Quote of the day

"Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the if statement..."
-- Comment about how Google works and thinks at a higher level of abstraction than Microsoft

The sub-10,000 PC

If you look at the deal closely, you will find that it's not really a sub-10,000 PC. The fine print says that you have to pay Rs 1,500 towards freight forwarding, installation and handling. A lot of publicity for what is essentially a lie.

What if you decide to take care of delivery, installation and handling (whatever that is) yourself? Would you then avoid the extra charges? I don't think so.

Keshav's cartoons

It is really puzzling why a newspaper of The Hindu's stature persists with a daily cartoon of such poor quality. The cartoons are not funny, they don't make you think, and the pictures are, at best, rankly amateurish. The same goes for Deccan Chronicle as well, but they have one thing going right for them: in a bid to assuage the cartoonist's overblown ego, they display his photograph alongside the cartoon everyday, affording you the pleasure of focussing your ire and imprecations on him directly.

Scientists uncover oldest bowl of noodles

Funny, I don't remember seeing any of these scientists in our cafeteria.

Syrian minister 'commits suicide'

Wonder if the UN investigation of the Hariri assassination had anything to do with this.

Raikkonen wins Japanese Grand Prix

This is probably as good as it gets. Kimi overtaking Fisichella in the final lap is one of the things the 2005 season will be remembered for IMO.

Movie Review: The Interpreter

The plot revolves around a conversation about the planned assassination of the President of Matobo overheard by Silvia Broome (Nicole Kidman), an interpreter at the UN. Silvia takes this to the authorities, but is not taken seriously because she is not considered credible; as we move along, we also discover that she has a violent past, going back to the days when she and her family used to live in Matobo and that she might very well be involved with folks who might want the President dead. The meat of the movie is about how the threat to the President is handled and the interpreter is protected from those who want her dead.

The Interpreter is a deeply unsatisfying and unconvincing movie. It takes something like an hour before anything interesting happens. Even when it does, the action is average at best. The climax also doesn't rise to the levels it could have, given the potential in the plot.

If I hear one more faux African tribal story that is supposed to showcase the wisdom of simple villagers and how it is so superior to modern civilisation, I am going to barf.

Google Reader

Google has entered the online news aggregator business. Initial impression: I am sticking with Bloglines. Reasons:

1. The annoying always-on 'Keep unread' thingummy (which also partly obscures the news item's heading)


2. I am not able to see the exact number of unread posts. It's just 'more than 20'.


3. I cannot see all the news items in a feed. I have to keep pressing Up and Down to navigate from one item to another.


4. When I import an OPML file, it does not fetch me any items at all, but only assures me that new items from now on would be displayed. Can't it display, say, the 20 most recent items instead?

On a general note, I think Google has added unnecessary bells and whistles; Bloglines appears to have a stolen a march over Google in sticking to the keep-it-simple-and-elegant principle.

The mess in Bihar

Reading the exceedingly sensible (and unanimous) opinion expressed in the Letters to the Editor section in The Hindu, I am wondering what possible reason the judges could have had for going ahead with the elections in Bihar and not simply reinstating the dissolved assembly. No doubt they will rationalise their decision by citing some precedent or an arcane section in the constitution, but their actions right now are analogous to saying that a thief is guilty, but that he can keep the loot. On second thoughts, maybe the cost already incurred for the fresh elections might have been a deciding factor. But then, should expediency be allowed to prevail over justice?

It's a sad reflection

... of the high esteem we hold politicians in, when the first thought that comes to mind when seeing this news item is Can't he have aimed better?

I am also waiting to see whether the people who beat the assassin to death (or thought they had -- he actually survived the beating) are booked.

Bad karma for Garnier

... for shamelessly 'poaching' such a kick-ass number and using it as the background music for their commercial. Especially when the philosophy of the song has no relation to the shining happy people portrayed in the ad.

Satori

Of all the Zen literature that I have read (fruitlessly, I must admit, since I am no closer to enlightenment than I was when I started out) the following satori experience stands out (it's from D T Suzuki's classic):

[Kyogen] returned to Yisan and implored him to teach in the faith of Zen. But Yisan said: "I really have nothing to impart to you, and if I tried to do so you may have occasion to make me an object of ridicule later on. Besides, whatever I can instruct you is my own and will never be yours." Kyogen was disappointed and considered his senior disciple unkind. Finally he came to the decision to burn up all his notes and memorandums which were of no help to his spiritual welfare, and, retiring altogether from the world, to spend the rest of his life in solitude and simplicity in accordance with the Buddhist rules. He reasoned: "What is the use of studying Buddhism, so difficult to comprehend and too subtle to receive instructions from another? I shall be a plain homeless monk, troubled with no desire to master things too deep for thought." He left Yisan and built himself a hut near the tomb of Chu (Hui-chung), the National Master, at Nan-yang. One day he was weeding and sweeping the ground, and when a piece of rock brushed away struck a bamboo, the sound produced by the percussion unexpectedly elevated his mind to a state of satori.

The lesson here goes beyond enlightenment (important as that is). It talks of the dignity in admitting defeat and letting go, of giving up all pretences and ambitions, and yet doing the right thing, without expecting a reward. If a person has attained this level of spiritual maturity, satori is just a bonus for him IMHO.

This is how you spread democracy

From an article in today's The Hindu (via The Guardian):

This is what Europhiles mean when they speak of the "soft power" of the union, the capacity to draw countries towards democracy through the magnetic pull of EU-style prosperity and stability. How much better, and more effective, than the "hard power" of George W. Bush: democracy delivered by bombs from the sky and boots on the ground.

Liverpool 1-4 Chelsea

Time for me to eat crow, I guess. Going by the way Chelsea has managed eight straight victories and how Man United and Arsenal are already stumbling, I think it's safe to say that Chelsea will most likely retain the title.

My very own crappy little web app

I have been spending the last couple of days coding up an application to track the English Premier League. Nothing fancy, just a screen to enter match results and another screen to view the points table. The application is based on JSF and MySQL and runs on JBoss. My experiences:

1. JSF seems quite promising, but there were times when things didn't work the way they were supposed to, but there were no exceptions or any other errors thrown. Or if there was an exception, it was not very straightforward to decipher it (here is an example).


2. MySQL's AUTO_INCREMENT feature along with last_insert_id() is pretty cool. No need to create sequences and triggers as in Oracle.


3. I know this has been beaten to death, but MySQL's habit of silently accepting invalid dates is not a Good Thing (tm).


4. I used JEdit for this. JEdit looks OK, but it's a bit slow. I'll reserve judgment till I have spent more time with it.


5. Do not place the wrong version of j2ee.jar in your classpath. Having both JBoss and Tomcat choke with weird errors is probably amusing in hindsight, but it's not funny at all when you are tearing your hair out late at night, wondering WTF happened.


6. I am also beginning to see why some people don't think very highly of checked exceptions in Java.

Everybody is Management

A couple of days ago we had a motivational speaker at work, talking about passion at work, giving one's best, and so on. One of the phrases used was 'Everybody is Management', meaning that each of us serfs were 'owners', in that we had both the power and the responsibility to steer the company's destiny in the most glorious, bestest way possible.

Everybody is Management, eh?

1. Then how come my pay is muchos less than management pay?


2. Why am I sitting in a cube farm and not in a corner office?


3. Where are my stock options?

Everybody is Management my ass. I am not claiming that I do management work. I do my job, and I get paid for it. Fair enough. But spare me this BS, please.

Satyendra Dubey

I know this is not much, but I thought I would post this as a sort of homage and hopefully let more people know about Satyendra Dubey (I received this via the alumni mailing list):

Bio-graphical note on Mr Satyendra K Dubey

Former Deputy General Manager/Project Director, Koderma Project Implementation Unit, National Highway Authorities of India (NHAI)

Born in a small village in Sewan (Bihar), Mr Satyendra Kumar Dubey studied in a village school before successfully competing in the IIT joint entrance exam. He graduated from IIT Kanpur with a B Tech degree in Civil Engineering in 1994 with second position in his class. Fuelled by his desire of contributing to public welfare, Mr Dubey chose to join the Indian Engineering Services as opposed to pursuing a glittering corporate career or greener pastures abroad. In July 2002, he was posted as an Assistant Project Manager at the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI). Honest and dedicated, Mr Dubey made his mark on the Rs 450 crore highway stretch.

He used to ride his bicycle to the quarry to inspect the quality of stone and other equipment to enforce commitment to contracts. He never compromised on quality and once forced a contractor to reconstruct a 6 km stretch of highway after discovering inferior work. Mr Dubey invariably visited work sites several times a week, instead of the usual practice of once in some months. While posted at Gaya on a project, he once got three engineers suspended for mishandling of funds.

Mr Dubey was selected as the Deputy General Manager/Project Director of the Koderma Project Implementation Unit to handle the 5,200 km stretch in the Golden Quadrilateral Corridor Project. A dreadful fate however awaited the courageous and upright young man. While travelling by rickshaw to his house from railway station on the morning of November 27, 2003, Mr Dubey was murdered and was found lying near A P colony in Gaya, shot dead by a highly sophisticated weapon. It appears that some people who found it inconvenient to have Mr Dubey as the Project Director eliminated him.

Mr Dubey did what he did despite of personal consequences, obstacles, dangers and pressures. In recognition of his honesty, integrity, dedicated service and upright behaviour in public life, the Satyendra K Dubey Memorial Award has been instituted by IIT Kanpur.

Movie Review - The Island

The setting for The Island is the not-too-distant future when cloning technology becomes advanced enough for people to take out an 'insurance policy' against any structural deficiencies in their bodies: put down the requisite cash and get themselves cloned. This clone can then be harvested for body parts.

The clone factory is run by an Evil Genius. The clones are kept in his futuristic clone farm where their lives are carefully controlled and monitored. Whenever the time comes for one of them to be harvested, they are told that their names have been chosen in 'The Lottery' and that they will now spend the rest of their lives in a tropical island paradise, when the reality is actually a quick one-way trip to the operating theater.

The movie is about how two of these clones (Ewan McGregor and the gorgeous Scarlett Johansson):

1. Learn the truth


2. Escape from the clutches of the Evil Genius (Sean Bean) and his minions


3. Get to wear designer clothes


4. Do cool things like taking part in furious chases in a futuristic LA and smashing things up


5. Foil the Evil Genius' plans and


6. Live happily ever after

The Island is a pretty gripping movie. Though the first part of the movie is only so-so (not being a big fan of sci-fi flicks, I found the scenes inside the clone farm a bit irritating -- people being named Lincoln Echo Six, for example), the tempo really picks up after the clones escape, and the climax is quite riveting.

Rossi is the MotoGP Champion

Rossi seems to be the most human and down to earth star of the lot. The camaraderie and fellowship he shares with his fans should be seen to be believed. In this age of stalkers and souped up security, it was refreshing to see him surrounded by his wellwishers, some of whom had brought along a T-shirt for him to wear (with the a huge '7' printed on it -- signifying Rossi's seventh championship title). He also found time to make his way to a photo-op with a group of fans dressed up as Snow White and the seven dwarfs.

When Rossi crashed into Gibernau's bike in the previous race, forcing both of them out of the race and postponing his championship victory, the way he immediately went to help Gibernau was also nice to watch. Compare this with the way a certain former F1 champion behaved in a similar situation recently.

The stage is being set

The IAEA has referred Iran to the Security Council for NPT violations. This came as somewhat of a surprise to me. I was under the impression that the IAEA had a more favourable impression of Iran's cooperation. Need to do some more reading up on this.

One argument put forward by proponents of the hardline stance is that Iran does not need nuclear energy when it has so much oil. A little-known fact is that based on current and forecast usage, Iran will turn into a net oil importer by 2024. Even if it doesn't, so what, given the blatant hypocrisy of the nuclear haves? India has not exactly covered itself in glory, either, by voting against Iran. Now that we are on the other side of the fence and have been accepted as de facto nuclear powers, we want to play holier-than-thou. The sops being offered to us by the US played a part in our vote, no doubt.

Syria to be accused of Hariri assassination

A news item in The Guardian says that "UN investigators will next month directly implicate the Syrian government in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister". There are no indications at present as to how high up the Syrian regime the investigation will reach.

My two cents (assuming that Syria is really behind the assassination):

1. The probability that the assassination of such a high-level figure was carried out by the Syrians without the knowledge and approval of Bashar Assad is very low. Unless, of course, Assad is not really in charge of things.


2. The probability that there exists evidence that can implicate Assad is even lower.

As usual, some mid-level players will take the fall. The masterminds will escape.

The green screen folks

...sure have one thing going for them: they may be working on legacy mainframe code, but they can manage to look busy even just browsing their datasets. At least that's the impression I get when I look over their shoulders. Try looking busy moving around the Windows file system with Explorer and you'll know what I mean.

Post inspired by this Dilbert cartoon.

You know you're living in the cyber age

...when BBC deems a disaster in an online game worthy enough to be reported.

imdb.com and BugMeNot

I went to imdb.com yesterday to check out what people were saying about The Grudge and was asked to register to enter the forums. I know that BugMeNot should only be used to log in, and not to register, but I didn't realise it then; I kept trying to get valid logins by using the Firefox BugMeNot plugin, but got turned away each time with the admonition that the email address I was using was blocked.

Anyway, I thought I'd post this because I found the successive addresses that BugMeNot supplied me with to be quite funny:

Try 1: imhereto@gazeta.pl <rejected>
Try 2: bugmenot@freemail.hu <rejected>
Try 3: thisis@bullshit.com <rejected>
Try 4: bug.me.not.imdb@gmail.com <rejected>
Try 5: soyouwanttoplayhard2get@huh
Try 6: imdb_bugmenot@spambob.com <rejected>
Try 7: comeonthisisnotfunny@anymore.com <rejected>
Try 8: eveyones@watching.com <rejected>
Try 9: dontmake@scene.com <rejected>
Try 10: f**kimdbsagediscrimination@bugmenot.cn <rejected>

Alright, I made up some of these addresses. I leave it as an exercise for the gentle reader to figure out which those are.

Methink they doth advertise too much

I am talking about the IIPM guys who periodically assail our senses with screaming whole-page ads about their institute. Question for you guys: have you seen any ads by the IIMs? No? Why do you think it is so? Hint: it's not because they think they are so lousy that how much ever they spend on newspaper ads, nobody will bother applying to their MBA programs.

Movie Review - The Grudge

Short version: Move over, Sahara and XXX-2, you've got company. Treat her well, OK?

Slightly longer version:

1. Most of the horror/suspense scenes take place at the same location, with the same pattern being repeated over and over - unsuspecting victim-to-be makes his/her way up a stairway to the haunted room, looks in every fricken direction expect the one from which the thing/danger springs, end of character.


2. There is no variety in the scare tactics employed: just sudden noise and some disgusting gurgling sounds.


3. Somebody has a hair fetish, that's for sure.

Cluestick time

Here is an example of the security vs convenience tradeoff: Hutch have recently launched their customer service portal in Chennai. There is a link for viewing all your bills, beneath which is this advice:

Note : To view your bill in shortest possible time please go to Tools on your tool bar and select Options. Choose privacy and set it at "LOW".

Also notice the blithe assumption that all their customers are on IE, for which they have to be complimented without reserve.

Child clothes 'fail to block sun'

A news item from the BBC says that children's clothes may not be providing proper protection from UV rays.

This is quite an important bit of information, no doubt, but I would not consider it on the same level as, say, the violence in Iraq or the election in Germany. But the RSS feed for BBC News (Front Page, World Edition) makes no such distinction [*].

Some sort of hierarchy or prioritising seems to be required. I think Google News addresses this somewhat by ranking news items based on their popularity, but that carries with it its own limitations, leading to Michael Jackson's antics being given more publicity than they deserve. The price one has to pay for choosing which items one wants to read about is to wade through all of them, I guess.

[*] Here is a link to much more pressing problems being faced by children in India and other developing countries.

I think I am slipping up: a post about news items without the obligatory, gratuitous DC-bashing? So here goes: DC doesn't even bother to give permanent URL addresses to their stories, thereby making them stale the very next day.

Galloway vs Hitchens

I haven't seen anything about this on the 'net, so I thought I'd write about it.

1. Hitchens does say that Juan Cole has never set foot in the region. He also says that Cole changes his mind every week (or was it two weeks?).


2. Though I disagree with Hitchens' views, he did come across as the more level-headed of the two. The way he held his ground against the hostile audience was admirable. He even got away with insulting them a bit ("you can make all the zoo noises you want...").


3. Galloway is the master of insults: "You are the first recorded example in natural history of a butterfly metamorphosing back into a slug!". LOL!


4. I think Hitchens was incorrect in labelling Syria's occupation of Lebanon as illegal. To the best of my knowledge, they went in with the approval of the UN and the western powers. Whether they overstayed their welcome is another story.


5. I think it's a reflection of the maturity of western values that such a vitriolic, ad hominem debate can even be conducted. Try something like this in India, and you will end up with the debaters trading blows, questioning each other's parentage and what not (to say nothing of the mayhem inflicted by their supporters).

Rant

I was reading Adam Bosworth's ICSOC04 talk when the sudden urge to get up to speed on the whole WS-* thing hit me (I know, the speech should have made me go and download Python or some such thing, but that's just me).

I started off with this page. Notice how it says "This document is also available in these non-normative formats: PostScript version and PDF version."

What's with these folks? Non-normative? Would it have hurt too much to have simply said "This document is also available in PostScript and PDF versions?"

Anyway, that took care of my morbid, albeit temporary, fixation with web services.

Must be a cushy life

...being a Deccan Chronicle columnist. Just wait for two weeks to pass since Hurricane Katrina, collecting readily available information from the Internet during this period, pick out some choice bits from this, add a dash of personal opinion to make it seem original, and voila, you are good to go.

Ruby On Rails Update

The md5.so problem in Cygwin turned out to be related to OpenSSL as well. Once I installed this, the Gems installation went through.

Next hurdle: Gems can handle only basic proxy authentication; since the proxy server at work uses NTLM, I couldn't automatically download and install Rails. Not willing to give up, I downloaded and installed all the required packages manually.

You would think my woes were over. You would be wrong. I do not have MySQL at work, so it looked like I wouldn't be able to build and run the sample Cookbook application. Having come this far, I decided to substitute for MySQL with Oracle. I fired up a SQL*Plus session and created the recipe table in a spare Oracle database.

OK, now I have to edit the database.yml file and fill in the details of the Oracle instance. Only problem is, I didn't have the ruby-oci8 package. Off to the relevant rubyforge page. Download. Configure. Error: I do not have the relevant OCI header files in the Oracle client setup in my machine.

Sometimes the signs are very obvious. Some higher power is telling you to stop, trying to gently drag you away from the mess, whispering it's not meant to be, give it up, son... but you pay no heed to these messages and keep on ploughing ahead, thinking just one more step, and then things will be alright... until you reach a stage where it's simply not worth it anymore, and you throw up your hands in frustration and proceed to rm -rf ruby-1.8.2 and watch with righteous wrath as tiny *.rb files run helter-skelter, squealing in panic, trying to beseech impassive *.cpp and *.sh files for help, only to be turned away and be hunted down mercilessly by the File Deleter.

Ruby On Rails

I had been meaning to check out Ruby On Rails for quite some time; got around to it finally . I am still in the middle of it (just finished setting things up), so these are just preliminary findings. I started this at work (in Cygwin), came home and did it again in Suse 9.3.

Cygwin:

1. There is no uninstall target in the makefile if you install Ruby from sources. This is probably not the case with Cygwin alone.


2. Attempting to install Gems failed saying that it couldn't find the file md5.so, although the file was very much there.

Suse 9.3:

1. Suse ships with Ruby 1.8.1; this is no good because Rails needs 1.8.2. Back to installing from the sources.


2. Attempting to install Gems failed saying that SSL was not installed, even though it very much was (see a pattern here?). I fixed this by installing a newer version of Rake (whatever that is), though there were some documentation-related errors. Anyway, reinstalling Gems with 1.8.2 went through without any problems.

Going to tackle the md5.so error at work tomorrow. Hopefully I can fix it quickly and move on to actual application development...

Three strikes for ESR

• Strike One: Selling out to The Man.


• Strike Two: Writing the essay on muff-diving.


• Strike Three: Sending the arrogant, self-serving and rude email to the Microsoft HR person.

There's a first time for everything

My first Suse 9.3 crash: system suddenly becomes completely unresponsive. No free memory available (including 1 GB of swap). Only running applications are Firefox and snotes (a sticky notes application).

As I was trying to post this entry earlier, the problem recurred: the culprit seems to be the Firefox window that opens up if you invoke Blogger's spellchecker. If there are any typos in this post, you knw whom to blam.

If Raikkonen were a Bollywood villain

Here is a wicked thought: seeing how difficult it is going to be for Raikkonen to beat Alonso to the F1 Championship title fairly, the best chance for him to win would be to get his teammate Montoya to run interference for him. By interference, I mean a strategically crafted, but innocent (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) 'situation' that forces Alonso to retire from the race. Mind you, this strategy has to be repeated more than once to bridge the points gulf.

Looking into the past

I recently bought a copy of Code Complete. As I was reading it, a thought struck me: being in India and hence outside the mainstream, so to speak, I get to experience a lot of things quite late, be it becoming aware of must-read books or even watching sitcoms on TV for that matter (Zee is right now proudly announcing the premiere of new seasons of Caroline in the City and The Sopranos; at a best guess, these are at least four/five years old).

The best analogy I can think of is astronomy; as we gaze at the sky, what we see is not the stars as they are now, but what they were when the light started its journey from them. Not a very good analogy, I'm afraid.

Dang, as I was searching for a link to Code Complete, it looks like I didn't even manage to get the new edition. I rest my case.

Now I know

...why J.K.Rowling didn't employ Bruce Schneier's services as a security consultant when writing the Harry Potter stories.

BTW, how can inadequate security be worse than no security at all? Imagine that you have a defective lock, which a few people know how to force open. In this case, your house is insecure from only these people. No lock at all, and your house is open to everyone.

Quote of the day

During the shot inside the Wal-Mart, the correspondent hounded the looters, who were loading up on supplies and a few choice gifts for their children, one man said to him that no one was worried about their lives, so why in the bloody hell would he worry about Wal-Mart's profit-loss ratio.
-- Bryan Newbury in Counterpunch

Sycophancy

I am not against people according due respect to their bosses, but can't this show of respect be at least a bit more measured? Case in point: when I was driving to work the other day, I happened to find myself behind a police vehicle. Since it was doing a fair bit of speed, I decided to tag along behind it. One advantage of doing so is that you can switch to autopilot mode and simply ensure that you keep a nice, safe distance between yourself and the vehicle in front of you -- no need to keep a constant lookout for the pesky jaywalkers and unpredictable two wheelers. Anyway, as our mini-convoy approached a junction, the traffic cop manning it immediately sprang to attention and saluted the occupant of the police vehicle. As we passed more and more junctions (I counted at least three before I had to make my turn), this spectacle was repeated like clockwork at each of them, the only variation being the alacrity with which the cops sprang to action (some of them were a bit slow in paying their respects; I wouldn't be surprised if they were later chewed out for this).

Brand Equity

The Hindu has a news item about how Madras University is trying to build its brand equity by issuing coffee mugs, handbags and T-shirts bearing the university's logo.

Here is a clue for you morons: make your degrees worth more than the paper they are printed on, and the brand equity will take care of itself.

Suse 9.3

9.3 takes ages to install. One reason could be that since it comes in a DVD, there are plenty of packages that get included if you choose whole package groups like development, office applications, games, etc. There are so many packages that the 5 GB partition I installed it in is more than 90% full already (Update: Mea culpa. More than 1 GB of this was taken up by the interim files from the 2.6.11.11 kernel compile).

Having come out unscathed from FreeBSD's disk partitioner, I thought I would find 9.3's partitioning a breeze. Not so. There are still enough mines to be wary of, if you want to preserve existing partitions (after a lot of hits and misses, I figured out that unless you make sure that the mount point is set to blank for existing partitions, they too would get formatted).

Since I am pretty up-to-date in terms of packages in 9.1, I didn't find 9.3 to be that much of a radical improvement. 9.3 doesn't have the perceptible slowness that I have experienced (and, in fact, continue to experience) in 9.1, though.

Parting tip: If you find Firefox's default menu and toolbar font sizes to be too small (happened with 9.3 for me), you can adjust them by updating the userChrome.css file.

Bloglines Plumber

Bloglines have taken to displaying a picture of a plumber sheepishly saying that the site is down, he is working on it, etc. All nice and sweet, but one thing I would do is remove/reword the part where it says that they've had a database crash. They could have just said that they were experiencing some difficulties; exposing 'ugly' things like database crashes somehow doesn't feel right. It doesn't exactly inspire confidence in their sysadmins and DBAs, either.

Interesting statistic

61% of Americans don't utilise their vacation time fully because of their fear of being replaced while on vacation (from a post in a Joel on Software forum).

Quote of the day

From portable gensets, we are now moving in to the manufacture of large and mid-size gensets of 5KV and 10KV.
-- Mr P.V.R.Murhty, group finance director, Yash Birla Group

As my weary head hits the pillow tonight, just before I fall asleep, I'll think about this gem and how its infinite wisdom and pithiness have enriched my life and made me pause and think about all the problems and challenges being faced by the genset industry in India.

No prizes for guessing which crappy newspaper I found this in. I am not simply picking a statement from a news item and anointing it as quote of the day; said crappy newspaper does this every freaking day in the business section.

You have to go for it

Luque made his debut for Newcastle against Man United today. In the middle of the first half, there was a cross from the right which he attempted to score from with a spectacular volley. If he had scored, it would no doubt have been a candidate for the goal of the season. He promptly got some stick from the commentators for not doing something more sensible, something with more percentage in it, like playing the ball back into the six-yard box and hoping for something to happen.

Every top-flight footballer dreams of being world class, of being a Zinedine Zidane. But how does he become one? Unless he tries things like these, and succeeds, he will not be considered world-class. Therefore, he has to go for it, irrespective of any self-doubts or what the pundits may say.

This may not seem like the best deal for the team. As in this case, the team might have benefited from a more conservative approach. But what if Luque had scored? Not only would the team have gained a goal, but it would also have gained a world-class footballer who believes in himself, who will go on to score more such spectacular goals. In itself a big plus, this also has the effect of galvanising the entire team to higher peaks of performance, knowing they have a star in their midst. Thus the missed goal is a risk well worth taking.

It takes a thief...

Cover versions usually don't appeal to me, because of their parasitic nature, but The Ataris' Boys of Summer is an exception. Ironically, listening to this song is the best way to come out of the blues caused by listening to the original number. Which just goes to show that lyrics mean diddly-squat -- it's the tune, the beat and/or the voice that hooks us.

Capitalism and communism

This is probably one of the most insightful things I have read in quite a while:

'I think that social relations - friendships and alliances - should be seen as horizontal relations between equals in contrast to the vertical hierarchy of power relations,' (Wilkinson) says. 'Friendship and hierarchy are opposite principles of social organization. In friendship one is talking about mutuality and reciprocity - your needs being my needs. Hierarchy is about power, coercion, and access to resources regardless of other people's needs . . It's strength and power that determine who gets what, and I think that's the fundamental reason why as inequality increases the social environment deteriorates.' We have much to learn, he says, from the 'vigilant sharing' of hunter-gatherer societies, where people 'don't compete for the essentials of life.'"

.NET more secure than Java

Two things I learned from this paper:

1. The byte code verification in Java is quite complicated (good thing I haven't attempted it in Vajra yet).


2. It is also Godel-incomplete, in a kind of way.

I was actually under the impression that Java was more secure, so make that three things. The reason for this could be that I was subconsciously conflating .NET with the Windows OS.

Brand IIT: the people behind the image

Today's Hindu carries an article that talks about the IITs, their significance and suggestions to improve them. I have some (mostly negative) things to say about this article, but being an alumnus, my viewpoint may be considered biased as well as, well, inflammatory. I am going to wait for some time and, if I feel it is worthwhile, go ahead and speak my mind.

These are the times when the need for anonymity becomes apparent. Sometimes the best way to say things that may cause offence is to do so anonymously. As long as one is not spreading lies and innuendo, that is.

Chavez and Bush

First, about Chavez (from The Hindu):

(Chavez) never stops talking and he never stops working. He has time for everyone and never forgets a face. For several years he travelled incessantly around the country, to keep an eye on what was going on. This was not mere electioneering, for he would talk for hours to those who had hardly a vote among them. He exhausts his cadres, his secretaries, and his Ministers. I have travelled with him and them into the deepest corners of the country, and then, after a 16-hour day, he would call the grey-faced Cabinet together for an impromptu meeting to analyse what they had discovered and what measures they should take.

Now the fun part -- Maureen Dowd rips Bush a new one:

W. vacationed so hard in Texas that he got bushed. He needed a vacation from his vacation..."I'm kind of hangin' loose, as they say," he told reporters.

As the Financial Times noted, Mr Bush is acting positively French in his love of le loafing, with 339 days at his ranch since he took office -- nearly a year out of his five.

And finally, about the latest rationale for the Iraq war:

What twisted logic: with no WMD, no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already?...Just because the final reason the President came up with for invading Iraq -- to create a democracy with freedom of religion and minority rights -- has been dashed, why stop relaxing? W. is determined to stay the course on bike trails all over the West.

PHB-speak

I usually like the IBM "On demand" ads -- they are smart, savvy and really makes one sit up and take notice. But the one where a lady advises the farmer and the people in his supply chain takes the cake for unadulterated PHB-speak: "customised, integrated, real-time web portal"? Uggh.

Talk about coincidence. As I type this, the ad where the lost trucker who is being helped by an IBM helpdesk lady who is tracking his shipment through RFID played on TV. The best and the worst, side by side.

No Bloglines? No problem.

The latest casualty in my running battle with our sysadmins is Bloglines: it has been added to the proxy server's blacklist. Never mind that Bloglines can be used to read "productive," work-related blogs as well.

The good news is that Newsgator seems to have escaped this blacklisting (the proxy server probably blocks any URL that contains the string 'blog'). I have therefore dusted up my Newsgator account and have brought it in sync with my Bloglines subscriptions.

Though I prefer Bloglines over Newsgator, I am beginning to like 'Gator and am getting more and more comfortable with it (either that, or I am making a virtue out of a necessity. Take your pick).

Cryptome publishes list of MI6 officers worldwide

The list contains a few who have served in India as well.

Vajra integrated with Classpath

Got Vajra to print a string using Classpath's SOP at last. But it's pretty unstable at the moment; things work only when all the debug flags are set; otherwise I get seg faults. Thus, as things stand, to see a simple "Hello, World!" (well, it's actually "Vajra has been integrated with Classpath!") I have to put up with about 17,000 lines of debug messages to stdout and ~170 megs of log statements dumped to the log file.

Self respect

I don't know who should be lined up against the wall and shot for this: the Zee folks or the HDFC guys. Probably both.

This is the reason for my anger: during commercial breaks in Zee Cafe, we are shown a still with a caption for an HDFC insurance plan for children. This is followed by a promo for either a) Friends that shows Ross cuddling his baby girl or b) the movie Crossroads with some mushy scenes involving Dan Aykroyd and Britney Spears. Next comes the actual HDFC ad.

Self respect my ass.

Update: HDFC are sponsoring the movie (not sure about Friends, though); the reason I missed this earlier is because I turn the mute on during commercial breaks. Still no excuse for the blatant appeal to emotion.

Pictures

I set up the Epson CX4500 scanner successfully in Linux. Still haven't figured out how to use it as a non-root user, though. I thought I would post some scanned pictures in the meantime:



This is the baby rat killer. Don't be fooled by the benign expression.

And here is her accomplice:

Michael Rivero doesn't get it

Much as I admire Mike's work and the service he is performing, I have to take exception to his response to an article about defective software in, of all places, rense.com:

The problem is that software engineers are having to STOP work on the product software to run around in circles dealing with hackers, worm writers, virus writers, porno spammers. etc. It is the fault of these cyber-criminals that our software is far from perfect, yet costs more.

While there are plenty of reasons for software suckage, programmers lacking time on account of being too busy fighting hackers and spammers is definitely not one of them.

Out of sight, out of mind?

From a study published in Current Anthropology via George Monbiot:

The Piraha (a tribe found in the Brazilian Amazon), Everett reveals, possess "the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of [and] are some of the brightest, pleasantest, most fun-loving people that I know". Yet they have no numbers of any kind, no terms for quantification (such as all, each, every, most and some), no colour terms and no perfect tense. They appear to have borrowed their pronouns from another language, having previously possessed none. They have no "individual or collective memory of more than two generations past", no drawing or other art, no fiction and "no creation stories or myths".

All this, Everett believes, can be explained by a single characteristic: "Piraha culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of [the speaker]." What can be discussed, in other words, is what has been seen. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, in this realm at least, to exist. After struggling with one grammatical curiosity, he realised that the Piraha were "talking about liminality - situations in which an item goes in and out of the boundaries of their experience. [Their] excitement at seeing a canoe go around a river bend is hard to describe; they see this almost as travelling into another dimension".

Me think Piraha people plenty smart. Me think Piraha people really know how to live life. Not wasting any time clinging to ghosts of the past or worrying about the future. As Philip Kapleau says in his foreword to Zen Keys:

For what else is there but the pure act -- the lifting of the hammer, the washing of the dish, the movement of the hands on the typewriter, the pulling of the weed? Everything else -- thoughts of the past, fantasies about the future, judgments and evaluations concerning the work itself -- what are these but shadows and ghosts flickering about in our minds, preventing us from entering fully into life itself?

Movie Review: Be Cool

Chili Palmer (John Travolta) is a street-savvy man (thug?) with connections to Hollywood who wants to make it in the music business. His foray starts off with the murder of Tommy Athens (James Woods) by the Russian mafia, who are pissed off with him for refusing to pay them protection money. Chili teams up with Tommy's widow Edie (Uma Thurman), and together they try to produce an album with Linda Moon, a talented singer struggling to make it big. The only problem (two problems, actually) is that Moon is currently under contract with Nick Carr (Harvey Keitel), who isn't averse to taking out a contract on Palmer to hold on to Moon. To add to the fun, Chili and Edie also have to deal with a bunch of West Coast rapper thugs led by Sin LaSalle, a producer, who wants the money owed him by Tommy a.s.a.p., with vig, or else... BTW, did I mention that the Russian mafia is also interested in Chili, him being a witness to Tommy's murder?

Contrary to what some of the folks over at imdb.com say, it's a thoroughly enjoyable movie from the get go. Dabu (played by André 3000 of Outkast) is pretty hilarious as one of the rapper thugs, as are Raji (Vince Vaughn), a black man stuck in a white man's body, and Elliot Wilhem (The Rock), Raji's gay bodyguard with silver screen ambitions whose only claim to fame is his ability to lift one eyebrow cockily.

Four stars out of five.

How the mighty have fallen

Not to take anything away from England, but seeing the Aussies in the dressing room jump up in delight and celebrate when Brett Lee finally saw off Harmison's final delivery was pretty pathetic.

Opera + Privoxy = Firefox (almost)

My recent experiences with Firefox (1.0.6) have been less than satisfactory; the ForecastFox extension keeps saying that I do not have permissions for some file every time I start Firefox (this started happening after an upgrade of the extension). Firefox also doesn't seem to remember my passwords sometimes. I have switched to Opera for the time being. I was worried that I would miss the Adblock extension, but it turns out that Privoxy does a good job in blocking ads. Such a good job that even the banner ad in Opera is blocked (I am planning to allow Privoxy to display the ad once each session, just to ease my guilt).

I miss the other FF extensions, though - the Gmail/Bloglines notifiers, DictionarySearch and ForecastFox. Opera has a Feeds option that takes care of the notifiers; I can also use kweather for the forecast, which leaves only the dictionary thing.

We pay him for saying things like this?

That Kadirgamar's assassination was a "premeditated act of violence"? News flash for the PM: a) If somebody kills another person by shooting him, nobody would confuse it for a non-violent act b) unless the assassin was having a friendly conversation with Kadirgamar, and whipped out a gun and shot him over some sudden disagreement, it was definitely premeditated.

Rhetoric and sophistry

I took a course called "The Theory and Practice of Rhetoric" in my senior year in college. This course was offered by the Humanities Department on an experimental basis; the ten or so of us who opted for this elective course were the first (and probably the last) bunch of students to do so. We started out with Aristotle's syllogisms, learned about the various logical fallacies and argument techniques and came up with our own bits of "well-reasoned" arguments (short speeches, a term paper and so on). All in all, a very enjoyable way to earn the required humanities credits.

Anyway, this course came to mind when I was dwelling on the number of poorly argued, emotional articles that I come across in the course of my reading (both online and print). One has to be very discerning and discriminating to really understand the issues involved and not be swayed by the emotions or the faulty logic employed by these articles. Once you get into the habit of not taking everything you read at face value and looking at things critically, it's pretty astonishing how much crap passes for news and informed comment (no, this is not a dig at Juan Cole -- I have a lot of respect for his views and read his blog practically every day) these days.

C++ FAQs

I recently bought a copy of C++ FAQs. I had read the online version about four or five years ago and found them quite useful, so I felt that it would be worthwhile getting hold of the print edition as well.

It's a good book, no doubt about it. But having read both Effective C++ and More Effective C++ in the interregnum sort of takes away the sheen from C++ FAQs. Scott Meyers' folksy and humorous style has a lot to do with this. The authors of FAQs do attempt some humour (I especially liked their answer to the question "Do customers ever change their requirements?"), but they are not in the same league as Myers.

Another slightly off-putting thing is the independent nature of each question. Since each FAQ can be read by itself, you feel slightly disconcerted to see identical (copy/paste?) wording in the answers to adjacent questions.

One section that deserves praise is the chapter on architecture and frameworks. The authors have done a great job in succinctly explaining, in less than ten pages or so, the role of architecture and the characteristics of a good framework.

The Rude Pundit is no longer anonymous

He is Lee Papa, a professor of drama studies at an American university. I would have preferred it if he had stayed anonymous. Knowing that I can now put a face to his rudeness somehow lessens the effect of his posts. I'm also not sure whether he can maintain the level of brutal honesty in his posts without the cloak of anonymity.

Who's next, Xymphora?

Movie Review: Madagascar

Not a sucky movie, but nothing much to write home about either. Didn't like the blatant rip-off of Eddie Murphy's donkey character from Shrek and Shrek 2 (now, that was some movie, alright).

Some of the good parts (few as they were):

1. The antics of the penguins and the chimp with the British accent


2. The raccoon gang (especially the king and the sweet little baby one).

Yet another unproductive Saturday evening draws to a close (well, not totally unproductive: the English Premier League has kicked off today -- Villa and the Wanderers are tied at two apiece as I type this -- so that's something to cheer).

Now I'm really convinced

From an article in today's Hindu about how the revaluation of the Chinese yuan is leading to more foreign investment in other Asian countries' stock markets:

"If China has a currency that is going to appreciate, then your currency becomes more competitive relative to China and your exports should do better."

But just a little further down:

But there is another rationale. The higher yuan means that Asia's other currencies will also rise, so foreign investors who buy stocks denominated in these currencies stand to see a return even if the stock prices go nowhere.

Translation: "We are investing more because the currencies will become more competitive. We are also investing more because the currencies will become less competitive". Can't they at least be consistent in their rationalisations? Reminds me of Mandelbrot's comment a while ago.

Sloppy journalism

There is a story in yesterday's DC entitled "Is encryption legal in India?" that goes like this:

Is encryption legal in India? Well that's the impression one gets when you log on to any of the online auction sites. Any Indian citizen, unaware of the IT Act 2000 or the Wireless and Telegraph Act would be led to believe that it is, indeed, legal in India, without realising that he/she would be liable for imprisonment for up to five years.

Wait a minute, if encryption is illegal in India, am I breaking the law every time I log in to my bank's site using HTTPS? Reading on:

For instance, ebay.in, an online auction site has been, apparently, inducing (into participating) its buyers and sellers into breaking the law. Incidentally, eBay India had acquired bazzi.com [sic] in July 2004. It may be recalled that bazzi.com's [sic] CEO Avnish Bajaj is still facing charges in connection with circulation of the lewd MMS depicting two Delhi Public students in a sexual act.

The paragraph starts with "For instance", but does not substantiate the dramatic charge it made in the previous paragraph. Also, the reference to baazi.com has no relevance to the point being made.

While the Indian IT Act, 2000 allows absolutely no encryption, eBay.in, seemingly, tells its site visitors that 128 bit encryption is legal in India. Furthermore, eBay.in has been inviting its customers to fax their Credit Card details in order to pay sellers through PaisaPay (a gateway used for payment provided through leading banks like ICICI, HDFC, Citibank), that the web site claims comes to a "secure server" and only "authorised eBay employees have access to".

Why do I get the feeling that the story is, at least partly, a hatchet job on eBay.in? There is also no evidence (in the form of a quote from the web site) to back up the claim that eBay tells its visitors that 128 bit encryption is legal in India.

IT act experts point out that by asking customers to fax their credit card statement which contains other details like name, credit card number and billing address, these web sites are actually "aiding and abetting" credit card frauds.

At last, something I agree with. Never mind the fact that this is absolutely tangential to the story.

"Going by the present status," said informed sources, "The Central Government, so far, has not notified any security procedures under Section 16 of the IT Act for on-line electronic commerce, banking and financial transactions in India." Informed sources also point that the department of telecom, which consents to 40 bits [sic] encryption also seems to be overlooking (the) law.

So I am breaking the law when I check my bank balance online. Hmmm.

Cyber law expert Pawan Duggal said that, "Although the government has not made any effort to define encryption in the Indian IT Act, but technically it clearly says that it is not allowed."

Allowing that encryption is illegal in India and that the authorities do not enforce the law, the story could have made its point just as well (if not better) by leaving eBay.in out of it, or by using any site that uses SSL as an example.

Iranian oil bourse

If there is one fact that still lends credence to an impending attack by America on Iran, this is it. I have linked to this article before, but it's worth a second read in light of the Iranian oil bourse.

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.