Ruby

I am about halfway through the Pragmatic Programmer book, and have decided to take up a proof of concept project in Ruby. I don't want to go the RoR route; the idea is to do just the domain objects in Ruby, and hook it up to a front-end via SCA/WSDL using SOAP. ActiveRecord seems to be a logical choice for this. Some things I've learned/realised along the way:

1. You should set the RUBYOPT environment variable to 'rubygems' if you want to use Gems things in your code.


2. "No configuration files" sounds great in theory, but doesn't amount to much when configuration information is stored .rb files. How much ever this information is legal Ruby code, it's still configuration information (I know, this is an RoR thing) Update: It's actually "No XML configuration files". Weasel wording, if you ask me.


3. Consider this:

   class Test
     print "In test"
   end

   When this code is executed, the "In test" message is printed. Not exactly rocket science, but it took me this bit of code to realise that what stumped me the other day was the equivalent of the static block in Java.

Advice to Skoda

1. Selling 35,000 cars in five years is not a big deal. It doesn't warrant a full page advertisement in The Hindu.


2. Consider changing your slogan. Using words like "obsessed" ("Obsessed with Quality since 1895") brings to mind a stalker, not a respected car-maker.

Firefox 2.0 sucks

There, I said it.

1. Any option that I choose in the Preferences dialog crashes Firefox. The error is:

   (Gecko:4845): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_parent_window: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
   (Gecko:4845): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_window_is_viewable: assertion `window != NULL' failed
   (Gecko:4845): Gtk-CRITICAL **: gtk_widget_get_parent: assertion `GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed
   /home/rajesh/firefox/run-mozilla.sh: line 131: 4845 Segmentation fault "$prog" ${1+"$@"}

2. Opening a web page with applets (using Java 1.5 plugin) causes it to hang, not always, but most of the time.


3. Blogger's spell checker doesn't work.


4. Right-click on GMail Notifier, choose Preferences: crash.


5. Even when you've set it up so that links meant to open in a new window should open in a new tab, existing tabs are reused. Again, this is random.

Time to downgrade to 1.5.

Nice sig material

From an old IEEE report on software reuse:

The attribute 'IsOptional' is mandatory.

Voting irregularities

I cannot understand what the fuss is all about re: the irregularities in the American elections. Is it really impossible to get a "true count" of the number of votes? Here's a clue (assuming that one wants to go the manual route): do it slowly, with multiple eyeballs. If you still want to go for electronic voting, put your best brains to work, and come up with a foolproof system, and then pass a federal law that mandates that all states/counties should use this (I think the states can suspend their irrational fear that they'd be subjected to the tyranny of a 'foreign' authority and agree to a one-time waiver of whatever constitutional laws that prevent this).

I almost started gloating about how we run our electronic voting setup nearly flawlessly, but then remembered the absolute farce that was the local elections here in Chennai recently -- though it involved only paper ballots, and quickly put the thought aside.

Is the Indian government playing tricks again?

I am able to access blogspot sites from Bloglines and by using Tor, but not directly -- I get "Internal server error".

Update: Nope, proved to be a temporary problem. Things are back to normal.

Advice to self

Never, ever listen to The Reason when you are feeling the way you do now.

Screw it. Going to play it again. And again.

Meta-blogging

Why do I blog?

1. It's an opportunity for me to express myself, to be a 'writer'.


2. It helps me to find out what I really think about something. Nothing brings out the holes/incompleteness in my thought processes better than writing them down.
   


3. It has hopefully improved my writing skills [*], which is always a Good Thing (tm).
   


4. I can always point to the technical parts of my blog as a way of showing that I have *some* clue about certain things to prospective bosses/employers.


5. Who knows, this blog may actually become popular, and I might even be able to retire on my AdSense earnings. Just kidding.


6. To pander to my ego a bit (OK, not 'a bit'; 'a lot').


7. It's a recorded history of my life, at least for the last thirty months or so. I think it's safe to say that I have captured nearly all the significant things that have happened to me in this period (at least those things I feel are safe enough to record in a public place).


8. But the most important reason of all: it's a therapeutic experience; maybe this is something any creative activity will lead to, but the very act of putting together a post is a big pick-me-upper (in fact, I started blogging in April 2004 just to get out of a real down-in-the-dumps situation).

[*] On the other hand, there is this weird thing: ever since I started blogging, I think I have become less articulate in speech. Leads me to think that I have a certain quota allotted to me vis-a-vis communicating my thoughts effectively, and I'm frittering it away on blogging.

Additions to the book shelf

• Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose
• Zen in the Martial Arts by Joe Hyams

The second book is much smaller (but probably equally difficult to understand), so I think I'll start with that.

Is this a dig at Paul Graham?

From Tim Bray:

Out there in the wild woolly “Web 2.0” world, maybe getting it built quick is all that matters, because after you’ve knocked ’em dead and been acquired, you can use the money from the Yahoo! buy-out to rebuild everything right the second time.

Maybe not.

Dish TV Sucks: Part 7844

You only read about things like this in the Dos and Don'ts Section of "Designing e-Commerce Web Sites for Dummies" and never expect it to happen to you. Unless, of course, you're trying to make an online payment at Dish TV's web site.

I tried to renew my subscription there the other day. While I was at it, I also wanted to see whether I could add the Star TV channels to my account (yeah, I know I was asking for too much, after my earlier experience, but what's life without hope? Anyway, I had had my confidence somewhat improved by talking to a customer service rep who advised me over phone as to which option to use for the renewal/upgrade.)

I did all the things I was advised to, including entering my credit card details, but instead of getting a "Transaction successful" message, I was informed that there was an error. I had faced this kind of error before (if I remember correctly, I think I was asked to try again after 24 hours, for whatever reason), so I wasn't overly concerned -- this was, after all, Dish TV I was dealing with -- and logged out.

Twenty-four hours later, I reentered my transaction, and it went through. This time I didn't opt for the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink option, but just a regular renewal, so maybe that had something to do with my success.

Cut to me reading my monthly credit card statement three weeks later; there are two back-to-back transactions billed against the same merchant. The transaction amounts didn't look familiar, and I fired up GnuCash to refresh my memory. That's when it hit me; the earlier of the two transactions was the $^%& 'failed' transaction.

The only saving grace is that my Dish TV account has been credited with both the amounts. Thank the Lord for small mercies.

Rubbing-salt-into-wounds addendum: Today I found from my friend's mother that Tata Sky doesn't have any problems functioning when it rains, whereas I have been blessed with 'No Signal' messages from my Dish $#%^ TV receiver for the past three years whenever the satellite dish looked at the cloudy sky and decided it didn't like what it saw.

Trackpad woes

The trackpad in my Acer 1641 has stopped responding. The problem exists in OpenSuSE 10.1, Windows XP (via VMWare) and Knoppix LiveCD, so it's not a software/OS issue. I use an external mouse nearly all of the time, of course, but still, when it has to work, it has to work.

Time to exercise the warranty. Taken together with my keyboard problem earlier, any guesses which four-letter brand I won't be looking at when considering my next laptop purchase?

Kiwi!

This is probably the saddest animated film that I've ever seen.

When it rains, it pours.

Sober

Why can't we not be sober?
I just want to start this over
Why can't we dream for ever?
I just want to start this over
                                   -- Tool

Haiku

Car, sitting out rain
Old SMS messages
Never so lonely.

Adjusting the laptop display brightness

I switched off the AC power today when I retired yet another casualty of my War on Rats -- the voltage stabiliser -- and the laptop battery kicked in; the display also dimmed perceptibly. Nothing wrong, except that when I moved back to AC power, the dimness persisted.

Per KPowersave my current hardware settings don't allow me change the display brightness. I booted into Windows and tried to install the Acer software that came along with the laptop, but it seems my machine is not an Acer laptop, most probably because Windows is only installed via VMWare.

I am currently left with no option to tweak the brightness. Shouldn't there be some OS-independent, hardware-level mechanism to do this? Some tiny knob somewhere, or a special function key?

Update: Duh. There is a function key combination right under my nose -- Fn + Right Arrow -- for this. To think I wasted nearly half a day mucking around with things like pbbuttonsd and pbbcmd.

So this is how ad fortunes are made

It's been less than ten days since I put up Google ads in my Conexant page, and I've already made $0.61, bringing my all-time AdSense earnings to $1.33.

$999,998.67 to go till I become a millionaire. At this rate, I just need about 40,422 years before I can retire to a tropical island. I better start paying attention to the travel brochures.

Ruby on Rails again

Well well well.

It turns out my brush with Ruby on Rails last year wasn't the end of the story.

I need to put together some CRUD screens at work, and I thought of giving RoR another try.

If I remember correctly, I stopped at the bit where I had to get the connectivity to Oracle working. This time I did a bit more googling and found that a Ruby version of the OCI adapter had been made available since the last time. Installing this didn't take me very far; when I ran the scaffold generator it informed me that it couldn't find the 'Comic' generator ('Comics' being the sample table I created).

Yeah, I didn't expect it to be that easy. Anyway, I found that a decent server side Oracle installation would contain the OCI libraries and header files; I checked our project server, and sure enough, oci.h and oci.lib were there. Back to building the adapter from the sources.

Success. I was able to finally see some CRUD screens in action.

I am still not enamoured with RoR, though. The reason: I simply couldn't grok the bit of generated code in the controller class which prevents POSTs. Is it a DBC thing? Is it a static block as in Java? Do the commas mean something special? Do I really care?

Firefox 2.0

Yesterday Firefox went crazy on me. Attempting to add a bookmark in any of the four ways crashed the browser, not just randomly, but every frigging time.

I thought I'd run it from the command line and see if any console messages were thrown. Big mistake; turned out that v1.5 had precedence in the path, and it grabbed this opportunity with both hands. It first informed me that Firefox was not my default browser, and asked me whether I wanted to make it so. It then proceeded to trash my extensions and themes gleefully: none of them worked when I opened 2.0 again.

I left things in this state last night. Before embarking on a painful download today morning, I wanted to check whether I could tweak the profile files and fix things. I renamed the extensions.cache and extensions.rdf files, and voila, the add-ons returned as if nothing had happened, and even had the gall to pretend to ignore me when I asked them where the fsck they had been.

Outing Xymphora

Here's a thought (an unfounded one, I hope): considering that Xymphora is most probably Canadian, is named Andrew -- as evidenced by the RSS feed information -- and had a root canal this Monday, wouldn't this be sufficient information for somebody with enough resources at their disposal to track him down?

WTF?

Joel is now blogging about SQL injection attacks?

Cricket talent in India

Nirmal Shekar writes:

In an age of boosterism and saturation coverage of a sport that is almost a religion in this country, truth tellers are not easy to come by. And, it is for this reason that Dilip Vengsarkar, Chairman of the BCCI's National Selection Committee, must be applauded for his courage and unblinking honesty.

"To be honest, India doesn't have exceptional talent now," Vengsarkar told pressmen after chairing a meeting to select the Indian team for the ODI series in South Africa.

Here's a contrarian thought: Vengsarkar's statement could be construed as an indirect assurance to the current crop of overpaid bozos in the team that their places are safe, and they don't have anything to worry about hungry youngsters nipping at their heels.

It's not really a contradiction

From a Guardian article via The Hindu:

Polls are relatively straightforward. When compiled reliably they are supposed to tell a story in digits. That story may be contradictory (people say they want more social services and less tax)...

It's not a contradiction because there are ways to fund social services through means other than taxation. I haven't thought this through, but what about the government competing with private companies by providing services, and using all the profits to fund social programs? They can also make money (which they do already) by running lotteries.

Press releases and Yahoo

You come across a 'news' story, find that it's from the Yahoo domain, and think it's a legitimate bit of journalism. But look closer, and you'll find that it's a press release (a careful scrutiny would have revealed the presence of 'prnews' in the URL), not subject to the rigours of checks for accuracy and editorial oversight.

Browser rivals playing catch-up?

I don't think so.

Like great minds thinking alike, the Internet's two main competing browsers unveiled new improved versions just days apart last week.

Please, give me a break.

Both browsers now provide built-in search windows, so that one does not have to open a new Google, Yahoo or MSN page to search on a keyword.

Incorrect again. Firefox has had the Google search bar from, like, the pre-1.0 days.

I also don't think the emphasis on anti-phishing protection features is really warranted. Is this probably because Microsoft is touting this feature as a competition-beater?

Happy Happy Joy Joy

Well, finally I got it right and managed to download the right version of CD #5.

There was a twist in the tale, though; after downloading the ISO image, I found that I had run out of blank CDs. After a bit of head-scratching, I figured out the solution: mount all my five ISO files and make YAST use the resulting file system as an installation source.

Result: I've finally, yes, finally, managed to compile and install the Crystal window decoration. The effort was worth every bit of the struggle. Check out this screenshot.

An unintended benefit of permanently mounting the CD images in /etc/fstab is that my system has become very snappy as well, for whatever reason. Plus, installation of additional packages from the hard disk is, of course, much faster.

Replatforming

I heard this word for the first time this week, from two different people. Question: in what way is this different from, say, migration? If not, why do we need a new word at all?

Methinks this falls under the same category as re-branding 'Testing' as 'Assurance'.

Alright ...

... now I'm really pissed: SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-i386-CD5.iso from here is actually the remastered version, but somebody mistakenly named it without the 'Remastered' tag. Another eight-hour download, only to end up with a file that I already have. Maybe I'm missing something here, but if the remastered version of the CD is identical to the original one, why is YAST not able to pick up packages from it?

Huh?

This has got to be the most inane and senseless letter to The Hindu that I've ever read (it's about the veil controversy in the UK):

Those advocating the removal of the veil feel the burqa hampers effective communication. What more is required to prove the degradation of values than the fact that we cannot accept a woman dressed decently and respectfully but would love to see her in indecent costumes? We put forward the most inane and senseless reasons to support our argument.

Straw man? Non sequitur? Slippery slope?

Remastered my ass

I have the first four OpenSuSE 10.1 CDs (did I mention that I'm now on an unlimited download plan?); I found that I needed CD #5 for installing the KDE development packages, so off I went to the download page. There I found that the ISO images were now adorned with the moniker 'Remastered', whatever that means. I didn't pay much attention to this and went ahead with the download. Big mistake. When trying to install the packages from this CD, YAST refused to proceed and kept whining that I was shoving in the wrong CD.

Googling reveals that the FTP mirrors contain the original ISOs as well as the 'Remastered' ones. Grrr.

Selling out to The Man

Considering how my Conexant How To page seems to be one of the main sources people turn to for installing Conexant USB ADSL modems, I've decided to try and make some moola off of it; I'm going to see if Google AdSense accepts the page.

Update: It turns out that there's no need to ask Google to accept my page; if I'm already an AdSense member, I can simply paste the AdSense code in any other page or site that I want (subject, of course, to Google's policies).

Firefox 2.0

I decided to wait till the dust settled down and 2.0 was well and truly available via getfirefox.com before downloading it. I had tried the release candidates, but didn't feel like abandoning 1.5.

There seems to be an issue with installing 2.0 over an existing 1.5 installation, i.e. an upgrade; updating my extensions or installing new ones failed with the 'installLocation has no properties" error. I ended up starting with a clean slate and downloading all my extensions -- ahem, add-ons -- again.

Anyway, 2.0 is way faster than 1.5, which alone is worth the cost of upgrading. Also, the spell check feature -- dotted red lines below misspelled words a la Microsoft Word -- is really really nifty. Makes posting to the blog a breeze.

Oops. When I click on the 'Check Spelling' button provided by Blogger (yeah, I'm like that), nothing happens. The error console says 'spellcheck is not a function'. Oh well.

Oh my!

From a COLA post:

>> The question isn't what matters.
>> It's the answer that matters,
>> you <expletive> moron.

> You know a person has no stance or
> debating ability when they
> consistently have to use
> personal attacks as part of
> their argument.

Those are called "ad hominems" there, wjbell. And you, without exception, have no stance or debating ability despite your refusal to resort to ad hominems, you microcephalic toad.

Explosions in Baghdad

Here is a video from an Arabic news channel about the recent explosions in an American base in Baghdad. There are all kinds of unconfirmed reports going around, claiming that the extent of the American casualties in this attack is being suppressed.

What stands out in this footage for me is the humongous explosion that you see at about 3:50 or so minutes into the video. Considering that the camera is quite a few kilometers from the base, I can't imagine how powerful the explosion must have been to produce that kind of a blinding flash of light. It was Diwali yesterday, so I guess I'm paying more attention to such things than I usually would have.

Here's a shoutout

... to anocturne :-)

Some Smalltalk

I have a small shell script that backs up my blog archives; it has a bunch of calls to wget for all the archive files since April '04, which is when I started blogging. Since I don't know shell scripting all that well, the script is not even intelligent enough to figure out the current month and use a for loop.

I decided to redo the script in VisualWorks. Problem was, I kept getting the exception related (I think) to Seaside that I mentioned earlier. I bravely stepped into the debugger, and I don't know what I did, but I now started getting another exception, something that seemed more fundamental; I wasn't even able to open the image successfully [*]. Back to a fresh base image (BTW, loading Seaside in this fresh image went through incredibly smoothly -- probably on account of all the downloads of the dependent packages the last time).

I managed to do nearly all the things I wanted to do, except for one thing: create a single tar.gz file that contains all the archive files. The GZipWriteStream class seems to create only single files. My not-so-elegant workaround is to feed all the archive files one after the other to the output .gz file's stream, in effect creating a single huge HTML file. Definitely not elegant.

[*] Coincidentally, Episode 6 of the Industry Misinterpretations podcast talks about image-based development and ways to recover from situations similar to mine.

Spelling bee contests

1. Why is ESPN, of all channels, broadcasting a spelling bee contest?


2. More important, why the hell am I watching it?

Both very valid questions, but my post is about the need for such competitions: the quirkiness of the English language. It almost seems like making a virtue of a necessity, and brings to mind the glorification of design patterns, when some people consider them as nothing more than ways to overcome the deficiencies of some programming languages.

What's happening in Georgia

There's an article in The Hindu today by Vladimir Radyuhin about the situation in Georgia.

Ignoring the pro-Russian bias in the article, what struck me the most about it -- apart from its incisiveness -- was this: how the big powers conduct their, for want of a better phrase, geostrategic business in such a brazen manner, readily discernible to any literate person willing to pay attention to these issues, and yet get away with pulling the wool over the majority of their populations with their fake concerns for things like democracy, human rights and free trade.

Staying on the subject of Russia, here's something from Rigorous Intuition:

You may know that Israeli President Moshe Katsav is facing indictment for the rape of two female staffers. Earlier this week in Moscow after a brief public appearance with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Vladimir Putin remarked "Say hello to your president. He really surprised us." The New York Times notes that the microphone "was quickly turned off as reporters were ushered from the room," but Putin was overheard to continue. "He turned out to be quite a powerful man. He raped 10 women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him."

There but for the grace of God go I

This is supposed to be funny, but sorry, not for me. People taking telemarketer jobs in the U.S. may not be that badly off, what with the general high standard of living, but when you consider their counterparts here in India, it's downright cruel to have fun at their expense or be rude to them. Come on, these are just people trying to eke out a living, people who have the same hopes and aspirations as you and me for a good life. I agree that they are irritating at the best of times, but that does not give anybody the right to treat them badly.

The next time I hear

... someone use the word 'metamodel' just to sound smarter than they really are, without knowing WTF the word means, I'm going to call them on it and ask them to explain themselves.

I attended a product demo webinar today, and something hilarious happened. The presenter was touting the RAD/MDA capabilities of the tool when someone asked him about support for AJAX. I don't remember the presenter's answer in detail, but the nub of it was that currently there was not much support. Nothing to get excited about, except that the questioner wanted to show how smart he was, and went on to say that AJAX was part of the upcoming World Wide Web Consortium's 2.0 specifications, and made it clear where he stood as far as support for such an important standard was concerned. At this point I backed away from the speaker phone, nearly crashed through the glass wall behind me, and ended up waking up the rest of the people in the room.

That's a good one

Afzal's death sentence should be commuted because otherwise the lives of the judges who sentenced him may be threatened by people seeking revenge.

Going by this logic, we might as well shut down all the High Courts and the Supreme Court.

By the way, is it just me or does Abdullah's statement sound like a veiled threat, something a Mafia don would say?

Movie Review: The Lake House

I have always had a fascination with looking at something -- a building, a work of nature, why, even the moon -- through another person's eyes, someone who has been there before me, perhaps even millennia ago, and wondering what they must have felt. Would they have thought the same thing and wondered about me, a fellow traveller further behind them on a highway called Time? Little wonder then that The Lake House struck a chord in me, as soon as I realised that it was not a romantic ghost story a la Just Like Heaven.

I know that any movie involving passing messages back and forth across time is bound to have logical paradoxes and things that are difficult to wrap your mind around, but even so, The Lake House is a beautiful movie. I still haven't figured out how exactly the happy ending is brought about -- a visit to IMDB.com is probably in order -- but this doesn't prevent me from anointing this my Movie of the Year.

(Hello there, Mr Sentimentality, how are you doing? Who's that behind you? Oh, it's you, Mr Senility)

More on the death penalty

One argument we hear against the death penalty goes like this: "So let me get this straight: you're saying murder is wrong, and must be punished with murder? Give me a break!"

Yes, I'm saying murder is wrong and must be punished. But is the punishment to be considered murder too? I don't think so.

Both the crime and the punishment involve taking a human life. But murder, by definition, is the taking of a life "under conditions specifically covered in law". So the taking of life in the second case is not murder. You may argue that the state is arrogating for itself certain rights which the citizen does not possess, but that's how government works.

Slashdot moderation

I used to receive moderation points regularly in Slashdot, but then I started reading the articles via RSS and stopped visiting the site, except to read the comments on stories that I found interesting. I received points yesterday, and it felt nice, moderating comments after a long time.

Why doesn't Slashdot have an RSS feed for intimating me that there are moderation points available to me? They seem to have feeds for all kinds of crap.

Torture and the ticking time bomb

I really don't know what is the correct way to resolve this dilemma, but thinking about it objectively, isn't torturing someone to extract information that would save millions of lives equivalent to killing someone in self defence?

And no, the argument that the torture might have been in vain if it turns out that the person being tortured didn't really have the information doesn't cut it; by a strange coincidence, I ran across this in a novel I'm reading right now:

"...he was feeding his pigs out of a bucket with his back to me, telling me how he didn't rattle, how he wouldn't piss on a cop on the pad if he was on fire, then he put his hand down in his jeans and I saw something bright in the sun and heard a click, and when he turned around I put a big one in his forehead. It was his Zippo lighter, man. Can you dig that?"

And you are still against the death penalty?

From an article by Praveen Swami:

At lunchtime on Sunday, Handwara-based dental surgeon Mushtaq Ahmad Shah was tied to a tree, tortured, and finally beheaded with an old-fashioned barber's razor. Villagers working in the cornfields around Naupora Kalan, near Sopore, pleaded for Dr. Shah's life but were shooed away at gunpoint.

Dr Shah's 'crime' was to cooperate with the authorities.

1. If the terrorists who committed this crime aren't punished in a suitable manner, how the heck can we convince people like Dr Shah that the Indian government will take care of people who respect and cooperate with it?


2. Something doesn't sound right when you consider the pain and agony undergone by Dr Shah and his family and compare it to the punishment of life imprisonment -- which is not even a fscking life sentence -- which would be awarded to the terrorists if (and this is a big if) they are caught.


3. Even if the people who did this do not fear death, the deterrent of the death penalty is sure to make at least a fraction of these fanatics think twice before embarking on such things.

Has this ever happened to you?

You are with a group of people, and you start to say something, and somebody interrupts you, and wanting to be polite, you defer to that person, and allow them to make their point, and when they are finished -- you don't want to repeat their mistake and interrupt them -- you start over again, only to be interrupted again, this time by another person, and you still want to be polite... this goes on for a couple more times, and then it's five minutes later, and you have almost forgotten what it was that you had wanted to say, and then you remember it, but by then the moment is long past, and an observer would conclude that you are a pushover, when all you were trying to be was a frigging polite conversationalist.

Is it just me...

or does this IceWeasel logo look like Mother Earth is being humped by an over-ambitious arctic rodent? Check out the gleam in the creature's eye, BTW.

North Korea conducts nuclear test

Years ago, we made a train journey from Delhi to Haldwani, on the way to Nainital for a long weekend. We were stupid/brash enough to barge into a reserved compartment when we should have proceeded to the unreserved one, and occupied the space next to the toilets. The rightful occupants of the compartment didn't protest against this, and we settled down uneventfully. A couple of stations later, sometime in the middle of the night, someone opened the door, and a fellow 'unreserved' passenger, a pretty unkempt, ragged individual, entered the compartment. I did nothing; who was I to complain, after all? But get this: a well-to-do gentleman, a rightful occupant, woke up and caught sight of this bloke, and proceeded to indignantly berate me for letting him in, knowing full well that I too was in the same category as the new entrant. I could do nothing, except watch in astonishment.

Anyway, this incident was more or less the first thing that came to mind when I read that India and Pakistan were protesting North Korea conducting a nuclear test. What breathtaking hypocrisy!

Here are some 'soothing' sounds from CNN-IBN (these were run as part of the graphics at the bottom of the screen, probably as an attempt to mitigate the hypocrisy):

• Pakistan supplied nuclear technology to N Korea


• Indian nuclear program is wholly indigenous


• If India did not protest, it would be construed that we are supporting N Korea

Nope, I am not convinced.

An eye for an eye

I came across this article about how the Amish are dealing with the shootout in the schoolhouse, about how they are treating the assassin as a human being, offering condolences to his family and helping them cope with the disaster.

Considering how I feel about the clemency petition for Afzal, this got me thinking: is there something wrong with my value system? Is it incorrect to bring an element of vengeance into the whole thing?

The answer to this may be yes, but this does not mean that Afzal's sentence should be commuted. "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind" may make all compendiums of quotable quotes, but there is a more fundamental law at work here: the law of karma, the law of action and reaction. Your reap what you sow.

Thus, though it may be wrong to harbour vengeful feelings towards the terrorist, it is equally wrong to interfere in the natural scheme of things.

One could, of course, argue that the death penalty in this case may be too harsh, but that should be addressed by changes to the penal code and/or the constitution, and not by an outside-the-system decision based on political expediency.

Dumbass quote of the day

The sum of the players is greater than the sum of the team.
-- Commentator's (David Platt?) remark during the England-Macedonia Euro 2008 qualifier, about how England, though it has a lot of great players, does not perform well as a team

That's funny

I get a download speed of about 30 kbps using the Conexant-based ADSL modem in Linux. I used to get 55-60 kbps earlier, but that's another story.

The funny thing is, when I connect to the internet from Windows -- installed as a guest OS using VMWare -- using the VMWare virtual network interface, and the same freaking connection that runs from Linux, I get 65-70 kbps. What am I missing?

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time

For once I am in complete agreement with the folks who write letters to the The Hindu.

If there is one group of countrymen I still have respect for, it's those soldiers who climbed the peaks in Kargil, knowing full well that the odds were stacked against them, and there was a better than even chance that they will not make it back to their bases alive. Requesting clemency for Afzal is akin to spitting on the graves of these soldiers.

Oh but that's not me

I am the fifth biggest fan of Van Halen's Mine All Mine in last.fm.

Methinks it's time to do some creative chart manipulation. Let's see, where can I find documentation on the Audioscrobbler API?

Bloglines podcast enclosures

There seems to be a problem listening to podcast enclosures in Bloglines: the audio plays at a higher-than-normal speed. I discovered this when trying to listen to one of James Robertson's Industry Misinterpretations podcasts recently. The problem is not restricted to Firefox; Opera too seems to be susceptible to this (let me check Konqueror: nope, Konqueror simply displays a link to the whole MP3 file, instead of the embedded Flash thing). I have contacted Bloglines about this.

Update: It looks to be a Flash Player issue. I received this email from Bloglines today (October 12):

Thanks for writing Bloglines regarding the podcast feature.

The Macromedia Flash player has a problem playing files that are encoded at a rate that is not a multiple of 11.025 kHz. This effect is sometimes called the “chipmunk” effect; in other words, the file is played at double speed. To avoid this, encode MP3’s at 11.025 kHz 22.050 kHz or 44.100 kHz.

The E Key

First problem with my Acer 1641: the E key suddenly stopped functioning, unless I pressed it extra-hard. I pried out the key -- man, these things are like chiclets, by the way -- and found that the problem was because of insufficient contact between the key and the rubber thingummy that sends the keystroke to the computer. A small piece of paper wedged between the key and this rubber thing took care of the problem, but the whole incident has brought down my confidence in Acer somewhat.

All right

I'm going to decouple my Robert Fisk articles blog from robert-fisk.com. The owner of that site hasn't updated it for nearly four months, and it doesn't feel right to come across Fisk's articles in Bloglines from other sources like The Independent's RSS feed and not do anything about them.

Now that's how trailers should be made

I have been watching movies on the Sony Pix Channel this week. It all started when I accidentally caught the start of the The Great Train Robbery this Monday. BTW, I loved the double entendre-laced dialogue between Sean Connery and the bank chairman's horny wife, and the reference to the '50 Miles Per Hour Club' -- a sort of pun on the Mile High Club, with steam engine-powered trains chugging along the countryside replacing jets in the sky.

Anyway, there were a lot of promos for other movies on the way, and I was struck by the quality of these promos: instead of splicing together short bits from a number of (memorable?) scenes from the movie, these promos focus on just one scene, interspersed with the details like the director/actors' names. This scene is invariably the scene in the movie, and you end up being impressed enough to catch the movie when its number comes up.

I was so taken in by this approach that I sat through a crappy thing called Krull. I don't know which was worse: a) sitting through the entire movie, or b) actually enjoying some of the cheesy action sequences. Oh well, never mind, The Golden Voyage of Sindbad is on as I type this. Someone, please take away the remote from me.

ISI hand in 7/11 Mumbai blasts, say police

Dudes, I sure hope that you have much more clinching evidence with you, evidence that you are not disclosing at present for whatever reasons, because reading today's lead story in The Hindu leaves me feeling distinctly unconvinced:

All but one of the Pakistanis escaped. He perhaps could not get down from the jam-packed train compartment, and died in the blast at the Khar station. His badly mutilated body remained unclaimed. Mr. Roy said police had got the face reconstructed and conducted DNA tests on the body. Investigators learnt from narco-analysis tests on one of the arrested persons that it was the body of Salim, a resident of Lahore, Pakistan.

Mr. Roy said 11 Pakistani militants in three groups had reached India via three different routes — from Nepal in the north, Bangladesh in the east and from across the Gujarat border with Pakistan. One Pakistani died in an encounter with the police at Antop Hill shortly after the July 11 blasts. Nine of the 11 escaped and might have left the country.

You better have something more concrete to confront the Pakistanis with, as they are going to laugh you out of the door otherwise (they don't call it "plausible deniability" for nothing).

By the way:

1. I wonder what the "narco-analysis tests" were. Hypnosis? Truth serum?


2. To the presstitutes: please stop calling every bombing incident 7/11, 12/13, etc. For one thing, India follows the day/month format. Secondly, it reeks of attempting to shamelessly warm yourself in the embers of the American 9/11.

Movie Review: The Hills Have Eyes

Shocking and disturbing.

No, I don't use these words to describe the use of so much gore and violence in the movie. It's shocking and disturbing that I spent Rs 150 and wasted a perfectly fine evening -- I took off early from work, for God's sake -- on this piece of sh*t of a movie.

I don't care how faithful the prodigy director has been to Wes Craven's classic, and even bettered Craven's effort, if some horror movie buffs in IMDB.com are to be believed, or how original and uncliched his rendition is. All I know is that I spent the last half an hour so laughing my ass off at the way the story unfolded, and wondering whether it would sink any lower, and laughing even more as it did.

So this was the jumping-the-shark moment in Friends

I was watching one of the 'Best of Friends' episodes last night, the one where Joey 'pretends' that he speaks French. At the very end of the episode, when the credits are rolling by, he proves to Phoebe that he can really drink a gallon of milk in ten seconds, and makes a right royal ass of himself (and the entire show) by proceeding to drench himself in milk.

People, it's not an either/or choice!

Vajpayee on Musharraf's book:

The former Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on Tuesday said the Agra Summit of 2001 failed because Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf refused to accept terrorism as the cause of bloodshed in Jammu and Kashmir, insisting that it was a result of the people's battle for freedom.

I think it is incorrect to think that freedom fighters cannot be terrorists. Just because the phrase "freedom fighter" brings to our mind great people like Mahatma Gandhi and Subhash Chandra Bose, it seems to get our goats when we hear terrorists referred to as freedom fighters. A terrorist is someone who kills innocent civilians in order to attain a political objective. Going by this definition, a terrorist who kills civilians belonging to an 'occupying' country in order to attain the objective of removing the occupier is very much a freedom fighter, never mind whether the quest for freedom is legitimate or not.

Have you seen this man?

He's in his late forties, has a two-day stubble, and has bloodshot eyes. He's probably drunk, or is just getting out of his hangover. His clothes, though not ragged, are well-worn.

But he's not just an average joe; there's something in his face that sets him apart, an innate intelligence or cunning. He's the one sitting idly in the tea shop and passing knowledgeable comments as someone reads out the day's stories from the paper. He's someone who's fallen on hard times, probably because of his drinking. Talk to him, and you'll find that he's very articulate, maybe even in English. But beware, he's very likely to impress you with his language and sophistication, and touch you for whatever you can spare him.

Why am I blathering on about this person, you ask? No reason, except that I saw a person fitting this profile a couple of days ago, and this triggered a train of thoughts; one incident in particular, when I was conned out of five bucks by such a person (he claimed to be blind or something, I forget).

Anyway, you can't help but like this person, scoundrel though he may be. He's the guy who's wasted his life looking for quick deals, the hottest racing tip that nobody else knows. He has burnt his fingers quite a few times, and is cynical as hell. Life has passed him by, in all probability, but he's still out there, keeping a lookout for an opportunity, a mark, while all he's certain about is the temporary relief he feels every night as the booze hits home, if only he could hustle the money for it by six o'clock...

Too disgusted to think of a title

A person gets admitted to hospital because of a brain hemorrhage. The hospital has two choices:

1. Operate on the hemorrhage


2. Give the man a haircut

Which option should it choose? Well, if the hospital were anything like the Tamil Nadu government, it will be option 2:

Next, these tribals will be able to use (a) motor to draw water from the well, build toilets and improve hygiene. Their children will be encouraged to spend more time with books and their overall living will improve.

The above comment is from a bureaucrat, who's talking about how some remote hamlets in the state have gotten to see a light bulb for the first time in their lives because the government wanted them to be able to enjoy their free television sets.

What breakthrough?

I really cannot understand what the fuss is all about. India and Pakistan have agreed to resume talks, that's all. Call me a cynic, but nothing on the ground is going to change; we have been down this road too many times. This is just a ploy by both countries to pretend to be moving somewhere while all they're doing is just running on the same spot.

Update: Do they take us all for idiots? "NAM totally opposed to terrorism", says a declaration. Oh goody, we can all go home now. The terrorists have been defeated.

Now I know why Intel is struggling

From their ad in today's Hindu:

[Intel Core 2 Duo Processor] automates routine tasks like billing. And lets you keep track of which clients have paid.

Either Intel have added accounting capabilities to their chips, or they are counting on the cluelessness of their customers and are deliberately misleading them into thinking that their chips have capabilities not present in their competitors' products. Either way, they don't come out smelling of roses.

Circularly Defined Word of the Day

From today's Dictionary.com Word of the Day:

inhere: to be inherent.

Tell me something

How is talking on a hands-free mobile phone while driving different from talking to the passenger in the car? Aren't both equally distracting?

Friedman's at it again

There was absolutely no reason for the Hezbollah attack on July 12 across the UN-recognised Israel-Lebanon border, in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two abducted.

and

If Hezbollah could just attack Israel -- unprovoked -- claiming among its goals the liberation of Jerusalem, and using missiles provided by the Iranian regime that says Israel should be wiped off the face of the map, then it was a war about everything.

Comments:

1. Did the abduction of the Israeli soldiers really happen across the border?


2. Is it really fair to call the "attack" unprovoked, when hundreds of Lebanese people are languishing in Israeli prisons, and the abductions were a way to negotiate for their release?


3. I was under impression that the "wipe Israel off the face of the map" phrase was shown by Juan Cole to be an inaccurate translation?

To give credit where it's due, at least Friedman recognises that

Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon are unsustainable.

I don't even know why I still read his column.

Two specific instances

...of our netas taking advantage of loopholes in the system:

1. Contesting an assembly election as an independent while being a Rajya Sabha member of a political party


2. A state assembly speaker sitting on a decision to disqualify two MLAs for 18 months because he wanted to protect the government

Both instances can be avoided by amending the concerned law, but do you think these scumbags will ever allow that?

And to think that people bristle at even the idea that Kalam could have used the 'hey-no-hurry-take-your-own-time' option to stall the Office of Profit Bill indeterminately.

Joke of the day

From a post in COLA:

> If I want to create a distro called
> "Death to the Infidel Linux"
> I should be allowed.

It already exists.
It's called Microsoft Vista.

This is not funny

From a letter to The Hindu:

New Delhi, Varanasi, Mumbai, and now Malegaon. The incidents are the same, so is the reaction. Only the people who deliver the dialogues are different. The Chief Minister concerned calls for a high-level meeting, condemns the blasts, and declares ex-gratia for the family of the dead and the injured. Visits by the Union Home Minister, the Prime Minister, and the President follow. The Prime Minister says no power on earth can divide the country, that the culprits would be arrested, and that the people should remain calm. News channels make merry. They offer to talk to anyone who is ready to offer an opinion. After about a month, the incident is forgotten.

I agree with all this, but would like to add one more thing to this: people write insightful letters about the incident to newspapers.

(Maybe two things: people also write blog posts about it)

Blah blah blah blah?.............Bah!

"...business service supply that meets the demand created by the agile business facing solution delivery environment"
-- From an article on SOA

(Yeah, like I'm really going to link to the article)

Seaside

While digging through the archives in my work PC yesterday, I found that I was in possession of VisualWorks 7.1 install files; I promptly installed VW, and as I was sitting there, idly wondering what to do with it, the 'enterprisey' side of me told me I should check out Seaside. I googled for a tutorial, and spent the next half hour going through it. Impressed with what I saw, I resolved to dig deeper, and came home and downloaded Squeak. Mistake; Squeak fonts look crappy in my Linux (OpenSuSE 10.1) box.

I turned my attention to VisualWorks. I managed to run the sample counter application in my browser, but not before some pain: you need the SeasideForWebToolkit parcel to install Seaside. This depends on the WebToolkit parcel, which in turn depends (among others) on the Regex11 and Opentalk-CGI parcels.

While I agree that managing these dependencies is not all that difficult, especially for someone used to Linux package management, a mechanism that automatically downloads and loads these parcels -- a la apt-get -- would definitely have eased the way. This was particularly apparent when I couldn't determine where I could get Regex11 (BTW, I ran into Isaac Gouy's post asking the same question -- hi Isaac); I took a guess (correctly, it turned out) and downloaded the Contributed.tar.gz file.

OK, now when I try to exit VisualWorks, I get a 'Message not understood' for some method called 'clearPageCache'. Not happy.

Update: Tried Squeak again. Fonts don't look that crappy now, for some reason. More importantly, Squeak's package management -- SqueakMap -- is more in line with what I mentioned above. I was able to download and install Seaside and its depedencies with no fuss. Nice.

Free insurance cover for tourists

This has got to be one of the more hare-brained schemes our beloved bureaucrats have pulled out of their asses. I can very well imagine a prospective tourist saying, "Honey, where shall we go for our annual vacation this year? Hmm... let me see...look, free insurance of Rs 10 lacs if we are killed by a terrorist bomb while boating in Dal Lake... sounds like a good deal... imagine, if both of us get our asses blown up, our kids will get 20 lac rupees! Talk about a no-brainer!"

It's different this time

Here's an excerpt from the preface to "Understanding Enterprise SOA" (don't even ask how I ended up reading this book):

Clearly there was merit in bringing the market back to earth. Valuations were high and rounds of venture capital funding, rather than business models, were sustaining many poorly conceived companies. But had the "irrational exuberance" been wholly irrational? The answer will surprise many: the initial optimism was justified. In fact the potential had been understated. As we will explore in this book, the fruition of the Internet's promise is coming and the resulting value creation will dwarf even the boldest estimates of the past.

Translation: You mean the Rolex I sold you three years back was a dud? Never mind, we'll settle that later. In the meantime, why don't you look at this fantastic deal I've got for you? It's a bridge in ...

Socialism

Today I saw something familiar on my way to work: a crew of about eight workmen from the Electricity Board, pushing a trolley/wheelbarrow, on their way to perform some repair work. They were a very relaxed and happy bunch, with hands on each other's shoulders, cracking jokes and generally pleased with their lot.

Nothing wrong with this scene, except for the fact that, when they reach their spot, not more than two or three of them will roll up their sleeves and get down to work. The remaining five will undertake the following tasks:

1. Smoking


2. Providing words of encouragement to the ones actually doing the work


3. Criticising the way the work is performed


4. Relieving themselves behind some nearby bushes

Meanwhile, back at the 'headquarters', their supervisor is probably on his way to his first break of the day, not even aware of where all the buggers have disappeared to.

It's official

Joel is just trolling for hits.

I am going to continue reading his stuff, not because of the quality of his writing, but for the feelings he evokes: admiration for the cool way he runs a business, his entrepreneurial spirit, and the sense of freedom and joy one feels when visiting his web site (I especially like the panoramic pictures at the top) .

This is really starting to bug me

This is the third time that sound has simply died in Kubuntu. No error messages, no warnings, nothing.

I have a feeling it's just the volume being turned down to zero because of some package update, but both KMix and ALSAMixer indicate otherwise.

Now I know how Robin Williams' character felt

... in Good Will Hunting.

I am an average IITian. I am not the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. My net worth is nothing to write home about. I have not won any awards, either for my distinguished career, or for my efforts for the betterment of mankind.

Having said that, I still consider it fscking demeaning that a billionaire alumnus will contribute an amount to the alumni growth fund, an amount that will match the sum total of all the contributions other 'ordinary' IITians will make, provided that they do so by a certain deadline. It's almost like saying "Ha! Is that all you plebes could come up with? Watch me match it from my loose change".

The true way of showing gratitude and affection for your alma mater is to write a cheque, for an amount that you arrive at on your own, without indulging in any one-upmanship or putting down others.

Dish TV, get your act together

I have ranted about Dish TV in the past, and they have improved their customer interface somewhat, but it's still nowhere near good enough.

They recently took to airing Star channels, but the channels are off the air now. Regular subscribers have been promised that they can get Star channels for free till December if they renew their subscription pronto. Having gotten used to seeing Seinfeld and Cheers again, I went to their web site to renew my subscription.

Long story short:

1. The site's usability still rates -19 on a scale of 1 to 10.


2. There is no option for renewing your subscription if the subscription is not due already. If you want, you can 'update' your package (but I don't want to do that; didn't you guys tell me I can get the Star channels without an update or upgrade till December?)


3. Alright, let me bite the bullet and try an update: but I don't see the Star channels (Star Movies, Star World) anywhere in the listed packages. Methinks the web site is lagging behind the rest of Dish TV's marketing campaign.


4. The way the online display of your transactions is designed leads me to this age-old question: what prompts otherwise normal human beings to commit such unspeakable acts of cruelty on their fellow men?

This list is by no means complete, BTW. I could go on and on, but let them figure out at least some things on their own.

Natwarji, please STFUji

None of us gives a rat's ass what you think.

Hitler's Cross

What a moron.

Unless, of course, he's way ahead of us and has been gunning for this publicity all along.

Observation

Reddit : Digg == Slashdot : Kuro5hin

I unsubscribed from Digg quite a while ago, not on account of any shenanigans that I perceived, but because a) it had too many stories, with a very low signal/noise ratio -- at least for me b) the stories seemed to be slanted more towards sensationalism and somehow getting a visitor to have a look at them and c) quite a few of the submissions were really old ones, reminding one of the Eternal September.

Funny Firefox bug

Happens only in Windows, at work, so I'm not really bothered about it:

When I try to open a link in a new tab by clicking the mouse scroll wheel, nothing happens till I move the mouse, even if only by a fraction of a millimeter. If I don't do this, Firefox simply sits there, looking at me dumbly, and not doing anything about my request, till I say Alright, you win and tap the mouse ever so slightly.

Interesting discussion

over at the RI Forum about libertarianism.

As I am reading the thread, I feel like a spectator at a tennis match, turning my head this way and that, following the path of the ball. I used to think libertarianism had its positive aspects and was a good thing in general, but now I'm not so sure. The quality of the debate is such that I find myself nodding my head in agreement to the arguments from both camps. As with most questions in life, the answer seems to be a mix of "It depends", "Yes, but only as long as one doesn't take it to its extreme", "No, but there are other mitigating circumstances", etc. In short, nothing is black and white.

Dad will pay

Thomas Friedman on the Lebanon crisis:

Hezbollah and Iran are like a couple of rich college students who rented Lebanon for the summer, as if it were a beach house. "Come on, let's smash up the place," they said to themselves. "Who cares? Dad will pay!" The only thing Nasarallah didn't say to the Lebanese was "Hey, keep the change."

Comments:

1. I am not clear how "a certain amount of money for every family to rent for one year, plus buy furniture for those whose homes were totally destroyed" translates to $3 billion, when the total number of families "number 15,000".


2. Hezbollah is a 100% local resistance, who do not simply visit Lebanon on vacation. As Seema Mustafa points out, they stand shoulder to shoulder with those providing relief to the affected families. If the Lebanese don't really support Hezbollah, don't you think they would have asked Hezbollah to cease and desist their activities long ago?

Excuse me, Mr Driver, but are you sure this is really the 21st Century?

Two news items:

1. Jats to protest against Natwar's "ill-treatment"


2. Mahim seawater draws big crowds

Here's a suggestion

Instead of holding something like the South Asian Games, where there is a small probability that one of the minnows we beat the crap out of refuse to stick to the script and end up winning a few medals, why don't we conduct the Indian Games, where the only participant is Bharat, and we can -- golly -- win *all* the medals?

The Premier League has kicked off

... and the matches are in full swing. If somebody had told me yesterday that I would be home, but instead of watching the action, the TV would be off, I'd be listening to One and Don't Cry and Estranged, and wishing that I were stone drunk, I'd have told them they were full of sh*t.

'Cause I see the storm getting closer
And the waves they get so high
Seems everything we've ever known's here
Why must it drift away and die

Quote of the day

"If there is a problem between a weak nation and another weak nation and the UN takes action, the problem disappears. If there is a problem between a strong nation and a weak nation and the UN takes action, the weak nation disappears. If there is a problem between a strong nation and a strong nation and the UN takes action, the UN disappears."
-- Carlos Romulo, former president of the UN General Assembly

What?!!

Question posed to the wise ones at The Hindu's Science and Technology department today:

Why does the colour of urine vary from light to bright yellow when we do not drink water for a long time?

Some people have waaay too much free time on their hands.

Come to think of it, maybe not as much time as the bozos at the paper who have actually decided to take this question seriously and have wasted about eight inches of newsprint to answer it. I didn't bother to read the answer, but I can guess it probably has to do with the chemical changes in one's body as one sits and thinks of idiotic questions to pose to newspapers' science desks.

Here's a shoutout

... to aabeirah :-)

Hmmm....

Maybe there is some merit to my rambling.

How NOT to install OpenSUSE 10.1 in 20 Steps

1. Download only CD #1 of the five-CD set, hoping you can wing it.


2. Boot from CD.


3. When it's partitioning time, delete the existing Kubuntu swap partition, thinking that you can fool Kubuntu into using the new swap partition that is going to be created for Suse.


4. Realise the folly of Step #1 when the installer demands to have access to CDs #2 and #3.


5. Abort installation of software and keep fingers crossed as the system reboots.


6. Pleasant surprise as system somehow manages to boot, albeit into a minimal FVVM desktop.


7. Install Conexant driver (this is becoming a real breeze, nowadays).


8. Realise that the minimal installation doesn't contain any web browser.


9. Pat yourself on the back as you use wget to download index.html from www.getfirefox.com and determine the Firefox Linux download URL by parsing this file.


10. Download and install Firefox.


11. Use Firefox and Google to find out how to add online installation sources for Suse 10.1.


12. Fire up YAST and try to repeatedly add these URLs, but fail each time, with either the 'Adding Catalog' dialog box hanging, or nothing happening on clicking 'Finish'.


13. See if you can at least go back to Kubuntu, after tweaking it's /etc/fstab to use Suse's swap partition: nope; see Step #3.


14. Go back to Suse 10.1 and download the mini ISO.


15. Find that cdrecord (downloaded separately) complains that it cannot find /dev/pg*.


16. Boot from both Kubuntu and Knoppix Live CDs and realize that thinking that you can get K3B from a Live CD to burn CDs is, well, dumb.


17. Reinstall Kubuntu in a new partition.


18. Burn the mini ISO from the new Kubuntu install.


19. Boot from mini ISO and realise that it expects a freaking network connection before showing me a root prompt, dashing all my hopes of installing the Conexant driver and then proceeding with the Internet install.


20. Make the new Kubuntu install my new home and proceed to spend the whole day customising it and installing all my favourite software. Sigh.

Movie Review: Cars

Cars is a delightful movie. Animation that is so good that you almost mistake it for the real thing sometimes, great drama, endearing characters, a wistful reminder of the Norman Rockwell times, a good story -- cocky, unwelcome outsider and a bunch of suspicious locals who nonetheless develop respect and love towards each other (I know it's clichéd, but still) -- all in all, more than worth the price of the ticket. Oh, forgot to mention this: there are no humans in the story; it's all cars.

And to think I almost didn't get to see the movie, thinking it would be yet another syrupy piece of crap.

Dial A Diaper

You are holding your baby on your lap, cooing to her gently, and the baby, overcome with the sheer joy of your cooing, does what babies do best. You crinkle your nose, lift the baby up and place her on the rubber sheet. You then clean her up, and reach for the Shmuggles pack (or whatever the heck these things are called) and oops, you find that you're out of diapers. What do you do?

You dial for a diaper, of course.

I'm not making this up. I saw a van yesterday cheerfully proclaiming to answer just these kinds of calls.

Kubuntu screwed me over

I'll try a haiku this time:

libasound.so
Where art thou? Try reinstall
Half of KDE gone.

Alright, I admit, there's one extra syllable, but I'm too pissed off to care. There was not even a peep from Kubuntu that so many dependent packages will be uninstalled as well. I'm off to download Suse 10.1. Since I moved to an unlimited download plan with Airtel, at least I don't have to worry about my broadband bill.

How refreshingly different would it be if

... an actor/singer, instead of saying:

<insert name of film/album here> is very different from my earlier work

says something like this:

It's the same old crap. What? You expect me to come up with something new and magical everytime? Do you really think I'm a creative genius or that my producer would allow me to wander away from the tried-and-tested path? Why should I even try when I know there are hordes of die-hard fans (read sheep) who have left their senses way behind and continue to watch/listen to my stuff out of sheer sentimentality? Oh wait, come to think of it, this is different; this is my 37th movie/album, while the previous one was, let me think ... yeah, my previous one was my 36th.

This rant was the result of watching yet another performer lamely trying to promote his latest PoS on TV.

Linux security in action?

I know that this is pretty trivial, but thought I'd mention it all the same.

I downloaded the binary installer for Poseidon 4.2 and attempted to run it by opening a bash shell and retrieving the file using the shell's auto-complete feature. But the shell couldn't locate the file for some reason. Then it struck me: if you are trying to execute a file, the shell will not bring it up unless the file has its execute bit set, which, in this case, wasn't so, in order to prevent malicious programs (especially those downloaded from the Internet) from executing. Neat.

Or is it Firefox which sets the file permissions during the download?