March 10 marked the fifth anniversary of the day that the Nasdaq hit its all-time peak. This article covers the story. One thing I take exception to is that the stories cited as dotcom successes invariably end as:

"...the internet incubator Antfactory, which he co-founded, was sold in 2002 for £77m"

or

"...First Tuesday - was sold in late 2000 to an Israeli internet company, Yazam, for £26m."

None of them end with the founders successfully turning a profit and continuing to grow their businesses. The bottom line still seems to be "Make money fast, and get out."

Bloglines has been down for most of the day. Sad part is, I don't have a backup of my feed URLs. Guess it's time to dust off a desktop RSS client, at least for situations like these.

Firefox tip: If you don't like the small size of the Google search box or would like to use the address bar itself as the search box (a la Netscape/Mozilla), replace the 'keyword.URL' property in about:config with 'http://www.google.com/search?q=' (without the quotes). Now you can remove the Google search box altogether from the navigation toolbar.

Mind you, you lose the flexibility of using multiple search engines, though.

Type 'about:mozilla' in Firefox's address bar and this is what you'll see:

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15

;-)

Having grown tired of posting to my blog using Blogger's web interface, I googled for a Blogger client for Linux and decided upon BloGTK. After resolving some dependencies involving Python and GTK (YaST keeps proving to me how indispensable it is), I managed to get it up and running.

BloGTK is OK, but the spellcheck seems to be broken; it blithely announced that there are no misspelled words even when I deliberately introduced spelling errors (to be fair, this might have be addressed in 1.1; I could only install and run 1.0).

I have wondered for long how I can create titles for my posts or classify them into categories; now I know how: there are text boxes in BloGTK for doing this. The only problem is that these text boxes are disabled. Looks like I will have to get a premium account with Blogger for this.

Man United are out of the Champions' League. My happiness would have been complete if Chelsea had joined them too. Not that I have anything against Chelsea per se; I just want to see the arrogant smirk wiped off Jose Mourinho's mug.

Though both the matches were pretty gripping affairs, the Chelsea/Barcelona match will go down in the annals of European football as one of the all-time classics. When I switched over to ESPN after the completion of the Milan/United game, the scoreline read 3-2 in Chelsea's favour (I was watching the replays -- I impose a news blackout on myself so that when I watch the replays, they are, to all intents and purposes, live matches for me), but the atmosphere at Stamford Bridge was pretty subdued. Turns out Barcelona had pulled two goals back, after trailing 0-3. But this was to be the end of their fightback.

The third match of the day is a contender for Ripley's Believe It Or Not: Lyon thrashing Werder Bremen 7-2.

Let me get this straight:

1. Venezuela is the fourth largest supplier of oil to the United States.

2. If Venezuela cuts off its supply of oil to the US, oil prices will skyrocket, thereby causing widespread economic harm to the US.

3. Ergo, in order to safeguard American economic interests, Chavez has to be assassinated.

WTF?

My run-in with bad movies continues. Having walked out after half an hour or so of Black (who the &^%* put the idea of speaking English with a British accent into Amitabh Bachchan's head?) three weeks ago, it was the turn of Sins yesterday.

Let's start with the language first. Though listening to the characters speak in Indian English is quaint, it quickly becomes irritating. The incredibly stilted dialogue doesn't help either. It would have been much better if the movie had been shot in Malayalam (or even Hindi) and English subtitles had been provided.

The director probably had good intentions when he decided to leave certain things unsaid and let the audience figure things out by themselves (a refreshing change when compared to movies where the other side of a phone conversation is repeated verbatim so that the audience doesn't miss anything), but he could have gone easy on the "One/Two years later..." stuff.

I wouldn't blame the actors for the bad acting, considering the constraints placed on them because of the script and language choice (but that's no excuse for some of the hamming that's on display).

Having said all this, Sins is still a watchable movie if you just go with the flow (and enjoy the steamy bits, of course). Watching the movie in a nearly-empty theater with a bunch of like-minded folks poking fun of the corny dialogue and laughing irreverently in all the wrong places helps, too ;-)

Some good analysis about the root causes of Islamic terrorism from Juan Cole. I was reading along and mentally nodding in agreement, until I reached this sentence:

To this litany of Occupations [sic] that produce radical Muslim terrorism, Chechnya and Kashmir can be added.

He concludes with:

Some just disposition of the Kashmir issue must be attained, and Indian enormities against Kashmiri Muslims must stop.

IMHO, I would not club Kashmir with the other hotspots like Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, Syria and Lebanon, for the simple reason that the onset of terrorism in Kashmir didn't coincide with the start of the so-called occupation; it required an external trigger ("death by a thousand cuts").

The Formula One season has kicked off. Michael Schumacher is languishing in eleventh place as I type this. Looks like the new regulations have levelled the playing field. I'll wait till the end of the race before gloating.

I think the Star Sports commentators have been told to say some nice things about Narain Karthikeyan if only to keep the Indian viewers happy. We hear that Karthikeyan is a "charger," "not intimidated by the big guys" and so on, with no mention being made of the fact that he is two places from the bottom.

Is it too much to ask that Blogger's spellcheck software recognise the word "blog"?

Dave Winer threw down the gauntlet at Kottke for implying that Dave was against the Google Autolink feature because Google chose to buy another blog company instead of UserLand. He asked Kottke to either have the guts to mention Dave Winer explicitly or STFU.

I was looking forward to some fireworks, but it looks like Dave forgave Kottke or the spat was settled offline; the challenge has been removed from Dave's blog post.

Something's wrong with BBC's RSS feed. Some stories keep appearing at least four or five times a day. This is all the more irritating when the story is about el freako.

Interesting tit-bit: The Eclipse.org domain name was purchased from a girls' soccer team.

You learn something new every day.

I have a bunch of dynamic libraries that implement the native methods of the Classpath reference implementation classes. These libraries refer to Vajra internals via header files. Problem is, you not only need these header files, but also the implementation files while building the .so file.

Not having used shared libraries that extensively (from a development perspective, that is), this was news to me. I thought it was enough for the code calling a function in the library to be linked to the class definition object file and the function will resolve the symbol from this (both share the same address space, after all).

Anyway, I discovered this by using valgrind. valgrind, in addition to checking memory leaks, uninitialised pointers, etc., also shows the above class of errors (undefined symbol in .so file). Such errors are not always reported in such a straightforward way when the program is run without valgrind; you only get segmentation faults or illegal instructions, making it harder to pinpoint the problem.

I have gone back to XEmacs and ddd for my C++ needs. I toughed it out for a while with Eclipse (it has a plugin for C++ development), but its sluggishness finally got to me. I would have liked to use Anjuta or KDevelop, but there doesn't seem to be a way to import an existing CVS module into a new project (both of them insist on creating a new module for me). Moreover, much as I love open source software, I am not yet ready to put Vajra through the grind of autoconf, automake and libtool; I am perfectly happy with a hand-crafted makefile for the time being, thank you very much. When I was using Anjuta in my Debian days, I remember being able to force it use my makefile, but this doesn't seem to be possible with the version packaged with Suse.

Richard Stallman has written about his recent trip to India. Doesn't look like he had a very enjoyable experience here (he was made to pay Rs 25 for a landline call at Delhi airport and also had to endure various other discomforts). Can't help but compare this with the reception Bill Gates got here, with his larger-than-life mug being plastered like election posters all over the place and getting treated like royalty.

Bloggers have been getting a lot of attention lately, and comparisons (both favourable and unfavourable) have been made between their journalistic capabilities and that of the mainstream media. While breaking a news story is a worthwhile thing, an even more important purpose is served by bloggers who link to online news sites -- especially foreign ones -- that carry stories that would otherwise not come to the attention of readers (WhatReallyHappened.com is a good example).

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been nominated for the "Razzie" awards eight times, but has not won even once. Therefore, he gets honoured with an award for being the worst Razzie loser.

Reminds me of the quote, "If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?"

Quote of the day:

...instead of "charming" them with his offensive, he came off as simply "offensive".

Continuing my tracking of brainy primates, here is a story about a gorilla who gets to gawk at women's breasts.

The knockout phase of the Champions' League has begun. English clubs are not doing so well in this phase, with Chelsea, Arsenal and Man United suffering defeats, and Liverpool conceding an away goal. One thing I have noticed in these matches is that the commentators' pro-English bias invariably raises its head (in their dismay at Leverkusen's injury-time goal, for example) how much ever they try to mask it.

If you follow the English Premier League in ESPN-Star Sports, the hype would have you believe that the top English clubs are the cat's whiskers, whereas the truth is that they usually more than meet their match at the hands of clubs like Real Madrid, Milan and Bayern Munich.

I have been spending quite a lot time recently on the different J2EE frameworks (Spring, Hibernate, etc.). The power of most of these frameworks flows from their ability to substitute implementations at runtime, by simply replacing the name of a class in a configuration file. Come to think of it, even the much-maligned JDBC works this way -- you can replace your driver class in the place where you set up your connection pool. Dynamic loading of classes at runtime is what make this possible. Reflection is also used to provide additional flexibility; for example, Spring uses reflection to invoke getter and setter methods on the classes and further abstract away the relationship between them.

I have not worked in .NET, but I think these features must be available there as well. In the earlier days, the only way one could do such things was a) loading a shared library dynamically from a file name supplied at run time (nowhere near as powerful as loading a class) and b) specifying a CLSID or IID in COM (my knowledge of COM is a bit rusty right now, so I am not sure whether this can be done at runtime).

This article appeared in The Economic Times recently as part of a debate about open source software. Some gems from this FUDfest:

Microsoft's own products are tightly integrated and they interoperate with non-Microsoft environments based on open industry standards.

Any sentence that has "Microsoft" and "open industry standards" without the word "not" in between is either a joke or is false. Anyone need a quick hug from Microsoft?

Keeping sensitive information secure is a government priority. Microsoft dedicates security resources for emergency response, product engineering, user-feedback and industry certifications.

Is that why CERT recently advised people to move away from Internet Explorer? Because it was too secure?

...OSS products have more vulnerabilities than Windows, but few of them are backed by a comprehensive, organised security response/testing framework. Platform and data interoperability is very important.

Leaving aside the fact that the first sentence is highly debatable, the next one is a non sequitur.

A and B are enemies.

A 'bad' event E is beneficial to A.

E occurs. Who is to blame for this event?

1. Since E is beneficial to A, Occam's Razor says A caused E.


2. B caused E to show A in a bad light (the benefits of E to A are outweighed by this bad publicity)


3. A caused E, but is trying to set things up such that B gets the blame for causing it, because B wants to put the blame on A because A derives the maximum benefit from it.

Where am I going with this, you might ask. Substitute A = Syria, B = Israel and E = Hariri's assassination, and things might make a little more sense.

This is just one instance of the kind of intrigue that goes on in the Middle East every day.

One aspect I have not seen covered much regarding Syria's presence in Lebanon is Robert Fisk's take on things:

Syria, you see, has a strategic reason for being here. In 1982, the Israelis invaded Lebanon and got up to beyond Jounieh. And had they struck east with their tanks, they could have cut Syria in half. And Syria wants to make sure there are going to be no more pro-Israeli governments or Israeli-sponsored governments in Beirut, who might allow such a devastating event to take place in Syria. So, there's a kind of long term strategic reason why the Syrians are here. They're not here because they want to throw snowballs on the mountain of Sanine, or they like Iraq or they are keen on Lebanese society. They're here for strategic military reasons.

Here is a good essay by novelist Michael Crichton about how the scientific method is being supplanted by non-rigorous, consensus-based studies to serve political ends.

While we are on the subject, here is a related essay by Richard Feynman.

SEBI has issued a notification that all stock market investors who enter into transactions of value one lakh rupees or more should obtain a unique identification number (UIN) after submitting their thumb prints and photographs to designated service providers. This should be done before March 31, 2005.

As is typical of any bureaucratic notification, it is ambiguous: it doesn't say whether it applies to persons who have done such transactions prior to the announcement of the notification (or even prior to 31 March, 2005). Also, is this number required even if I have two transactions that cross the threshold when taken together, but not individually?

Unless the designated service providers process the application free of charge (which I doubt very much), I can't help thinking that some undeserving people are making a killing here.

Oh and SEBI, while even a person's height is a biometric measure, calling fingerprints biometric impressions sounds a bit highfalutin.

I am right now watching the umpteenth repeat of Goodwill Hunting. One of my favourite movies of all time. Three scenes are particularly noteworthy: a) the scene where Matt Damon wades into the obnoxious college grad in the bar b) when he finally breaks down after Robin Williams keeps repeating "It's not your fault" and c) when he toys with the closet gay psychiatrist ("putting from the rough" -- ROTFL!).

Fact: The biggest explosion ever observed by humans occurred in a neutron star 50,000 light years away.

Fearmongering/sensationalism:

"Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and would possibly have triggered a mass extinction"

Note carefully: the scientist didn't say, "Had the star been 10 light years closer to Earth, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and would possibly have triggered a mass extinction"

It is precisely this kind of attitude that fuels Islamophobia in the West and draws supporters to the Hindutva ideology in India:

Iraqi representative, Sheik Bassem al-Shommari says: "Sharia will be the foundation for the constitution. All the laws must be taken from Sharia because the country has a Muslim majority."

In other words, a Muslim-majority country should not be secular.

Joel raises the concern that Microsoft's entry into the anti-spyware market would "wipe out a useful industry and replace it with something that's difficult to trust due to conflicts of interest," but I wouldn't be so worried about that. Microsoft's track record vis-a-vis viruses, spyware and sundry other nasties is so poor that no one would consider them the first choice in this space. Not to mention that Ad-aware and Spybot S&D are already free.

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.