OpenSuse.org is up

I am considering downloading Suse 9.3, but the size of the download makes me pause -- five 700 MB ISOs. At the current bandwidth rates, it would cost me something like Rs. 2000. But one difference now is that I have five independent ISO's to download, so it's not the all-or-nothing-proposition as used to be the case when there was just one huge DVD ISO to download. I also don't have a DVD writer, so there's not much I could have done with the ISO even if I had downloaded it successfully.

One alternative is to scout for folks here in India who ship these things for a few hundred rupees. I have a feeling 9.3 will become available shortly via this route (if it's not available already, that is).

Workaround (sort of)

I have come up with a workaround for my problem: I am going to retain object and Class as independent classes, but cast from one to the other on a case-by-case basis. I know I am throwing type correctness out the window, but I seem to have no other easily implementable solution. But I think things will be OK because the casting is going to happen in code that is in my control as VM implementer -- either in my implementation of JNI, or in the invocation of native methods by the VM (in particular, the way arguments are passed to these methods).

I have managed to take Vajra past the point of the previous failure, so I think this approach will work. But there is still a lot of work left to do to implement this strategy in all the required places.

Another gumption trap

It looks like I have hit a major roadblock in Vajra. The problem stems from my not having thought through fully how to handle class objects. I have two classes called object and Class, which model the respective Java constructs. Whenever I need a class object, I create a dummy object which has a Class object as its data member. I was able to manage things as long as I was aware of when I needed to access the class object and when I did not (e.g. invoking static methods vs instance methods). But I have at last run into a situation where I will not be able to make this distinction: places where the class object is used in a (for want of a better word) non-static scenario -- as, for example, happens in Classpath's Permissions.java:

perms.put(perm.getClass(), allPermission);

(which is incidentally where Vajra chokes right now).

The ideal solution is to inherit Class from object, as is done in JNI, but I think this will break too many things at this stage. Meanwhile, I am looking for a less painful solution...

What is consulting?

Here is a great post from Bruce Eckel on the difference between a real consulting firm and a "high-tech body shop". This post struck an immediate chord with me because I had just had an interesting conversation with a friend (via email) discussing the same thing.

Design Patterns

Design Patterns recently won an ACM award for its contribution to the field of programming languages. I guess this is an apt time for me to mention a recent epiphany I had (I seem to be having a lot of epiphanies lately. Note to self: go easy on the bhang).

Why do we ask for a user name *and* a password to authenticate a user? Can't we just accept a single unique token? The token can be mapped to a user behind the scenes. It can be made unique by generating it using user-specific information (e.g. 'What is your pet's mother's maiden name?'). Then it occurred to me: separation of the user name and the password provides an additional layer of abstraction; the user can change his password independently of his ID. Also, passwords need not be unique; only the combination of user name and password has to be unique. This provides for more flexibility,

*removes tongue from cheek*

Cartoon of the day

:-)

Epiphany

I couldn't download the Java Web Services Developer Pack installer at work today because our proxy server blocks all executable content. I wanted only two JAR files from JWSDP [*], so I decided to download the Unix version (a shell script) and see if I could hack it. I had managed to install Cygwin a while back, so I thought I would try to run the shell script from Cygwin and see what happened.

Long story short: after tweaking the script a bit, I managed to install JWSDP and extract the needed JAR files. What made this possible was that the Unix installer is actually a wrapper around the Java version of InstallShield, which will of course run on any Java environment.

This whole experience was an eye-opener for me: the way the operating system was circumvented by the two layers of abstraction -- Cygwin and the Java VM -- brought home the fact that our dependence on the OS is less than what we think it is; it also makes me wonder what might have been if Netscape's air supply had not been cut off and Java had really taken off as an alternative, equally strong platform for application development on the desktop.

[*] The Sun JSF implementation JARs. Actually, I could have gotten them from somewhere else, but that's another story.

How are they going to spin this one?

How are the astrology folks going to incorporate the discovery of the tenth planet into their calculations and predictions? Here is one attempt. I especially like this part:

Recent studies on astrology say that Neptune and Uranus can influence a person and develop his brain in the field of computers and information technology.

A fine example of after-the-fact dovetailing of the available information with theory (unless, of course, they already knew about computers thousands of years ago). BTW, how come these guys didn't predict the discovery of the tenth planet itself?

I would relate my experiences with naadi josiyam, but I'll reserve it for another day; the shame and embarrassment of subjecting myself to that brand of quackery is still too painfully vivid in my mind.

Dev Anand to pen his own life

Thank you, Dev. Very kind of you. Oh wait, I read it as "Dev Anand to take his own life". Never mind.

Saddest song ever

Boys of Summer. Maybe not the lyrics alone, but taken together with the video. Visions and memories of days irretrievably lost, moments of sheer joy and of being in the present, of lost youth, of missed chances, of what-might-have-been-but-never-was, knowing some doors are forever closed and you have no fricken way of ever entering them...

I think the baby rat has affected me more than I thought.

If you suspect it, report it

On my first visit to Delhi more than a decade ago (it was part of a month-long sojourn around the country cloaked in the guise of a college field trip), the first thing I noticed as we came out of the railway station and got into a bus was the warning sign on the back of the seat in front of me that said, "Warning: look under your seat. There may be a bomb there. Report it to authorities and claim reward". This was during the peak of Punjabi terrorism with transistor bombs going off with regular intervals in the capital. Needless to say, I was scared shitless (being exposed to sub-ten-degree cold for the first time in my life didn't exactly help, either).

Anyway, the point is that I saw a similar sign today in a press conference organised by the UK police. The sign wasn't so dramatic or sensationalist: it simply said, 'If you suspect it, report it'. Shades of Big Brother and 1984?

(As I type this, I spy a naked guy walking nonchalantly around in an art gallery in Euro News. WTF?)

Quote of the day

Short of nominating a horse wearing diapers to be his next U.N. Ambassador, I'm not sure how Bush could make his contempt for the international community any more clear.
-- Daily Kos

RIP, little guy

A couple of days ago one of my dogs got hold of a baby rat in my room (probably one of the relatives of the culprit who cost me a mouse and a watch strap some time back). I managed to save the creature's life, but not before it suffered some crippling injuries. The poor thing lost the use of its hind legs completely and could only move by painfully dragging its useless hind portion. It was really painful and poignant to see it try to deal with the cruel hand that fate had dealt it so early in life, and attempt to get on with its life.

I tried to alleviate its suffering somewhat by trying to feed it some crumbs, but it looks like it was not enough. After struggling for two days, the little guy passed on. My sadness is somewhat mitigated by the knowledge that at least he won't suffer any more.

Abramovich in the dock for the first time

Bingo. Too early for the handcuffs, but let's wait and see.

Windows Vista

I don't know whether it's intentional or not, but the practice of calling a product one thing (Longhorn) during most of its development and then calling it by another name at the time of release has the benefit of dissociating the product from all the negative PR it suffered (Longhorn is so much delayed, most of the promised features have been deferred, etc.).

myHQ.com

MyBookmarks.com is supposed to be back up and running shortly, but in the meantime I decided to try out myHq.com. I am glad I did, because it is equally good, if not better. Though it doesn't have features like collapsible folders, the UI is really neat and uncluttered (no banner ads). There is also no need to scroll up and down to navigate through your bookmarks; judicious arrangement of the various categories can ensure that everything fits in a single screen (although the position mechanism needed a bit of effort to grasp -- can't say I have mastered it, but I now know enough to try out different numbers and get the layout I need).

I think there is a lesson here; in such a competitive environment, you cannot afford to slip even a little bit; every minor setback (whatever it is that is causing MyBookmarks.com's outage) carries with it a risk of losing marketshare.

Quip of the day

Ancient phallus unearthed in cave.
"No ancient batteries found with it, however."
-- Michael Rivero

Guffaw!

MyBookmarks.com down

Have they folded up for good? Need to begin looking for another service, just in case. I tried out del.icio.us, but didn't really like it for two reasons: a) pretty crummy interface b) I'm not sure whether my bookmarks are private to me or are exposed to everybody.

Long time no release

It's been more than a year since I let loose v0.4 of Vajra on an unsuspecting public. I haven't been exactly idle all this time; I am integrating Vajra with Classpath, but this effort has been besotted with a lot of hurdles. I have been plugging away, taking care of bugs exposed because of the pretty extensive working over given to the code by Classpath (and also adding a lot of defensive code that will enable me to catch the next [inevitable] bug). There have also been long spells when I didn't do anything at all with the code.

I wanted to at least release a version that doesn't depend on Classpath (but uses Vajra's minimal class library instead), but the code seems to have become inseparably bound to Classpath that it is not worth the effort to put in temporary code just for releasing something.

Currently my aim is to take the integration to the point where I am able to emit a "Hello World" using Classpath's System.out.println and then call it a day. I think I will try to join the Squeak team (the VM team, that is) if they will have me. That would be a best-of-all-the-worlds scenario for me: Smalltalk + system programming. Something to aim for...

Privoxy and Tor

I have been trying out Privoxy [*] and Tor for the last couple of days. The initial thrill of knowing that I was now browsing with complete (well, almost) anonymity has worn off. Now I am beginning to get put off by the cost of this anonymity, i.e. the speed penalty introduced because of Tor's encryption and the multiple hops. Sometimes it takes pretty long to load a page (need to check whether this has something to do with the packet loss suffered by Asian routers yesterday). I have half a mind to turn off at least Tor, but the psychological effect of exposing my identity stops me. Not that there's anything to hide about my browsing habits, of course. Honest. Really.

[*] Tip: If you are using Suse 9.1, do not install the one carried by YaST. Results in 503 errors. Download it directly from the Privoxy site.

Some more bad karma

I caught two squirrels having their moment of sinful pleasure on my window sill today. Squirrels being the skittish creatures that they are, they decided to break their coupling and bolted their separate ways rather than try to continue and brazen it out.

Well, can't say it's really my fault. If they didn't want to be disturbed, they shouldn't have chosen my window sill. Moreover, it's not like I was actively searching for squirrel porn or something.

Why do PC vendors

...insist on saying '<insert vendor name> recommends Microsoft XP Professional for business' in their advertisements (at least here in India)?

1. Are they of the opinion that only Windows will bring out the best in their hardware?


2. Is this a way of promoting the more pricey Professional Edition than the Home edition?


3. Is Microsoft still twisting their arms?

Suicide bomber suspect shot dead

BBC has these eyewitness accounts of the shooting. According to one of the eyewitnesses:

"I saw an Asian guy. He ran on to the train, he was hotly pursued by three plain clothes officers, one of them was wielding a black handgun."

The person's reaction to being challenged and pursued would definitely have been more suspicious if he had been pursued by uniformed men. Even an innocent person is likely to take to his heels if thinks he is being chased by some unknown assailants. The suspect's reactions reinforce this:

"He looked absolutely petrified and then he sort of tripped, but they were hotly pursuing him..."

One question that comes to mind is, if this person is one of the four suspects whose pictures were released earlier, would he chance it and make another attempt the very next day after the failed one on Thursday?

The entire story hinges on whether any explosives were found on his person.

Need some confirmation

This puzzle has been driving me nuts for the last couple of days (it's from last week's Hindu):

* * * * 4 3 * 9 *
* 2 * * 9 * * * 6
* 5 * 6 * * * * 1
* 7 6 * * * * 4 *
* * * 4 * 8 * * *
* 3 * * * * 2 5 *
5 * * * * 4 * 7 *
3 * * * 1 * * 6 *
* 8 * 5 7 * * * *

My Smalltalk program chokes on this as well. Is this an invalid puzzle (can a Sudoku puzzle be invalid?)? Going to give it a concerted effort today; if I still can't figure it out, going to chuck it.

(My Two Step Program didn't work, obviously. Still being drawn to these blasted things).

Movie Review: Sahara

Sahara belongs neither to the Indiana Jones genre nor to the regular action flick category. The dialogue was so cliched that I could literally predict the words before they left the mouths of the actors. Why do all action movies have to have the mandatory geeky sidekick? The way Steve Zahn kept on about losing his hat during the various chases was irritating. Except for the scene where the good guys defuse the bomb in the plant and rescue Penelope Cruz (lousy choice for leading lady), the action sequences were singularly unimpressive (the way Matthew McConaughey brings down the chopper with a Civil War era cannon was breathtakingly incredulous).

All in all, Sahara gives XXX-2 a good run for its money in vying for the worst movie of the year.

China to send pig sperm to space

No comment.

Alright, maybe just one: how did they get the pigs to donate the samples? Did they say Hey dudes, remember the "Shoot for the Stars" programme we told you about during induction...?

Wanted: name for a new phobia

Definition: Fear of making even a trivial change to a working program because the change might break it.

The Two Step Program

Hi, my name is Rajesh, and I am a Sudoku-aholic.

There, that's Step One out of the way. Step Two will be to tighten up the Smalltalk Sudoku Solver so that it can handle more complex puzzles, feed it this humdinger, watch with glee as it makes light of this, and then get on with my life without looking even askance at another Sudoku puzzle again.

Dear Leader, I salute thee

From Slashdot (my emphasis):

Meet Arfa, a promising young software programmer from Faisalabad, Pakistan, who is believed to be the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in the world. She received the certification when she was 9. During a recent meeting with Bill Gates, she presented him with a poem she wrote that celebrated his life story.

*Gags*

Fugitive to be taken off the air?

The Fugitive plays on Wednesday evenings at 9 PM on Zee Cafe. Just before today's episode, I caught a promo for Season 4 of The Sopranos premiering next Wednesday. OK, I thought, maybe this is the final episode of Fugitive. The current week's plot also seemed to confirm this, with an hour-by-hour countdown displayed as the episode wound down. But no, this was not the final episode; Dr Richard Kimble is still running, still searching for the elusive one-armed man. Trust the buggers at Zee to not leave a good thing as is.

Update: Oops, The Fugitive plays at 8 PM. The Sopranos after that. No conflict. In keeping with my policy of not taking down a post, I have decided to leave the original up in all its inaccurate glory. Apologies to Zee are in order.

Just a thought

If, instead of clicking on a hyperlink in a page, I copy/paste the link in a new browser window (or tab), I would be nullifying the referring page info for that link [*]. This would a) screw up the referrer stats and b) play havoc with any revenue-sharing mechanism in place that is based on referrer links. This would defeat the designs of websites that pretend to be non-commercial but make money from such revenues. Would an extension similar to Adblock that does this be useful? I wouldn't mind using such an extension if it didn't add too much overhead to my browsing.

[*] Links that have the referrer information embedded in the URL itself would not be amenable to such filtering, though.

Sweet-talking terrorists

Interesting post from Slashdot (not sure about its veracity, though):

...in Saudi Arabia, they had a program where when a jihadi was captured, they were given the opportunity to debate with a muslim cleric, on the justification in Isalam [sic] for external jihad (Jihad waged as a physical war of violence against infidels, as opposed to the more accepted definition of an internal war within the believer to defeat a non-believing self). The conditions of the debate were; if the jihadi wins, he goes free. If the cleric wins, the jihadi goes to prison, and when released, must join in the effort to convince other jihadis that violence is wrong, and not an acceptable part of Islam. Each and every jihadi that went through this program (in 2002, when I read about it) was converted from radicalism.

My two cents on the London bombings

1. Any statement from a shadowy group claiming responsibility for the bombings should be viewed with skepticism. How difficult is it for anyone (not the actual perpetrators) to go to an Internet cafe anywhere in the world, log in to the discussion board in question using a made-up handle, and post a statement?


2. Reading too much into the nuances of the statement and speculating on the culprits' identities based on the usage of certain words and phrases (no disrespect to Juan Cole) is also not very fruitful, IMHO. People who are smart enough to plan and execute such a sophisticated operation are also smart enough to couch the statement with red herrings.

It is for these reasons that such terrorist attacks usually don't lead to any convictions; while such speculation and talking points are enough to paint certain groups as the culprits in the public's consciousness, they will not hold water in a court of law (compound this with the prosecutors' lack of willingness to share evidence in an open court citing national security and you have a no-win situation).

Sig of the day

When is bedtime at Neverland Ranch? When the big hand touches the little hand.
-- From Slashdot

Terrorism a global threat: Manmohan

No shit, Sherlock.

Google Toolbar for Firefox

I am not able to proceed further after installing the Google Toolbar for Firefox. After the mandatory browser restart, a dialog window pops up, asking for preferences, but doesn't respond to any inputs (there is a cute warning asking you to *really* read the fine print, but I am in no mood right now to appreciate such things). I need a way to get rid of this extension pronto to resume using Firefox or to fix the problem. I am posting this from Opera, in case anyone is wondering.

Update: Turned out to be a permissions problem. Started Firefox as sudo, dismissed the preferences dialog, then reverted to being a normal user.

Some comments on the Cole interview

Juan Cole has posted excerpts from an interview he took part in. I have some nits to pick:

1. Even if the Madrid bombings didn't directly lead to Spain's withdrawal from Iraq, they definitely hastened it.


2. Regarding the purported powerlessness of the terrorists:

   What do you do if you're a tiny fringe who is completely right and indeed only if your plan succeeds is the world saved? And you're opposed by all of these massive states and powers?

   I don't think the terrorists are as powerless as that. There is a broad swathe of support for them (if not for their actions, at least for the causes they espouse and the injustice they strike out against) in the Arab/Islamic world, fuelled by things like the treatment of Palestinians (and, in our own country, the Gujarat pogrom).

On a related note, I am veering more and more to the view that al-Qaeda is like a McDonalds franchise, with sundry local groups all over the world using it as a label to claim brand recognition for their activities (Update: click here for a old, but nonetheless relevant, article on this).

Foreign Aid

What is one to make of the news that Iran is going to give $1 billion to Iraq? I don't mean just this one particular instance, but the general issue of foreign aid. Why should a country make such a big contribution to the welfare of another country? Pure altruism is not the reason; in fact, it rarely is in any foreign policy decision. Does the donor country expect some benefits to accrue from its generosity? Or, is the donor country so wealthy that the aid amount comes from overflowing coffers and did not find any useful purpose (poverty eradication comes to mind) in the donor country itself? Since no country is so wealthy (not even America), its less fortunate citizens have every right to protest this, and ask that the money be spent on them instead.

Sometimes the motives for such a handout are very obvious, as in the G8/Africa case; the debt is written off (partially or fully) in return for the African countries' willingness to open up their economies for exploitation investment. In this case, the aid money is nothing more than the cost of doing business.

Coming back to Iran, its motive is purely political; in return for its $1 billion, it gets to have a say in how the Shiite government in Iraq runs things, in addition to scoring some brownie points.

And then we have countries like our own who send cargo-loads of foodgrains elsewhere when people are dying of famine within our borders. Maybe altruism (however misplaced) does have a role to play sometimes, after all.

No offence

...but scores of people getting killed in suicide bombings in Iraq (so ably covered by Juan Cole -- also see update below) on a daily basis does not merit more than a passing mention in the BBC (if at all), whereas a similar, but less deadly event in the heart of western civilisation results in non-stop, saturation coverage.

Update: It looks like the casualty figures are higher.

Update 2: Again from Juan Cole:

The bombings in London on Thursday underlined what absolute hell Iraqis are living through, who suffer the equivalent every other day.

What's worse

... than waiting patiently for five hours for a 344 MB download to finish so that you can broaden your horizons with some classical music? Answer: waiting patiently for another five hours because you have to repeat the download.

The story is too painful and embarrassing to relate; let me just say that had I been in the habit of pressing Delete instead of Shift-Delete, I wouldn't have found myself in this predicament.

Question

What is this Kut al-Amara that Robert Fisk keeps referring to (as in "Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara")?

Why Deccan Chronicle can't hold a candle to The Hindu - Part 3

(I promise, this is the last post on this topic)

1. Article bemoaning the "commercialisation of education" in India, while in the same breath talking of the "over Rs 1,500 crore yearly market in technical education".


2. Publishing an essay by Brooke Shields on a pretty sober topic, but using a steamy picture of the actress (note: picture not present in online edition). The story is about her postpartum depression, for God's sake.

Neat trick to get rid of ORA-24002

Here's a nifty way to get rid of ORA-24002 (I'm still trying to figure out how I ended up with this error -- all I did was import some tables and then tried to clean them up):

1. Log into SQL*Plus or Server Manager as a user with DBA privileges.


2. Issue this command:
   
   alter session set events '10851 trace name context forever, level 2';


3. Now you can go ahead and drop the problem table.

The post in the link goes on to explain why this works:

Solution Explanation: =====================
Event 10851 disables error 24005 when attempting to manually drop a queue table. It should be noted that this is the "Hard Way" of dropping queue tables, and should only be practiced after all formal procedures, i.e., using the "DBMS_AQADM.DROP_QUEUE_TABLE" procedure, has failed to drop the table.

Movie Review: War of the Worlds

War of the Worlds is a pretty good movie. A gripping story line, good action and some human drama as well. Tom Cruise turns in a decent performance as an overwhelmed man trying to save his kids from mayhem; no memorable one-liners or hard-to-believe acts of heroism from him (except for the scene where he saves his daughter and a basketful of human beings from the alien tripod; anyway, I am willing to overlook that one, all things considered).

Cruise's daughter is sickeningly cute, but provides comic relief with her high-pitched screaming and some great dialogue (cases in point: 'I've a back problem' and 'Are we still alive?').

Four stars out of five.

Why Deccan Chronicle can't hold a candle to The Hindu - Part 2

The absolute tripe that is the Tall Tales column. So Anish Trivedi went to some parties, people like (gasp!) Vijay Mallya and Louis Banks were there, Louis Banks asked Anish why he (Anish) didn't land up at his parties, blah blah. OK, we get it, you are on back-slapping, first-name terms with celebrities. Go get a blog or something, instead of inflicting such crap on the paying public.

You have to hand it to the lady

Indira Gandhi might have done a lot of bad things in her time, but you have to give credit where it's due. Today's Hindu has a story on the events leading up to the creation of Bangladesh that tells of the way she stood up to the bullying from Nixon and Kissinger. I seriously doubt whether any of the current crop of leaders would have the cojones to do what she did.

Sig of the day

I want to die quietly in my sleep, like my grandfather,
not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
-- From Usenet

Alright, my curiosity is piqued

What did Kissinger call Indira Gandhi?

Opt-in instead of opt-out

From Bruce Schneier's blog about a Wired editorial on identity theft:

Require opt-in rather than opt-out permission before companies can share or sell data.

Bingo. I recently received a letter from my credit card company saying that they were going to share my data with the regulatory authorities unless they heard from me within 30 days. Guess the situation applies here, too.

Second thoughts about Haloscan

Haloscan's comments system seems to be broken:

1. Even if there is more than one comment for a post, Haloscan reports that only one comment is present.


2. There is no email intimation when a new comment is posted.


3. One of my replies has simply disappeared.

Object behaviour

From an article on object-relational modelling (emphasis mine):

Behavior

Objects provide an abstraction that clients can interact with. The behavior of an object is the collection of provided interactions (called methods or operations and, collectively, an interface) and the response to these method calls (or "messages"). All interactions with an object must be through its interface and all knowledge about an object is from its behavior (returned values or side effects) to the interface interaction.

Hmm, interesting...

Smalltalk it is

As I spent a little more time thinking about writing a program for solving Sudoku puzzles, I realised that I was giving Smalltalk the go-by for a pretty flimsy reason: my lack of familiarity with two-dimensional arrays. Then it struck me: use an array of arrays (duh). Once this hurdle was out of the way, the rest was pretty straightforward (except for the GUI; I am not very comfortable dealing with value/domain models yet, so this is yet to be tackled).

I am glad that I went ahead with Smalltalk because I am pretty sure the same effort in Java would have taken me much longer. The ease and benefit of incremental coding and testing (the Workspace really comes in handy for this) was really striking.

Come to think of it

...though The Shutter Island is a very good novel, I can't shake the feeling that there is some level of dishonesty in the narrative. Both real and imagined events are presented from the point of view of a neutral observer. One thus tends to think that he is being presented the facts as they are.

Reminds me of a short story by Isaac Asimov I read long ago, in which Asimov (deliberately) spelt a word the way it was pronounced and used this as a cheap trick to set up and resolve the tension in the story. I don't remember what this story was about, except that the word was 'Bailley' or something similar sounding. I vividly remember feeling very cheated, though.

Book Review - Shutter Island

Shutter Island is a great read. The ending is pretty out-of-the-blue, sort of like The Sixth Sense, but much more disturbing (I don't want to say more and spoil it for people who haven't read it yet).

By the way, this book from the author of The Mystic River. Makes me all the more eager to get my hands on that one.

The Secret Service at Booker Elementary: The Dog That Did Not Bark

I think Michael Rivero should go a bit easy on this issue:

With a supposedly unknown number of planes flying over the nation and crashing into buildings, with Bush's presence at Booker Elementary announced in the media three days in advance, and with an airport just 4 miles away, how did the United States Secret Service know for a fact that Bush was safe where he sat reading about goats? How did they know they did not need to throw him into that armored limousine and start driving to foil an intercept? How did they know that by keeping Bush in that room they were not making targets out of all those teachers and students? How did they KNOW they were not targets?

It seems to me that too much stress is being placed on the fact that it was foreknowledge that prompted the Secret Service to act the way they did, when it could just have been an inability to respond correctly to the situation because of various reasons ("never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained with stupidity" comes to mind).

DC dumbs down Sudoku

Looks like I spoke too soon. The Deccan Chronicle has made its Sudoku puzzles as easy as those of The Hindu by making the initial board less sparse. Now it's just a question of mechanical elimination to figure out the solution. So mechanical, in fact, that I am currently working on a Java program to do this. I wanted to do this in Smalltalk initially, but my lack of familiarity with Smalltalk's collection classes (in particular, static two-dimensional arrays) made me go with Java.

Su.do.ku

Alright, I admit, there's one thing that The Deccan Chronicle is better at than The Hindu: Sudoku. I have been trying my hand at these things for the last two or three days, and while Hindu's puzzles can be usually solved in fifteen minutes or so, I am yet to solve even one of DC's.

Easy way out

Rather than take the trouble of learning how RSS and syndication works, I have opted for the easy way out: start another blog and post links to Robert Fisk's articles to it. Here is the blog, and here is the site feed. I didn't spend much time creating it; just accepted the Blogger defaults, so go easy on any criticism.

Now I'll just have to make sure that I get notified of additions to robert-fisk.com and post it to the new blog. Wish there was an RSS feed for that. Oh wait...

Three reasons

... why Deccan Chronicle cannot hold a candle to The Hindu:

1. Headline that screams "Mother saves sons"
2. The emphasis on the fact that the Ambani patch up can take the Sensex to 7000
3. Publishing bimbo photos on the front page (couldn't find a link; the bimbo is Mallika Sherawat, BTW)

As an aside, I think the Ambani settlement is more one-sided than it appears; if you look at the cumulative revenue figures, Mukesh's share is something like eight times that of Anil's.

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.