Now that is picturesque speech

Her faked orgasm was so unconvincing that I mistook the feeble shudder as a delayed gastric response to the conch fritters, which had been criminally overseasoned.
-- Carl Hiaasen in The Basket Case

I know

...that there is a moral in this story, but I can't for the life of me figure out what it is. Maybe I can.

Funny KDE bug

When I right-click on the KDE desktop, the context menu makes an appearance only when one of these conditions is satisfied:

• It's Monday, Wednesday or Friday


• The hour of the day (24-hour format) is a prime number


• I have thought of the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path within the last 37 minutes

This is where the difference between Suse and the other distros becomes apparent; Mandriva has quite a few of these annoying bugs, whereas I don't remember even a single such instance with Suse. I don't have the option of going back to Suse, as only Mandriva -- for all its minor quirks -- is immune from my freezing problem (the BIOS update has immunised Mandriva, it seems).

Next big project:

... Converting my entire tape collection to MP3. I had converted a few of my tapes earlier, but looking at the rest of the collection gathering dust reminds me that there is some great music that I no longer listen to simply because the idea of physically swapping tapes and rewinding/fast-forwarding till I reach the desired song seems too much of an effort.

Last.fm

I signed up with Last.fm a couple of months ago, but started using their player only since last Friday. I don't want to take the name of Web 2.0 in vain, but last.fm really seems to fit the mould. Compared to the top-down classification of radio stations (a la Worldspace), the concept of tagging music, and much more importantly, letting you listen to music of a particular tag or related tags is really great.

Oh, and getting a (thoroughly undeserved) free subscription for a month as a deal-sweetener for putting up with some glitches doesn't hurt either; I get to enjoy two more stations: one for my personal music (i.e. the ones that I have submitted) and another for my loved tracks.

There are still some glitches; I keep getting "There is not enough content left to play this station" errors for no reason, but temporarily switching to another user name takes care of this.

Baby Blair in Yale

I have never understood how Ivy League universities admit below average students purely on the basis of their parents' connections, while closing the door to much more deserving students who don't have influential backers. Since these universities are privately funded (alumni donations forming a sizeable portion, granting the donors even more influence), I guess they don't have to answer to anybody re their admission policies. But the problem is, when you hear that so-and-so is a Yale/Harvard alumnus, there is a lingering question in your mind whether he or she really deserved to be there.

Treating letters of recommendations as one of the key admission criteria (I think this applies only to post-graduate education; I could be wrong) is another related practice that I find irregular. Come to think of it, such letters could be the fig leaf used to justify such admissions.

Of course, we too have private colleges with management quotas here, but they do not enjoy the sort of fame and name recognition that a Yale or a Harvard commands.

Movie Review: The Pink Panther

The comedy scenes (when I say 'comedy' I use the term very loosely) in The Pink Panther remind me of a crappy program called 'Didi's Comedy' that used to air on DD2. Typical scenes would include someone carrying a ladder horizontally and knocking people down when they turn carelessly, opening car doors in traffic and sending cyclists flying, and so on. It wasn't that funny then, and it's not funny now.

Pink Panther only has slapstick comedy to offer, never mind the poor attempts at making fun of the French language. BTW, the only joke I enjoyed in the whole fricken movie was the Is it hard? What is? exchange in the New York hotel bed between Steve Martin and Jean Reno. Not even sure whether this was meant to be a joke. Go figure.

Sheesh

From Thomas Friedman's latest column:

If more countries can get just a few basic things right -- enough telecom and bandwidth so their people can get connected; steadily improving education and decent, corruption-free economic governance; and the rule of law -- and we can find more sources of clean energy, there is every reason for optimism that we could see even faster global growth in this century, with many more people lifted out of poverty.

That's like saying, If only I had Rs 100 crores, were engaged to Aishwarya Rai, and were the captain of the World Cup winning Indian football team, there is every reason for optimism that I could be happier than I am today.

Pruning my reading

Yesterday I unsubscribed from a few blogs; I realised that there was not much takeaway from them, for various reasons: scatological humour and general obscenity (Rude Pundit, Bile Blog) stop being funny beyond a point, reading about stuff already covered elsewhere (Common Dreams, Gorilla in the Room) is actually not a very productive use of my time, and some blogs are so rarely updated (OSI News, What's Happening in Smalltalk) that you are not missing much.

I would have unsubscribed from Bruce Schneier's blog as well -- squid blogging? Yeah, I care *so much* about that -- but his post on the value of privacy convinced me that there is still good stuff there.

That's a new experience alright

Driving behind the municipal truck on the IT Highway, enjoying Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, watching large pieces of garbage escape the loose netting covering the truck's load and fall in front of you, swerving to avoid the pieces, and continuing to appreciate the music while you continue to take evasive action...

Quote of the day (July 3, 1990)

The Italians have seen Naples, and they have died.
-- Commentator, after Italy lose to Argentina at Naples in a heartbreaking semi-final penalty shootout

(Caught one of the FIFA World Cup Specials on ESPN last night)

The perfect cup of tea

I usually don't care how I brew my tea: boil the water, add the tea leaves, milk and sugar, stir and drink. But once in a while, the urge to do it the mindful way hits me, and I go all out to do everything the way it ought to be done:

1. Pour three-fourths of a cupful of water into the pan


2. Fill 10% of the same cup with milk


3. Allow the water to come to a complete boil


4. Add two teaspoonfuls of tea


5. Wait for about 10 seconds


6. Change the stove setting to 'Simmer' mode for a minute


7. Apply the 'Normal' mode for two quick bursts of five seconds each interspersed by three seconds of 'Simmer' mode


8. Pour the tea into the cup containing the milk


9. Add sugar to taste


10. Stir the cup the Zen way, i.e. don't have any preconceived notion that you have to stir it for 20 seconds; keep stirring until you 'know' that the sugar is now one with the tea

Now you know why I prefer coffee most of the time.

Disenfranchisement

I have voted in all the elections that I have been eligible to vote in -- '89, '91, '96, '98, '01 and '04. 2006 is the first time I will not be able to do so, due to no fault of mine: my name is missing from the voters list.

Reservation in the IITs

Today's Hindu carries an essay by a student of IIT Madras about one of the complaints against reservation in the IITs. I am going to address only the core of his argument and ignore the things he says about how JEE can be cleared just by cramming, how IIT graduates end up just being 'techno-clerks' in IT, and so on. Maybe later, if I work up sufficient enthusiasm for it [*].

He takes issue with the argument against reservation that "there should be no regulations upon excellence" and claims that the IITs aren't

actual centres of research that do indeed strive for creative and disciplined endeavour...

OK, conceding for a moment that better research gets done in other places like BARC, TIFR and IISc, how does it take away the calibre of the students passing out from IIT? Do they not *excel* in whatever they do in life after four years in the campus? And no, I don't buy the argument that they are simply "software-writing minions". IT jobs are not just about writing CRUDy business applications, you know.

[*] On second thoughts, maybe it is pertinent to address them, since they are put forward to downplay IITians' calibre.

Let's take JEE. I cleared it more than a decade ago, and things are bound to be different now, but even then I cannot accept the fact that someone can clear the exam just by rote-learning. You need a pretty strong grounding in the fundamentals of science and math to do well. Even if it is the case that sheer hard work will get you in (which I don't buy at all), someone who makes this concerted effort, sacrificing all the things a typical seventeen year-old gets to enjoy, and succeeds, *has* done an 'excellent' job, I'd say.

OK, what about this:

Temples of education? Of the 180 credits that a B. Tech student is required to accumulate towards completing his degree, how many do not relate to science and technology? A grand total of twelve -- including an instructional course in English. How much flexibility does a B. Tech student possess in deciding his course work? None.

News flash: The 'T' in IIT stands for 'Technology'.

Or this:

Even a cursory perusal of campus culture in the IITs -- their cultural hierarchy, their social interactions, their means of recreation, etc., paints a definitive picture of IIT students as self-aggrandising delusional brats living off the fat of the land in the form of subsidies that an indulgent government continues to ritually bestow upon a system that has deviated so far from its founding principles that it betokens those who feel responsible for it to look the other way.

Great prose, but whoa there, that's a mighty broad brush you got there, fella :-)

Movie Review: Syriana

I was expecting something of the same calibre as Traffic, but Syriana comes nowhere near. The first half of the movie is incredibly boring that at one point I even contemplated walking out. Things are better in the second half.

1. The scenes involving the Pakistani boy and how he is brainwashed by the devious preacher are probably the most riveting parts of the movie.


2. The Prince's assassination is overly dramatic; drives home the point, good cinematic value, and all that, but showing the CIA guys shaking hands with and backslapping each other borders on caricature.


3. Matt Damon's character opting to switch vehicles seems to be introduced into the script solely to have a happy ending of sorts, when he rejoins his wife and son in the States.


4. Clooney's performance is singularly unriveting.

Bwaahaahaa

The Polish Ambassador to India, Dr Krzysztof Majka, has written a strongly worded protest to The Deccan Chronicle for publishing a piece called "Poland next in line for US invasion", not realising that this article is actually a satire piece. Excerpts from his letter:

The observations made in it are totally unfounded ... The new phase of Poland-US relations started ever since Poland became independent from the clutches of so-called socialism in 1989 and remains unchanged. There has been no deviation or rift from the original standing. We enjoy smooth and uncontroversial political as well as other ties with the United States. Therefore, we must consider this article to be a single-handed effort to mislead the public, and we will not bow to such provocative and malicious inventions of unscrupulous and irresponsible acts.

Quick, someone set His Excellency straight before he calls for a pre-emptive strike on New Delhi.

The Semantic Web

Today I quickly put together another hype-laden FAQ; this time it was about the Semantic Web. I think I am getting quite adept at churning out such evangelistic brochures.

Incidentally, FWIW, when I posted a message in comp.lang.smalltalk quite a while ago asking for ideas for hobby projects in Smalltalk, Dublin Core was one of the things that was brought up.

Coming soon: "All You Ever Wanted to Know About Web 2.0 But Were Afraid to Ask". Just kidding.

Movie Review: Basic Instinct 2

Here's a wild thought: Stan Collymore would probably have been a better choice for David Morrissey's character. Morrissey's performance is very one-dimensional. His range of emotions seems to be limited to suppressed rage, suppressed lust and not-so-suppressed superciliousness (and no, dumb looks of bewilderment don't count).

As for the story itself, the plot is devious and Stone plays a great villain, but I feel that things could have been done much better. The movie really seems to drag at some points.

BTW, I couldn't figure out one thing: why does Stone have to bend forward and place her left hand on the small of her back every time she lights a cigarette?

It's official

Blogger.com thinks that the Robert Fisk articles blog that I maintain is a phlog. I posted some more articles there today, and was prompted with captchas every time. Going to email them about it.

Arundhati Roy Interview

There is an interview with Arundhati Roy in today's The Hindu. It's about the Narmada issue, but she makes some great points in general:

(A country) cannot be run like (a corporation). All policy cannot be guided by commercial interests and motivated by profit. Citizens are not employees to be hired and fired, governments are not employers. Newspapers and TV channels are not supposed to be boardroom bulletins. Signing over resources like forests and rivers and minerals to giant corporations in the name of `efficiency' and GDP growth only increases the efficiency of terrible exploitation of the majority and the indecent accumulation of wealth by a minority -- leading to the yawning divide between the rich and the poor and the kind of social conflict we're seeing.

and

You cannot say I'm taking away the livelihood of 200,000 to enhance the livelihood of two million. Imagine what would happen if the government were to take the wealth of 200,000 of India's richest people and redistribute it amongst two million of India's poorest? We would hear a lot about socialist appropriation and the death of democracy. Why should taking from the rich be called appropriation and taking from the poor be called development?

You go girl.

Geekiest ad ever

(From Slashdot)

The simple pleasures

No, I'm not talking about smelling a rose, walking barefoot on grass, or any such touchy-feely crap. I am talking about starting a game of GNOME Nibbles from level 15, eating the dots one by one, running low on snake lives, wondering whether you can win (and by winning I mean surviving level 15), surviving some close calls with the insidiously designed obstacles, hoping that each dot you eat will be the last one so that you can graduate to the next level and claim 'victory', and finally throwing up your arms in relief as you are informed that you have made it...

And the hits keep coming

Given that Karunakaran has floated a party called Democratic Indira Congress (Karunakaran) and is also its head, wouldn't that make him a you-know-what?

Mine All Mine

When you listen to a song after a gap of more than fifteen years, two things happen: a) you rediscover the smoothness of the music and the fantastic guitar riff and b) realise that there are things in the song that you didn't even pay much attention to earlier, like the Hey! This is mine! in the middle that you now belt out lustily along with good old Sammy Hagar.

I have listened to it six times already, and I predict that the song will lose all its appeal by some time around 10 PM tomorrow :-)

Movie Review: After the Sunset

I hate Salma Hayek. I hate her affected mannerisms, I hate the fact that she cannot a) act her way out of a paper bag and b) appear in a single scene without showing at least 43.65% of her total skin surface area.

I don't hate Pierce Brosnan; in fact, I consider him the best 007 of all. But he is a pale shadow of his usual charming and dapper self in this movie. Speaking of shadows, couldn't he have at least gotten a shave or two, at least for some of the scenes?

I like Woody Harrelson. Though his role doesn't allow him to be as cocky as he would prefer to be, he does turn in a pretty decent performance.

Did I like the movie? Well, not really. For one thing, it really wanders all over the place -- there is this comic scene when Brosnan and Harrelson go fishing that, though quite funny in itself, doesn't really sit well with the rest of the movie, there are some gratuitous shots of Ms Hayek's butt, some supposedly tender romantic exchanges between Brosnan and Hayek, some not-so-tender 'romantic' exchanges between Brosnan and Harrelson, a few poorly executed action sequences and a completely unbelievable diamond heist scene at the end.

Trifecta?

This has never happened to me before: three great reads one after the other: John Katzenbach's The Madman's Tale: A Novel, Elmore Leonard's Pagan Babies and John Sandford's Certain Prey.

I might as well put my reading on hold, as the law of averages will make sure that I end up with crap for at least the next six months.

WTF of the day

Unintentional humour from robert-fisk.com:

I rather liked the way we Brits did things in so haphazard a way. Churchill lies under a simple stone in Blaydon in Oxfordshire. Our poets cluster together in Westminster Abbey. Under the nave are the remains of Isaac Newton. "Mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race," it says in Latin above his grave. Three miles away, the Iron Duke commands heaven alone in his black iron catafalque in Saint Paul's. My favourite epitaph remains that of Dean Swift - he wrote it himself, again in Latin - in Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, the translation of which I owe to reader Stephen Williams:

Sorry - full article not yet available. Please try again soon.

Movie Review: Doom

You walk up to the attendant, hand your tickets to him and enter the theatre. There's no one inside. You take your seat and remark about this fact to your buddy. The man in the projection room comes out of his slumber on hearing this and realises that the no-show he was hoping for will not happen, after all, and reluctantly starts the movie.

To be fair, eight more people joined us a bit later, though this was reduced to six after a couple left in disgust after a particularly hideous alien closeup.

OK, now for the movie review: take four parts Aliens, one part Dawn of the Dead, add a dash of lousy acting, a hint of even lousier dialogue, a spoonful of shameless-recourse-to-first-person-shooting-perspective from the video game that inspired this whole thing, allow it to boil in its own juices for ninety minutes or so, and what do you end up with? An eminently forgettable Saturday evening.

Never let a good deed go unpunished

You try to do your bit for society, and all you get is a captcha?

Longtime readers of this blog may know that I maintain an RSS feed for the articles at robert-fisk.com. It's part of the bad-karma-reduction deal that I have going with the Big Man in the Sky.

Anyway, there has not been any new articles posted there for more than three months. The site's owner finally got around to updating it today, and I had a lot of catching up to do: 24 articles, to be exact.

No problem. I quickly got into zombie automaton mode, and began posting the links one by one. Only problem was, this behaviour triggered the bot-sniffers at blogger.com, and the &*%$ started prompting me with captchas.

Some more on Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves

Chapter 7 is devoted to the author's publishing experiences. We learn that Sex, Drugs... was rejected by Atria books, Warner Books, Newmarket Press, Thames & Hudson, Pelican Publishing, Red Wheel-Weiser-Conari Press, Coffee House Press, Verso, Rutgers University Press, Adams Media, Princeton University Press, Kensington Publishing Group, Prometheus Books, McGraw-Hill, Chronicle Books, Andrew McMeel Publishing, Simon & Schuster, Johns Hopkins University Press, Berkeley Books, HarperCollins, University of Chicago Press, Vintage, MIT Press, BenBella Books, NYU Press, Knopf, Beacon Press, Soho Press, Routledge, Workman Publishing, Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, Harcourt and Tarcher/Penguin.

Now he tells us.

And no, I don't buy the argument that other great books have been rejected by unwitting publishers; there is no way this book can even be mentioned in the same paragraph as War and Peace or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Thumbs up to the Amazon reviewer 'No thanks' for going against the grain and telling it like it is, when all the other reviewers (lemmings) gave this book five stars.

The Intelligent Voter

With election season upon us, I thought I would say something about the Indian voter and how "intelligent" he is. You see things like

The majority of Indian voters may be illiterate, but they cannot be fooled that easily. They know how to send a signal to their political masters, by voting for some party but stopping short of giving it an absolute majority, in effect sending a message that they are putting the party on notice...

When I go to the polling booth, I have a pretty clear (mostly binary) choice: vote for Party A, or Party B, and so on. There is no way in hell for me to coordinate my vote with the millions of other voters so that we turn in an "intelligent" vote.

It could be possible that intelligence is displayed unwittingly due to statistical effects, but this makes the voter no more intelligent than ants in a colony. But I am not inclined to trust this analogy too far, as the ants' behaviour is something that evolved over a much longer time period and is honed by things like survival, foraging for food, etc. Thinking about whom you are going to vote for once in five years is simply not on the same level.

Know Your English

Question: What is the meaning of 'what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander'?
Answer: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=meaning+
of+what+is+sauce+for+the+goose+is+sauce+
for+the+gander&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&
client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

Question: What is the difference between 'semblance' and 'resemblance'?
Answer: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?
q=semblance and http://dictionary.reference.com/
search?q=resemblance

Question: What is the meaning of 'nuts and bolts'?
Answer: http://www.google.co.in/search?
q=meaning+of+nuts+and+bolts'&start=0
&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&
rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

That wasn't really that hard, was it? Does it need a postcard to The Hindu, the anxious wait to see if your question is considered for publication, and finally the joy of seeing it in print? Unless, of course, that's the whole point, and improving your English is only a secondary goal.

Movie Review: Underworld: Evolution

Underworld: Evolution is easily the worst movie I have seen this year. There are still nearly nine months to go in 2006, but something tells me that this one is still going to be at the top of the list, come December.

Blood, disgusting creatures, blood, confusing story, blood, lots of noise, blood...

Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves

I waited more than a month for Fabmall to import this book for me, and the wait has simply not been worth it.

The book seems more like someone took Pickover's blog posts over the course of a year and printed them out. I have read 126 pages, and the single overriding theme of the book -- till now, at least -- is that people have weird experiences and see weird stuff because of a) consuming psychedelic drugs like DMT or b) being afflicted with certain brain syndromes. A typical quote:

Why do drugs and brain syndromes continually bring us back to elves that also appear to permeate the folklore of many cultures?

Well, let's see, could it be because

1. All humans are pretty much identical in terms of the way their brain functions


2. People over the millennia have been getting stoned using the same sh*t and therefore have the same experiences which have been passed down as folklore?

And what's with the cheap, titillating title?

Movie Review: Zathura

Question: You are standing on the porch, gravity holding you firmly down, your house is floating in outer space, and you send a gob of spit out of your mouth. What happens?

Reasonable answer: The spit falls, depending on the effort you put into it, one to three feet away from your feet, after describing a parabolic trajectory.

The Zathura answer: Your gob of spit joins the ranks of objects floating weightlessly on an infinite zero-gravity orbit.

Zathura is still a fun movie, if you overlook such defiance of physics and the whiny little younger brother. I was quite surprised at how the story was spun in such an engaging manner given the severe limitations vis-a-vis location.

Confirm via HTTP GET (sort of)

There was a recent discussion about this in JoS. The problem is that users simply click on a hyperlink in an email message, and their subscription is automatically confirmed, their membership is automatically activated, and so on.

The implications of doing things this way was brought home to me rather unexpectedly recently. I received an email from Yahoo Groups about approving a membership request, but the person making the request didn't actually want to apply for membership: they were simply trying to get in touch with an existing member. I dutifully forwarded this message to the entire group, leaving the acceptance/rejection mechanism in place. To be fair, these are mailto: links, but I think this still qualifies as a vulnerability, since the email address is a specially constructed one that triggers the required action when a message is sent to it.

You want a movie-plot threat?

How about this? Make Bush President-for-life.

Cause terror? Check. Make the American people notice? Check. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy? Check. Change the political landscape, or the culture? Double check (why does life always have to be about either/or choices? Think out of the box, people).

Service Oriented Architecture

I have spent the better part of the last two days working on an FAQ for Service Oriented Architecture, as part of an effort to help my group understand what it's all about. Truly a unique experience, I must say. I had to set aside my not-so-charitable opinions about SOA and put on my most expansive pseudo-evangelist smile as I blathered on about how SOA is more than just web services, how you may already have an SOA and not know it (God, that makes it sound like it's an STD), and so on.

Who knows, if nothing much comes of the FAQ, I might even release it out into the wild and watch with glee as it gets mauled by a pack of disgruntled programmers.

Loose Change

Well, it looks like Google Video has been made available in India.

First, must-watch video: Loose Change

How to create a torrent and share your seed

Practise celibacy for six months.

(You expect me to see a title like that and let it go?)

Gnome peeves

[Note: I plan to keep adding to this post as I go along. I may have become inured to the KDE way of doing things, so I am going to persist with Gnome 2.14 for a while more.]

1. There is no way to set the font for the time/date display in the panel.


2. The date occupies premium space in the panel by appearing adjacent to the time instead of below it.


3. Most of the configuration dialog boxes have no 'Apply' button, but directly apply the changes


4. There is no option for a slideshow of wallpapers by specifying a directory of images.


5. The option to toggle desktop icons is not available in the context menu when you right-click on the desktop. You have to invoke the Configuration Editor and dig into the settings to do this.


6. Nautilus opens new windows for each folder as I navigate into a folder hierarchy.

Middlemen

Admiral J.G.Nadkarni (retd) has written an op-ed piece in DC in support of legitimising middlemen in arms deals. Going by its contents and the logic employed, I am glad that he has retired from the navy and no longer has any say in the way defence matters are being run.

The essay starts by incorrectly comparing these middlemen to dealers in car showrooms and travel agents. This comparison then neatly segues into kickback territory by including the shady operators in the RTOs who enable people to bypass the system and obtain driving licenses illegally. The implication being that people in the first category are no different from those in the second.

He then argues that ever since the government has banned these middlemen, the defence establishment has found it very difficult to obtain spare parts, since the middlemen performed this service admirably when they were allowed to ply their trade. What a load of crock. If you buy something from somebody, it is only reasonable to expect them to provide after-sales service and support; there is no role here for the middleman. It's not like it's very difficult for the arms manufacturers to do this on their own.

Next comes this:

The embargo on dealers is based on a number of myths. It is generally believed that agents bribe their way to procure orders ... While this may be true, the elimination of middlemen will not stop corruption. There are even major bribes when governments deal with each other.

So it's not really a myth. Also, if we eliminate middlemen, at least some of the corruption would go away? Sounds like a good deal to me.

Finally, there is this gem:

If the government is confident about the integrity of its staff where is the question of corruption?

I believe this is called 'the fallacy of many questions'.

Here's a chance

...for Tendulkar to turn things around and shut his critics up once and for all: a match-winning century tomorrow. The non-believer in me pipes in that he won't, though.

Humphrey is dead?

Who is Humphrey? He's not a person? Oh, you mean he's a cat? A very special cat? In what way? I see, he was a politician's pet? 10, Downing Street, you say? Very impressive. Did he die there? No? Did he live there recently? Oh, you mean to say he used to live there, but Tony Blair kicked him out in 1997? Now, since he wasn't living there since 1997, do you think it's really honest to say that Downing Street will no longer be free of mice? I'm sorry, what was that again? I'm afraid you'll have to speak up, I can't really make out what you are saying when you hang your head and mumble like that.

Gnome 2.14

I am currently engaged in a mini-project of sorts: build Gnome 2.14 using Garnome. I started this on Saturday morning, and three days later, I still do not know how far I have progressed. But I feel much more in control of the process this time as compared to my aborted attempt about a year and a half ago. However, the compile was (is) not that straightforward, though; there was this really unique error, which was not fixed by installing some package, or fixing something else and rerunning make; instead, I had to keep running make again and again (four times, actually) until the error was fixed. The error had something to do with the 'no' command not being found; there is a web page somewhere which explains why this approach works, but I'm too tired to find and link to it.

I had wanted to make a note of all such interesting things so that I can record them here, but none of them come to mind right now. Maybe later.

Movie Review: Just Like Heaven

Just Like Heaven is a very good movie, except for the contrived ending. I don't like Reese Witherspoon very much, and I was a bit pissed off on seeing that she was the lead actress (I knew practically nothing about the movie except its title when I walked into the theatre). The hospital scene at the beginning didn't do much to change my opinion either.

However, things improve once she makes her appearance as a 'spirit', and the scenes involving her and Mark Ruffalo really sparkle.

Goof (sorta): How is Elizabeth able to physically control David in the bar when it has been shown earlier that she has no ability to interact with solid objects?

Goof (real): When Elizabeth tries to get David to sleep with the hot neighbour, you can see the microphone at the top of the frame.

Never give up

Watching South Africa chase down successfully the humongous target of 434 yesterday has had a deeper impact on me than I thought.

Yesterday's match was one of the very few times when Life says "This is the situation; the odds of you overcoming it are, like, one gazillion to one, so why don't you just curl up and die?", and though the pragmatist in you knows, in your heart of hearts, that Life is correct, after all, and why don't you just accept things and not dare to dream of glory and success, somewhere inside you there is a kernel of irrationality that says Screw it, I am going for it, and you go for it, and then it's seven needed off the last over, then it's two off three balls, and finally it's one off two, and then the ball is racing towards the long on boundary and you have done it...

I know that the inexorable law of averages will assert itself with a vengeance and the euphoria will not last long, but while it does, I am going to play myself some Diamonds and Guns, Land Down Under and Happy People and be a Believer for just a little while.

Google Video Tip

Google Video isn't available for India yet, but since the decision to serve the video or not is based on the requester's IP address, you can pass this check by using Privoxy and Tor so that the request seems to come from some other IP address [*]. But the speed takes a hit, though.

[*] This assumes that the Tor node is from a country that is currently served. Probably a fair assumption to make.

Best One Day International Ever

Australia	434/4 (50 overs)
South Africa	438/9 (49.5 overs)

I guess the ghosts of World Cup '99 can now be laid to rest.

Quote of the day

(Steve) Jobs is so anal-retentive he probably awakens each night wondering if anal-retentive should be hyphenated, or not...
-- from a COLA post

Five reasons why I think The Da Vinci Code is a piece of crap

[Warning: spoilers ahead if you are one of the lucky few who have not yet read the book]

1. For such riveting prose (Langdon has just learned that he is to be accused of murder and is trying to escape from the museum):

   Langdon looked displeased. "I'll meet you there on one condition," he replied, his voice stern.
   
   She paused, startled. "What's that?"
   
   "That you stop calling me Mr. Langdon."
   
   (Sophie) felt herself smile back.

   (I still get goosebumps when I read this)


2. Sophie's grandmother and brother are living in Scotland in a well-known place, one that Sophie would very likely visit in her professional capacity, and yet she has no idea about them.


3. After dispelling the reader's suspicions that Sophie might have a royal bloodline, finally revealing that the reader's suspicions were in fact well-founded. That was indeed a cheap trick to pull.


4. For going out of the way to stay on the right side of Opus Dei, while using them as a whipping boy.


5. Dude, why don't you decide once and for all whether you are a suspense thriller writer or a Simon Singh wannabe?

Two interesting news items from DC

The first one is a contender for tongue-in-cheek-report-of-the-day; it's about the canines that are part of Bush's Secret Service:

Sources have confirmed that these dogs, with ranks of sergeant-major, first lieutenant, second lieutenant, third lieutenant and fourth lieutenant, will have rooms on the same floor on which President Bush is likely to stay ... "We were told to be careful while addressing the animals and not call them dogs. These sniffer dogs are an integral part of the US President's security team. We have been instructed to address them as per their ranks," said a member of the Maurya Sheraton hotel staff ... It could not be ascertained whether Indian policemen would be required to salute these sniffer dogs.

The other news item is from the sports page. It looks like a correspondent has reported on an off-the-record conversation that he had (more likely overheard) with ex-England captains Hussain and Atherton where they question Flintoff's leadership qualities:

Then the topic shifted to Flintoff and the mantle of captaincy that has fallen on him. Hussain shrugged off by stating that he is no good for the job and Athers shook his head in the affirmative.

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)