parallel and distributed computer systems.

;-)

The U.S. presidential election results have been quite a bit of a surprise to me; I was expecting a landslide victory for Kerry, considering the amount of animosity felt towards Bush by everyone.

But reflecting more deeply on this, I think I relied too much on the Internet to serve as a barometer of public opinion (even after considering that Americans are probably one of the most wired folks on the planet). It could also be that I was only seeing one side of the story, since I tend to avoid pro-Bush sites generally.

A person who doesn't spend much time online would have a consistent world-view; whatever he/she has been reading in the newspapers and watching on TV (i.e. the candidates are neck and neck, things are too close to call, etc.) would have been affirmed by the election results.

BTW, why do only Ohio's provisional votes matter? What about the provisional votes from other states? Is it because the margin of difference between Bush and Kerry is larger than the total provisional votes in other states?

I think the Democrats not thowing in the towel is more of a gesture to their supporters, to show that they are still fighting. Unless more than 75% of the provisional votes in Ohio go to Kerry (seeing that the race is so close, this is probably pretty much impossible), we are in for another four years of Bush (shudder).

BBC's online coverage of the election is fantastic, BTW. It's Flash-based, with a lot of information (going back till the 1948 elections).

A humourous comment about the US presidential elections in Slashdot:

Wait a minute... something just occurred to me!

If some insidious government officials were to approve the installation [sic] an easily-corruptible voting system in order to co-opt the election according to their agenda, and if the mass media then convinced the masses that the election is really close and could go either way, then it wouldn't be quite so transparent when the election was rigged in favor of one candidate!

Holy crap!

Either the above comment is true, or Americans really do prefer Bush. I don't know which of the two possibilities is scarier.

This occurred to me as I was reading the Rude Pundit's usual castigation of Bush: when you take sides in a bitterly contested fight, you demonise the opposite side. You cheer their misfortunes, gloat over their mistakes and revel in their miseries. But once the battle has been won, I always find that a wave of pity and tenderness washes over me as I contemplate the plight of the loser; all his sins are instantly forgiven. He returns to being a human being as prone to making mistakes as anybody else, probably wracked by feelings of self-doubt and vulnerability.

I wouldn't mind feeling some of this pathos for Bush on November 3 :-)

All the problems related to election fraud in the US would vanish if one thing were to happen: the states agree to cede to the Federal government's authority in the conduct of the presidential election. The federal government could then come up with a uniform method of electronic voting throughout the country. This method can be vetted by a professional body like the ACM (speaking of the ACM, they have devoted a full issue to this topic).

When India, with all the scope for corruption here, can conduct a blemishless electronic vote (at least there have been no complaints of large-scale fraud), the current state of affairs in the US doesn't reflect well on its technological/political maturity (imagine the mortification of having to listen to advice from Cuba and Zimbabwe on how to conduct an election).

Another thing I cannot understand about the American elections is voter registration. Why must a voter be registered as a Republican/Democrat/Independent before the election? Doesn't this sort of invalidate the concept of a secret ballot? Is this a way to ensure that people vote only once? If so, can't this be done without asking people to disclose their voting preferences?

The print and electronic media should desist from mentioning any computer security firm when they release news about new virus threats. No purpose (except free publicity for the company in question) is served by doing so. Why cannot they just say that "an analyst at a leading security firm today said that..."? It's not like anybody would complain (except said analyst, perhaps). Attributing a statement to a source when the source wants to remain anonymous is a no-no, but not its opposite. In addition to putting unscrupulous companies in their place, who knows, we might even see a reduction in the number of threats.

There is a line of argument which goes like this: "both Arabs and Israelis are Semites, therefore to accuse Arabs of anti-semitism is essentially meaningless, because it implies that they are against themselves". Next time you read an article containing the term anti-semitism, mentally replace it with anti-Jewish (which is the article's real intention) and this bogus argument vanishes.

The fact that the charge of anti-semitism is used to deflect genuine criticism of Israeli actions is another matter altogether, of course.

Just finished watching the first part of the State of the Union debate on BBC World. One thing I learned was that Madeline Albright suports India's candidacy for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council. Another was that James Woolsey (former CIA director) was the only person who showed any cognisance of the fact that Peak Oil may be upon us. He rightly stressed that we need to start developing alternative energy sources and should also work on conserving the available resources. This point was made in the context of the emergence of India and China as strong powers and their energy demands in the coming decades.

I also got to see George Soros and Sid Blumenthal for the first time. When you read quite a lot of things written/said by somebody, you form a mental image of them in your mind. When you finally see that person, it invariably turns out that the mental image is at odds with how the person actually looks.

It looks like our government is going to offload its dollars. I don't remember this being reported in our newspapers though (it could be that I missed it).

There is a slew of programs in BBC World this weekend covering the presidential elections in the US. Personas featured include Michael Moore, Sidney Blumenthal and Bill O'Reilly. I foresee a lot of fireworks. I have one question: Was the program featuring O'Reilly recorded before or after the scandal?

My Linux machine has become very sluggish of late. I think the culprit is either YaST Online Update or Gnucash. I noticed the slowdown only after I installed or started using them. Either some security patch or one of the packages required to run Gnucash is causing this problem.

I had neglected balancing my cheque book for quite some time, so it was no great surprise to see that things were pretty messed up when I attempted to do so recently. It took a marathon session with OpenOffice Calc (that's the OSS equivalent of MS Excel for the uninitiated) and poring over my barely legible cheque book entries from more than a year ago (yes, that's how long it's been since things were fine) for me to get things back on track again.

Flush with the above accounting success, I downloaded and installed Gnucash. After some twiddling around and reading sections of the online help, I have set things up the way I want them. If I continue making entries in Gnucash religiously for the rest of the year, I will know exactly how much I spent on coffee this fiscal...

Bruce Schneier has this to say on what works and what doesn't when defending targets against terrorist attacks.

According to Bruce, none of the predominantly used mechanisms (ID cards, face recognition software, screening attendees) work. The one solution that works is:

"...smart security officials watching the crowds. It's called 'behavior recognition,' and it requires trained personnel looking for suspicious behavior..."

But even then, there is no way to stop a really determined terrorist willing to die in the process of committing the act. If he is not able to blow himself up at the location of his choice (bang [pun unintended] in the middle of the spectators in a stadium, for example), he would then do so at the checkpoint where he is about to be busted.

I have a simpler solution: as Michael Rivero is often wont to say, stop messing with other countries' people, and the terrorists will go home. But then what do you do with the home-grown variety? Try to ensure that there are no alienated groups ready to take to violence because they feel that justice is being denied to them. This may not solve the problem completely; there will always be someone with a grievance (real or imagined) that is not being addressed, but application of the 80:20 rule (80% of the violence is due to 20% of the causes) will at least make the problem manageable.

I think I will buy a copy of Mike Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon. I have a lot of respect for Mike's opinions and I think this book will throw light on quite a few things in addition to 9/11. But FTW's endorsement of Pinnacle Quest International is slightly disturbing, especially after reading what Daniel Hopsicker has to say about this.

Suse 9.1 is the best distro I have tried out so far (the others being Debian and Mandrake). Here is where the backing of a company like Novell comes through. No evidence of the annoying little nuisances that I faced with Mandrake (mind you, these annoyances in no way made Mandrake unusable). The only gripe I have is that the 9.1 Personal edition does not come bundled with developer tools (no gcc, xemacs, etc.). You have to go to the Suse mirrors for them.

Update: Turns out Suse already had a fine tradition of reliability and engineering excellence prior to being bought by Novell.

What do normal people do when they can't sleep? They count sheep. Being a nerd, I have come up with a mechanism suitable for such people (courtsey EGB): trying to determine whether the number 27 has the Wondrousness Property. A number is said to possess this property if it is reducible to 1 by applying these transformations to it:

1. If it is is even, divide it by 2
2. If it is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1 to the result
3. If the result is 1, stop; else go to step 1

It goes without saying that you have to perform these computations in your head.

Spoiler: 27 does possess this property, but I can assure you that unless you are an insomniac, you will not work your way to this conclusion within a reasonable amount of time.

Firefox 1.0PR (Linux version) has the annoying habit of dying out on me when I click on a link that opens a popup window. This doesn't happen always, but more than half the time. I would have reported this to Bugzilla, but it asked me to jump through so many hoops before accepting a bug report that I lost interest. There is supposed to be a Quality Agent that should kick in when an exception occurs, but no evidence of this so far. The saving grace is that at least the "Profile in use" message doesn't appear when I restart Firefox after the crash [*].

[*] Useful tip to remember: if you get this message after a crash, delete the file called 'lock' in the Firefox profile directory (usually ~/.mozilla/firefox/*default*)

Update: this problem vanished when I moved to Suse 9.1; however I had to fix another issue before I could get Firfox to work in Suse.

Update #2: Nope, the problem still persists, though on a random basis. But at least the Quality Feeback Agent faithfully calls home and whines about the problem now.

The Aussies must be a happy lot, having managed to save the second test. This is where their calibre shows; any lesser team would have lost heart when they have a second innings lead of just nine runs, with two days to go and their top batsmen back in the dressing room (not to mention the prospect of facing Kumble and Harbhajan on a turning/bouncy wicket). But they gamely hung in there and managed to set a pretty decent target for us (who knows, they might even have bowled us out for less than 200 if the weather hadn't turned out the way it did).

Something tells me this series will be very different from 2001. The Australians may even end up winning it.

I was thinking about how the war on terror started with 19 men armed with nothing more than boxcutters hijacking airliners and slamming them into buildings and metamorphosed into a crusade for the destruction of WMD capabilities in the hands of terrorists and their sponsors. I had already typed these words on the screen:

"It has been more than three years since 9/11 and there is no evidence that anybody has attempted a WMD-based terror attack in this time period".

completely forgetting the anthrax attacks that immediately followed 9/11. This lapse of memory has convinced me that the anthrax attacks were staged precisely to link terrorism with WMD. The way the investigation has been conducted (click here for a good overview of this) has also reinforced my belief. It is almost a certainty that world events would have followed a different course had either 9/11 or the anthrax attacks happened in isolation (i.e. not both of them together).

Patiently downloaded Croquet last night. After reading through the short-on-specifics- and hype-laden introduction and FAQ (as Hani Suleiman would say, there is quite a lot of arm-waving going on there), my curiosity was piqued and I decided that the 60 MB download was worth it. Sad to say, but it wasn't. I simply couldn't see where Squeak ends and Croquet begins. It is not very obvious what Croquet brings to the table. Both seem to have a goal of becoming a guest OS (or at least the default desktop). May be I need to dig deeper. But based on first impressions, definitely a disappointment.

Having heard so much about Test Driven Development, I was wondering how easily and effectively I could incorporate this into Vajra. I am currently in the process of writing the native methods for the few classes that the JVM author needs to implement in order to integrate the JVM with Classpath. Each such class has an associated .so file that contains the native methods for that class. If I were to write a unit test for these native methods, let's say for the class java.lang.reflect.Constructor, and more specifically for the method getDeclaringClass(), what would I need?

The native method definition looks something like this:

JNIEXPORT jclass JNICALL Java_Constructor_getDeclaringClass(JNIEnv *env, jobject obj) ;

In order to unit test this method from a harness, I should have these things available:

1) A functional JNIEnv pointer
2) A jobject

Both of these structures are either direclty mapped to internal classes in Vajra, or are members of these classes. If I need to correctly initialise these structures, those internal classes will have to be initialised first. This brings into play the entire internal object hierarchy of Vajra, with all its dependencies, some of which border on the incestuous.

There are two ways I can proceed here:

(a) invoke the virtual machine on a sample class that in turn makes the call to getDeclaringClass() in its main method, thereby invoking the native method

(b) create stubs for all the internal objects I need to be initialised before I invoke getDeclaringClass() from the harness.

Option (a) is the easier option for me, but is more of an integration test. Option (b), while technically the correct way to do unit testing, would involve a humongous effort at setting up the testing environment.

I do not know whether the 'failure' (if I can call it that) of the unit test approach in this instance is due to the inherent complexity of the problem or because I am going about this in the wrong manner. I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in between. It could also be that the design deficiencies in Vajra (a lack of testability) play a part in this.

Just wondering: are people who do not know HTML (i.e. the non-techies who use their computers only for email and browsing) aware that when one web page is linked from another, the anchor text can be anything at all and need not reflect the actual web page title? I got to thinking about it after seeing Eschaton link to a New York Times story with the caption "Unfuckingbelievable".

Now this is a great sig (found it on alt.politics):

The GOP recently announced that it is changing the Republican emblem from an elephant to a condom because it more clearly reflects the party's political stance. A condom stands up to inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, protects a bunch of pricks, and gives one a sense of security while screwing others.

Freepops is a great utility to get POP3 access to your web mail. It works with all the popular services (Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail). Now I have the best of both worlds; offline access to my emails as well as the ability to access my emails from the the 1 GB mail server inbox from anywhere. But I think accessing Gmail through POP3 violates their Terms of Service. Need to check up on this...

Here is another this-could-happen-only-in-America story. Is it just me, or does anybody else feel that it is too much information to know that there was "zero shit factor" each of the 298 times that Ms Bentley did it?

Not only does xymphora come up with very insightful comments, he can be wickedly funny at times as well:

Israeli spies found in the U. S. are like a fishing show: it's always 'catch and release'.

It looks like the extensions have caught up with Firefox 1.0PR. When I re-installed 1.0PR and tried to download the extensions that I have come to consider as indispensable (Adblock [*], DictionarySearch, GMail Notifier and Firesomething [OK, I admit, this one is more of a humour thing]), I found that these extensions happily admitted to supporting 1.0PR and installed without any problems.

All is well in the kingdom and the subjects are happy.

[*] IMHO, this extension is the single biggest differentiator between Firefox and Opera (along with Opera's inability to support Gmail).

The bozos responsible for the Fair and Lovely (tm) ad that features a girl aspiring to be a cricket commentator should be made to bend over and experience the pleasure of a semi-sharp (preferably rusty) object savaging their unmentionables.

This ad peddles the impression that no matter how good a girl is, it is superficial things like the color of her skin that would decide whether she gets ahead in life.

The Technorati problem has been fixed (not sure how, though). Just goes to show that any problem would simply go away (or cease to be your problem) if you ignore it for sufficiently long.

One more person to add to my list of people with bad karma: Ram Jethmalani. This guy has no scruples whatsoever; he will defend any client that approaches him, no matter how odious they are (some of his notorious clients: the LTTE, Harshad Mehta). It wouldn't matter so much if he did not possess such a sharp intellect. He makes use of this gift to indulge in all kinds of sophistry and get his clients (who are probably guilty as sin) off on technicalities when there are so many noble and worthy causes which would love to have him on their side.

Some hilarious stuff.

As promised, here is a list of some lousy sigs:

1. This is not a sig. It is a figment of your imagination.
2. This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
3. Sig? what Sig?
4. why have a sig at all anyway? It's not required is it? oh damn! now I have one. nevermind.
5. My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
6. This signature is largely concerned with Hobbits
7. If you recognize me at all, you probably recognize me by this sig.
8. No sig
9. This space intentionally left blank.
10. vi ~/.emacs
11..sigs are a waste of data...turn them off...

Back in Chennai after a two-week trip to Mumbai for attending a training program. Mumbai is a great city in all respects, except for the condition of its roads. The timing of the visit was also right; the monsoon was just tapering off, producing some excellent weather, with cloudy or pleasantly sunny days with some rain thrown in. My visit also coincided with the Ganesh festival. The fervour shown by the people in celebrating this has to be seen to be believed. The beating of the drums as the idol is taken for immersion in the sea is pretty exhilarating.

Here is the solution to the Smalltalk trivia question: if you type 'class' an odd number of times after anyObject, you would get 'Metaclass'; for even numbers, you would get the class object of Metaclass, i.e., 'Metaclass class'. If you are wondering what the heck a metaclass or a class object is, welcome to the wonderful world of Smalltalk, where Everything is an Object (tm).

Firefox 1.0 Pre-Release Candidate is available for download, but I don't think it is ready for prime time yet (the Linux version, at least). It breaks many of the useful extensions that work with 0.9.3. Also, for some reason, the 'Get More Extensions' link in the Extensions window refused to work. To top it all off, when I tried running 0.9.3 (I had installed 1.0PR separately), I found that it was also behaving erratically (the Adblock extension kept appearing on and off, depending on whether I invoked it from the KDE Panel or from the command line). I restored sanity by knocking off 1.0, renaming my profile folder in 0.9.3 and re-installing my extensions.

I am not bad-mouthing Firefox, BTW. I still think it is a great browser. All power to the folks at Mozilla. I only hope that they kiss and make up with Arvid Axelsson so that Qute becomes the default theme once again.

One of my friends emailed me a link, asking me to enter my birthday in the form pointed to by the link. I blithely went to said link, filled my name, date of birth and email address; just after clicking on the OK button, it struck me: what a neat way to harvest email addresses and other important[*] information! And I might have fallen for this like a complete jackass. There is a chance that the whole thing is genuine, but this is one more instance that shows that even the best us of (yup, that's me :-)) let our guards down sometimes.

[*] considering that your date of birth is often used to validate credit card transactions.

Smalltalk trivia: what would you get if you typed the following in a workspace and clicked on PrintIt?

anyObject class class class class class ... ad infinitum

assuming that a) anyObject has been initialised and b) you have a life and stop after typing 'class' 10 or 20 times?

I'll give the answer in a later post.

WTF?? If I click my Technorati Profile (at the top right corner of my blog), I am told that my associated Weblog is something called ~Kissable~Loveable~Huggable~Unbelievable~ I admit, I possess all of these qualities, but still, I would like my profile to point to my blog.

Anyway, it's not like Technorati is bringing me a lot of eyeballs, so I'll leave it like it is for the time being. I also like the cute (Turkish?) girl featured on that page.

I don't know who is the pettier of the two: the Kerala government for deliberately omitting Gujarat from the national anthem (if it is deliberate, that is), or the Chief Minister of Gujarat for taking offence over it.

To complete the misery, there is a news item which suggests that Bangladesh is doing much better than India in removing social/gender inequalities. I am not begrudging Bangladesh's achievements (they need some good news as much as we Indians do), BTW, but am only drawing attention to our wrong policies.

These are the days when you wish the British had never left India...

Predictably, the row over who will bag the telecast rights is heating up, with the BCCI now tripping over itself in court:

"Meanwhile, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), which had earlier said both ESPN-Star Sports and Zee Telefilms were eligible for telecast rights, today, in an affidavit, stated that both were ineligible."

Why am I not surprised?

Both wget and curl have let me down. After my download aborted for some reason (after downloading more than 400 MB), wget refused to continue the download even though I had specified the --continue option. I then decided to try curl (curl has an option of continuing from a specified offset); but it turned out that for some reason, curl didn't stop at the point where it should have reached the end the file and continued happily downloading. End result: a total of about 800 MB downloaded, and still no ISO file. Grrr...

I am presently engaged in the biggest download attempt of my life: a full ISO image of the Smalltalk ESUG 2004 offerings. 160 MB down, 440 MB to go... I am assuming that the --continue option in wget works. If it doesn't, I guess I'll have to grin and bear it and order the CD through PayPal (which I would like to avoid, BTW).

Watched Shrek 2 last night. Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas' voice-overs for the donkey and the cat respectively are simply hilarious. Whenever these characters spoke, I couldn't help picturing the actors behind the voices; this added to the fun. The high point of the movie for me was the spoof of 'Cops' when Shrek and his buddies get arrested; the cat is pressed against the wall and its paws are cuffed behind its back. The 'police' discover a small plastic pouch containing a suspicious-looking powder hidden in the folds of the cat's clothes; the cat says "that's not mine" in a thick Spanish accent. I was literally rolling on the floor.

I know it's no fun being exposed to the fury of hurricanes as is happening right now in Cuba, Jamaica and parts of America, but I find the idea of hunkering down in one's home with no electricity, with winds howling and rain lashing the battened-down windows, with just a battery-operated radio that transmits information about how far away the storm is (and how quickly it is approaching you) quite pleasant, actually. There are probably two reasons for this: a) this scenario reminds me of the typical murder mystery in which a bunch of people are caught during a rainstorm in an isolated cabin/mansion with a murderer amongst them and b) I have experienced this personally and enjoyed the forced vacation from school (the fact that our roof wasn't blown away when I was taking a dump in the bathroom probably played a part, too).

Here is an article that talks about how two of the most intransigent maths problems might have been solved. I have only one complaint about this article: the way it exaggerates the threat to the security of our online transactions because of the danger to internet cryptography posed by one of these solutions. I agree that the author has qualified this prediction with a big if, but the fact that people have been trying in vain for millennia to find order in the sequence of prime numbers reassures me that our cryptography systems will be safe for a while longer. I am not a mathematician, but I think it will not be that easy to take advantage of this proof and exploiting it (though the Russian mafia have been known to employ serious hackers, I think such an exploit will be beyond them - for the time being at least).

I simply fail to see any point in inviting teams like the United States to the ICC Champions Trophy. Much as the administrators of the game would wish, cricket is not (and will never be) a global game. Let's at least drop the pretense and make sure that all the matches are played among the few countries unfortunate enough to have taken the game seriously enough.

On a related note, Sevanti Ninan's latest column hits the nail on the head vis-a-vis the gobs of cash that cricket attracts:

Why does the Board for Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) need such obscene sums to hand out rights? Our cricketers are not exactly poverty stricken, but they will get 26 per cent of the board's gross revenue, we are told. The bidding has taken the price of international cricket rights within India, for four years, from Rs. 250 crores the last time around, to Rs. 1,400 crores! The Board says it will use the money for the development of cricket in the country. As our recent performance in the Olympics will show, it is all the other sports that are in need of being developed.

I think it is a safe bet to say that a sizeable fraction of the money earned from the telecast rights ends up in the hands of people who have no business even looking at it (this includes some of the cricketers as well).

I have been spending a lot of time recently updating my music page. When I started this, I didn't think that I would get close to 100 songs, but unless I am more selective/discerning this figure looks likely. May be I'll have to spawn off a separate list called "Notable Mentions" and move some to this list.

On a side note, I think I am leaving a wealth of information in this page for someone do a psychoanalysis of my personality ;-)

If I see one more too-clever-by-half sig in a Slashdot comment, I am going to barf. Everybody wants to prove how cool, smart and funny they are, it's absolutely sickening. Sample: "This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)"

Update: I have started collecting these sigs. Once I have enough numbers, I am going to put them in my home page.