NDTV, how low can you get?

Don't you scumbags have any shame? What was the need to show movie scenes involving dancing eunuchs in the story about the athlete caught in the middle of the gender controversy?

99 Lisp Problems

I recently ran across this list of Lisp problems and added it to my 'rainy-days' link bin. One afternoon, as I was aimlessly reading posts in the JoS forum (hey, go easy on me; the proxy server at work blocks Google Groups, so I don't have much choice by way of internet entertainment), my conscience piped in that I was slacking off too much, and I decided to assuage it by trying out some of these problems. Once I did a couple of them, my interest in all things Lispy was rekindled.

It's been three days now, and I am at #27. A Lisp hacker will probably cringe at the way I've solved some of the problems, but what the hell, I'm having too much fun to care.

Reddit problems in Bloglines

The Reddit feed in Bloglines has not been updated for three days now. Let me try unsubscribing and resubscribing...Yup, that did the trick, but only partly: I am now able to see eight new items, but they are, like, a week old. I know that the problem is specific to Bloglines because Google Reader shows me the new items without a hitch.

Quote of the day

You probably should realize you're doing something wrong when people engage in long debates whether you should be compared with Nazi Germany or Apartheid South Africa.
-- xymphora

You know you are anal

...when you find the thought of directly pressing the little red button on your mobile phone abhorrent, and instead always press the 'Back' button 17 times to return to the main menu.

These are the times

... when you wish you had gone with PostgreSQL.

We received an email from Oracle saying that we either had to renew our support contract with them or else terminate the license altogether (and thereby lose the ability to run our production database) because we had a master contract covering other applications in our enterprise, and our decision not to renew the support contract for this application was in violation of this master contract.

The best part is that we are using the database as a plain vanilla data store; no -- ahem -- leveraging of advanced Oracle features.

Jurassic Prick

From The Independent:

Crowley said he was "strangely flattered". "If someone offers substantive criticism of an author, and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he's conceding that the critic has won."

Couldn't agree more.

Diana's death ruled an accident

If you go only by what you read in the papers, things would seem pretty cut and dried, but reading up on what has been posted in the RI Board throws up a whole new side to the controversy. There are so many unexplained things that I think we are not being told the whole truth.

Amen to that

This post by 'yesferatu' in the RI discussion board is probably the most insightful post I've read in a forum:

I do believe that is where this is headed. 9/11 facts and converts will double, and then some. They seem to be aware continued warmongering on a grand scale is not a workable diversion, since the needed draft would open up problems they do not want to anticipate. The diversion of individual economic survival will be the taser they use to keep us in line. Of course, when the immediate concern of financial survival stretches from weeks, and then months, and then years, they will still have a revolt brewing. But they will juggle the crises so that pressure is allowed to vent before any idea of uprisings, with a ready-made fresh diversion to take the place. My guess is this is their long term plan, till that time when 9/11 is history from another time, just like JFK, or the Tet ofensive [sic] is history from another time. After just a couple decades, amerikans stop caring anyway. The PTB are quite apt at shuffling and juggling these things till, lo and behold, twenty-five years has come and gone....without any challenge from the mythical "We the People", even though for that twenty-five years the facts of an evil government ruling them, amasses its proofs day after day. And yet with no rebellion.
But yes, the next diversion is financial. After that, something else, even though by then not 1/3, but probably 2/3 will accept that 9/11 was an inside job. Yet each diversion will be just enough to prevent justice and the avenging anger required. But this will happen. In the near future we will pick up the paper with a story that tells us 2/3 of us believe it was an inside job. And yet somehow we will be little islands to ourselves, unable to coagulate the 2/3 into any kind of democratic retaliation and reform.
Sickening. But true.

One down, 200 million to go

Recently a friend of mine mentioned that he wanted to download and try out Linux, so I made copies of my Kubuntu 6.06 and SuSE 10.1 CDs and sent them to him. I have also offered to help him with the installation. Let's see how it goes.

Economic storm brewing in America

There's an article in The Telegraph predicting disastrous times ahead for the American -- and hence global -- economy. These kinds of doomsday stories have been doing the rounds since I cannot remember when, but the thing that struck me the most about this one was the very high quality of the comments the story elicited from readers. It almost seems as if any of the insightful commenters could have done a better job of writing the story than the actual author.

Joke of the day

We are a sovereign country.
-- Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq

Uh oh

A couple of days ago I developed a yearning for some music I grew up listening to: in particular, two guys (playing insipid music) calling themselves a name that aptly summarised the way their band imploded.

Note to self: remember to switch audio scrobbling off when listening to Wham!

Cheesy government ads

Recently there was a series of newspaper ads run by the central government for raising public awareness about preserving our monuments. The theme was to depict some unthinking persons littering/vandalising/spitting inside a heritage building, and a group of goody two-shoes kids pointing at them and saying something disdainful.

All the ads -- four, if I remember correctly -- were incredibly cheesy, but the last one in the series took the gold medal: a man spitting on a monument wall. I guess they erred on the side of making their point, rather than going for realism. Here's a clue: when somebody spits paan on a wall, he doesn't disgorge something like half a litre in one shot, unless said person is also so far gone that he's vomiting blood (I'd have liked to scan the ad and post it, but my scanner isn't playing ball).

Speaking of gold medals, I was about to post something about North Korea getting more golds than us at the Asian Games, but mercifully we have overtaken them. Rhetorical question of the day: how is a country that is ravaged by international isolation, famine, lack of development, and rule by an eccentric dictator able to do better than (or at least as well as) us?

Waiter, there's a lizard on my keyboard

"Your search - lizard on lizard - did not match any documents." Better luck next time, little guy.

Excuse me?

Why is Gmail running these ads when there is no mention of the word 'bra' (seriously; I kid thee not) in my email?

Noam Chomsky

I was under the impression that Chomsky's books are well referenced, but this is not so, according to Jeffrey Blankfort:

As a matter of fact, there was an article on Counterpunch by someone from Harvard, who complained that Chomsky's books were not being reviewed by serious, scholarly journals. And I wrote this guy back and said, Chomsky's very lucky because nobody who writes thirty books in thirty years would be considered a serious scholar. A serious book requires a lot of time and research, and Chomsky hasn't done that. And when I decided to do an article called "Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict," I didn't realize what a snake pit it is when you're trying to investigate what Chomsky has written because it's more self-referential than a good scholarly work should be. So what happens is that you're reading in a book of his, and you go back to a footnote, it will often refer to another book he's written.

Puzzle

This puzzle has been sitting in my feed items list for quite a while now. I keep resolving to spend some time on it, but haven't yet had a chance to give it a serious shot.

Staying on the subject of animals

My beloved rats have gone on to a higher level. They have now taken to hijacking whole bars of soap from the bathroom for their dinner. I can't for the life of me imagine what kind of nutrition they derive from soap bars, though.

I replaced the bar of soap with a king-size bar. It looks like their soapy diet hasn't made them stronger; incapable of lugging the larger bar, they have taken to eating at the restaurant instead of ordering take-aways: I found a couple of rodent teeth marks on the bar today.

Hope I don't turn into Ratman.

Tale of two animals

On my way to work today morning, a cow started crossing the road in front of me. It looked at my car, quickly ran some time/distance calculations in its brain and decided that it wouldn't make it across the road at its current leisurely pace. It put its foot on the pedal, as it were, and got safely to the other side.

Two seconds after I finished admiring the animal's intelligence, another animal, a biped on a motorcycle this time, cut across my path from the left and proceeded to make a right turn, forcing me to brake in order to avoid hitting it.

Oops, I did it again

Paid twice for an online bill, that is.

This time it was with Airtel. The first payment was through my credit card; the transaction was not approved for some reason. I waited a day, and made the payment again, this time through my bank account. Later, while reconciling my credit card statement, to my shock, bewilderment, astonishment, and indignation (who am I kidding? I half expected this to happen), I found an entry corresponding to the 'failed' payment.

Airtel has excellent customer service. It took just one phone call for them to acknowledge the double payment and assure me that the second payment would be adjusted against my next bill.

Pimping your column

Memo to The Hindu: stop wasting valuable space on piddling product reviews. It reflects poorly on the integrity of your journalists when they start gushing about the virtues of a camera when there are so many other interesting things to write about.

What lousy infrastructure?

I made a trip to Bangalore by car this week. It's been a while since I took the road route, and the transformation was quite amazing; there was not a single pothole or bump on the entire stretch, and the drive was a very pleasant change from the ordeals these trips usually are.

Here's a way

... to prevent desecration of statues and the rioting that follows: stop putting up these statues at every frigging street corner.

Movie Review: Casino Royale

Let me count the number of ways the new Bond is different from his predecessors:

1. He has the physique of a body builder.


2. He's not debonaire or suave ("How would you like your martini, sir? Shaken or stirred?" "I don't give a damn").


3. He gets a testicular whipping from the bad guys.


4. He doesn't get to use any of the gadgets in the car that has been placed at his disposal (not counting the medical kit).


5. He is more in touch with his emotional side.

Casino Royale is a very watchable movie just for these things. The poker game brought to mind Enter the Dragon -- competitors from all over the world assembling at the villain's lair (sort of), the presence of a friendly American, etc.

I have only one nit to pick: maybe I'm missing something, but with all the sophisticated means available to transfer money electronically, what was the need to do a physical handover at the climax?

Zen Koan

The Koan

The master took a piece of chalk and drew a line on the floor. He then said to the disciple, "How will you make this line shorter?" After thinking for a while, the disciple said, "I'd rub out a portion of it".

The master shook his head. He then bent down and drew another line, parallel to the first one, but longer.

On seeing this, the disciple grabbed hold of the master and threw him against the wall of the monastery.

The master was enlightened.

Commentary

"I have been your disciple for ten years. I have waited on you hand and foot, have cooked for you, have washed your clothes, have swept the monastery all this time, without a word of complaint. During these ten years, not even once have you condescended to teach me The Way. When you called me to your quarters today, I was ecstatic, thinking that I was finally going to be initiated into the Noble Path. Instead, you ask me to solve a puzzle, a puzzle that legions of people know the answer to, either by virtue of having spent their Saturday afternoons watching B-grade karate flicks or by reading enlightened blogs. At first, I thought I'd be clever and ask you 'Shorter than what?', but decided against it. Who knew, venerated master that you are, maybe you had a trick up your sleeve, after all. But oh no, I was giving you too much credit. Come to think of it, I should have seen the signs when you simply waved your hand disdainfully and said 'Cow' when I asked you about Mu.

"And dude, BTW, do something about your B.O."

(Apologies to Joe Hyams)

These are the days

The weather in Chennai sucks most of the time, except for a couple of months after the monsoon, i.e. right about now. The monsoon season is not yet officially over, but I think we are done with the rains, at least for the time being.

Pleasant afternoons, clear blue skies, the warmth of the sun on your face, mellow thoughts, nothing to hurry you, at peace with yourself, catching the pretty young girl's eye, no hints, no promises, nothing, thinking *This* is life, so very mundane, yet so very special.

Robert Fisk on the Gemayel assassination

From the very last paragraph in the essay:

For if only the Lebanese stopped putting their faith in foreigners - the Americans, the Israelis, the British, the Iranians, the French, the United Nations - and trusted each other instead, they would banish the nightmares of civil war sealed inside Pierre Gemayel's coffin.

I'd like to think that the omission of Syria from the list of foreigners is accidental, but I don't think it is. Anyway, I've pretty much given up trying to understand or analyse why things happen the way they do in the Middle East. It sure makes for some intriguing reading, but you get nowhere.

Bring out the champagne

Last July I cancelled an Air Deccan ticket because the flight was delayed by eight hours (!) and I resolved never to fly with them again. The fact that there was no sight of the refund all this while also rankled me (I know you guys are a low-cost airline, but does that mean you don't even have enough money to pay for a higher mail server disk quota? I'm talking about all the bounced emails I sent you).

I finally got the refund today. I'm somewhat mollified, but I'm not sure whether this is enough for me to consider them as a travel option again. I have had a decent experience with them earlier, so I may end up giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Got to hand it to you guys

I've seen my share of bad ads, but the 'e-Serve is now Citigroup Global Services' one with the guy who goes into a little girl's nursery and annoys her is, undoubtedly, absolutely the worst ad I've ever seen. Dudes, what were you smoking?

Smalltalk to the rescue

Well, it finally took Smalltalk to find out the answer to yesterday's question.

It's enough to simply raise the exception in the method that implements the web service API. ActionWebService takes care of converting this exception into a SOAP fault message.

Five lines of code in the VisualWorks workspace was all it took:

wsdlClient := WsdlClient new loadFrom: 'http://localhost:3000/hello/service.wsdl' asURI.
soapRequest := SoapRequest new.
soapRequest port: wsdlClient config anyPort.
soapRequest smalltalkEntity: (Message selector: #Hello ).
soapResponse := soapRequest value.

Executing this snippet produced a Smalltalk exception; step into the debugger, inspect the transportEntity object, and see the SOAP fault message in all its glory.

ActionWebService question

How do I create and return fault messages from the class implementing the web service API? Do I just raise my own exceptions, and the runtime takes care of the rest?

I tried to figure this out by invoking my web service from a) a WSIF dynamic invoker sample class and b) from Ruby's own SOAP client. In the first case I hit a WSIF exception, and I was not sure whether the problem was with the WSIF code or with the way I was just throwing my exception without doing anything, well, SOAPy with it. In the second case, the exception was simply propagated along the SOAP client's call stack. Oh, and using the 'invoke' scaffolding option just throws the runtime error in the browser [*].

The RoR documentation needs to be a lot more organised. I see something like api_method in the ActionWebService::API:Base class, and go to the documentation page, hoping to figure out an answer to my question. Instead, I find that I can't even locate the class there. Throw in modules and mixins, and I don't even know where I should be looking. JDK documentation it sure ain't.

[*] Come to think of it, all successful calls to web service methods using the 'invoke' option produce nice SOAP response XMLs, so if I were doing things correctly, even the error scenario should have produced a response XML, albeit with a fault message (Update: I was wrong; it does).

Shadows of the mind

Horrible prose. I'm just on page 26, and I simply cannot see myself finishing this book. The content may be excellent, but if it's going to take me as much effort to even parse the sentences as to understand the deep logic behind them, sorry, no go. Here's a sample:

I shall need to start by describing some examples of classes of well-defined mathematical problems that -- in a sense I shall explain in a moment -- have no general computational solution.

Taken by itself, I agree that this is not so complicated, but if I were the editor, I would have insisted on something along the lines of

I'll need to start with some math problems that have no general computational solution.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it? Also notice how easier it is on the brain. You just have to let go of the irrational fear that some lawyer is going through the text with a magnifying glass, and is just waiting to trip you up because you said something which you didn't back up in the same fricken sentence.

Now that's what I call a rip-off

A box of 50 blank Moser Baer CD-Rs at Fabmall costs Rs 750 (add Rs 60 for shipping), while the same thing is available at the local computer store for Rs 480. The price might be even lower now; this is what I paid a year ago.

Rant

What is usually a 40-minute drive became a 90-minute ordeal for me today evening, because of a detour and a number of traffic jams.

This is just a rhetorical question, but I'll ask it anyway: how can two stretches of the same road that carry the same traffic load respond differently to the monsoon rains, with one holding strong and servicing its users satisfactorily, while the other one disintegrates completely?

The 'Aha!' moment

I guess it had to happen at some point, given the amount of time I've been spending with Ruby.

The ease with which I exposed the ActiveRecord objects' functionality as a web service was what did it for me. Staying 100% inside Ruby code, no mucking around with XML schemas and WSDLs, nothing. I am impressed.

Word

This is from a really old essay, but I couldn't agree with this passage more:

The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts--the only medium--that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media (the richer tourists at Disney World wear t-shirts printed with the names of famous designers, because designs themselves can be bootlegged easily and with impunity. The only way to make clothing that cannot be legally bootlegged is to print copyrighted and trademarked words on it; once you have taken that step, the clothing itself doesn't really matter, and so a t-shirt is as good as anything else. T-shirts with expensive words on them are now the insignia of the upper class. T-shirts with cheap words, or no words at all, are for the commoners).

Word.

Just what the doctor ordered

An easier way to send mobile spam.

Bloglines problem?

Bloglines hasn't updated any of my feeds since this morning. If I continue with Google Reader for much longer, I might start liking it enough to consider a permanent switch.

ActiveRecord (criminal) gotcha

My foray into ActiveRecord started with this simple bit of code:

require 'active_record'

class Message < ActiveRecord::Base

  establish_connection(:adapter => "oci",
  :username => "someuser",
  :password => "somepasswd",
  :host => "somehost")

  set_table_name "MESSAGE"
  set_primary_key "MESSAGE_ID"
  set_sequence_name "SEQ_MESSAGE"

end

msg = Message.new(:name => "Test message")
msg.save

Very straightforward, no reason why it shouldn't work, but it didn't: Oracle kept complaining that I was supplying the MESSAGE_ID column twice. No amount of tweaking, googling and tearing out my hair got me anywhere, and I lost nearly a whole day because of this. Finally, out of sheer desperation, I changed "MESSAGE_ID" to lower case.

Nirvana.

(I'm not even going to ask why upper case table names are OK, while upper case column names are not)

What's up with Blogger?

Blogger's posting interface is behaving weirdly all of a sudden. No Preview option, none of the usual buttons for hyperlinks, spellcheck, etc. [Update: The problem is with Firefox (see a pattern here?). Opera displays the page perfectly]

I downloaded Bleezer and BloGTK (I've tried the second one a long while ago), but couldn't get either of them to work. Bleezer gave a NullPointerException, while BloGTK complained that gtkhtml2 was missing (installed gtkhtml2; nope, same problem).

Next choice: the Deepest Sender Firefox extension (which is what I'm typing this post in, BTW). Had a bit of trouble, figuring out Blogger's posting URL, but things look OK. Only thing is, the Spell Checker seems to be disabled.

Posting seems to take forever; copy/paste entry into Kate, then onto Blogger. Sigh.

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.