PETA plans protest outside KFC outlet

Where was PETA all these years? I've been seeing chickens carried in bicycles, tied upside down, practically all my life, and now when it's KFC it's a big deal? Something tells me it's not animals' welfare these people are really after.

I am underwhelmed

Is this the same Joel who wrote such great essays? The trilogy of management-related essays has culminated in something called The Identity Management Method, a singularly uninspiring piece containing nothing but a rehash of standard management best practices and a plug for his wonderful company where everyone gets to eat catered lunch everyday.

Rajesh is not on vacation. This post was blogged live. So there.

Star channels available on Dish TV

I don't know when this happened, but I am now able to receive the Star TV channels on Dish TV. I guess there is now full interoperability between the content providers and the satellite TV vendors.

Now I have twenty more channels that I can ignore. Just kidding. It felt good to watch The Simpsons and Seinfeld after, what is it, three years?

Another schadenfreude moment in Formula One

No, I don't mean Schumacher retiring from the race just when he looked like finishing fourth and whittling down Alonso's lead further. I mean the nuts falling off Alonso's right rear wheel and forcing him to crash into the protective barrier.

I used to not like Schumacher till a little while back, but my even greater dislike of Alonso has made me a Schumi fan -- sort of.

Anyway, today's race is, hands down, the most dramatic and unpredictable of the whole season.

A Line in the Sand

I have discovered Gerald Seymour only recently, and A Line in the Sand is my second Seymour novel. Great read, but this post is not about how good the prose is, but about how one of the dialogues in the novel set off a train of thought in my mind:

"... every attack abroad by the Iranian killer squads has the authorization of the highest echelons of government. It's only the appeasers who say otherwise. Government provides the training for the killers, the weapons via diplomatic pouches, the digital secure-phone links, the passports, the finance. Every operation abroad is laid before the foreign minister, the interior minister and the defense minister sitting on the National Supreme Security Council. It is authorized, sanctioned, on one condition only. The condition? There should be no smoking gun in Iran's hand ..."

The above words are uttered by a Mossad station officer in the story.

The first issue is that this is quite a neat way of demonising your enemies using fiction. The second issue I have is on a more fundamental level; an event -- a bombing, an assassination -- has occurred, and one party points its fingers at somebody. When proof is asked for, it simply says the perpetrator has hidden its involvement so successfully that there is no smoking gun, and you'll just have to take their word for it. Sort of like the opposite of Occam's Razor: go for the most complicated, unprovable solution to a problem.

Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

I really had high expectations for this one, what with all its record-breaking box office collections. But boy, did the movie suck.

Except for Johnny Depp's antics -- even they were a bit over the top sometimes -- there is nothing in the movie to grab your attention and hold on to it. Indiana Jones-style brushes with the natives, hideous creatures, general mayhem in the high seas, been there, done that, next please.

The RCMP rocks

There is a fitness plan developed by the Royal Canadian Air Force, called the 5BX Plan, which contains a set of just five exercises to be performed in 11 minutes. It's at least 40 years old, but still very relevant today.

I had a PDF version of this in my old (as in the late nineties) PC, and subsequently lost it. Google searches didn't really help me because I mistakenly thought that a) it was called the 5B plan and b) it was the RCMP who developed this.

I contacted the RCMP, not really expecting a reply, and was pleasantly surprised to receive the PDF from a very helpful gentleman.

My earlier experience with the plan was not very successful, as I presumptuously skipped the earlier charts and started in the middle; I stopped after three or four days after my body threatened to go on an indefinite strike. This time I am starting at the bottom, and going by the book. It's been five days now, and my body is holding up pretty well so far (touch wood).

Something happened on the way to the plane

Last night, at the Mumbai airport, I gave my boarding pass to the person at the counter and got into the shuttle. The shuttle travelled for about a hundred meters, made a U-turn and returned to the same spot we started from, but on the opposite side, and we got down and got into the plane, which had been waiting for us morons patiently all the while, right outside the building, probably shaking its head at the foolishness of it all.

Bonus weekend

I travelled to Mumbai yesterday. The trip was initially planned for four days, but there was a change in plans, and I returned home last night itself. End result: whatever time I have this weekend at home is bonus time. I don't need to stick to any schedule, don't have any chores to run, nothing planned. So what does one do in such a situation?

1. Spend the entire two days without reading a single word, either on the computer screen or on the printed page (the non-verbalisation thought experiment).


2. Do two days of zazen (yeah, like I really could).


3. Find out what it's like to stay in bed the whole day.

Something tells me this weekend will be no different from the countless ones before. I have been in the rut for too long to do anything so out-of-the-box.

Movie Review: The Inside Man

Easily the best movie I've seen this year. No special effects, no slick production values (frankly, some of the scenes are quite mediocre), but a great story and some cracking dialogue. I really hated Clive Owen in King Arthur, but he redeems himself in this one. Wearing a mask and hood most of the time probably helped, too. For once, Denzel Washington comes off second best.

Not going to say anything about the story; I am too sleepy to ensure that my post will not contain any spoilers.

Never really knew folks could dance like this

I watched three spoofs of Shakira's Hips Don't Lie, and while one of them is absolutely hilarious, there's this other one where everyday (but really hot) folks profess the integrity of their hips. I haven't seen the original video, but here's a suggestion: release this video as an alternate and watch it take off on the charts; it's that good.

BTW, I know that this goes against everything I stand for, but a side effect of watching these spoofs multiple times is that I have started liking the song as well. While I consider Shakira incredibly sexy, I hadn't really paid much attention to her music. Now I am.

The Sound of Silence

The only thing missing from the Linux setup in my laptop was games, so I fired up Adept and rectified the situation. After playing a few rounds of Nibbles and Patience, and a bit of surfing, I tried playing some music, and found that there was no sound. This was not a problem with Amarok alone; even XMMS and Kaffeine seemed to be afflicted. The surprising thing was that there were no error messages, either from the UI, the console, or even the system logs.

My only experience with resolving sound issues in Linux is 'killall artsd' and switching between ALSA, OSS, etc., but none of these tricks helped this time. I narrowed things down somewhat by booting from the Kubuntu LiveCD and checking whether the sound worked (it did, so the problem is definitely not hardware-related).

Going to look into this tomorrow.

Update: Problem solved, sort of. I installed ALSA from the sources and fiddled around with gnome-volume-control, and the sound came back. Only thing is, there is a constant hiss from the speakers and an occasional high-pitched whine. The sound of my keystrokes also are faithfully reproduced by the speakers. Wait a minute, is it because of the mic volume? It is! Turned it down, and I am again able to type in peace.

Mystic Microsoft

I am reading Kraig Brockschmidt's autobiography, and this paragraph at the very end of Chapter 4 caught my attention:

For me, total acceptance of my situation helped me let go of what I thought my career should look like, and once I let go, the right things started happening almost without effort. It wasn't long before I was able to look back on my "failure" and know that I just wouldn't have had it any other way.

I've been grappling with this question for quite some time: Does the universe only wish the best for us, and any setbacks that we face are really course corrections that set us on truly happier paths, or is it just that our brains/minds are hardwired to make the best of a situation -- so that we are spared the agony of painfully lingering over what happened?

To be fair, there have been instances in my life which, in retrospect, were really for the best, but can this be attributed to a benevolent universe instead of random chance?

I guess it's ultimately a question of faith.

Everlong

If everything could ever feel this real forever
If anything could ever be this good again

I watched Foo Fighters' Everlong video last night, courtesy of the 100 Best Music Videos of All Time. The video is not that great, actually, but the song? Probably the single most adrenalin-pumping thing I've heard, except for maybe Goo Goo Dolls' Long Way Down.

The thing is, I have The Color and the Shape somewhere in my collection, but I haven't even thought of this song in ages. All the more reason to convert the rest of my tapes to MP3.

Indian government blocking blogspot.com?

I think the authorities will come to their senses soon (assuming that the story is true, that is). Anyway, I am able to access blogspot sites by using Tor.

The funny thing is, the Boing Boing page contains links to helpful pages that supposedly tell you how to bypass this block, but these pages themselves are from a blogspot site.

BTW, the Torbutton Firefox extension is *way* better than SwitchProxy.

You know you are in the wrong profession

... when you sit through a presentation that contains an architecture diagram with pretty boxes in five different colours, with arrows going hither and thither, and everybody is smugly congratulating one another on how wonderfully SOA-compliant the whole thing is, and then somebody brings up non-functional requirements and how all responses should be sub-second, and everybody looks at each other, and concur that, yeah, in such 'special' cases maybe we should bypass the calls to the Enterprise Service Bus and collocate the business/service/component layers, and maybe the servlets should directly call the fricken business objects...

Sigh.

Mystery

I installed Windows in my laptop yesterday using VMWare. I installed the driver for my ADSL modem, and proceeded to download and install the things you cannot run Windows without: Firefox, ZoneAlarm, AntiVir, etc. Only problem was, before connecting to the Internet, I had to physically pull out the modem cable from the USB port and plug it back in, in order to force the (Linux) cxacru driver to relinquish control over the modem. Not willing to settle for such a hack every time I booted Windows -- rare though such occurrences may be -- I decided to try to make Windows use my already running instance of Privoxy as a proxy server. Bzzt. Found that Privoxy was listening on 127.0.0.1, which cannot be accessed by the virtual network interface helpfully set up by VMWare for the Windows virtual machine. I could, of course, change the Privoxy listen-address to that at the Linux end of the virtual interface, but somehow this didn't feel right.

Here's where the mystery comes in: just for the heck of it, I booted Windows and started Firefox without pointing it to any proxies, and I was able to connect to the Internet. What gives? Not that I'm complaining.

Movie Review: The Da Vinci Code

Some books, even good ones, don't make the transition to moviehood that well. That being the case, considering what a piece of crap the book was, I guess I shouldn't really be surprised by how badly the movie sucked.

There was no evidence that the lead actor had won three Best Actor Oscars. But Tom Hanks (who, BTW, looks like Quentin Tarantino on steroids) can't really be blamed, what with the poor quality of the material he had to work with. And the less said about Audrey Tatou the better. Is she the same pert and endearing girl that I liked so much in Amelie?

I didn't mind the innumerable and lengthy digressions in the novel where one of the characters (or even the author) launched into monologues about this and that -- the novel had far worse things to bitch about -- but these digressions don't sit well in the movie at all. Couldn't a better way of conveying this information have been found? A summary at the beginning, a voice-over, etc.?

Here's where all the Zen training comes in handy

1. I mistakenly assumed that the final would start at the same time as the earlier matches. Set the alarm for 12:25 AM and went to sleep, only to be woken up at 11:50 or so by shouts of joy from next door. Hurriedly jumped out of bed and switched on the TV, to find that the match had been in progress for 20 minutes, and that I had missed two goals.


2. The power went off shortly. The inverter mercifully kicked in, and I was able to continue watching the match.


3. Spent a miserable hour and a half, fearing the worst every time France looked like they would overrun Italy's defences.


4. Bittersweet moment as Zidane gets red-carded. Good for Italy, but man, what a way for Zizou to bid adieu.


5. Just as the penalties are about to get underway, the inverter's batteries finally run out of juice.


6. I spend the next ten minutes or so in pitch darkness, listening to my neighbours' shouts of joy as they cheer the result of each penalty kick (did I mention that everybody in our street have electricity except me?).


7. There is a final, humongous celebration all around as one team is finally left standing.


8. There is a stoic smile on my face as I shake my head, switch off the dead TV and lights, and return to bed.


9. Just before I fall asleep, it strikes me that, had I not had my laptop on for the duration of the match, the inverter's batteries might very well have lasted another 15 minutes, and that I could have seen Italy lift the Cup. Oh well.

Confession

I didn't watch the Germany-Portugal match. For one thing, the third-place playoff match is so pointless; I also didn't want to make the Monday morning blues worse by staying up late for two nights in a row. I missed saying goodbye to Figo, but to be fair, though I have great respect for him, he's not on the same level as Zidane for me.

Dear David McGowan

It's been three months since your last essay. Please, please release stuff more often. Putting up an RSS/Atom feed for your site wouldn't hurt, either :-)

Movie Review: Superman Returns

The movie was too long, Superman's expressions were plastic, Kevin Spacey's lines were quite run-of-the-mill, the world domination plot was so is-that-all-you-can-come-up-with ...

I am willing to overlook all of these things, if someone can explain to me how, by just donning a simple pair of spectacles, Clark Kent is able to fool everybody and disguise the fact that he is Superman. It's not even the case that he is a shadowy figure whom only a few people have laid eyes on -- he stands around grinning idiotically and posing for cameras as he holds up the giant Daily Planet globe, for God's sake (not to mention having his mug beamed on giant screens in sports stadiums all the time).

Del Piero is one of my all-time favourites, but ...

Dude, get a grip:

Alessandro Del Piero, who scored the second goal in the 2-0 semi-final win over Germany, has taken to comparing himself to mythic heroes. Asked why he didn't talk to reporters before the tournament, he gave a unique response. "I went up on my hill to think like Achilles did before war," he said. "It's not important to me how many wars I fight, but how I fight them."

Italy 2 - 0 Germany

I had almost reconciled myself to penalties (with Germany the odds-on favourite to get through with their clinical efficiency) when Grosso scored.

I know that the feeling is very fleeting, and the joy I experienced will be but a distant memory in about a week's time, but for one instant it felt like I'd died and gone to heaven.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any better, Del Piero goes and scores a humdinger of a second goal.

I don't even care if the Italians lose in the final. They've given me something to remember for the rest of my life.

Brazil 0 - 1 France

Only the fact that Zidane gets one more chance at World Cup glory mitigates the sadness of Brazil's exit. To be fair, Brazil seem to have too many superstars for their own good (a certain top-flight Spanish club comes to mind, as well).

Yet another affirmation that you cannot take anything for granted in football, especially the World Cup.

Movie Review: X-Men: The Last Stand

Though the movie ought to be remembered for its great action sequences, the one thing that stays in your mind long after the rest of the stuff is forgotten is the betrayal at the end. Though it's for a good cause, it still hits you hard and leaves a bad taste. I guess that's what good cinema is all about (I never thought I'd use 'good cinema' and 'X-Men' in the same sentence, but there you go).

Movie Review: MI-3

Good action, but not great. One thing missing was the high-tech plotting and scheming to get at a goodie that is protected in a Fort Knox like environment (though Cruise gets to do his dangling-from-a-cable-inches-from-the-ground bit in another scene).

On the whole, a *lot* more watchable than MI-2, with it's over-reliance on action sequences at the expense of everything else.

Got myself a laptop, finally

It's an Acer 1641, straight out of the box except for the additional 256 Meg RAM and an external Microsoft mouse. Running Kubuntu on it; installation and hardware detection was a breeze. Only thing left is to hook up my Epson CX4500, but don't foresee any problems there.

The 24-Pass Goal

I missed the Argentina V Serbia match because of a doctor's appointment, and finally got to look at the 24-pass goal via YouTube.

All I can do is shake my head in wonderment and make this Reason #13.

Ouch, that must've hurt

Richard Williams on the English World Cup team:

• ... the most overrated and under-performing team at this World Cup


• On Thursday, the midfield resembled a man who has been asked to write a novel in a foreign language, using only a quarter of the letters of the alphabet.


• Apparently the latest tests identify (Frank Lampard) as the fittest member of the squad, which merely suggests that the medics are testing the wrong things.

Thirteen reasons why the World Cup scores over club games

1. In the World Cup, you represent your country. In club games, you represent your club, which may not even be your home, come next season. Makes a big difference, commitment-wise.


2. The shot of the Japanese player's closeup fading into the blood red Nippon flag as the national anthem is played.


3. How you always end up supporting a team -- usually the underdog -- no matter how detached you are the start of the game.


4. How your legs involuntarily kick out to take possession of the ball as you see the striker either overhit the ball or run out of steam as he approaches the six-yard box.


5. How you can sort of understand how things like ethnic cleansing happen, when you look at the supporters of the opposite team crowing after their team scores a goal (just kidding).


6. You want your team to escape defeat so badly that it doesn't matter how the goals come -- your team's witch doctor could have put a spell on the opposite team's goalie, for all you care.


7. The sheer relief of hearing the final whistle, as the underdog hangs on by the skin of its teeth for the last ten minutes, defending with only ten men against the hot favorite.


8. There is not a single empty seat in the stadium.


9. You know it has something to do with the Stockholm Syndrome, but you still feel stupidly sentimental as the opposite team give the ball back after your team sportingly put it out of play so that one of their players can receive treatment.


10. Every game -- even at the group stages -- is do-or-die.


11. You'll never forget the sight of Ronaldo being overcome with emotion in the substitutes' bench, as he waited for the whistle to blow in the 2002 final, after he had more than paid back for the ignominy of France '98, including two goals in the final itself.


12. The agony and the human drama associated with a penalty shootout.


13. The 24-pass goal.

And we are back to Mandriva

For all its ease of installation, inbuilt support for the Conexant driver and the nifty Free Serif font, Kubuntu 6.06 did not prove to be immune from my PC's freezing problem. Back to Mandriva.

Cheesy Word Play / Quote of the Day

Cometh the hour, cometh the Ahn
-- Gary Bloom on Ahn Jung-hwan scoring South Korea's winning goal against Togo

Time

Two interesting quotes from a novel I am reading:

Time was not a big deal with (him). Everything was right now. He could read a history book about Rome and get angry about the Roman empire.

and

Time passes, but sometimes it beats the shit out of you as it goes.

Speaking of time, one of the techniques I use sometimes to fall asleep is to try to define the concept of time. How much ever one tries to do so, it's difficult not to end up with one of these conclusions: a) the passage of time is strictly a mental construct or b) time is very tightly coupled to matter and space; one cannot talk of time in a manner that is orthogonal to either of these things (I sure as hell don't understand relativity theory, but the space-time continuum does sort of make sense).

Rajesh's Law #177

Law #176 doesn't always apply.

Rajesh's Law #176

If a team leads by the odd goal in three when the halftime whistle blows, bringing an exciting 45 minutes to an end, and you look forward to more goals in the second half, you are invariably bound to be disappointed; there will be no more goals, and you will be left wondering whether these are the same players who disappeared into the tunnel during the break.

Meta bad, very bad

I am sitting through ESPN's pre-match discussion of the Germany-Costa Rica encounter. The TV is on mute, and as I keep half an eye on it while my attention is focussed on the computer, a thought strikes me: the amount of time these guys spend talk about something (as opposed to letting one enjoy the actual event) is simply unbelievable. Game plan, win-loss record, who said what about whom, who is hot and who is not, yada yada.

By the time you get to the game, a) your senses are dulled by the sheer amount of commentary you had to put up with and b) you have been fed all kinds of BS predictions which invariably fail to materialise.

P.S. ESPN gave me a fright when they kicked off the match with Hindi commentary; mercifully, this was replaced by English commentary very quickly. Guess somebody had a cojones-in-the-vise moment.

How in the name

... of all that is ineffable, sacred, heavenly and profound did &*^%#ing Harsha Bogle become ESPN's World Cup anchor? Who is responsible for this? And where the hell is John Dyke?

And the World Cup is here (finally)

Some of the matches begin at 6:30 pm IST, so unless I dash back quickly from work, I may miss the first fifteen minutes or so. Come to think of it, going to bed at 2:30 every night for a month may also not be feasible. I could do it easily when I was in college, when Italia '90 coincided with the summer vacation, but not so now.

Smoothest switchover ever

I must say, the switchover to Kubuntu 6.06 went very smoothly and painlessly, even considering your host's considerable (ahem) Linux experience. I completed the installation in about half an hour or so last night, and started the customisation/tweaking at about nine this morning, and by noon I was pretty much done. My desktop is practically identical (in both look and feel and functionality) to the previous distro -- Mandriva -- minus Mandriva's glitches. Mind you, I have not really started working on the development tools -- gcc, CVS, Anjuta, etc., but all my day-to-day needs are taken care of.

Going to reward myself with a perfect cup of tea.

My work is done

I installed Kubuntu 6.06 today, and was not exactly looking forward to carrying out the steps to install the Conexant driver, when, to my very pleasant surprise, I found that the 2.6.15 kernel has already done so.

I guess I can update my instructions page, lean back and put up my feet.

"Purchase free if you don't get a receipt"

I used to look at a similarly worded sign at a local pizza joint and wonder what purpose it served. Now I know the reason.

Reservation

The more I think about the whole issue, the more I feel that it is a turf war between two rich and powerful groups; the prize being money, power and position, not just for the current generation, but for their progeny as well. Each group puts forward seemingly fair arguments -- the supremacy of merit on the one hand and the setting right of social injustices on the other -- but the real motives are pretty transparent. While all this is happening, the real people who deserve reservation are completely ignored by both groups. The politicians are meanwhile having a whale of a time.

BTW, The Hindu editorial flaming President Kalam for sending back the government's Office of Profit Bill is totally uncalled for; here's one guy who is calling BS on the politicians, and all you can say is that "he's throwing a spanner in the politics of the country"? Shame on you. If you ask me, we don't need a spanner; we need a nuke.

WSIF provider for Spring

Today I did something worthwhile for the OSS community -- if I get around to releasing it, that is: I wrote a WSIF provider for the Spring Framework. It was pretty trivial actually, as I reused quite a lot of the code from the existing Java binding.

Speaking of WSIF, I still fail to understand why it hasn't taken off in a big way; I can't think of a more performant and flexible way to do an SOA in a Java world.

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...