XMI interoperability

I had to export a class diagram in XMI format from ArgoUML to Poseidon today. The export/import went through without a hitch; only problem is, the graphics disappeared somewhere along the way. All the model objects were faithfully reproduced in the explorer window on the left, but no boxes or lines. Looks like neither of these tools implement the diagram interchange specification. To be fair, I don't know whether this spec has been adopted by all the tool vendors yet.

The reason for moving to Poseidon is that there doesn't seem to be any way to specify user-defined stereotypes in ArgoUML (or, if there is a way, I couldn't figure it out). Anyway, Poseidon, in addition to having this feature, also feels slicker and faster. The only catch is that even the Community Edition seems to be limited by an evaluation key and trial period.

Milan 2 - 0 PSV Eindhoven

The scoreline, taken with the first-half action, would lead you to believe that Milan had it all sewn up, but it wasn't so. PSV had a number of chances in the second half (they really turned things around after allowing Milan to dominate them in the first 45 minutes). Had they not conceded a 'soul-destroying' second goal, things would have been pretty even going into the second leg. It could still turn out alright for them, but beating Milan's defences twice in a game when Milan has an ongoing seven-game shutout streak looks unlikely.

Movie Review: Hitch

1. Some of the dialog is really sharp and fresh (case in point: when Will Smith meets Eva Mendes for the first time).


2. Kevin James' bumbling antics are worthy of some laughs.


3. The scene where Will Smith makes up with Mendes is incredibly lame.

All in all, if you have nothing else to do on a Saturday evening, are a Will Smith fan and are looking for some mild entertainment...

Benedict prayed 'not to be Pope'

Pardon my French, but what a crock of shit. If he didn't want to become Pope, why didn't he just decline it? Methinks it was more likely that he was secretly praying that he would be the chosen one; the reluctant-prince-act is just a sham.

Alonso wins at Imola

At long last, I got to watch a thrilling F1 race. There were times when it looked like Schumacher was going to pull it off, but Alonso held his nerve and didn't allow himself to be passed, unlike Button.

I initially wanted to link to the official Formula One site, but those bozos have disabled right-clicking altogether, making it difficult to even copy a hyperlink. Instead, they display a stupid message that says that the contents of the entire site is protected by copyright (I've got news for you guys: it's not very difficult to re-enable the right-click).

Roadkill

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Gmail POP3 goes crazy

When I retrieved my emails from Gmail from Thunderbird, for some strange reason it started resending older emails which I had long ago retrieved, from as far back as last November. Hope this doesn't recur; imagine the bandwidth costs if my entire 160 or so megs of emails get pumped back to me. Probably this is why they still call it beta.

The Zone

Athletes often speak of being in "the zone" -- a state where the energy and will expended by them appear to come effortlessly and lead to record-breaking performances. From The Celestine Prophecy: An Experiential Guide:

"The athlete goes beyond herself; she transcends the natural. She touches a piece of heaven and becomes the recipient of power from an unknown source...the performance almost becomes a holy place -- where a spiritual awakening seems to take place. The individual becomes swept up in the action around her -- she almost floats through the performance, drawing on forces she has never previously been aware of"

and

"Skiers tell of the magic moment when you are right on the mark, when everything falls into place and the only sensation you feel is the ecstasy of what you are doing. Skier, skiing, skied are one."

Capra speaks of something similar, too (the reference here is to archery):

"...to draw the bow 'spiritually', with a kind of effortless strength, and to release the string 'without intention', letting the shot 'fall from the archer like a ripe fruit'. When he reached the height of perfection, bow, arrow, goal and archer all melted into one another and he did not shoot, 'it' did it for him."

Though I have become skeptical of touchy-feely New Age crap in general, I think there is something authentic going on here. I have sometimes experienced this feeling when driving. There comes a time when the whole world is defined by the contours of the car's windshield (or by the edges of the helmet when I am riding my bike); the only sounds you hear are the purring of the engine and the occasional swooshes of vehicles from the opposite direction. You perform the various actions like braking, shifting gears and changing lanes with a complete sense of detachment. Though these actions don't seem to have the conscious approval of your brain, they are the 'correct' actions. You don't want this feeling to end, ever, because if this isn't living in the present, nothing is...

Model Driven Architecture

I am currently reading Model Driven Architecture by David Frankel. Notwithstanding its small size -- 300 pages, this is one helluva deep book. Some parts (especially those not targeting PHBs) have to be read more than once to wrap your mind around the concepts. The chapter on the Meta Object Facility is a case in point. There are so many levels and metalevels (the MOF model is actually a meta-metamodel) that it's very easy to lose track of the context unless you pay very close attention.

On a side note, this brings to mind an experience I had when I was cramming for the JEE. There is a hefty volume by M L Khanna that is sort of a bible for the JEE maths exam, which contains a challenging section on probability theory. I remarked about this to a friend who was also preparing for the exam, and he advised me that it was a pretty small section (I think it was around 30 pages or so), and, considering that probability theory was expected to fetch about ten marks in the exam (ten marks may not seem like much, but are absolutely crucial in an exam as competitive as the JEE), I'd do well to read it even ten times, if necessary, to ensure that I grasped the concepts thoroughly; which I did, though I didn't have to read it ten times, of course. Though I have pretty much forgotten all the maths I had to learn then, this piece of advice has stayed with me all these years. Both of us cleared the exam, BTW.

The best thing I like about Model Driven Architecture is that the author doesn't have any axe to grind or any hidden agenda. He takes a no-nonsense approach, stating clearly the areas where much work remains to be done; there is no hype that MDA is the best thing since sliced bread, it's going to take the field of software engineering by storm, and so on. In short, short on hype, but long on facts.

I am a dumbass

All the great Firefox extensions are also available for Mozilla.

Since 1.7 is most likely the last release, it is only fair that I install it and give it a whirl, for old times' sake. Who knows, with all my favourite extensions, I might even prefer it over Firefox.

Jo Coke chahe ho jahe

Alexander Cockburn writes about the harm Coca-Cola has inflicted on marginalised Indians.

Firefox 1.0.3 released

Bloglines down again

Not able to log in manually, but the Bloglines notifier is somehow able to get through and report that there are 21 unread items. Here's where Technorati's real-time blog monitoring comes in handy. You can see others blogging about it as well and are assured that you are not the only one with the problem.

Further proof...

that Microsoft doesn't have anything new and great to offer:

A "quick search pane," for example, allows users to type queries and instantly see matching files.

and

...Allchin stressed that Microsoft has broken new ground in Longhorn. For example, document icons are no longer a hint of the type of file, but rather a small picture of the file itself

If they expect people to upgrade to Longhorn just for these bells and whistles, they have got another think coming. BTW, Gnome and KDE have had equivalent features for quite some time.

That's a relief

I have only read a collection of short stories based on the original novel, but they constitute some of the scariest stuff I have come across. I think the 'fact' that it was a true story probably contributed to the effect as well.

Must be a really slow news day...

at Bruce Schneier's blog .

Smearing bloggers

Another attempt by the MSM to put down blogs. The risks highlighted in the article are equally applicable to any free hosting service (I don't buy the argument that the amount of free space provided by blogging services has anything to do with it; how much space is really required to store malicious code?), so why highlight only blogs?

Liverpool in semis

Well, conventional wisdom was wrong, after all.

Much as I admire del Piero, I am yet to see a game he has taken by the scruff of the neck and delivered the goods for his team, the way Steve Gerrard supposedly does for Liverpool.

The commentators' pro-English bias was so blatant in this match. One of the two bozos was literally pleading with the Liverpool team to "just hang in there" for the last five minutes. Wonder how bad it will be in Istanbul, with one English club assured of a place in the final.

I also ended up watching the replay of the Chelsea-Bayern match. In spite of knowing the result in advance, I sort of enjoyed the game because I didn't know when the goals had been scored (did Chelsea go 2-0 up before a heroic fightback by Bayern, or were Bayern sitting on a 3-1 lead, expecting to enter the semi-finals, only to be thwarted by a last-gasp winner from Chelsea?)

Interesting side note: the only way extra time would become necessary in these home/away fixtures is if the scoreline of the first leg is duplicated in the second leg, with the winner/loser being reversed.

Ubuntu KDE woes

KDE in Ubuntu is not ready for prime time:

1. kdm has screwed up my system fonts. Even if I revert back to gdm/Gnome, they refuse to change from the defaults to Bitstream Vera, thought the font applet indicates that these are the current values.


2. The screen resolution reverts to 1024 x 768 even if I set it to 800 x 600. I had this problem during installation as well, but I had to reset the resolution only once then; the system learned this setting on the second go.


3. The screen does not always get rendered properly and gets pulled to all the corners of the display. This usually happens during startup.

Going to give KDE a wide berth once I get rid of these problems and get Gnome working properly again.

Note to self

Don't read the BBC RSS feed if you are planning to watch 'live' the Champions' League matches later.

*bangs head repeatedly on the table*

Musings

This question has been bugging me for quite a while now: why should the laws of nature be different for different physical scales, i.e. why should one set of laws apply for very small things (quantum mechanics), and another set for the larger things (classical mechanics, astrophysics, etc.)?

After all, if nature were impartial, there should not be anything special associated with a particular dimensional scale. What is so special about a distance of one micron when compared to one meter? In fact, if all the objects in the universe -- or at least those that we can observe -- increased in size by a factor of ten uniformly, we wouldn't even notice it.

One answer could be that there does exist a uniform natural law, but we are yet to figure it out. If we are able to drill down further, we would find that there is a sort of fractal geometry at work here: each subatomic particle contains a complete, but scaled down, universe within it, with its own galaxies, stars and planets. Brings to mind Blake's immortal words "..To see the world in a grain of sand". BTW, This would require us to handle infinite regression as well, since nothing prevents the subatomic particles of this miniature universe from containing their own miniature universes.

Another answer could be that I am full of shit :-)

Ubuntu update

Some more feedback on Ubuntu:

1. It is definitely faster than Suse 9.1 (at least on my machine). The perceptible seizing that I had talked about earlier is also absent, proving that the problem is not related to hardware, but lies squarely with Suse (it could be an issue with either the kernel that Suse is using or with a wrong DMA setting).


2. Ubuntu does not ship with KDE. But Gnome 2.10's performance almost makes one not miss it.


3. Package management is on a par with YaST.


4. I couldn't configure Ubuntu to see and share my Windows printer (the other Windows shares proved easy enough to connect to, though). It simply could not remember the printer name at all; I would type in the correct share name and click on 'Close', only to find that the name I typed had reverted to its previous value.

Blog zeitgeist

Earlier it was Miss Jammu porn; now it's the turn of Sania Mirza's breasts. I am referring to the search terms that inadvertently lead to my blog.

Here's a really productive way...

to spend a lazy Sunday morning: learn French by having Google translate one of your older blog archive pages and trying to figure out what you were saying. Trust me, it's not that easy, especially when you are looking at posts that don't have any easily recognisable words.

Hoary Hedgehog

Ubuntu 5.04 has been released. Though I have no intention of switching from Suse, I kicked off a download all the same (I have an unused 6 GB partition in the Suse machine I thought I would put to use for this). After a 10-hour download and a one-hour installation process, Hoary Hedgehog is up and running. Some (very preliminary) impressions:

1. The installation process is not as slick as that of Mandrake or Suse. Same old Debian character-mode installation.


2. Something went wrong with the part where we choose the screen resolutions; the input areas (the ones with the asterisks) were sort of garbled. I don't know whether this is the cause, but when I boot up, the resolution always defaults to 1024 x 768 even if I explicitly set it to 800 x 600. Update: for some reason, the system caught on the second time I set the screen resolution. BTW, I also had to manually adjust the screen positioning in the monitor.
   


3. Firefox 1.0.2 is the default browser. Good thing.

Back in business

As usual, the problem took care of itself. I took out all the IDE cables in the computer and re-plugged them back in; the machine promptly started working again.

Dabblers and Blowhards

Looks like I am not alone in my criticism of Paul Graham's essays.

Hardware woes

My Linux machine is on the blink. It stopped working all of a sudden; on restarting it, it kept emitting long, periodic beeps and doing nothing else. After a while, even that stopped. Opening the CPU case cover revealed that the power unit was functioning alright; the CPU fans were spinning and the network card LEDs were also on. After poking around a bit (and getting some mild electric shocks in the process) and checking the wiring, I could not find anything wrong.

I think I will give it some more time and switch it on tomorrow; most of the time, such problems disappear as mysteriously as they appear (due in no small measure to my good karma ;-) ). Let's hope this is one of them.

My experience with assembled PCs has always been like this; they work fine 99% of the time, but behave unpredictably once in a while. Leads me to think that the components these PCs are made of didn't pass that rigorous a QC test as would their counterparts in a branded PC. Since I bought most of these components in Richie Street (the electronics grey-market district of Chennai), this is quite a real possibility. Having said that, these components do give value for money when compared to their overpriced brethren from the likes of IBM.

In the meantime, I have regressed to being an unwilling Windows user. Sorely missing the Bitstream Vera fonts...

Update: I have installed the Bitstream Vera fonts in Windows as well; still not as nifty as they are in Linux.

What gives?

Google is now running Buddhism-related ads on this blog. Go figure.

See blog title

Quite a number of visitors to my blog arrive here by googling for 'shikantaza', so I thought I would avoid the bad karma of disappointing them by providing some information about the term (from The Three Pillars of Zen):

...shikan-taza is a heightened state of concentrated awareness wherein one is neither tense nor hurried, and certainly never slack. It is the mind of somebody facing death. Let us imagine that you are engaged in a duel of swordsmanship of the kind that used to take place in ancient Japan. As you face your opponent you are unceasingly watchful, set, ready. Were you to relax your vigilance even momentarily, you would be cut down instantly. A crowd gathers to see the fight. Since you are not blind you see them from the corner of your eye, and since you are not deaf you hear them. But not for an instant is your mind captured by these sense impressions.

The Pope was not a saint?

Some articles with an alternative viewpoint regarding Pope John Paul II.

And for comic relief, here is The Rude Pundit's take on things.

Liverpool 2-1 Juventus

I feel sorry for Scott Carson. But for his blunder, Liverpool would have been sitting pretty going into the second leg next week. After they scored their second goal, it looked like they were going to walk all over Juve, but Juve managed to pull themselves together in the second half, even though their goal was a gift.

BTW, the commentators should go a bit easier on their praise of Gerrard. He's good, but not that good. The way they were wetting their pants every time he passed the ball (no matter that the passes failed to find their intended targets half the time) was irritating.

Conventional wisdom says that Juventus will win 1-0 in Turin next week and enter the semis.

Linux USB ADSL modem -- not yet

Chennai is experiencing thundershowers as I type this. There was some pretty awesome thunder and lightning near my home yesterday . Anyway, my USB ADSL modem (the one I have written so much about) was taken out because of this. After the tech support guy from Airtel replaced the modem with another one and got things working, I wanted to revisit the possibility of using the DSL connection directly from Linux. A Google search confirmed that there are Linux drivers available for it (the modem is based on the Conexant AccessRunner chipset).

Long story short (I have to leave for work): need to do a lot make this happen:

1. Extract the modem's firmware binary from a Windows file using a utility that is still under beta and which may or may not work.


2. Compile the kernel with the modem driver sources.


3. Figure out how to set up ADSL in Suse.

Had I still been using Debian, I wouldn't have given a second thought to jumping right in and giving it a go, but after moving to Suse, I no longer have the stomach to roll up my sleeves and start hacking around (and breaking God-knows-what in the process). I have also been spoiled rotten by YaST.

Movie Review: Finding Neverland

Finding Neverland starts out pretty slowly (not that the action ever gets too hot), but manages to retain viewer interest. Though the storyline is pretty thin, it never gets too boring.

I was worried at one point that there might be a pedophile twist to the plot; there is no love interest between Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet, so I thought may be the director was going for something saucier -- one of Depp's friends even says that tongues were wagging that he (Depp) was getting too close to Winslet's children -- but good thing this didn't pan out (pun unintended). Similarities to el freako's current predicament and his predilection for Peter Pan and Neverland also came to mind.

I would give this movie three stars out of five. One minor quibble is that Dustin Hoffman really shouldn't agree to such nothing parts. He's too good an actor for such roles.

Puff piece

The summary of the article describes it as "John Simmons on the way the search engine managed to dominate its market - and get up Microsoft's nose", but the article doesn't really throw any new light on Google's strategy. It's not a book review either, though it mentions a book called "Search Me". Makes me question its whole intention: is it just a means to generate page viewership by hitching on to Google's popularity?

Clusty extension for Firefox

I downloaded the Clusty extension for Firefox recently, and I must say that I am pretty impressed. I especially like the dictionary feature: you highlight a word, right-click and select the 'Dictionary clip' menu option; a small window appears with the word's meaning. Much better than the Dictionary Search extension, where you are taken to the reference.com web site with all its attendant annoyances.

Newcastle brawl

Folks, why take out your frustrations on the opposite team's players, when you can beat up your own compatriot? I have always considered Lee Bowyer to be a slightly unstable character. I still vividly remember one of the goals he scored recently, where he rudely clambered on top of his own team mate to head the ball in. It was a great goal alright, but the way he scored it was slightly scary. Not having watched the match, I don't know who started the punch-up, but I strongly suspect that Bowyer would have had a big role in escalating things.

Gmail and Fractional Reserve Banking

Google increasing Gmail's storage capacity has an interesting parallel with fractional reserve banking.

Fractional reserve banking refers to the phenomenon wherein banks are required to maintain only a fraction of the depositors' funds with them; the rest is lent out or invested so that the bank earns some money out of the deposits. The underlying assumption is that this fraction is enough to service the all depositors' withdrawal requests at any point in time; not all depositors are expected to turn up at once and demand their money (if this happens, a run starts on that bank; it's not very easy, even for a financially sound bank, to stave this off).

In the case of Gmail, though each user is right now presented with two gigs of storage, most of the users are unlikely to have used up more than a small fraction (I am currently at 8% myself, BTW). So it's not even required that Google should have two gigs of hard disk space reserved for each user; they can very well claim to provide this without doing so and still not come to grief (what would constitute a 'run' in this case? All the users suddenly deciding to store their porn in Gmail?)

Morbidity

This is getting morbid; each time the Bloglines notifier announces that there is a new unread item from BBC's front page feed, I keep thinking that this the end, the Pope has passed on.

April Fools' Day stories on Slashdot

I think the Slashdot editors have gone overboard with their April Fools' Day stories. It's pretty irritating to come upon a seemingly never-ending stream of inanely stupid things like NASA builds the world's largest paper plane, Information does not exist and so on. Cut it out, guys.

Gmail storage has been increased to 2 GB...

but my account displays only 1495 MB. Where's the rest?

Update: Now I have 1811 MB of space. Looks like Google is incrementally increasing the storage capacity.

Web annoyance

There are some web pages where, no matter which part of the page you navigate to, the annoying ad in the sidebar follows you. You scroll up, you scroll down, you think you have lost the bugger, but no, the ad always catches up with you, notwithstanding the fact that it ends up wheezing and panting in the process.

You are basically not in control. You have no power over it. You can block the ad, of course, but nothing can be done if it is an integral part of the page, like Google Groups' Go to the top feature. That leaves you feeling hopping mad. Which is certainly not the state of mind the advertiser wants you to be in when you are looking at his product...

Paul Graham's essays

Of late, Paul Graham's essays have begun to put me off. I don't think it is because of any change in their style or content. May be it's just me, but I find a recurring theme in them:

1. How he has made it big because he's so smart and clever.


2. He doesn't want to come right out and say it, but he considers himself a great hacker.


3. Others would do well to pay heed to his advice (with regard to hacking, starting a startup, or becoming a good writer) so that they too can enjoy his success.


4. How the folks he hangs out with are such a cool, smart bunch of people.

Needless to say, I no longer subscribe to his feed.

Movie Review: Shall We Dance

Movie Direction 101: a movie should have a high point towards which the storyline builds, preferably with suspense. This high point is called a climax and should occur at the end of the movie. Any tension built up as we are led to the climax should be resolved then, ideally in a positive manner so that the moviegoers are left with a sense of wellbeing. Unfortunately, this basic principle is not followed in Shall We Dance; the climax occurs some 15-20 minutes before curtains, and doesn't have a happy ending, either. I'll just leave it at that, except for these comments:

1. What's up with the 'intimate' moment between Susan Sarandon and the private detective, when you are led to believe that they are going to kiss and start an affair? Other than cheap titillation, that is.


2. The second half (especially post-climax) is like a freaking documentary.


3. The scenes of camaraderie at the dancing school are the only watchable scenes in the whole movie.

Movie review: Polar Express

We had planned on watching Shall We Dance, but had to settle on Polar Express because Shall We... was cancelled unexpectedly. Good thing, it turned out.

Polar Express is a delightful movie. Though it is primarily meant for children (we were feeling slightly out of place in the theatre, being surrounded by kids -- most of the other grownups were escorts for their children), the story is handled in a pretty mature way; there is not much of the usual wheee-we-are-all-happy-kids-watch-us-fart-around-with-nary-a-care nonsense.

The animation is quirky, though. The action sequences involving the train were very good, but the facial expressions of the children sometimes made them appear, well, retarded.

Obligatory favourite scene: ski-ride on top of the train with the ghost.

Printing blues

I wanted to title this post as "Epson sucks" initially, but changed my mind, because, all things considered, I am pretty much satisfied with my printer.

All the cartridges in my Stylus CX4500 ran out of ink (more on that later). Since I don't do much of colour printing, I thought I would buy only a black cartridge. But when I fixed the new cartridge, the printer still refused to print. After a phone call to the customer help line, I learned that:

1. Epson printing technology is different; you need all cartridges even if you are only printing black and white documents.


2. You may think that you are not using up the ink in your colour cartridges, but if you print more than 15 pages per minute of black and white stuff, the colour ink gets used too (black is, after all, a mixture of all colours -- or is it white? Never mind).

Bottom line is, I have to shell out an additional 1125 bucks.

//TO DO: think of a nice title

I think I should be more selective in installing the patches suggested by Susewatcher. Since my Linux box is not directly exposed to the outside world (it sits behind my Windows machine -- I know, it should be the other way around, but since my DSL USB modem works only with Windows, I don't have much choice), the security patches aren't very critical for me.

In addition to incurring bandwidth costs, I suspect that some of these patches could be making the computer intermittently slower; when I perform some action, there is a two/three second delay, followed by a clickety-click from the CPU case and then the machine responds. It's almost as if the computer has gone to sleep and has to be woken up.

Narendra Modi and Henry Kissinger

At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if Narendra Modi ends up in the same predicament as Henry Kissinger, afraid to travel outside his country for fear of an arrest warrant being issued against him. There are enough expatriate Indians all over the world whose hackles have been raised by Modi's actions that this is a very real possibility.

Good old Mozilla

I (re)installed Mozilla today in order to try out Epiphany, since Epiphany uses Mozilla's rendering engine. After checking out Epiphany -- it's OK but doesn't have that much flexibility -- I did a bit of browsing with Mozilla; I have to say, its rendering is definitely faster than that of Firefox (BTW, Firefox 1.0.2 is out).

If it weren't for Adblock, Gmail Notifier and other goodies, I would definitely make Mozilla my primary browser.

VisualWorks is not just a GUI framework

This is an old article, but incorrect nonetheless:

This crucial ability, which is the impetus behind the Composite design pattern, is routinely implemented by object-oriented graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such as Swing or VisualWorks Smalltalk.

Backup for Bloglines

I have created an account with Newsgator as a backup for the times when Bloglines is down. Though I have subscribed only to 23 feeds, creating them in Newsgator was pretty painful. I realise that it is not in the best interests of the online feed aggregators to provide a common format for exporting/importing one's feeds (since this would prevent lock-in and force them to compete solely on the strength of their implementations), but it sure would be a nice feature to have.

Newsgator looks OK, but not as good as Bloglines. The default option is to retain all feeds as unread; one has to manually mark them as read. The site was also a bit sluggish, but this could just be a temporary thing. Though the UI is pretty neat, Bloglines' feels cleaner.

Indian government earns bad karma

Looks like the Lok Sabha has put a stop to the good work being done by the Indian pharmaceutical companies. While it is fair that the research done by pharmaceutical companies (not the Indian ones, but companies like Pfizer) should be rewarded in the form of patents, an exemption could have been made for the AIDS drugs at least; this is too serious a problem to allow profit motives to influence decision-making.

Yellow Times shut down

...due to lack of funding. I had stopped visiting this site a while ago, so I am not sure when exactly they folded. Hope this is not permanent.

Quote of the day

"...it's a sad commentary on the world today that the choice for leader of the World Bank is an Irish rock singer or Wolfowitz, Bono or Bonehead."
-- xymphora

The Broker

1. Grisham could have gone a little easier on the Italian-travel-guide motif.


2. This book almost seems to have been written with a movie in mind.


3. Towards the very end of the book, there is a small bit of corny dialogue: when Joel's son asks him what he planned to do, Joel says (paraphrasing slightly here), "Back to what I've always done, son. Cutting deals."


4. Definitely not one of Grisham's best.

Deepak Chopra and the EPR experiment

The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment is often touted as an example of the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics: two elementary particles with complementary properties (spins of +1/2 and -1/2) are separated by an infinite distance (well, not really infinite, but infinite for all practical purposes). We do not know (in fact, neither do the particles themselves) which particle has which property, but only that if one particle is measured to have a spin of +1/2, the other one will be found to have the opposite spin (-1/2).

After this separation, we measure the spins of both the particles simultaneously and find that the spins are as expected. The only catch is, since the particles themselves don't 'know' what spin they have, how did they coordinate between themselves (at a rate faster than the speed of light) and decide which of the properties each will exhibit? This sort of communication is termed a 'nonlocal' connection.

Deepak Chopra really goes to town with this nonlocal connection in his book Synchrodestiny, employing it to 'explain' such phenomena as how the human body performs the various metabolic activities so that one can enjoy a jog at the beach, how cognition is effected by the "'phase and frequency locking in' of the firing patterns of individual neurons in different parts of the brain," and so on.

I stopped reading Synchrodestiny after about a hundred pages or so. The problem with these books which attempt to draw legitimacy from science [a plague on your house, Capra, for starting the whole thing ;-)] is that you already have to be a believer to get anything positive from them. If you read them with an open mind, you end up shaking your head in skepticism at sentences like these, which have to be taken on faith, since there is no way to prove or disprove them:

We are both local and nonlocal, an individual pattern emerging from nonlocal intelligence, which is also part of everyone and everything else ...The personal, local part of the soul exists at the quantum level.

It would be worthwhile to keep these things in mind when evaluating any New Age mind/body/spirituality theory:

1. All our sensory experiences are electrical impulses carried by our nerve cells. If somebody claims to have experienced something 'special,' it simply means that the corresponding impulses were registered in his brain. Whether they came about because of a genuine experience or not is another story altogether.


2. What we call our 'mind' could be nothing more than the epiphenomena associated with the functioning of our brain.

BTW, I am not claiming that all the unexplained phenomena are hoaxes; just that some of the explanations need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Wanted: Paste and Go extension for Firefox

Title says it all.

Greek sprint duo cleared of doping charges

They did this, and were still cleared?

The pair then spent four days in a hospital, claiming they had been injured in a motorcycle crash.

Looks like somebody pulled some strings.

The Gorilla in the Room

Following in the footsteps of xymphora, here is another anonymous blogger with way more credibility than the MSM.

US denies visa to Narendra Modi

The American government has denied a visa to Narendra Modi. I think this indicates the seriousness of his crime; to get into the bad books of the American government which is as far as one can get from being a paragon of virtue takes some doing. And he has the gall to call this an insult to the Indian constitution.

Quote of the day

"I would agree with that statement. To privatise would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."
-- Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, on alleged plans of privatising Iraq's oil fields

BTW, this program (BBC's Newsnight) strengthens the claim that the decision to invade Iraq was taken well before 9/11.

Baramati Bus Stop: Web Documentary

Here is a post by Andy Carvin about a web documentary about teaching computer skills to children in Indian villages.

How to survive the next Mybookmarks.com outage

I discovered that Mybookmarks.com allows you to export your bookmarks to your browser, but this works only in Windows. However, instead of adding the bookmarks to the browser, here is a better way (actually, I am making a virtue out of a necessity, since this is the only workaround if you are not using Windows):

1. Click on the 'Export' link in your bookmarks page and click on the 'Export' button in the next one.
2. After observing that your browser bookmarks remain unchanged, turn your attention to the browser window.
3. You will notice that a new HTML page has been built, which sort of mimics your bookmarks page.
4. Save this page to your hard disk.
5. Add a bookmark in your browser to this saved page.
6. Now you are all set to tackle the next Mybookmarks.com outage.

If only Bloglines had such an export feature for the feed URLs as well...

I used to be an AdSense ToS Violator

Oops, looks like one of my earlier posts was violating the Google AdSense Terms of Service.

If I am really, really bored...

I'll think up titles for all the 250 or so posts I have made so far. Come to think of it, this would be a nice way to polish my skills as a newspaper headline writer.

Iranian serial killer executed

A serial killer has been gruesomely put to death in Iran. Even if his crimes were horrific, he could have been executed in a more humane manner. The article doesn't mention it, but I think this is more of Sharia in action. This provides more ammunition for those who agree with Berlusconi's comments following 9/11.

Submitting stories to Slashdot

My record with submitting stories to Slashdot is 3-0 (Rejected - Accepted). Granted, two of the stories had already been carried (my bad for not noticing this), but the third one was rejected because it probably didn't suit the omelette.

As a mark of protest, I have created an account with kuro5hin ;-) BTW, K5 dispenses mod points to everybody it seems -- unlike Slashdot which sort of considers this a bestowed privilege.

The discerning reader would have noticed that this post has a title. Thank you very much. No, it wasn't much trouble. Just had to turn on a Blogger formatting option.

Turns out it is possible to give titles to your blog with even a free Blogger account. I'm still trying to figure out how to create categories.

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.