The Windows command prompt can never be as powerful as any of the Unix shells, but is it too much to ask that the auto-completion feature (that retrieves the directory or file name when you enter the first few letters and hit the tab key) add the file separator ("\")? This causes immense irritation whenever you assume that the separator would be filled in and start typing the subdirectory's name, only to find the computer refuses to play ball with you.

Greenpeace's exhortations to North Korea asking it to renounce its nuclear weapons are laughably naive:

[North Korea] should immediately set aside their weapons and rejoin the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime. They should advocate for the disarmament of the US and other nuclear weapons states from within the treaty system, not from without.

In short, North Korea should simply bend over and invite the US to have a go at them...

There is a vendor of straw mattresses (called pais in Tamil) in my neighbourhood who is leveraging technology to peddle his wares: instead of using his voice to hawk the mattresses, he plays a tape of himself from a small cassette player which he proudly carries along.

If only somebody like NDTV would do a human interest story on him...

It has been nearly two weeks since the Iraqi elections were held; still no sign of official results. I think this indicates that certain people (you know who) are unhappy with the direction things are taking and are busily engaging in backroom maneuvers to get the result they want. There could also be tampering of the ballots (the ballot boxes not being sealed will come in handy here). Though it looks unlikely that my prediction about Allawi will come true, I wouldn't put it past the powers that be to pull a fast one and have him continue as prime minister.

All this newfound enthusiasm for women's tennis in India would never have happened if a) Sania Mirza's hemline were six inches closer to the ground (and her t-shirt were a bit longer and looser-fitting as well) and b) Indians were not so obsessed with fair skin. Do you really think any of these bozos care about how good her two-handed down-the-line winners are?

I occasionally come across reports from journalists belonging to an organisation known as the Free Arab Voice based in Iraq. They usually claim that US forces have suffered a defeat at the hands of the resistance forces, a chopper has been shot down, etc. The only problem is that you never get to hear these stories repeated in respectable media outlets (even alternative media sources), thereby exposing these stories for the sorry attempts at propaganda that they are (their bias is also evident from the way they report that "two resistance fighters were martyred"). The fact that their news stories are carried at a web site called Jihad Unspun is also a tell-tale sign. Another curious (at least for me) thing is that timelines are reported in Mecca time. I do not know whether this is a standard Middle Eastern custom, though.

The lead story in BBC World is that Prince Charles is going to marry Camilla Parker Bowles. It's either a slow news day, or they have temporarily forgotten that they are called BBC World. Knowing the British propensity to treat their royalty like they were sent from heaven, it's probably the latter.

Here is a page that tracks the usage of swear words in the Linux kernel source. Some more enlightening comments can be found here and here.

Saw National Treasure yesterday. Pretty entertaining if you suspend your disbelief and go with the flow. I have only one nit to pick (assuming you let all the other monstrous nits go by): when Sean Bean and Co try to find out what 'Stowe' means, they go to Yahoo.com and type 'Stowe declaration of independence'! Haven't these guys heard of Google?

It could be just me, but I think there were some subtle barbs at the Bush administration as well (when Nicholas Cage reverently reads aloud a sentence from the Declaration of Independence about it being the responsibility of good men to act when they see something wrong happening, for example) .

According to Gosling, Microsoft’s decision to support C and C++ in the common language runtime in .NET is one of the "biggest and most offensive mistakes that they could have made" because of these languages' inability to prevent things like arbitrary casting and so on.

Going by this argument, Java should never have had JNI. What prevents a native code call dumping all over your sweet and innocent Java objects?

While I agree with xymphora's sentiments in general, I do not think that the neocons (at least the younger ones) will end up in jail for their war crimes. In the 'Real' world (no pun intended), the rich and the powerful always manage to get away with whatever evil things they do. Being a citizen of a corrupt third-world developing country, this is borne out to me on a daily basis.

If Schopenhauer were alive today, he would have been instantly branded a male chauvinist. From his Essay on Women:

It is only man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual impulse that could give the name of the fair sex to that undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race; for the whole beauty of the sex is bound up with this impulse. Instead of calling them beautiful there would be more warrant for describing women as the unesthetic sex. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for the fine arts, have they really and truly any sense of susceptibility; it is a mere mockery if they make a pretense of it in order to assist their endeavors to please.... They are incapable of taking a purely objective interest in anything.... The most distinguished intellects among the whole sex have never managed to produce a single achievement in the fine arts that is really genuine and original; or given to the world any work of permanent value in any sphere.

Here we are, happily traipsing along, making A-lists and wondering when our favourite porn portal will start an RSS feed, and this guys shoots down our core belief systems without a hint of remorse or mercy ;-)

I was flipping through the pages of a magazine called Better Photography when I came across a photograph that had been adjudged a winner in a competition conducted by that magazine. It depicted a crying man cradling a telephone receiver to his ear; nothing special about this photograph, except that when you look closer, you can catch a glimpse (through a window) of a woman hanging from the ceiling of an adjoining room. The man was probably calling the police.

Which of the following jerks deserves to have his balls set on fire?

1. The person who captured this moment on film
2. The person who decided to send this image to the competition
3. The person who adjudged it a winner

I am leaning towards persons 2 and 3, though I wouldn't mind a lit match stick being held under person 1's cojones for a minute.

This is a great article about the realities of software development, in the form of advice to a newbie programmer. Excerpts:

Documentation: The true use of documentation is to bridge the inevitable gap between what the project is supposed to do and what it actually does. Politically written documentation bridges this gap by appearing to claim the former without actually denying the latter. On close examination, it will be found to say nothing at all.

Ass-covering: The chief difficulty is reaching a satisfactory compromise between ass-covering and not appearing too negative. If you know something is going to fail, make sure you point it out and have a record, but try to present it in a positive way. Say that it is a "major risk", rather than a certain failure. Try to request additional resources or time even when you know they will be denied.

Error messages and logfiles: As well as being later than you expect, the system will be less reliable than you expect. Make sure your debug and logfiles give you plenty of information. As with architecture, make sure that your error messages assign blame appropriately.

Overtime: ...better to do half an hour Monday to Thursday than two hours on Wednesday. It also sounds better to say: "I've worked late four nights this week." No-one will be keeping track that closely anyway.

Woe betide the PHB who gets the author of this article in his team ;-)

If you want to read Robert Fisk's latest article in The Independent's online edition, you will have to shell out £1; alternatively, you can read it at his web site for free. Talk about being on the horns of a dilemma...

Some 'heretical' thoughts: what's wrong if Iraq breaks up into three fragments (Sunni, Shia and Kurd), without any violence, something along the lines of the velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia? There wasn't a country called Iraq prior to 1918, anyway. On the positive side, the internal divisions tearing Iraq apart would disappear once and for all (assuming that these internal divisions are not a figment of the imagination).

Other considerations:

1. This would play right into Israel's hands by permanently weakening one of its powerful enemies.


2. Turkey would never allow this, as its own Kurdish minority would clamour vigorously to become a part of the new Kurdish state.


3. The Americans would get to play their democracy-exporting games in three countries for the price of one.

It looks like the unsealed plastic containers are not just for overseas Iraqis; even the polling stations inside Iraq have them.

An opinion poll recently conducted by the BBC found that 62% of the Indians polled felt that Bush's re-election was a positive thing for global security. Methinks this is the right-wing Hindutva chauvinism shining through...

Gumption trap update: Solved the problem, finally. I introduced a temporary global variable and pointed it to the offending object; adding a watch on this global variable helped me identify the exact line of code that caused the original object's value to change mysteriously. To my surprise, this was the creation of another unrelated object (although, to be fair, both objects were of the same class). Simply adding an empty constructor to that class' definition made the problem go away. From the look of things, I am probably missing some not-so-subtle point regarding constructors in C++...

In one of the Seinfeld episodes that featured gay men, any reference to homosexuality by Seinfeld or Jason Alexander would be followed by "...not that I think there's anything wrong with it, of course..." I was reminded of this when reading the last paragraph of this commentary:

It is also important to underline that only a small minority of American Jews support the Likud Party or its policies, and that a majority of Jewish Americans opposed the Iraq war. In short, the problematic nature of Feith's tenure at the Department of Defense must not be made an excuse for any kind of bigotry.

Latest addition to the monkeys-are-intelligent motif.

Man is a rational animal.
Socrates is a man.
Therefore Socrates is a rational animal.

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn't it? At least I thought so until I read this:

...the major premiss of this syllogism takes for granted precisely the point to be proved; for if Socrates is not rational (and no one questions that he is a man) it is not universally true that man is a rational animal.

Looks like nothing is as simple as it seems.

BBC is showing footage of overseas Iraqis voting in the elections. The first thing I noticed was that the ballot boxes did not have any seals on them; their lids were kept in place by some kind of plastic fasteners (the boxes themselves were some sort of plastic containers). Not that it is worthwhile rigging the overseas vote, minute as it is.

According to Seymour Hersh, dogs were not used simply to intimidate prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but were used to hurt them as well:

It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn't publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty hard. A lot of blood.

Today I learned that there is a company that offers to surgically implant artificial testicles in your neutered pets.

These images from a shootout in Iraq are sure to escalate the anti-American feelings even more, but I am taking the soldiers' side on this one. It's easy to second-guess the soldiers' actions sitting in the comfort of our homes. To be fair, they did try to get the car to stop by using hand signals and by firing warning shots. They also did the right thing in administering first aid to the injured children and taking them to the hospital (how difficult would it have been for them to continue pumping bullets into the car 'just to be sure'?).

The people who should be charged for this crime (if anybody should be charged at all) are not the soldiers; it's rather the people who sent them to Iraq in the first place.

As has already been mentioned elsewhere, the image of the little girl is bound to go down in history as one of the enduring images of the war and the suffering caused by it.

Two bright spots in an otherwise dull day (in fact, they had me rolling on the floor with laughter):

1. The Rude Pundit's post about Bill O'Reilly (warning: not for the faint-hearted; explicit content)
   
   
2. A contest advertised on the cover of a Harpic bottle called Pot Banaye Kismat Hot that depicts the prizes (car, refrigerator, washing machine) springing out of a toilet bowl (seriously, dudes, what were you thinking?)

It looks like I have hit one of the gumption traps mentioned in ZMM in my work on Vajra. I don't know how to classify this trap, so I'll just state the problem. The value of a data member of one of the internal objects has gotten changed mysteriously, so to speak. The value is fine during the execution of one bytecode instruction, but gets screwed up somewhere down the line. Ideally, I would get a fix on this by setting a conditional breakpoint, but this is not possible in this case because I don't know how to refer to the object (it exists as a newly added member in a map).

To solve this problem and others of a similar nature, I need a mechanism to track the changes to the VM (the currently executing method and its frame identifier, the bytecode instruction, the pre- and post images of the operand stack, and so on). This requires quite a lot of grunt work (AOP would really come in handy here if I could apply it), which leads to another gumption trap -- boredom.

From a recent letter to The Hindu, on the issue of how God, if He existed, allowed so many innocent people to be killed in the tsunami disaster:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?

There are two ways that believers answer this:

1. Karma: People, though they may be innocent in this life, would still be held accountable for the bad karma accumulated during their past lives.


2. The 'equilateral triangle' argument: Once someone is part of this physical world, there is no way he can escape any of the tribulations and suffering that living in such a world entails (it's called the 'equilateral triangle' argument because once God creates an equilateral triangle, even He doesn't have the power to make its sides unequal; this book has an excellent essay regarding this issue).

There is also a third argument: life as we know it is nothing more than an illusion; the pain and suffering that we endure in this life is akin to what we experience in a dream. Once we awaken from this 'sleep', we will realize this and simply shrug it off as we would a bad dream.

The folks over at alt.atheism will have some (not so pleasant) things to say about this, of course.

Disclaimer: I am not an atheist myself, though I have pretty much abandoned the concept of God as a deity listening to people's prayers, doling out wishes and punishing evildoers.

MyBookmarks.com has screwed up my bookmarks. The site was down yesterday for maintenance. When it came back online, I found that it had replaced my current set of bookmarks with an obsolete one; all my changes over the last month or so seem to have been lost. I am currently engaged in reapplying these changes as well as making a backup of these bookmarks in Firefox itself. An hour of fun and frolic ahead...

Looks like Bollywood has stolen a march on Hollywood when it comes to tackling piracy.

Mobile phones have a mode of text entry called iTap (mine does, anyway) where the software in the phone tries to guess what word you are typing. For example, if you want to type in the word 'while', you type 'wggjd' (these letters are the first of each letter group in the keypad - wxyz, ghi, ghi, jkl and def); the software interprets this correctly. Really speeds up your typing.

I was reminded of this when I discovered a similar feature in OpenOffice. I typed in 'pers' and this was completed as 'perspective' (don't ask me why it didn't select 'perspire' -- probably 'perspective' comes out ahead in some frequency analysis) which was the word I wanted. Pretty cool feature; imagine the amount of time I could save by having the software helpfully filling in words for me. The only problem is that I don't use OpenOffice at work. Time to investigate whether MS Word has this feature (knowing what a piece of monopolistic crap it is, it probably doesn't).

One should not judge a person by his or her looks, but I am willing to make an exception for Condoleeza Rice. This lady radiates pure evil.

I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but these people are a shoo-in for the Darwin awards.

My home page has been given a makeover. The new layout is actually from a blog template. This has got me thinking: why not change my blog's template to match this one as well ?

Update: Makeover complete.

Six Gmail invites available. Send me an email if you would like one.

Two weeks to go for the elections in Iraq. Some predictions:

1. Violence will continue unabated.


2. Voter turnout will be abysmal, but this will not prevent the authorities from declaring the election a success.


3. Allawi will continue as the prime minister (I think a form of Murphy's law is at work here: the caretaker prime minister (or president) will always retain his post after 'elections').


4. US troops will continue to remain in Iraq.


5. No change in the status quo as far as the ordinary Iraqis are concerned.

Robert Fisk on the current climate of fear in Baghdad:

So, "full ahead both" for the dreaded 30 January elections and democracy. The American generals - with a unique mixture of mendacity and hope amid the insurgency - are now saying that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces may not be able to "fully" participate in the elections.

Good news. Until you sit down with the population statistics and realize - as the generals all know - that those four provinces contain more than half of the population of Iraq.

This is the most important thing in the world right now, when 150,000 people have recently lost their lives in a horrific tragedy.

In case you missed it, that was sarcasm.

Having read Lila recently, I was impelled to pay another visit to ZMM. An excerpt from this venerable classic (I am yet to finish the book, so I am sure there will be more such passages to come):

The first problem of empiricism, if empiricism is believed, concerns the nature of "substance." If all our knowledge comes from sensory data, what exactly is this substance which is supposed to give off the sensory data itself? If you try to imagine what this substance is, apart from what is sensed, you'll find yourself thinking about nothing whatsoever.

I don't remember this passage from my first reading, so I am all the more surprised at its similarity to something I posted a while ago.

Finished reading Optimizing Oracle Performance yesterday. This book presents an unconventional way of getting better performance out of an Oracle database, throwing statistics like buffer cache hit ratios out of the window. Instead, it focuses exclusively on the response time a user action takes and how this response time is split among the various database calls and wait events. It's a well-written and authoritative book (the author is an ex-Oracle Corp employee with quite a lot of performance analysis experience). Some nits:

1. The chapter on queuing theory could have been moved to an appendix (or even have been skipped altogether).


2. The chapters targeting PHBs could also have been condensed.


3. Unless you have an automated profiler tool (not sure whether the author's web site provides this tool for free), you are not going to get at the response times from voluminous trace files that easily.


4. You will need additional sources to delve deeper into the ways of correctly interpreting the response times (and fixing the underlying causes) -- Rich Niemiec's "Oracle 9i Performance Tuning" is probably a good resource for this.

When I was in the ninth standard, our English teacher posed a question to us: What happens when we listen to good music? One of the replies she got was, "We forget ourselves." I had never thought of music that way before (to be fair, I was barely into my teens then -- all the more credit to my friend who was smart enough to come up with this answer). A prime example of Dynamic Quality. This is what you experience before your intellect kicks in and you start thinking about the music at a 'meta' level, i.e. who made the music, what emotions it triggers in your mind, what you think of the musician's decadent lifestyle ;-) and so on. The problem is, the Dynamic Quality component of your listening experience diminishes successively each time you listen to the song, till it becomes practically zero (if this were not so, a great song would probably never fall off the charts).

One of the main goals in the practice of Zen Buddhism is to never let go of the Dynamic Quality (they don't call it that, of course) in each and every action that you undertake. Easier said than done...

Wired.com has a hilarious article about how Indian policemen are not properly equipped to tackle cyber crimes. Excerpts:

Cybersecurity expert Raghu Raman said in 2004, police squads were known to confiscate evidence from some offices, returning with monitors and leaving computers behind. Computing teacher Vijay Mukhi said two years ago cops in Mumbai seized pirated software floppies and stapled them together as though they were documents, destroying the material.

A sleuth from Mumbai's high-profile Cyber Crime Investigation Cell once told Wired News how he planned to tackle hacking: "Let hackers know that some tough people are out here.... I have killed Naxalites (regional terrorists who wage guerrilla warfare against police in some Indian states) in Andhra Pradesh (a state).... We cops have seen such tough situations that we know how to handle boys."

I have been bombarded with SMS messages from my mobile service provider, warning me that sending MMS/SMS messages containing porn is punishable under some draconian Penal Code section with a stiff fine and/or prison sentence. This is an offshoot of the MMS porn scandal involving the Delhi school children (considering the act they were engaged in, is it right to call them 'children'?) Anyway, my question is, does ASCII porn also fall under the category of SMS porn?

New blog look courtesy of this collection of free templates (thanks!).

Update: Pretty short tenure for the new look, BTW.

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.