Embedded journalists

Robert Fisk has a dig at embedded journalists:

More of (journalists) are dying in wars than ever before. And fewer people, I fear, care about us than ever before. This is not just because of the enormous toll of civilians who are being cut down in our modern wars - journalists deserve no god-like status above any other human (we, after all, can fly home business class if we tire of war, unlike the huddled masses who cannot escape) - but also, I suspect, because of the way in which too many of us like to pose on screen, to put military helmets on our heads, to parade our flak jacketed selves in front of tanks, to dress up in army costume.

I even remember a young American who turned up to report the 1991 Gulf War - Lou Fontana of WISTV, South Carolina, to be exact - wearing boots camouflaged with paintings of dead leaves, purchased for the desert at Barrons Hunting Supplies store. Anyone who has glanced at a picture of a desert, of course, must surely have noticed the absence of trees.

Movie Review: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

When I look back and think about what my reaction was as I sat in the theatre watching Mr. & Mrs. Smith, nothing particular comes to mind; this does not mean that the movie is eminently forgettable. It's just that I neither enjoyed any scene particularly, nor was I disgusted with any part of the movie.

The movie did have its share of good moments (car chase scene; not on account of the action, but on account of the great song that serves as the backdrop) and bad ones (the way Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie come out unscathed from the assault in the climax -- an Evil Overlord moment in reverse, if you will).

And Angelina Jolie? Let me just say that I know I speak for the entire male heterosexual community when I say "Yummy!".

Some karma whoring

I am going to start maintaining an RSS feed of Robert Fisk's articles in robert-fisk.com. An opportunity for me to learn about Atom and related syndication technologies. A quick look at the atom.xml for this blog reveals a whole mess of XML goo; guess I'll have to start wading right in...

An easier approach would be to simply start a new blog called, say, robert-fisk.blogspot.com and simply post links to the articles from robert-fisk.com, letting Blogger.com take care of the syndication bit, but where is the fun in that? :-)

Growth

Public limited companies are always under tremendous pressure: they need to keep on growing at a 'healthy' rate every year, or face the wrath of shareholders and stock market analysts. It's not enough to simply maintain the previous year's numbers. Come to think of it, this applies not just to companies, but to the economy as a whole, be it that of a country or that of an entity like the EU.

Why should this be so? The only reason I can think of, and this explains only things at the level of a country, is that every year, a new batch of people enter the work force, fresh out of college. These people will not find jobs unless new jobs are created (unless, of course, they replace an equal number of people leaving the workforce on account of retirement -- which doesn't happen). Ergo, to keep them away from discontentment and to prevent them from becoming a law and order problem, new jobs have to be found for them.

That brings us back to companies. The stated reason is that we need a vibrant stock market in order to attract investors' capital into worthwhile ventures. This is possible only when the returns are attractive, in the form of an assured growth in the stock price. The stock price will continue to move north only if the company's prospects are good.

I take exception to this because we are encouraging speculative behaviour (albeit for a noble cause); an investor interested in a steady income will look for steady profits (achievable even with zero growth), whereas a more aggressive investor doesn't even bother about dividends; he is only interested in capital appreciation.

I initially thought that the speculative element is needed to attract money into IPOs, but even in that case, can't an IPO be fully subscribed with the investments from the first type of investor, i.e. the one looking for steady income? Speculators are always welcome to try their luck with VC firms, aren't they?

El freako

...not guiltio

(that was a reference to Brad Pitt's poor Spanish in The Mexican, BTW).

Tale of two images

Two similar images, but the emotions are at the opposite ends of the spectrum -- one from page one, the other from the last page (I was not able to locate this image from the online edition, so it's just a scanned image).

MotoGP

I have recently started watching the MotoGP races and, I must say, they are miles ahead of Formula One in terms of excitement. The regularity with which the lead keeps changing among the top three or four racers is amazing. The races are also pretty short affairs, with no commercial breaks. All in all, definitely more bang for the buck.

The female of the species

I don't know whether this is true or not (it's from a novel I'm currently reading):

Spotted hyenas frequently have twins. The cubs are extremely well developed at birth: they have fur and sharp incisor teeth. One cub will almost invariably attack the other, sometimes while still in the amniotic sac. Death is usually the result. The victor is also typically female and, if she is the daughter of a dominant female, will in turn become the dominant female in the pack. It's a matriarchal culture.

Yikes.

USB ADSL modem on Linux - at last

Going to post step-by-step instructions on this shortly, but for the time being I'm just going to sit back and revel in the satisfaction.

Update: Here are the instructions.

The Savior

I have just now finished watching The Savior on TV. The movie is a pretty gripping story about the Bosnian war. But it's pretty one-sided, depicting the Serbs as the victims (the director is a Serb, so it figures). To be fair, there are some scenes depicting atrocities by Serbs. The climax, in which the Bosnian soldiers massacre the bus passengers, was pretty horrific, but the scene lost its appeal a bit when the mother starts singing a lullaby to quieten her baby (held by Dennis Quaid hiding nearby) even as she herself is about to be bludgeoned to death.

BTW, it was quite a weird coincidence, catching the movie at this point in time, with the recent surfacing of the Serbian execution video.

Installing a new kernel

I am going to make a determined effort to get my ADSL modem working in Linux. The first thing to do is to move to a kernel later than 2.6.10, since this is the version with which the AccessRunner driver is supposed to work. I therefore downloaded the latest kernel sources and set about compiling them. The compilation was a very straightforward process; just a question of a few configure and make commands, and adding entries to grub's menu.lst. The only catch is that you need gcc 2.95 for the compilation. Now I have the option of booting with either 2.6.11.11 or Suse's default, 2.6.5-7.

There was one problem with running 2.6.11.11, though. The first boot didn't allow me to connect to my Windows machine, though the network interfaces appeared OK. This got sorted out by iteself on a reboot.

Some pop psychology

The bar in Cheers is described as "a place where everybody knows your name". It's a place where there are no strangers and you know everybody.

I was reminded of this when I was thinking about living in a big city, the very epitome of a place as removed from Cheers as possible; so many of your daily interactions are with people whom you'll most probably never again see in your life: auto drivers, traffic cops, the person you help out with directions, and so on (come to think of it, considering the proportion of unsavoury elements in the population, this is probably a good thing).

Anyway, the point I want to make is that such interactions are kind of special because a) you don't take any history [*] into the transaction (you are seeing the person for the first time, after all) and b) provided nothing untoward happens in the interaction, you leave the transaction in a pretty neutral state of mind. I think there is a lesson in this: if you are able to ensure that these two principles are adhered to in all your dealings, you will be well on your way to achieving better emotional health.

[*] Assuming you don't indulge in stereotyping or prejudice.

Just when you thought

...politicians can sink no lower, they show that they can. I wouldn't have a problem with Advani's actions if he had been consistent all along. After pandering to the right-wing elements for so long, he now sheds crocodile tears about the Babri Masjid demolition and tries to make nice with the Pakistani leaders.

His actions make sense (in a venal sort of way) if you look at it from this angle: he doesn't want to be left out in the cold when the Congress government is making good progress mending fences with Pakistan. He can then claim when it matters (i.e. election time) that he too played a part in the whole thing.

By the way, if Jinnah's vision for Pakistan was that of

"...a secular state in which while every citizen would be free to pursue his own religion, the state should make no distinction between one citizen and another on grounds of faith"

what was the need for partitioning India into Hindu and Muslim nations?

Linux geeks to take over the world

This article likens Linux geeks to the Mafia. Excerpts:

In a coordinated combination of attacks which included a broad DOS attack on Sys-Con

Incorrect. It was not a DoS attack, but a slashdotting.

This is power that Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and many governments could only dream of having. The power to control the press and the skills contained in this organization are likely capable of disrupting travel, power grids and other broad national infrastructure systems if their demands are not met.

Yeah, all Linux users are terrorists. Give me a break.

At long last...

xymphora has changed his blog template.

Haloscan

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

This post (the above sentence, that is) was created automatically by Haloscan. I wanted to delete it initially, but decided to let it remain. Let's give these folks some well-earned publicity.

I don't really like the trackback link. It sort of adds to the clutter, but there doesn't seem to be any way to remove it.

Smoking to be banned in movies, TV serials

What a half-assed idea. Going by this logic, why shouldn't the showing of murder and theft scenes be banned too?

Slashdotted for all the wrong reasons

My recent post about Yahoo being sued by a woman somehow found its way into the index of a blog search engine called metaeureka, as a result of which this blog was subjected to a mini-slashdotting (not a slashdotting really, since blogger.com is quite resilient). As usual, the search term was porn-related: 'nude photos'.

Sigh.

BHEL Disinvestment

The Hindu has an interesting article on the BHEL disinvestment. It throws light on an often-overlooked reason for the M&A folks to target these companies:

...BHEL, like several other "navratnas" has been showing profits continuously for some years, but has not been allowed to spend the money for its own expansion and development. Instead, it has simply added to its reserves, such that its reserves currently amount to well over Rs. 50,000 crore.

The corporate predators must be licking their chops at the thought of getting their hands on such a windfall. From the article:

The fear is that if they are privatised, the private purchaser will then have access to the use of these huge reserves that it can use to its own ends rather than in socially desirable ways.

Rightly so.

Tip for beating the computer at chess

Well, not all programs, but at least Knights:

1. Start a game. Make a couple of moves.
2. When it is your turn, save the game to disk.
3. Now reopen the game and make your move.
4. Watch with glee as the computer's clock runs down.

It's a bug; 100% reproducible if you follow the above steps.

Yahoo sued

From Slashdot:

After notifying Yahoo that two member profiles about her were not authorized, Cecilia Barnes of Oregon is suing Yahoo for $3 million for failing to take down the profiles in a timely manner. The profiles allegedly set up by her ex-boyfriend contained nude photos of her along with her email address and work phone number.

*ears prick up*

(Note: The member profiles have since been taken down by Yahoo)

Never mind.

Comeback of the century

Alright, maybe that's an exaggeration, but three goals in the space of six minutes is something. In a way, Milan paid the price for having sneaked into the final after such a poor performance against PSV.

One thing I noticed in the penalty shootout was Dudek's shameless gamesmanship; the unsolicited way he kept giving the ball to Milan's penalty takers made me want to clean out his clock. He was also doing some pretty weird things at the goal line to psych them out.

Wanted: Greasemonkey user script

...to suppress all hyperlinks in Justin Raimondo's essays. The links really spoil the flow.

The Fugitive

I watch only sitcoms usually on TV, but I came upon an episode of The Fugitive yesterday. I enjoyed both the movie and its sequel, so I decided to give it five minutes or so. I ended up watching it fully, and am even thinking of adding it to my regular list of programs to catch.

Something about the plot line -- the good guy being pursued relentlessly across the continent, living by his wits, avoiding capture by a whisker and living to fight another day -- really appeals to me. There is also some wanderlust involved, going to new places and meeting new people. I am not sure whether the analogy is correct, but I am also reminded of The Dark Tower, for some reason.

Conundrum

The last page in today's Hindu has two ads: one for a top-of-the-line mobile phone that costs about Rs 21,000, and another that hawks a motor bike for Rs 33,000.

I am sure this says something profound about the country's economic priorities and the way its finances are being run, but I can't for the life of me figure it out.

Meditation and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle

Any book on meditation worth its salt will advice the novice to start off by counting his breath to quieten the mind. Some of the more high-falutin ones will even advice you to follow the breath in your mind; never mind the fact that you have no fricken idea how to do so.

I have always had a problem with the counting-the-breaths approach. For some reason, whenever I start counting my breath, it would seem like my breath becomes aware that it is being counted, and starts playing to the gallery: "Oooh... I am being watched; let's do something fancy..." and bingo, it would get faster, it would get shallower, it would start dancing the Macarena... in short, do everything except assist me in achieving a quiet mind.

A way out of this problem is to inhale from the stomach (more precisely, from the diaphragm area), and exhale through the nostrils. This is quite effective, except that I need to place my palm over the diaphragm for this to work. Which doesn't work when you are sitting in the lotus position, with your palms touching your heels...

Speaking of The Hindu

...they have recently started publishing Paul Krugman and Thomas Friedman's columns from The New York Times. Though we have access to their writing via the Internet, it's nice to read them in print along with the morning coffee.

I have always enjoyed reading content from The Guardian in The Hindu. Guardian's refreshing neutrality has neatly balanced the scales that would otherwise have tipped the content towards a right-wing, pro-war viewpoint. NYT's liberal leanings will complement this quite nicely.

Deccan Chronicle in Chennai

Deccan Chronicle is now available in Chennai. It is priced at one rupee so as to wean away readers from the more expensive (Rs 4.50) The Hindu.

Going by DC's contents, I don't think the Hindu folks need to worry too much, although it is nice to see a fire being lit under their complacent asses. Deccan Chronicle has the irritating habit of never finishing a page one story on page one itself; it's always "Turn to page 2" for the rest of the story. They are also counting on sensationalist stories to increase their readership (case in point: "New drug makes sex last longer").

But to give credit where it's due, their coverage of international news is much broader. They seem to have a London correspondent who is working feverishly to fill up column space (he/she is the author of the wonder sex drug story, incidentally).

Arsenal wins FA Cup

The electric power started misbehaving during extra time -- one of those typical midsummer voltage fluctuations. Luckily, TVs seem to function well even with a fraction of the required voltage, and I was able to continue watching the match. Until the moment Lungberg's penalty just made it past the goal line, when the power went off completely, leaving me grinding my teeth in frustration. By the time the electricity was restored (in all its 220-volt glory), a jubilant Viera was already sharing his joy with a reporter.

<sour grapes>Never mind, I never really liked English football that much, anyway.</sour grapes>

Two words to add to my vocabulary...

thanks to George Galloway:

lick·spit·tle n. A fawning underling; a toady.
pop·in·jay n. A vain, talkative person.

:-))

Telling it like it is

Juan Cole lets the anti-abortionists have it between their eyes:

The problem is that no religious scriptures teach any such thing [that life begins at conception]. No one even knew about conception (i.e. the fertilization of eggs by spermatazoa) until recently. If you think about it, the discovery had to come after the invention of the microscope. When the Bible and the New Testament were written, and for centuries after among church fathers and authorities, life was thought to begin with the "quickening" (i.e. when the mother could feel the baby move). A blastocyte is not a human being and it is not a person. It is a blastocyte. It may or may not develop into a human being. Large numbers of fertilized eggs never get attached to the uterine wall and just get flushed down the toilet. Shall we hold a funeral for each of them? The poor deluded fundamentalists who know about this even think they will meet brothers and sisters in heaven that they never knew about. And on such irrational and frankly stupid bases (who told them they were going to heaven?), they want to forbid us to cure Alzheimers, and want to force raped women to give birth to the babies of their rapists. It makes a person want to tear hair out, thinking about it.

Quote of the day

"Another book to read is Scott Meyers "Effective C++". It should've really been called "Defective C++" because a large part of the book is telling you what features of the language to avoid or be extra careful with."
-- Usenet post

George Galloway and the Senate hearing

When I first learned that George Galloway was to attend a US Senate hearing, I was miffed at the arrogance of the American government asking a foreigner (and an MP at that) to appear before it. But Galloway went there of his own volition, it seems.

Anyway, he seems to have come out of the entire episode unscathed, which cannot be said of his accusers. The full text of his statement is well worth reading. Yep, a bitch-slapping, no doubt about it.

MDA and code generation

Context CurrencyOption::currentPrice::get
 "WebServiceDispatcher.find
  ('\"Options Price Info\").execute("+
  ("self.currency.country+","+
    self.putOrCall = OptionKind::#put ?
      "put" : "call"+","+
    self.americanOrEuropean =
      ExerciseKind::#american? "1" : "2"+","+
    self.expirationDate+")"

The above code fragment appears in Model Driven Architecture and is an example of an action statement that can be used to generate code for an operation.

I could be wrong here, but doesn't this call into question the whole premise of using MDA to automate the code generation and produce error-free code? The generated code would only be error-free in as much as the above code is error-free (ignoring for the time being the fact that it would give any self-respecting Perl script a run for its money in the Complex Code Sweepstakes). In effect, you are simply moving the debugging effort up a level, from the Java layer to the action statement layer.

I am veering around to the view that MDA will only go so far; there will always be some code that will have to be manually written (whether you do it at the action statement level or at the programming language level), unless the problem is so well understood that code generation is a breeze.

Movie Review: XXX-2: The Next Level

XXX-2 has got to be one of the worst movies I have seen in the last decade or so. It is unbelievably clichéd, has some really third-rate acting and assumes a very unintelligent audience. Some scenes that I particularly disliked:

1. The way the geeky sidekick hacks into the DoD computers so easily and retrieves the troop movement detail


2. Hijacking the civilian truck that has a concealed cache of high-tech weaponry


3. The way Ice Cube's car, unable to catch up to the train with regular tires, manages to do so after climbing on to the rails and having the tires shredded (don't even get me started on how the width of the tracks is miraculously equal to the distance between the car wheels)

Oh, and Ice Cube had better stick to making music. He cannot act his way out of a paper bag.

25 years of DOS

Microsoft is planning to celebrate the 25th anniversary of DOS. This article examines the reasons for the success of DOS and posits that Linux is at the same inflection point DOS was at 25 years ago. According to the author, one of the reasons this inflection point has come about is that people are fed up with Microsoft's greed:

A friend of mine told me he thinks that if Microsoft released just 10% of the roughly $2 BILLION in CASH (does not include other assets) to help curb diseases and help starvation, many people could be helped. Instead the goal and mode of operation is to continue to amass wealth. People see this. People know this. It bugs them.

I respectfully disagree. Why should Microsoft spend its cash reserves on charity? The company's charter is to make money for its stockholders, not eliminate hunger, poverty and disease. By the same token, why doesn't Sun, IBM or Oracle use their money this way? Why target only Microsoft?

IMO, the real reason people don't like Microsoft is that they have cottoned on to its predatory and monopolistic policies, claims of non-existent innovation, poor track record vis-a-vis security and the endless upgrade-without-real-benefits road it forces its users to take.

Security through obscurity

I keep reading that Windows has more security vulnerabilities and exploits simply because it is the most popular OS and that Linux, MacOS and others are not that heavily targeted because they are niche OSs. Here is the latest example of this:

Yes, Microsoft's software has security holes, but hackers mainly love it because there are so many Windows PCs out there. Write one virus and 90% of the wired world could be yours.

Question: considering the enormous negative publicity that a successful exploit against Linux would generate, with the attendant vindication of the OSS detractors and their I-told-you-so's, do you really believe that hackers are not trying their best to discover and exploit security holes in Linux? At the risk of sounding paranoid, I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to invest some of their resources into this; IMO, such a tactic would be more fruitful than hiring the services of hatchet men like ADTI and Laura Didio.

I have always wondered about this

Why are all the bills tabled by the government named like this: Weapons of Mass destruction and their Delivery Systems (Prohibition of Unlawful Activities) Bill, 2005? The crux of the bill, i.e. the prohibition in this case, is always mentioned as an afterthought. I can very well imagine how the government would go about naming a bill for protecting women: Rape of Good Looking Women (Punishment) Bill, 2005; leaving one to wonder whether the bill was meant to protect good looking women or to punish them for being good looking.

No Koreans were flushed down the toilet

From Juan Cole's blog:

A friend of mine with Pentagon contacts tells a tragicomic story. The Pakistani government complained to the US Department of Defense about the desecration of the Koran. The Pentagon passed the protest to the Southeast Asia division. It looked into the matter in East Asia and responded that it could find no evidence that the US military had flushed a Korean down the toilet.

:-)

FreeBSD 5.4

Before I start my rant about FreeBSD 5.4 and my experiences installing it, here is a topical and informative factoid: the fear of the number 13 is called triskaidekaphobia.

Back to the topic of the post:I downloaded FreeBSD 5.4 yesterday. I wanted to check out how an OSS, non-Linux OS looked like; in particular, how different it would be from a typical Linux distro. Answer: not very different. If it looks like Linux, walks like Linux, talks like Linux...

Anyway, the one thing I take away from my brief dalliance with FreeBSD is that it didn't get the bootloading right. During installation, it offered a choice of incorporating the existing OSs in its loader, but when I tried to boot my existing Suse installation, nothing happened; no error messages, just a beep. No way for me to get back to Suse.

I had to reinstall Ubuntu into the partition I installed FreeBSD in (this was the same partition which had earlier contained Ubuntu) to get things back to normal.

P.S. The disk partitioning part of the FreeBSD install needs some working over. It's strictly not for beginners and nowhere near as straightforward as that of even a pretty 'raw' distro (from an installation perspective, that is) like Ubuntu. I had to abort the installation thrice before figuring out the correct way to set up the partitions.

As promised

...here are the nominations for the BS Hall of Fame:

• ...to achieve the vision of an agile enterprise with a flexible IT infrastructure that enables a business to respond to changes in the best possible way. As the business dynamics change and new opportunities emerge in the market, the IT infrastructure of an enterprise should be designed to be able to respond quickly and provide the applications needed to address the new business needs before the business opportunity disappears.


• ...to provide an environment where better business applications can be developed with less effort - business applications which should closely align to the business processes, which should not be too complex, and which can be adapted to the changing nature of business processes without too much effort.


• Developing enterprise-scale applications today requires an approach to software architecture that helps architects evolve their solutions in flexible ways. This approach should permit reuse of existing efforts in the context of new capabilities that implement business functionality in a timely fashion, even as the target infrastructure itself is evolving.


• Modern business systems need to cater to rapidly evolving business requirements in an ever-shrinking window of opportunity. Modern business systems also need to keep pace with rapid advances in technology.


• ...the growing need of enterprises to consolidate, reuse, adapt and integrate their typically large collection of software assets in an agile manner...to evolve abstractions and develop architectures and methodologies that significantly improve the way software systems are built and maintained today.

All of these are from real-world articles; I'm not providing cites for obvious reasons.

Teaser

Don't you just hate it when you are reading a technical article and have to wade through the obligatory first paragraph targeted at PHBs that goes something like this: "In a constantly evolving and ever-changing business environment, the demands placed on IT support systems are getting bigger everyday. For an organisation to successfully meet these challenges, stay agile and adapt itself..."?

In case you are thinking of writing such a technical article, I can be of some help: I am going to post a collection of such BS sentences I have culled out in the course of my technical reading. I would post them today, but the choicest pieces are languishing in my desk drawer at work.

Dish TV sucks big time

The morons have taken to relaying the F1 races with commentary in Tamil. In case you are wondering how that sounds, believe you me, you're better off not knowing. It's that bad.

They are also the most customer-unfriendly people around. I have sent them two emails complaining how non-transparent their billing process is and have suggested improvements, but have received no response. Not sure if somebody even read the emails.

The reason I am a hapless Dish TV customer is that they were the only option for me for catching last year's Euro 2004 matches live, as my friendly neighbourhood cable operator defaulted on his payment to ESPN just when the tournament was starting to get interesting.

Another drawback with Dish TV is that you don't get channels like Star World and Star Movies (mercifully, HBO found its way in somehow), but I don't mind this so much, what with their Zee-equivalents being equally good.

My own domain

I am in the process of moving my home page to my own domain (rajeshjayaprakash.in). Two things are holding me up:

1. Though I have FTP'd my files to the hosting server, I am only shown the default Plesk index.html when I try to access the URL.


2. The Name Server details of the hosting server have to be updated with the guys with whom I registered the domain name.

Figure it will take another day or so for these things to get sorted out.

PSV Eindhoven 3 - 1 AC Milan

Andy Gray got it right when he said that the best team did not get through to the final; Milan's performance reminds me of how Argentina sneaked into the Italia '90 final after not doing anything special (though, to be fair, Milan were nowhere near as negative as the Argentines).

When I checked the program listings in the newspaper, I found that the match was scheduled to be relayed between 8:30 PM and 10:30 PM (IST). I didn't think much of this when I started watching the match. But after PSV had scored their second goal, it suddenly struck me: the match hadn't gone into extra time, since the time slot allotted for the replay was not sufficient, implying that there was at least one more goal to come. But I didn't realise then that there was also big time heartbreak ahead.

P.S. The PSV fans were thoroughly rude to Milan's Seedorf, a Dutchman, booing and whistling whenever he played the ball. But not a peep from them regarding Stam, who is also a Dutchman, and an ex-PSV player to boot. What's up with that?

P.P.S. No offence, but is Vennegoor of Hesselink a count?

No treble for Chelsea

Definitely not for the weak of heart. Though the match never rose to great heights in terms of technical brilliance, the occasion and the stakes involved more than compensated for it. The atmosphere during the closing stages especially (six freaking minutes of injury time!) was simply electric. I'll bet quite a few hearts stopped beating as Gudjohnsen's shot missed the target in the dying seconds of the match.

Book review: UML Bible

UML Bible is the third book in the Bible series that I have bought; it is also the best among the three. One reason for this is its relatively smaller size compared to the other two (XML Bible and BEA Weblogic Server Bible). It could have been made even smaller if the author hadn't heeded the publisher's threat of canceling the book contract if he turned in a manuscript less than 500 pages long (I think this a standard clause in all the Bible book contracts). Another reason I like UML bible is that there are no typos.

Content-wise, it's sort of OK. I was not disappointed, but neither did it excite me. It probably has something to do with the way these Bible books are structured. They present a lot of information, but there seems to be a deliberate intent to fill pages at the cost of sacrificing succinctness. This may find approval with the kind of folks who judge a book by the number of pages or a PowerPoint presentation by its duration, but it doesn't satisfy those who want to get up to speed about something without wading through pages of laboured explanations.

One thing I simply hate about the Bible series is the incredibly stupid saying on the back cover: "If UML/XML/<insert book topic here> can do it, so can you...". WTF is this supposed to mean?

If ever xymphora gets tired of blogging,

...he can pursue a literary career and be assured of making a mark; consider this:

It took two woodsheddings, the first by Bush Administration official John Bellinger III - after which Lord Goldsmith found his natural baritone voice had become a tenor - and then by Blair cronies Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan - at which point Lord Goldsmith had become a full soprano - before Blair got the opinion he was looking for.

Guffaw!

Dodgy mathematics

Though I have my doubts about the official 9/11 account, this is not the way to go about debunking it. Here is a simple refutation of the article's premise:

Assume that a murder has taken place and that the prosecution asserts that:

A. The defendant bought a knife at a store.
B. The defendant stabbed the victim with this knife.

If it can be shown that the defendant didn't buy the knife at said store, then the assertion that the defendant bought the knife at said store AND stabbed the victim with this knife is false, which is a perfectly valid assertion. But this does not prove that the defendant did not stab the victim with that knife.

Similarly, if the probability of the defendant buying the knife at a particular store being true is 0.1 and that of his stabbing the defendant with it being true is 0.7, the probability of both these assertions being true is 0.1 x 0.7 = 0.07; again, a valid statement. But this still does not make assertion B any less likely, or preclude another high-probability compound event (example: the defendant stole the knife [probability 0.4] and stabbed the victim with it [probability 0.7] -- leading to a compound probability of 0.4 x 0.7 = 0.28).

Vajra woes

The Practice of Programming contains the following advice on debugging:

Another effective technique is to explain your code to someone else ... you can even use non-programmers as listeners. One university computer center kept a teddy bear near the help desk. Students with mysterious bugs were required to explain them to the bear before they could speak to a human counselor.

The idea being that telling someone about the bug produces a solution by itself.

I am going to follow this advice and use this post as a sounding board to help me fix a bug in Vajra (it's not really a bug, but more of how to address an implementation issue):

Strings are to be handled specially by the JVM. There is to be only a single instance of each unique string, i.e., even if there is more than one String object that 'stores' the value "Hello, world", all these objects will share a single instance of "Hello, world" maintained internally by the JVM.

I am handling this requirement currently by trapping the execution of the ldc and ldc_w instructions (those of them dealing with string literals, that is) and either creating string objects by myself (or reusing already-created string objects, as the case may be). I am also executing the <init> method for the newly created strings manually.

Now the problem is, how to handle string objects that are created by other means, i.e. when a String doesn't come into existence through an ldc/ldc_w, but through a normal call such as

String s = new String();

Should I trap these <init> calls and handle them in a special manner? But in that case, how to handle cases where one <init> method in turn calls another <init> method of String? There is also the problem of how to keep the member data of a String object in synch with the internal object representation in Vajra in this situation.

Nope, still waiting for the Eureka moment.

Robert Fisk on the Assam Regiment

Robert Fisk writes about the role played by Indian peacekeepers in Lebanon. The essay is primarily about the relevance of the United Nations: he poses the question that, since Security Council Resolution 1559 is forcing Syria to withdraw from Lebanon, should the UN have been allowed to use its clout to make Saddam step down, instead of allowing the US to do so and make a right royal mess of it? My take is that, irrespective of whether you are for it or against it, the US military action did send shivers down the spines of countries like Syria and forced them to comply. I doubt whether 1559 would have had the same effect absent the American action in Iraq.

Having said that, the fact that Chirac threw his weight behind the resolution (Franco-Syrian relations go back a long way) could also have played a part.

Chelsea win League title

I watched the Chelsea-Bolton match till Lampard scored the first goal. I switched the TV off after that, knowing there was no way Bolton were going to draw or win, after muffing at least three clear chances to score in the first half. I also didn't want to see the gloating, arrogant look on Mourinho's face when the final whistle blew.

Mourinho says "I want to stay with Chelsea as long as I can. My heart is with the club", but let's see what tune he sings when the likes of Man United and Arsenal get their acts together next season and start whupping Chelsea's ass. The honeymoon might end as early as next week if Liverpool manage to knock Chelsea out of the Champions' League.

Firefox breaks 50,000,000 barrier

MasterCard ad redux

Value of possessions lost in tsunami:	Rs 20,000
Value of government aid expected:	Rs 5,000
Receiving Rs 2 instead:	Priceless

Quote of the day

"... most modern politicians would rather plead the fifth amendment than directly answer even the simplest of questions."
-- Brian Sedgemore, British MP

There are also some great putdowns:

"(To) describe him as bloody useless would be to heap high praise on him."

"(Gordon Brown) has a massive intellect but no backbone"

"He is in office, but not in power"

Chelsea 0 - 0 Liverpool

An absorbing match, even if there were no goals. Just goes to show that even goalless draws can be exciting if you are in a knockout tournament. Compare this with the dull affairs in the Premier League when neither team has an incentive to go for a result.

If Liverpool is able to fully leverage its home advantage in the second leg, we might even see Chelsea knocked out (from my lips to God's ears :-) )

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

I am sure Tiger is great and all that, but both these sentences seem straight out of a PR press release:

Spotlight can rapidly find almost any file, any time -- even years after it was created, and even if it is hidden among tens of thousands of other files.

and

Spotlight could spark a major change in the way people use computers.

'Meta' is a dangerous word

I have two reasons for coming to this conclusion; the first one frivolous, the second a bit more serious:

1. When used to denote higher levels of abstraction, it causes confusion and a lot of hair-pulling.


2. There seems to be a link between this mode of thinking and the subject-object dichotomy that the mystics are forever asking us to step out of. This dichotomy arises because we think about something ('about' being the operative word here), rather than experiencing reality as it is. Come to think of it, isn't 'meta' the opposite of tathata, Sanskrit for suchness?

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...