Mystery Solved

If all goes well, I will be in possession of a free USB drive from the Evil Empire in about six to eight weeks' time.

(I wanted to post the image of Garfield with an evil grin, but couldn't locate a suitable image)

Faux news item of the day

(In other news) India hooked up a generator to Gandhi's spinning body and shortly afterwards announced they no longer needed the US civilian nuclear power deal.
-- Michael Rivero on Bush laying a wreath at Raj Ghat

[Never mind that Gandhi was cremated :-)]

Questions

My IBM ThinkCentre has been freezing at least a couple of times a week, ever since I wiped the OEM hard drive that came with it and installed Linux on it. I don't think the problem is related to Linux because I encounter this with all the three distros I have (Mandriva, Suse and Kubuntu). I felt that a BIOS upgrade might fix things, so I paid a visit to the IBM site. This site contains the bootable disk and ISO image versions of the upgrade program, but you first need to download and run a Windows executable to create either the bootable diskette or the ISO image. What if you are not running Windows? Is the assumption that if you are not running Windows, you must then be knowledgeable enough to know about things like Wine?

If there is a technical reason why a direct download of the ISO image cannot be provided, I can't figure out what that might be. Does the executable they provide dynamically generate the ISO image based on a scan of my hardware?

Is this the Indian equivalent of borowitzreport.com?

The newspapers are all chockful of budget-related items, but this post is not about any of them. Instead, we will focus our attention on the IIPM ad (yes, it's a full page ad; do you even have to ask?) that shares the space with the budget analyses; in particular, let's look at one of the essays in the ad. Here's a quote from the essay:

We live in a country where democracy is a farce, however much anyone sings artificial praises of a democracy called India. Who then is being penalised the most in this pseudo-democracy? Well, arguably the business community. They are the favourite exploitees of the political community and the bureaucrats... And they are the ones whose buildings can be demolished most cruelly and ruthlessly...

Arundhati Roy rips him a new one

I dare say it must look like a sieve by now.

Movie Review: The Chronicles of Narnia

Stunning visuals? Check. Endearing characters? Check. Magical land whose discovery is the dream of every little boy and girl? Check. Morality play between good and evil? Check.

In spite of all these things, there is a certain je ne se quoi whose absence stands in the way of considering Chronicles a must-watch movie. The presence of the lion, majestic though he is, somehow doesn't fit in that well with the rest of the characters. I also feel that the movie would have been better served if the witch's character had been played by someone like Glenn Close (a la Cruella de Ville). In the final reckoning, the movie neither belongs to the LOTR genre (although the witch's minions remind one of orcs -- especially in the scene in which the lion is 'sacrificed') nor is it an out-and-out children's fairy tale.

Microsoft Certified Child Prodigy

There's a news item in today's The Hindu about a child prodigy who became a Microsoft Certified Professional when he was only ten. Leaving aside the fact that he has gone over to the dark side, I consider this remark of his more dangerous:

So where does he see himself in a few decades? "In the presidential seat. Because I am inspired by President Kalam's journey from Ramanathapuram to the Raisina Hills," he says even before the question is completed.

Folks like these who have such an overweening ambition (especially one involving a 'prize' that depends more on other people's goodwill and your equations with them than on your own inherent abilities) usually leave behind in their wake quite a few bodies with knives sticking out of their backs. Moreover, going by Kalam's track record, even an honest and dedicated non-politician occupying the highest office doesn't seem to have made any difference to the way the country has been governed (let's face it: what has Kalam really achieved as President, other than scaring the bejesus out of school kids with his creepy smile?), so it is hard to treat such an ambition on a par with, say, inventing a cure for AIDS or finding an alternative fuel to petroleum.

Quote of the day

"How can anyone wake up in the morning next to a woman whose face is like a donkey?"
-- Mohamed Al Fayed on Camilla Parker-Bowles

Fuel

I wanted to check out how Amarok handles audio CDs, and gave Something Like Human a whirl. After playing my regular favorites like Bad Day, Down and Innocent, my eyes fell upon Hemorrhage. Though a part of me wanted to eject the CD, I went ahead and played the song anyway, and boy, did it bring back some memories. This song used to be something of an anthem for me; there was a period when I listened to it practically every day. Funny thing is, it wasn't even pleasant listening (great though the song is); it felt like undergoing a very painful experience which, for some strange reason, I wanted to inflict on myself

Over and over and over again...
Don't fall away
And leave me to myself
Don't fall away

Anyway, coming back to the present, listening to the song now feels good; though a bittersweet feeling lingers, I am now able to enjoy the song for its own sake.

Plato said that?

Your intrepid host functions as the coordinator of his alumni group in his spare time, in which capacity he received an email on behalf of a newly floated political party called bharatudaymission.org. The email asked me to spread the word among the group members about the need to bring probity into Indian politics, halt the degeneration, and so on.

Nothing wrong with this, except that the email contained a quote, purportedly from Plato, that went something like this: "Those who condemn politics to be the last resort of a scoundrel are bound to be ruled by scoundrels".

Wait a minute. Ignoring the fact that the original quote referred to patriotism, and not to politics, unless Plato had mastered time travel in addition to being a great philosopher, I very much doubt that he uttered these words.

Update: Two seconds after posting this, I found the actual quote: "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." Well, at least it got the spirit right.

Labour liberalisation

If someone were to ask me to summarise, within 30 words, what's wrong with world trade today, I doubt that I can do it better than this:

So long as some people's pocket change can feed other people's families for a week, labour will seek and deserve all the freedom of movement that capital has been granted.

Friends

Zee English are going to broadcast the final episode of Friends this Sunday. I have said nasty things about Friends, especially the later seasons, and I stand by that, but I can't help feeling quite a bit sad. All said and done, it was a great show and it will definitely be painful to say goodbye. It's not even the case that the ending is a and-they-lived-happily-ever-after one, like that of a good movie; we have the characters saying goodbye to each other and to their favourite haunts as well.

I haven't decided yet whether to even watch it; what with Sunday afternoon not being my favorite time of the week, I don't think I'd want to ruin it even more.

Update: Went ahead and watched it anyway. Wasn't so bad, after all; at least Ross and Rachel get back together.

Quote of the day

Q. What is the nature of Scottish involvement in world politics ?
A. We supply the whisky to every G8 conference.

(from a post in the RI forum)

Official Confirmation

...that the Euro may have had -- and continue to have -- a bearing on the American designs for the Middle East.

The Celebrity Cameo Design Pattern

Intent
Milk a sitcom for some more rating points

Also Known As
Don't-they-have-any-shame-whatsoever Pattern

Motivation

1. A show has been on the air for longer than anybody would have wished, and the writers have long since run out of good storylines. But the channel does not want to risk taking it off the air and replacing it with something unproven, thereby losing its primetime spot.
2. The lead actors are beginning to have weight problems.
3. Things are not so hunky dory since the sickeningly cute child star hit puberty and looks plain sickening, instead.

Applicability
Typically applies to sitcoms where each episode is self-contained, thereby affording easy entry and exit of, say, one of the main character's childhood friends or estranged sister.

Consequences

1. The show in question loses even more credibility
2. The actors are richer by another million dollars

Known Uses
Brad Pitt in Friends; George Clooney in Friends; Christina Applegate in -- where else -- Friends.

Related Patterns
Air-cuts-from-old-episodes-as-flashbacks Pattern

Non-alignment and Quining

'Non-alignment is not an empty slogan' is an empty slogan.

Manmohan Singh's personal integrity may be beyond reproach, but his political integrity has been pretty much shot to pieces.

I think there is a lesson here: Both our President and Prime Minister have impeccable characters, yet their honesty has had practically no influence on the government's actions. Probably indicates a) the depths to which politics has sunk in our country and b) that nice guys have no place in politics.

Confessions of a leecher

I downloaded the first CD in Mandriva 2006 via BitTorrent a couple of days ago, and, being a bit impatient, I terminated Azureus before the share ratio turned green. I also deleted the .iso file after writing it to the CD.

I am downloading CD #2 as I type this, and seeing the aborted upload in the lower pane, I decided to soothe my conscience and put up the ISO file again for upload. Only problem is, running mkisofs on the CD contents produces a .iso file alright, but this file is not identical to the original one, as evidenced by the MD5 checksums. I am therefore hesitant to put this up in case it is an invalid file and my karma goes south.

Movie Review: Fun with Dick and Jane

Trust Jim Carrey to carry the entire movie by himself, never mind that the storyline is pretty silly and requires a firm suspension of disbelief.

The best scenes in the movie are those in which Carrey and Tia Leone bumble their way into perfecting a career as holdup artists ("Mercedes, off"? LOL!). [Update: How did I miss the R Kelly 'I believe I can fly' elevator scene?)

The climax is torturous; I still haven't fully convinced myself that Carrey & Co really pull anything over the evil CEO (speaking of Alec Baldwin, I wonder why he said yes to such a nothing role).

Two-and-a-half stars out of five.

Let me get this straight...

Iran should not acquire nuclear weapons because Sunni nations cannot tolerate this and would also try to get nukes, leading to a new arms race, while the fact that Israel (whom they hate with far greater intensity) has had nukes for God-knows-how-long has not prompted them to do so.

Give me a break.

Staying on the topic of anonymity

... here is a way to conceal your identity effectively:

1. Install Privoxy and Tor.


2. Log in to yahoo.co.ar (yes, Argentina) and create an email address for yourself (with, of course, a handle that doesn't reflect your real name). [*]


3. If you want to enjoy the benefits of a Gmail account while retaining your anonymity, proceed to Step 4. Otherwise go ahead and put your Yahoo account to good (anonymous) use.


4. Assuming that you have a Gmail account with invites to spare, send an invite to the yahoo.co.ar email address created in step 2. If you do not have a Gmail account, wheedle one from a friend or an acquaintance. We are basically establishing plausible deniability; in the event that the Yahoo email address is traced back to you, you can always claim that you sent the invite via Gmail Swap.


5. Use this invite to create a valid Gmail account, again with an untraceable handle.


6. If you are really paranoid, proceed to Step 7. If not, use this Gmail address to post anonymously to your heart's content.


7. Repeat steps 2 to 5 by creating a chain of shell Gmail/Yahoo accounts. Visit the Mongolian, Tadjik and Burkina Faso versions of Yahoo. Be creative.

[*] Yahoo currently permits you to create an email account without specifying another existing and valid email address. If this policy ever changes, replace Yahoo with some other free email service that doesn't impose such a restriction. The idea is not to leave any trace or log of your real email/IP address anywhere in the 'system'.

On the Joys of Posting Anonymously

Today I posted anonymously to a discussion forum. Nothing inflammatory (it was a technical discussion), but man, it felt good for whatever reason (probably the same one that prompted Calvin to play low volume Muzak as a form of protest against his parents). Different kicks for different folks, I guess.

Cognitive Dissonance and You

I periodically receive letters from CRY asking for support. The fine print in all these letters say that CRY does not ask for cash donations; then why do they only contain different options for support, i.e. support one child for a year, three children for a year, etc. which of course entail monetary contributions?

He's not the one who needs help, actually

Hamas and the ANC

Bill Kirkman has this to say about Hamas' election victory:

... South Africa, where those fighting apartheid concluded that they could not successfully do so by democratic means, because the processes of democracy -- notably the vote -- were denied to them. Hence the African National Congress's (ANC) use of violence. The dramatic change in the political scene in the early 1990s led, of course, to victory by the ANC in the 1994 election. That changed the situation. Violence was no longer appropriate for people who had acquired the responsibility of government.

It's apples and oranges. When ANC won the election, it won complete control. In the case of Hamas, when Israel still controls the West Bank (and withholds tax receipts to boot), it's only responsibility; there is no -- or rather limited -- power to go with it.

Rigorous Intuition

There's no question about it: Jeff Wells' blog is the scariest thing I have ever read on the Internet. I have been spending the last two weeks reading all the archive posts; it was almost like reading a crime novel, the only difference being that this is real life we are talking about.

Some of the comments left in the blog and the associated discussion forum seem to be pure evil, purportedly containing triggering signals that push abuse victims over the edge and bring out their alters. Not since I spent a late night watching The Blair Witch Project alone after eating something dodgy have I been this spooked; I think I'll get over this soon, but for the time being I have taken to ensuring that there is at least one other light on somewhere else when I switch off the light and leave my den.

Abramovich

Passing reference to Abramovich here in connection with nefarious things like drug trafficking and international terrorism.

SeaMonkey 1.0

The more things change, the more they remain the same. There is practically no difference between SeaMonkey and Firefox, except for the animated image at the top right of the browser and a different way of setting options.

Alright, there is one difference: I'm not able to access Gmail, either directly or from the notifier extension.

Movie Review: Transporter 2

I didn't really expect much from the movie, other than something to do on a lazy Saturday afternoon, so it was a pleasant surprise that it wasn't too sucky. In fact, there are very few moments when one feels bored; the action is non-stop, and there is always something or the other happening, never mind how outlandish it is or how clichéd the dialog is in some places. I'll just mention two gems:

1. The way Jason Statham removes the bomb placed under his car by executing a somersault and using a crane hook to prise it loose


2. How he uses an iPod to transfer a picture from a PC to a Unix machine at the police headquarters (that his French sidekick somehow manages to hack into in a matter of seconds).

Ontology, taxonomy and etymology

In addition to having a lot of O's, these words have something else in common: their meanings have to be looked up every time you encounter them. You come across them in the course of your reading, a dim light goes off somewhere in the recesses of your brain, but it's not bright enough to avoid a lookup, and off you go to reference.com.

I used to consider semantics in the same category, but nailed it firmly by taking recourse to XML: if an XML document is well-formed, it's syntactically correct, while it has to be valid (i.e. satisfy a schema/DTD) to be semantically correct. I guess there is something to the rumour that XML can solve world hunger, if only we would let it.

The Cobra Event

I am reading Richard Preston's The Cobra Event, or I should rather say "was reading", because I have no intention of finishing the book. Ignoring the demonising of Iraq (this book was written much before the American invasion, so whatever one reads about Iraq's WMD capabilities must be seen for what it really is), I didn't really like the style of the prose, with it's a) over-reliance on the knowledge of esoteric matter to carry the plot and b) the soapboxing. Here is an instance of the second kind:

It was Charles Darwin who first understood that evolution is caused by natural selection, and that natural selection is death. He also understood that vast amounts of death (vast amounts of natural selection) are required to effect a small permanent change in the shape or behavior of an organism. Without huge amounts of death, organisms do not change over time. Without death, life would never have become more complex than the simplest self-copying molecules. The arms of a starfish could not have happened without countless repetitions of death. Death is the mother of structure. It took four billion years of death -- a third of the age of the universe -- for death to invent the human mind. Given another four billion years of death, or perhaps a hundred billion years of death, who can say that death will not create a mind so effective and subtle that it will reverse the fate of the universe and become God? The smell in the Manhattan morgue is not the smell of death; it is the smell of life changing its form. It is evidence that life is indestructible.

Replace death with life, i.e. that natural selection is the rewarding of fitness with life, and the above paragraph's basic premise is still valid, but the sentence about the Manhattan morgue doesn't have a leg to stand on, showing that the mini-lecture about natural selection is pretty much extraneous.

Is it just me

... or does listening to some of Coldplay's songs feel like having a bored sheep piss on you :-) ?

Slovak, anyone?

A post in a Slovak Linux forum has a question related to my Conexant page. My Slovak being a bit rusty (non-existent, rather), I don't know what the question is and whether I need to update my instructions.

Najde sa niekdo kdo mi pomoze?

Best. Ad. Ever.

The NikeFootball.com ad with the laughing baby doll taped to the garage roof. Call me a sadist, but the little girl's expression as she watches her brother(?) and his friend hammer the doll is absolutely priceless.

Security Through Obscurity

I didn't get the receipt for an online insurance premium payment that I had made recently, so I went to the LIC home page to find a phone number I could call regarding this. But instead of a number, I found something even better: a link called 'Next Due', which would tell me the status of my payment without my having to talk to someone. On clicking on this link, I was prompted for my policy number (note: no login/registration required), and on entering the number, I was shown the premium amount, the date of the most recent payment and the date by which the next premium was due.

Neat. Only problem is, this information is available for the whole world to see.

Quote of the day

If this was the Middle Ages, and Magellen was an American, and we sailed around the planet and found out it was round instead of flat, we wouldn't tell anybody so we could attack from the rear.
-- William S Burroughs

Distro Promiscuity

Well, after finding an easier way to integrate the Conexant modem into the kernel, I have made Kubuntu (the distro on which I piloted the approach) my primary distro. Coupled with putting my data and software in their own separate partitions, accessible from multiple installations, the move from Suse to Kubuntu was pretty much seamless. Though it feels good to be back to a 100% non-commercial distro, I might continue playing with other distros, seeing as to how easy the switch has become.

Speaking of Kubuntu, it has come a long way since my last brush with it. Definitely ready for prime time.

Some More Chess

No, I'm not going to post any more smartass Tao quotes.

I have gotten quite good at engaging the computer. I even managed to obtain a legitimate draw last week (albeit by means of a perpetual check, but a draw is still a draw).

The secret of this success lies in my decision to stick to just one line of openings; I have resolved that I will open all my games with d4 (i.e. the queen pawn). The computer reacts to this in a pretty standard and predictable way, so I have managed to steer clear of errors and reach a balanced middle game most of the time. Research reveals that there are only about 13 openings involving 1.d4, so boning up on the main ideas and objectives behind them shouldn't be too much of a task.

Using only a little knowledge,
I would travel the Great Way
And fear only of letting go.
The Great Way is very even;
Yet people love the byways.
                  -- Lao Tzu

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

Mindlessness

I have posted about this before, but thought I would mention it again in a related context. One of the 'no-mind' [*] activities that I engage in quite often is ironing my clothes. It's usually a mechanical activity, and I don't give much thought to it, but looking back over the years, and paying more attention recently, I realise that in addition to getting to wear neater clothes, I have benefited in other ways as well: for someone like me who spends most of his time in left brain activities, the fifteen or so minutes I spend ironing a shirt provides my mind the rare opportunity to wander unfettered. Mind you, this is different from meditation, where the objective is to quieten one's mind. The benefits also seem to differ from the rest obtained by the mind from a good night's sleep.

[*] I am using the term 'no-mind' in the inaccurate, but nonetheless common, sense. It has a wholly different meaning in Buddhist philosophy.

Related thought experiment: how would it be like to go through a whole day without any kind of verbalisation: no talking, reading, programming, not even 'thinking in words' (i.e. practising the real 'no-mind')?

Of Kernels and Modules - Part II

A quick and dirty way of doing things is in place. I still get "LCP terminated by peer" errors when I try to connect after installing the driver this way, but this may be a problem with my set up, since the modules get loaded properly and the modem firmware is also loaded. Still working on it.

Update: Got things to work. Had to set up the connection using pppconfig.

Of Kernels and Modules

Taking a fresh look at my instructions for setting up the Conexant AccessRunner modem in Linux, I realise that they don't address a quite common scenario: what if you already have a kernel later than 2.6.10? Some digging around reveals that it is not very difficult to compile a module into an existing kernel (this page provides good instructions). I'm going to give this approach a shot and post the results, both here and on the How To page.

Oh, and I finished reading LOTR. As a mark of my respect and appreciation, my posts for the rest of the month will be in the style of Westron or the Common Speech.The title of today's post is an attempt in that direction. Just kidding. Verily.

King Kong

I watched King Kong yesterday, or more accurately, King, since we left the theatre during the intermission. We could only manage front row seats, and that too at the edge of the screen. If you have not experienced this situation, trust me, it's no fun craning your neck upwards at an unnatural angle and turning your head this way and that all the time to stay with the action. The closeups of the hideous natives in the island didn't help, either.

Iran and WMD

There's an article in today's Hindu about Iran's nuclear ambitions and how we have not really come up with a consistent way to handle atomic energy. It makes for some pretty depressing reading. An analogy that comes to mind is the way my jousts with the chess computer have been ending of late: I am about 25 moves into the game, all the pieces have been developed (to the best of my abilities), and there are no immediate threats to deal with. But there is something structurally wrong with the whole setup; I do not seem to have many options. Any option I consider seems to have some negative implication, some gotcha that seems insurmountable. The only way out is the meta-solution, i.e. the reset button.

The problem with the current situation is that instead of a reset button, there is only a big, red one.

Google Earth on Linux

Following the instructions in the Gentoo wiki, I managed to install and run Google Earth in Linux, but only after trying my luck with three different Wine versions (0.9.4 did it for me, finally).

After going through all these troubles, I must confess that all the effort seems to have been in vain (sort of): though I am able to zoom in and out and twirl the globe with my mouse, the menu items and the navigation buttons appear only when I hover the mouse over them. I also haven't figured out how to input coordinates and zoom there directly, if that is at all possible.

Put me down for Less Than Impressed.

Smeagol, my precious

I am nearly through with LOTR, and the action is pretty much over: the ring has been successfully destroyed and the characters are well into singing their songs of glory, and guess what? The one thing that sticks to my mind, the one thing I'm sure I'll remember long after I forget everything else in the book, is the Gollum character. Tolkien's writing really stands out in Gollum's utterings; one is filled with delight and tender pity for the wretched creature, with its soliloquies and peculiar way of talking.

Robert Fisk on Ariel Sharon

Mandatory reading.

MBAs and Distributive Justice

There is yet another full-page ad for IIPM in The Hindu today. I am not going to say much about the solicitation for admissions, except that it seems inappropriate for someone to call the IIMs and their ilk "the MBA mafia" and at the same time use their name in their advertisements ("Dare to think beyond the IIMs..."). My post is about an article that appears as part of the ad. The article can be found here.

1. The article (IMHO) correctly recognises that unbridled capitalism is not a Good Thing (tm) and must be tempered by humanism, which it claims is the "social vision" of IIPM. But distributive justice, the proposed remedy, and "to each according to his need" seem too close to communism for comfort.


2. The reason given for the faster expansion of business in China seems pretty weak and nebulous:

   ... present MBA course structure concentrating only on market segments by individual profit making units. This fails to explain the potentiality of market expansion through distributive justice. Potentiality of business is always in harmony with growth rate of national economy. That is why business expands much more rapidly in China compared with expansion of business seen in India in the past.

   though I do agree with the ultimate aim of "raising the living standards of the people at the bottom".


3. The footnote claims that the column has a monthly readership of 75,000,000. I am not sure whether this astronomical figure is for the online edition or for the print version. In any case I would like a cite before taking it seriously.

Cruelty to Animals

In the end, only kindness matters.

-- Jewel

A sight that one often comes across on the roads of Chennai (or, for that matter, on any Indian road) is that of an emaciated bull struggling to pull an overloaded cart, frothing at the mouth, while its master keeps whipping it in order to spur it up the incline. The only way I can reconcile this injustice in my mind is by taking recourse to karma: may be the bull had done some evil things in a previous life for which it is now payback time. May be it was a Hitler, or who knows, it could even be that it played the role of the cart-driver in an earlier avatar. But even assuming that this 'explanation' is true, the current suffering of the poor creature still doesn't seem right. Screw karma.

The Tao of Chess

The knight is without a place to thrust its dagger
  The rook is without a place to affix its claw
The queen is without a place to admit her blade

Why is this so?
 Because your pawns are strong.

Commentary: Avoid standard pawn weaknesses: the isolated pawn, the backward pawn and the doubled pawn.

Lead the organisation with correctness.
 Direct the military with surprise tactics.
Take hold of the world with effortlessness.

Commentary: Always make moves that either win the initiative or maintain it.

... to rise above people,
One must, in speaking, stay below them.
 To remain in front of people,
One must put oneself behind them.

Commentary: Avoid moves that impede the development of other pieces.

Evolved individuals regard the center and not the eye.
 Hence they discard one and receive the other.

Commentary: Control the center (the squares d4,e4,d5 and e5).

A good lock has no bar or bolt,
 And yet it cannot be opened.
A good knot does not restrain,
 And yet it cannot be unfastened.

Commentary: Make sure that all your pieces are defended at all times.

(Apologies to Lao Tzu)

Accurate-but-unintentionally-funny definition of the day

Tax'i·der'mist n. Someone who mounts animals

The Lord of the Rings

After watching Parts 1 and 3 of LOTR, I finally got around to reading the book. While I do concede that it is good (I am about 350 pages or so into the book, so this opinion is subject to change -- for better or worse), I am yet to see any justification for the cult status that the book and its author enjoy. One positively irritating thing is Tolkien's presumptuousness (if that is the right word): the way he goes on and on about how the chronology of the entire thing was recorded for posterity by various people, the elaborate family trees, indices, appendices and so on. It's almost as if he knew beforehand that the book would become a bestseller, and he decided to milk it for all its worth. People who are just interested in a compelling, well-told story simply do not care about these details (they care even less when one of the innumerable characters bursts into long-winded, crappy poetry -- some of it not even in English, but in some made-up language the author came up with when he was probably stoned).

So does that mean I have what it takes?

Since I got right three of the four questions that Joel posed here? I don't know JavaScript and hence didn't attempt Question 2, so I guess I should feel even more snotty :-)

To be fair, the two C questions are trivial to anyone who has done anything worthwhile in C. The Scheme question was a bit trickier for me, since Scheme syntax is slightly different from Common Lisp, but again, nothing an average Lisper would find too challenging.

On a related note, it's getting quite predictable:

1. Joel writes something controversial


2. His acolytes jump in and express their concurrence enthusiastically


3. A few nay-sayers pipe in with their objections and


4. A legion of geeks go to bed that night, satisfied that they have done their bit to uphold their geek cred

How to touch Reader's Digest for Rs 150

1. Start with a common saying or idiom, say, "quitting when ahead".


2. Modify this slightly so that it is still grammatically correct, but has an altogether different meaning. Example: "quitting when a head".


3. Think up a contrived, patently unfunny story that has the above phrase as the punch line:

   Finally, after six girls, Luke's wife had a boy. But he had only a head - nothing else. Luke didn't care, though. He was just happy to have a boy.
   
   On the kid's 21st birthday, Luke took him to a bar. "A shot of your best Scotch," he ordered.
   
   The boy drank it, and - POOF - he grew a neck. Amazed, Luke then ordered another and - POP - a torso sprouted. "Keep 'em coming!" Luke shouted. Eventually, the boy had a whole body. Everyone cheered.
   
   Tipsy, the boy stood on his new legs and stumbled to the left ... to the right ... out by the front door and into the path of a truck.
   
   The bar fell silent.
   
   "He should've stopped drinking," the bartender said, "while he was a head."



4. Submit this story as a contribution to Laughter the Best Medicine


5. Wait patiently for the Rs 150 cheque

Book Review: Mystic River

Imagine that you somehow get talked into going to a B-grade action movie. You sit through the entire movie, fidgeting, and finally get to the climax, in which the villain and his minions have the hero at their mercy, with the hero's sweetheart writhing helplessly in the hands of two leering henchmen. The villain starts his standard heh-heh-I-got-you-what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it spiel, and though you know it's a cheesy flick, you start to look forward to the hero escaping from his bonds and start kicking some serious ass.

What happens instead is that the villain finishes his speech in his own sweet time, asks the hero to say his prayers, and after waiting for the customary ten seconds, pulls the trigger and the hero drops dead.

Cut to the villain riding off into the sunset with the hero's girl by his side (who has quickly adjusted to the turn of events and is in fact wondering what she ever saw in such a good-for-nothing bloke who can't even best a B-grade villain, who, by the way, doesn't seem that bad, if you think about it).

Now what has all this got to do with Mystic River, you ask. Nothing, except that I felt the same way after finishing the book as you would feel walking out of the theatre after seeing said imaginary movie.

(Alright, I admit that this doesn't exactly qualify as a book review)

Damn he looks young

Boys and girls, now you have the pleasure of having a face to go with all the witty, incisive and informative commentary that's been inflicted on you for the past 18 months or so: I have graciously decided not to withhold said pleasure any longer and have added a mug shot to my Blogger profile. Incidentally, the picture is from a recent trip to the Hogenakkal Falls.

White to play (and win?)

After mucking around with Knights a bit, my passion for chess was sort of rekindled, and I dusted off my trusted old Radio Shack 2250XL and fired up a game. I usually consider myself lucky if I manage to stay 20 moves in the game without committing some egregious mistake like losing a piece through oversight or tying myself hopelessly in knots, but this time I surprisingly found myself in an interesting position: I breached the black king's defences with some pretty bold moves and won a rook and a pawn in exchange for a bishop and a knight.

I stopped the game at this point and went to bed, with hopes of finding a winning combination over the weekend. But it turns out that I underestimated the computer's resilience, for, on resumption, the bastard managed to neutralise my initiative within a couple of moves and I found myself back on equal terms.

Not willing to let such a potentially winning opportunity turn into a loss, I magnanimously offered a draw, which the machine gratefully accepted (translation: I pressed the Reset/Clear button).

Coming soon: "Chess: Tips, Techniques and Strategies" by Rajesh Jayaprakash (ELO rating 1650)

Wasn't he servile enough for you?

With the UN's reputation pretty much in tatters vis-a-vis the oil-for-food scandal, James Bone has every right to ask questions about Kofi Annan's son. Mr Annan should either answer the question, offer a 'no comment', or, if he is so indignant, sue the reporter. The one thing he should not do is call the reporter an overgrown schoolboy.

BTW, looking at how the sons of politicians invariably turn out to have reached their station in life via pater's influence, Plato's model, while a bit extreme, seems more attractive than ever:

The guardians (i.e. the rulers) will have no wives. Their communism is to be of women as well as of goods. They are to be freed not only from the egoism of self, but from the egoism of family; they are not to be narrowed to the anxious acquisitiveness of the prodded husband; they are to be devoted not to a woman but to the community. Even their children shall not be specifically or distinguishably theirs; all children of guardians shall be taken from their mothers at birth and brought up in common; their particular parentage will be lost in the scuffle.

In the market for a notebook

I sent the following email to Dell, Acer and Toshiba:

Hi,

I am looking for a notebook with the following specifications and
would appreciate it if you could provide me with a quote:

AMD processor (32 bit)
80 GB hard disk
512 MB RAM
DVD/CD-RW drive
No operating system, no other system software
Linux-compatible

Thanks and regards,

Rajesh Jayaprakash

The folks at Dell and Acer have responded. Toshiba (more precisely, their resellers in India, HCL) have not condescended to send a reply. However, even in the case of Dell and Acer, the responses were more along the lines of 'let us know your contact details and we'll get in touch with you'. Looks like they do not want to send quotes to an email address. I then sent them my address and phone number, but haven't heard from them yet.

There's an ad today in The Hindu for a Thinkpad that costs about Rs 34,000 and pretty much meets my specs. I am not very satisfied with my earlier IBM purchase (the ThinkCentre I am typing this from), and with IBM selling its PC business to Lenovo, I am hesitant to turn to Big Blue again.

Smalltalk Sudoku Solver

Seeing the huge demand for a Smalltalk Sudoku Solver, as evidenced by the number of Google searches that hit my blog (well, it was actually one stray hit yesterday), I have put up my solver here. It was developed on VisualWorks 7.2, but the non-GUI part should be 100% portable to other Smalltalks.

How to think like a conspiracy theorist

Facts:

1. The Congress Party have egg on their faces owing to the Volcker report


2. The questions-for-money scam arrives at the right time, affording them a way out and putting BJP on the defensive instead.

Naive Conspiracy Theorist: "The questions-for-money scam was engineered to bail out the Congress Party."

Realist: "The sting operation was more than six months in the making, so there is no conspiracy."

Seasoned Conspiracy Theorist: "The Congress Party engineered the whole thing as a sort of insurance policy, to be used in case some scandal breaks out, so there."

Realist: *shakes head and mutters something incomprehensible under his breath*

My Air Deccan Experience

1. The Travel Department send me an e-Ticket, which is nothing more than a web page print-out. The e-Ticket contains a lot of intimidating stuff like how I should check in two hours before the departure time, flights are subject to cancellation with no obligation on their part other than a refund and so on. Alarm-O-Meter reading: Slight Concern.


2. I call Air Deccan at 1 PM to confirm my flight and am informed that the departure time is 9:15 PM, which is 15 minutes later than the scheduled time. Alarm-O-Meter reading: Heightened Concern.


3. I receive an SMS message at 4 PM advising me that the flight has been rescheduled to 8:40 PM. Alarm-O-Meter reading: transitions to Faint Alarm.


4. I reach the airport. The lady at the counter has just finished having a spat with her colleague and doesn't seem very eager to see me. In addition, she says that my rather small suitcase cannot be considered as cabin baggage as it weighs 12 kg and will have to be checked in. Alarm-O-Meter reading: Since I have managed to successfully obtain my boarding pass, drops to Mild Concern.


5. As I wait to enter the security check-in, I receive another SMS stating that due to operational reasons, the flight has been cancelled, and can I please contact the given number? Alarm-O-Meter reading: May Day!


6. I approach an airline personnel, who quickly asks me to ignore the SMS message and assures me that the flight is on schedule. Alarm-O-Meter reading: climbs down to Mere Panic.


7. Just as I am about to board the plane, I am asked to hold on for a second. A young kid scurries out of the plane with the trash. Alarm-O-Meter reading: Shakes Head (Why do you even bother)?


8. There is only one stewardess, a pretty, innocent-looking, sweet young thing. AOM reading: Enters positive territory for the first time


9. The stewardess further endears herself to me, with her broken and lispy English. AOM reading: Nods Head Approvingly.


10. The pilot is a very cheerful bloke and seems quite talkative, giving a pretty thorough update of how high we are flying, the weather conditions, etc. More importantly, he makes an immaculate landing, much better than most of the landings I have experienced with the bigger airlines. AOM reading: Give Air Deccan another chance. They do get the important stuff right.

Off to Hyderabad

...for four days, followed by another three-day trip. No blogging for the next week or so (like anyone really cares).

Lisp and Elegance

Disclaimer: I am new to Lisp, and the idioms and syntax are still somewhat alien to me, so there.

I am in Chapter 9 of Practical Common Lisp, in which Peter Seibel develops a unit testing framework to build on the concept of macros. By the end of the chapter, we end up with just 26 lines of code that is quite powerful (albeit slightly arcane) and elegant (apologies for the horrendous formatting):

(defvar *test-name* nil)

(defmacro deftest (name parameters &body body)
  "Define a test function. Within a test function we can call
   other test functions or use 'check' to run individual test
   cases."
  `(defun ,name ,parameters
    (let ((*test-name* (append *test-name* (list ',name))))
      ,@body)))

(defmacro check (&body forms)
  "Run each expression in 'forms' as a test case."
  `(combine-results
    ,@(loop for f in forms collect `(report-result ,f ',f))))

(defmacro combine-results (&body forms)
  "Combine the results (as booleans) of evaluating 'forms' in order."
  (with-gensyms (result)
    `(let ((,result t))
      ,@(loop for f in forms collect `(unless ,f (setf ,result nil)))
      ,result)))

(defun report-result (result form)
  "Report the results of a single test case. Called by 'check'."
  (format t "~:[FAIL~;pass~] ... ~a: ~a~%" result *test-name* form)
  result)

All well and good, and I appreciate the way in which we ended up with this code, starting from a simple definition of the problem, recognising repeated patterns and refactoring them via macros, but my grouse is this: from a maintainability perspective, the final code, while very powerful, and well-commented to boot, still contains none of the thought processes that led to it. May be it's alright if the same person who wrote the code is also doing the maintaining, but IMHO, unless they are documented somewhere, another person will definitely have trouble grokking things.

This has always bugged me

How can Eriksson be coach of the England team and lead it against his native country, Sweden, without any questions of conflict of interest? Which comes first, patriotism or profession? Remember the stick Wasim Akram got when he did nothing more than pass on some informal bowling tips to Irfan Pathan?

Slashdot = Tabloid?

Slashdot content has become very predictable of late: most of the stories look to be either designed to start flame wars or to report sensationalist news items. They seem to fall in one of these categories:

1. Is XYZ all that is cracked out to be (replace XYZ with the flavour of the day - AJAX, Google, OSS, Evolution)?


2. Beating a dead horse, something that is universally reviled by the Slashdot regulars -- like Microsoft, DRM, SCO, patents, et al


3. The latest shiny object unveiled by Google or Firefox

The articles that don't belong to these categories are either boring (Jupiter's 14th moon is discovered to contain traces of methane? Really? How could I possibly have made it through life without knowing this?) or plain sensationalist.

The reason for my rant is one of today's /. items: a Japanese bank loses a lot of money because of a typo. Nothing wrong with reporting this, but, never being one to let facts stand in the way of a good story, they hype it up so:

1. The amount of money lost due to the typo is not $3 billion, as the story's headline misleadingly indicates


2. No shares were sold at the price of one Yen

What's more, in the age of RSS, when one subscribes to the blog feeds of people like James Robertson, Bruce Schneier and Joel Spolsky, in addition to providing interesting insights, they also serve as an unintended filter on stories reported by Slashdot: if they blog about it, it's definitely worth knowing about (notwithstanding the argument regarding gatekeepers and all that). I might as well unsubscribe from Slashdot's feed and still not miss anything really relevant.

One thing Slashdot really excels at, though, is the quality of the comments. Provided you browse them at 3+, you get to read some very Informative/Insightful/Interesting/Funny stuff.

A koan for modern times

This is from one of David McGowan's older newsletters:

Imagine that you are Jacobo Arbenz in the 1950s, or Fidel Castro in the 1960s, or Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, or, skipping ahead, Hugo Chavez in the present day. You're trying to get a fledgling administration off the ground and you've got a big problem: the institutions of your country are littered with assets controlled by Western intelligence agencies.

The CIA, for instance, has moved into town and set up shop under various assumed names to operate an 'opposition' press, which daily agitates against the sitting government with heavy doses of manufactured 'black' propaganda. If you take any action against these operations, you will be vilified via the entire Western media establishment for brutally censoring the opposition press and crushing free speech. If you do nothing, the problem will continue to fester and grow. What do you do?

Now consider this:

Kyogen said, "Zen is like a man up a tall tree hanging from a branch by his teeth. His hands can't grasp a bough, nor his feet reach one. Under the tree a man asks him the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West. If he doesn't answer he fails the questioner. If he does answer he will lose his life. What should he do?"

The similarities are pretty striking, aren't they?

I had a dream last night

... that I wake up late on a Sunday morning, finish reading The Hindu, turn my attention to Deccan Chronicle for some comic relief, and in the course of flipping through its pages, land up at Indira Bhangar's column, where somebody writes in that they had a dream that Sania Mirza had married Irfan Pathan and would Ms Bhangar please interpret this dream for them, and I fall off the bed, rolling with laughter, and injure myself.

Oh wait, that wasn't a dream.

The world is flat

Watch the Hazard music video on VH1, realise you would like to get the MP3 version, fire up LimeWire^H^H^H^H Apple iTunes, and two minutes later, you have the song streaming out of your computer speakers.

Yup, it's a flat world, alright.

Obscene political cartoon of the day

:-))

Aniel Matherani

I have two problems with Matherani's statements:

1. If you read the entire transcript carefully, you realise than he doesn't even have any direct accusations; everything is innuendo. Examples:

   Q: How did the allocation of oil vouchers take place?
   
   A: When Natwar Singh introduced his son and Sehgal to all the Iraqi officials he didn't have to say anything. All that he needed to do was to show that they were in the delegation, that they were his son and his cousin, and therefore it was confidential. They could go later and do whatever business they wanted to. You don't have to say anything to the face. The fact that they were introduced was a clear signal to the Iraqis.

   and

   Q: What were Jagat and Sehgal doing all this while?
   
   A: After the meetings, they would disappear. Nobody knew what they were doing. They kept to themselves. Natwar, Jagat and Sehgal. What they discussed was confined to Natwar's room. It was a very closed group. By that time it was becoming quite clear that they were looking for trade.

   There is therefore some truth to Matherani's claim that the conversation was quoted out of context and was supposed to be off-the-record (watch him get his ass sued for libel in double-quick time if he argues anything to the contrary).


2. Deccan Chronicle claims that

   Mr Matherani's controversial remarks come two weeks after he dismissed the allegations by the Volcker Committee as a "campaign of lies, deliberate falsehood, distortion of facts and baseless conjectures."

   My first impression was to think that this totally shredded his credibility, but I realise that this statement was on-the-record, so he was basically doing his bit for the cause, defending his masters. The story would have probably ended there, but for the deviousness of the India Today reporter.

Strike two for Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk on the Internet:

Look, if I use the internet, and email, I'd never get out of Beirut. I'd never finish my work. If someone actually wants to communicate, they can call on the phone, which costs them money, or they can write a proper letter which costs them time and effort. Most of the stuff I've seen when people show me emails are misspelled, ungrammatical, and stupid, and I'm not going to waste my time with it. I haven't got time. I simply haven't got the time. I want to work.

Easy there, Sparky, I am *this* close to deleting the RSS feed.

IIT student found dead

Predictably, the focus is on how the inability to match up to high expectations in the IITs and/or peer pressure is "an emerging and frightening phenomenon". While I agree that there may be cases where this is true, they do not constitute a trend in any way. My own experience has been quite the opposite. JEE is a bitch, alright, but once you are in, the effort needed to get by with passable grades (meaning a CGPA greater than 7.0) was nowhere near the effort needed to get in [*]. More than a decade has passed since I graduated, and the competition an IIT aspirant faces has gotten fiercer with every passing year, so I feel that my point still has validity.

To be fair, there are students who need special attention, and I have heard some of my friends complain about the pressure they felt immediately after a mid- or end semester exam, when the conversations in the hostels were all about the question paper and who did what to which question, but the situation was never so bad as to warrant such an extreme decision.

[*] On a personal level, I averaged something like 7.5 in the first two years. I was practically cruising the whole time, revelling in the joy (more accurately, the relief) of getting in, but I realised that there is a life after four years at IIT, and that I might brighten my prospects if I brought my CGPA to more 'respectable' levels. I started attending all classes (though minimum mandatory attendance during those days was -- gasp -- just 55%) and began to maintain class notes religiously. I also made it a point to work through all the tutorial problems. Sure enough, these actions had the desired effect: I was ranked in the top five in my class during the third and fourth years (I even managed to climb as high as third in the sixth semester). The point is, I never had to stretch myself beyond this; no all-nighters, no studying extra material, and so on.

The fact that in the final analysis, a) the law of diminishing marginal returns ensured that I could only bring my CGPA up to just under 8.0 and b) neither my grades nor my field of study have diddly-squat to do with what I do for a living now is another story altogether.

Firefox 1.5

...has been released. I am sticking to 1.0.7, however. Reasons:

1. Applets don't display (both JDK 1.4 and 1.5 plugins; could be a problem with my setup)


2. The Greasemonkey and DictionarySearch extensions are not compatible with 1.5


3. Neither is the Mozilla Modern theme (though, thankfully, Qute seems to have become the default theme)

On a general note, I didn't see that much of a difference between 1.0.7 and 1.5. Seems to me like they have hit a plateau in terms of differentiators, what with the farming out of most of the interesting functionality to the extension writers.

P.S. I wanted to write something about the Catholic Church doing away with the concept of limbo (the spiritual equivalent of the location of Schroedinger's cat, you might say), but I couldn't really figure out what that something was. Never mind.

Milestone

As of 1 December, 2005, India joins an elite group of industrialised nations who have made remarkable strides in accurate, comprehensive and sophisticated weather forecasting, by adopting the practice of assigning catchy-but-completely-unnecessary names to the tropical cyclones that batter our coasts. Congratulations!

If I were a PR hack

... how would I go about promoting my blog? Here are some ideas for the blog title:

1. The world according to Rajesh


2. The bestest blog in the wholest world!!! (apologies to the endearing Mahir Cagri)


3. One man's journey in search of himself (and some eyeballs)


4. Blogging in a not-so-free world

and finally, my favourite:


5. 658 blog posts. 19 months. 2 readers.

:-)

Movie Review: Red Eye

Though the storyline is quite thin and not very believable, Red Eye manages to hold one's attention pretty well. The way the plot develops is very natural -- I especially liked the conversation in which the villain (Cillian Murphy) exposes his plans to Rachel McAdams' character. Very slickly done.

Going by Murphy's performance in the first half of the movie, I was on the verge of anointing his character as one of the classic villains of modern cinema, but he totally loses it in the second half, almost being reduced to a caricature, croaking and stumbling around in the climax like a clown.

Speaking of the climax, I can't believe that a director of Wes Craven's calibre would go with such a cliched ending. Come on, the girl being chased by the crazed killer never runs up the stairs (didn't one of the characters in Scream -- also directed by Craven -- say so?). The phone ringing during those tense moments also reminded me of Scream, by the way.

Some Practical Lisp

My work on Vajra has sort of come to a standstill, what with the amount of time I have been spending taking care of the hardware issues. The most recent work (as revealed by the CVS commit comments) was an earth-shaking enhancement to a string utility function.

Anyway, I am reading Practical Common Lisp now (a quick micro-review: should have started with it instead of Paul Graham's On Lisp), and an idea for a worthwhile Vajra enhancement just occurred to me: write a Common Lisp library to extract class files as byte streams from JAR files. I am using Arun Sharma's ziplib utility for this currently, and while it's a great utility, there are some issues with it (Valgrind reports quite a few memory-related problems).

The plan is as follows:

1. Write a CL library interfacing with the zlib routines


2. Write a C++ class that wraps the CL library (it can wrap the zlib functions directly, but what's the fun in that?)


3. Become a Lisp hacker in the process of implementing steps 1 and 2


4. Take over the world

Understanding Power

This is not exactly a book review, but I have only about fifty or so pages left to read, so I decided to put down my thoughts all the same.

Most of what Chomsky says is just confirmation of what I have already known or have at least felt intuitively to be true, but he provides plenty of footnotes as evidence (pity the footnotes are not available in the book itself -- you will have to visit the web site for this, but the fact that they exist is comforting enough; going by Chomsky's reputation, they are sure to be rock solid).

Chomsky is under no illusion that he is somebody around whom like-minded people can rally and look to for guidance. He simply claims to be playing the role of an observer who brings things to people's notice; it is up to them to decide how best to act upon this information. Having thus established his role (since he is no messiah, don't look to him for quick and easy solutions to the mess we are in), he is then free to take a pretty pessimistic outlook on things. By the time you reach the end of the book, you have gained a lot of insight and knowledge, but there is no sense of hope, that things are on the right track and will get better and so on.

BTW, even if one dismisses the book as the ranting of a liberal firmly on the left of the aisle, I would consider it to be mandatory reading, at least to disabuse one's notions about how the global capitalist economy really functions and how free the 'free markets' really are.

November of Discontent

Matthew Parris, former British MP, writing in The Spectator (via Deccan Chronicle) about the recent French riots, plugs the Anglo-Saxon economic model:

Voters in France and Germany do not want their national economies to follow the Anglo-Saxon model. Popular instincts in France are protectionist. In both France and Germany the elaborate social machinery which cossets and protects workers at the expense of competitiveness is what most citizens want ... It is because European leaders do listen to their peoples, rather than because they do not, that their countries are saddled with the policies that the British want to see discarded.

Were I not in the middle of Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power right now, I would probably have let this go, may be even nod my head in agreement. Looking at the above passage from this new perspective, the first thing that comes to mind is Whither democracy? Does Parris imply that the will of the people really doesn't matter, and it is up to all-knowing elites to decide what is good for the hoi polloi?

I am not going to argue why protectionism may not actually be that bad a thing. Chomsky does it far better than I ever would.

Some conspiracy theory

Sharon quit Likud because he was under the threat of more damaging revelations vis-a-vis the plea-bargain of his son Omri in the corruption scandal.

I have no cites or logical arguments to back this up, of course; I just approached this story from a tin-foil-hat angle. [And you thought only Xymphora can come up with stuff like this :-)]

Goodbye KDE, welcome Blackbox?

I have been having a lot of problems with KDE lately: the main panel freezes up quite often, leading to the whole system becoming unresponsive; the only way out is to power off and power on.

Looking for an alternative, I decided to try out Blackbox (I have sort of decided to stay away from Gnome for various reasons, BTW). Blackbox is very lightweight: you just get a window manager, nothing else. The advantage is that it is not resource-hungry, and the response (as well as startup) times are much faster.

To achieve the same levels of usability as KDE, you need to go for other components: iDesk for desktop icons and bbkeys for key bindings, for example.

I have set up iDesk, but it sure is a pain to have to create text files for each icon that I want on my desktop. But this is a one-off activity, so it's not that much of a PITA. bbkeys needs a newer version of libstdc++.so than I have currently, so I don't have an easy way to manipulate the windows via the keyboard yet.

One drawback with BB is that when you minimise a window, it seems to disappear into the ether; you have to delve deep into the menu structure to get it back. There is supposed to be a way to tear off this menu and make it more accessible, but I haven't yet figured it out.

Indira Singh

I spent more than two hours yesterday listening to an interview of Indira Singh (9/11 researcher/whistleblower), and it was interesting to say the least. However, I am not sure whether she is a kook or the genuine article. Her credentials seem impeccable -- assuming she is the same Indira Singh who co-founded the Object Developers Group, but some of her contentions seem explosive: for example, she says that the elder Bush is directly implicated in some satanic cult rituals (after reading Programmed to Kill my ears seem to be specially tuned to pick these things up), but doesn't go into specifics.

Her main premise is that there is a core of around a hundred or so individuals who run a shadowy transnational organisation that is involved in money laundering, human/drug trafficking, global terrorism and so on, and that this group is in control of American politics. As, I said earlier, explosive stuff if true.

BTW, going by the one image I could find of her via Google, she's a serious contender to Sibel Edmonds in the eye candy stakes.

Book Review: Programmed to Kill

Programmed to Kill is probably the most disturbing book I have ever read. It takes up the issues of serial killers, pedophilia, snuff films and satanic cults and exposes things which, in a sense, one is better off not knowing, such is the feeling of revulsion and black emotions that rise in you as you read the book. It's been about a day since I finished it, and I don't know for how long the loss of faith in the goodness of humanity will last (case in point: there have been [and probably still are] snuff films involving infants as young as two months; one cannot even begin to imagine the depravity of people who would do things like that).

The book is meticulously researched, with something like 500 references. McGowan analyses the various scandals like the busting of pedophile rings and how serial killers operated and were apprehended, and shows that the official story is woefully inadequate in explaining the facts, and mostly involved sham trials and coverups aimed at protecting pretty important government figures. He also lays the blame on secret government-sponsored mind control projects , which he claims are the reason why many of the serial killers turned out the way they did.

OK, now for the negative stuff: after a while, reading about the more or less identical life histories of serial killers becomes quite monotonous. Also, the book doesn't move towards any sort of denouement and ends on a slightly flat note. In fact, the first few chapters are IMO the best part of the book. There also could have been more coverage of the mind control stuff. But having said this, the book is still eminently unputdownable and is well worth your time and money.

My first brush with DRM

I found that David McGowan's Programmed to Kill (no, it's not a book on programming) was available in eBook form, and seeing that it was a good bargain at $6, went ahead and bought it. I had bought an eBook from O'Reilly about a year ago, and didn't foresee any problems: you make the payment, you are taken to a download link, you download the PDF, and you are done with it.

Not so this time. I received an email containing the link, but on clicking it, I found that I did not have Adobe eBook Reader 1.1 installed. The page also contained a link to an eBook Reader download URL, which however produced a 404. Googling for 'adobe ebook reader linux' gave the first inkling of the trouble I was in: there was no version available for Linux.

Not willing to let my $6 go down the drain, I opened up my machine, swapped my Linux hard disk with the Windows one, and again tried the download URL, only to realise that I didn't have Adobe Reader 7.0 installed.

After a 28 MB download, the download URL finally did what it was supposed to do, but not before asking me to activate things by using my .NET Passport ID. Which I proceeded to do, and lo and behold, Page 1 of the book finally appeared before my eyes.

During the activation process, I was informed that it would be possible to transfer my activation rights to any other computer that I owned, so I proceeded to make a copy of the PDF and emailed it to myself in order to access it from Linux.

Swap hard disk, boot into Linux, open Gmail, download copy of PDF, fire up acroread, open said PDF, and I get a message saying that I do not have a required plug-in. kpdf was a bit more helpful, prompting me for a password (what password?).

OK, where do I sign up? To take part in the anti-DRM campaign, that is.

Illicit

A quote from Illicit (via Thomas Friedman):

Show me a democratically elected government today anywhere in the world with a popular mandate rooted in a landslide victory -- there aren't that many.

This principle applies here in India as well; witness the disproportionate sway that minor, regional parties with single-digit representation in parliament hold over the nation's policies.

Blog posts that never see the light of the day

Whenever I suffer from a bout of insomnia and lie awake thinking about stuff, I get some ideas which seem very worthy of blogging, but make me go "what was I thinking" the next morning. Some examples:

1. What if time came to a standstill? Would it be a good or a bad thing?


2. How I spend my time sitting through boring presentations, trying to classify the audience (and guessing their motivations for displaying acute symptoms of foot-in-the-mouth disease)


3. A stinging critique of the Indian IT industry


4. Office politics and some of my own Machiavellian tips and techniques to steer one's way clear of them

I am at home right now, on sick leave (the cause of last night's insomnia, probably), so I might even take up one of these topics if I am up to it.

Karthikeyan leaves F1

I do not know of any other instance where a team charges persons to represent it in a competition. I think this is more in the nature of a face-saving exit for him.

How to _really_ enjoy a football match

I love football and can't think of a better way to spend a rainy evening than to lie sprawled on my sofa watching, say, a Champions League match between Juventus and Real Madrid, but how to get through an EPL encounter between two teams like Sunderland and West Brom (no offence to their fans), when you aren't rooting for either team and goals are hard to come by? Switching the TV off, changing channels or any other heretical suggestion is not an option, BTW.

Well, I have hit upon a way to stay focussed and interested even when faced with such matches: instead of counting the goals, you count other things and award points to the teams accordingly. I have chosen three candidates for this: a) number of corners gained b) number of shots on goal and c) number of shots on target. There is an overlap between b) and c), but it's the principle of the thing that matters, not the specifics. I award one point for each of these; were a team to score a goal, they get five points [*].

Keeping track of these points not only gives you something to keenly look out for, it also helps you to appreciate the pulse of the match; at any given point, you can say which team is dominating the proceedings, how the tide has turned in the last 15 minutes, and so on.

I piloted this strategy in the Man United - Chelsea game last Sunday, and for what it's worth, though United were winners by goal margin, Chelsea clearly came out on top according to my system (if I remember correctly, the score was something like 23-14 in Chelsea's favour).

[*] a) You can extend this to include things like the number of offsides, the number of free kicks in threatening positions and so on, but then you start to get mired in statistics instead of concentrating on the game b) I have not yet decided whether to award only five points for a goal. My gut feeling is that it should be higher.

Some Nietzsche

Tiring of reading fiction and spending too much time on the Internet, I dusted off my copy of The Story of Philosophy. I started with Kant, but was soon lost in the intricacies of his arguments (the primary point he makes is that our knowledge doesn't come just from our senses; I couldn't make much headway beyond that). I tried Nietzsche next, and man, was I in for a treat. Not only is Nietzsche's philosophy more easily understandable, he is way more entertaining and controversial as well.

Nietzsche's premise is that to strive for equality among men is folly and that democracy goes against men's instincts. In fact, he is against the equality of the sexes as well. He is also against communism, socialism, Christianity, feminism, anarchism, hedonism, capitalism and terrorism (alright, I made the last one up).

Nietzsche posits that all of us, openly or otherwise, aspire to be supermen and that might is right, morals and justice be damned. He considers this aspiration to be natural and not something to be suppressed or to be ashamed of, and that things like democracy which belittle this aspiration by glorifying equality and egalitarianism are to be shunned. Nietzsche also seems enamoured with war, strife and conflict, which provide an opportunity for man to revel in the glory they bring and to shape his will and character. Speaking of will, he also says that "instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered." Shades of Robert Pirsig?

Some of his other, more inflammatory, quotes:

"Shop-keepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats belong together."

"Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one answer: its name is childbearing."

OK, that's enough of Philosophy 101. Back to scheduled programming.

The Internet: a vile institution?

Here I am, dutifully visiting robert-fisk.com every fricken day to see if any new articles have been posted, so that I can add them to the RSS feed that I maintain, and Fisk goes and calls the Internet a vile institution? WTF?

Bad timing is

...when you start digging hungrily into your dinner, just in time to catch the Jeff Daniels bathroom accident scene in Dumb and Dumber in its full glory, stereophonic sound effects and all :-(

Dude...

What did you do to her to deserve this?

Oracle CFO resigns

The reason I am posting about this is this article by Paul Graham:

Sarbanes-Oxley is a law, passed after the Bubble, that drastically increases the regulatory burden on public companies. And in addition to the cost of compliance, which is at least two million dollars a year, the law introduces frightening legal exposure for corporate officers. An experienced CFO I know said flatly: "I would not want to be CFO of a public company now."

I have said some unflattering things about Paul Graham's essays some time ago, and I haven't really changed my opinion yet; I came upon this one via the JoS discussion forum.

Movie Review: The Legend of Zorro

We hadn't planned on seeing The Legend of Zorro at all; Fahrenheit 9/11 had at last made an appearance here, and I was looking forward to watching that, but on reaching the theatre we found that F-9/11 was cancelled due to technical reasons, so The Legend... it was.

1. If you wear a mask that only covers your eyes, while leaving the rest of your face clearly visible to everybody (in fact, you stand around like a dumbass basking in the adulation of your fans), and yet nobody can figure out what your real identity is, who is the bigger idiot here? Those of us watching all this, the village people, or the guys who made the movie?


2. The spats between Banderas and Zeta-Jones are pathetically unfunny.


3. What's worse than watching Banderas making somersaults hither and thither without so much as a speck of dust alighting on his clothes or his face? Watching Zeta-Jones perform the same antics. What's even worse? Watching their &*^% kid do the somersaults, that's what.

$564.54

That's how much this crappy little blog is worth.

Back to Linux

The cost of one moment of madness: about Rs 8,000 (one fried motherboard and a side order of a 256 meg memory card).

The hard disk turned out to be salvageable. I have now harvested the Linux machine for parts (except for the above-mentioned items) and have plugged the hard disk into the Windows box. Modern motherboards do not allow you to have multiple hard disks -- assuming that you want to hold on to one of the IDE slots for the CD/DVD drive, so I cannot retain the option of booting Linux or Windows; I will have to manually switch the hard disks for this.

One issue I am currently facing is that I am not able to go beyond a resolution of 640x480. The graphics card is built into the motherboard (Intel 810 chipset). Googling for this shows that this is a pretty common problem, but the suggested solutions (e.g. increasing the video RAM in the XF86Config file) don't seem to work (Update: Tweaking a BIOS setting for video memory did the trick).

Hardware Woes

I should warn you that this is going to be a long post -- I am stuck at home because of the monsoon rains and have nothing better to do, so go and get yourself a nice, hot cup of coffee before reading on.

All my troubles started when, in a fit of uncalled-for exuberance, I removed 128 megs of RAM from my Windows machine and tried to add them to my Linux box. I must have plugged the RAM the wrong way, because the motherboard started giving out a burning odour and the machine refused to boot. I quickly removed the offending memory card, but found that one of the three power supply wires for the CPU fan had been severed (not sure whether it was burnt or had given out earlier due to some other reason). I re-attached the wire, but restarting the PC resulted in the BIOS POST failing, with long beeps repeated in an infinite loop. I tried my usual trick of re-plugging and swapping the IDE cables, but this did not solve the problem. One suggestion I found after Googling for this error was to check the CPU fan wires. Thinking that my quick fix might not have been sufficient, I made a quick visit to the neighbourhood electronics store for a new CPU fan.

The problem was not with the fan, it turns out. The PC continued its long (and, at this point, incredibly irritating) beeps. I finally had to call for a hardware engineer, who quickly made the beep go away by resetting the CMOS jumper. The PC now booted, but now it reported that there was a CRC failure in the hard disk. I sent away the engineer, thinking that this was a software problem that I could handle on my own.

Repeated reboots resulted in different failures -- kernel panics midway through the boot process at different points. Finally, the dreaded long beep returned again.

At this point, I did what I must have done a long while ago: RTFM. I realised that the long beeps meant that the memory was not being recognised. After repeating the hardware engineer's trick and getting the machine to boot, I ran a memory test via the Suse installation CD: turns out that the memory had gone bad (why the BIOS POST didn't detect this is still a mystery to me).

Cut to me receiving a new 256 meg memory card from Fabmall three days later. I plug this new memory in, reboot, no go: same old story.

The story does not have a happy ending yet. I have managed to get the PC to boot and stay up as long as I don't try any networking activity (LAN or the internet).

The only thing that redeemed itself during the entire nasty episode is the eight-year old 2GB hard disk that showed it still had it in it when I substituted my regular hard disk with it in a bid to isolate the problem.

I am mulling over whether I should get a new motherboard or bite the bullet and treat myself to a long-overdue laptop.

Movie Review: A Lot Like Love

Boy meets girl, they hit it off, go their separate ways, meet again, continue from where they left off, go their separate ways, meet again, continue from where they left off, go their separate ways, meet again...

I lost count of how many times this is repeated before boy and girl get together for good. Not much of a storyline, but A Lot Like Love is still an eminently watchable movie. There were shades of Love Actually, but this one doesn't come anywhere near the level of exuberance and poignancy. Another thing going for A Lot Like Love is the kick-ass soundtrack (some of the numbers are old, though).

One thing I didn't like was the way we are led to believe that there may not be a happy ending. I appreciate the sentiment of maintaining tension, but they could have been more subtle about it (two examples: a) you think Emily is putting her own child to bed when Oliver comes to serenade her and b) the piece of dialogue between Oliver and the tailor in the men's clothing store where Emily's friend learns of Oliver's 'wedding' seems quite contrived).

The UN report on Hariri's assassination

I am in the middle of page ten of the report, and I am already veering around to the view that it will neither be very conclusive in its findings, nor will it lead to any major upheaval or changes in the way things work in that part of the world. Two choice bits:

Despite the human, technical and financial capacities mobilized for the purpose of the investigation, and although considerable progress has been made and significant results achieved in the time allotted, the investigation of such a terrorist act with multifaceted international dimensions and their ramifications normally needs months (if not years) to be completed so as to be able to establish firm ground for a potential trial of any accused individuals.

and

Until the investigation is completed, all new leads and evidence are fully analyzed, and an independent and impartial prosecution mechanism is set up, one cannot know the complete story of what happened, how it happened and who is responsible for the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the murder of 22 other innocent people.

Another interesting tidbit:

However, although resolution 1595 called on all States to provide the Commission with any relevant information pertaining to the Hariri case, it is to be regretted that no Member State relayed useable information to the Commission.

Everyone paid lip service to the UN, but when push came to shove, national interest trumped international justice; they decided not to share any really valuable information.

Update: Looks like I was wrong. The report pretty much nails certain individuals. The part about the phone records is the clincher. But even so, only mid- and low-level figures are named; the mastermind(s) still appear to be likely to go scot-free.

On a side note, considering all this, George Galloway's chumming up with Basher Assad is making him (Galloway) look less and less of a knight in shining armour.

Update 2: Mehlis appears to have made last-second alterations to the report, removing references to Assad's brother and brother-in-law, apparently at the insistence of Kofi Annan.

DEBKAFile reveals the identities of the other individuals whose names were excised from the report:

• Gen. Roustum Ghazali, head of special external intelligence and former Syrian military intelligence chief in Lebanon


• Gen. Hassan Khalil, liaison between the various Syrian intelligence bodies


• Col. Mohsein Hamoud, a former military intelligence officer who served in Lebanon (Hamoud is the colonel who drove the Mitsubishi Canter bomb car from Syria to Lebanon on Jan. 21)

Linux and usability

Disclaimer: Linux is still my favouritest child.

I am currently back to my Windows machine because I managed to screw up my Linux box's RAM (how I did that is a story for another day). I thought I would make my Windows experience as Linux-like as possible and installed Privoxy.

Privoxy appears as an icon in the system tray while running. Any configuration can be done by right-clicking this icon and choosing a menu option. Example: Edit->Main Configuration opens Notepad with the main configuration file [*]. A similar option opens the user actions file. Starting and stopping Privoxy is also possible via a menu option. Way more simpler than how it is done in Linux.

It's not that difficult to perform the same tasks in Linux, but even someone who knows how to do them would definitely prefer an easier option. What is especially difficult to fathom is why the Linux version doesn't have these options, when the developers were thoughtful enough to include them for Windows.

It is my humble opinion that unless we manage to make all applications as easy to use in Linux, Windows will continue to dominate the desktop. I am aware that there are some applications that do get this right (KInternet comes to mind) but this is not yet a standard feature for most of them.

[*] I don't even know where this file is stored -- no futzing around with /etc/privoxy/config or /var/lib/privoxy/config.

The Simpsons convert to Islam

Homer and Bart Simpson become Omar and Badr Shamshoon respectively. I am still trying to figure out whether I should laugh or cry.