BJP is a well-wisher of Muslims

Yeah, in the same way that a wolf prays fervently for the well-being of sheep.

The Accountants' Green Belt

From The Undercover Economist:

Other professionals, like doctors, actuaries, accountants and lawyers manage to maintain high wages through other means than unionisation, erecting virtual 'green belts' to make it harder for potential competitors to set up shop. Typical virtual green belts will include very long qualification periods and professional bodies that give their approval only to a certain number of candidates per year.

Add to this the foiled attempt to restrict their members from acquiring additional qualifications:

The Supreme Court has quashed a notification issued by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) imposing restrictions on its members on the use of the diploma or designation of `CFA' awarded by the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India (ICFAI).

Enough is enough

Notwithstanding all the negative things I've said about Kalam, I'm all for giving him a second term. The way things are going, I'll not be surprised if someone from the DMK is nominated for the presidency (or, heaven forfend, someone from -- shudder -- the PMK).

You know you are living in India

... when it's the 21st century and a paper called The Hindu publishes this on its front page:

The caste composition of the Cabinet is: three Brahmins, one Muslim, one Thakur, one Bhumihar, one Vaishya, four Scheduled Castes and eight OBCs.

Don't let the door

...hit your ass on your way out.

The Undercover Economist

I picked up The Undercover Economist at the same time I got Freakonomics, and while I was not that greatly impressed with the latter, I still didn't think The Undercover Economist would actually turn out to be the better book.

My first impression was that it was a wannabe, trying to cash in on the fame of Levitt's bestseller, but I was quickly dispelled of this notion. Tim Hartford does a great job of laying out the fundamentals of demand and supply, with lucid prose and a good storytelling technique. The book is still a very enjoyable read in spite of most of the stuff not being new for someone who devoured Paul Samuelson's classic with a vengeance and topped the single Economics course he took in college (I am talking about *ahem* moi, of course).

One slightly jarring note was Hartford's contempt for Cameroon and its corrupt ways. I'm sure he has travelled to all kinds of third-world hellholes, so he must have had a really bad experience there to stick it to it so much.

Oh, by the way, the Freakonomics Blog's brief stay in my Bloglines feed list is over. Turns out the blog is not even half as interesting as the book.

Had Columbus never come to America...

Pat Buchanan on the Virginia Tech massacre:

Almost no attention has been paid to the fact that Cho Seung-Hui was not an American at all, but an immigrant, an alien. Had this deranged young man who secretly hated us never come here, 32 people would heading home from Blacksburg for summer vacation.

The rest of the article builds up on this, and lays the blame for the massacre squarely on the immigration policy of the American government.

I have always wondered why people disliked Pat Buchanan. Now I know the reason.

Movie Review: Night at the Museum

Ben Stiller:	Good as usual
Robin Williams:	Can't blame him, role not weighty enough for him
Overall impression:	Good enough for a few laughs on a Saturday evening if you don't have anything better to do

I must really stop these movie reviews unless I have something specific or compelling enough to say. Only problem is that till I do them there is a nagging feeling at the back of my mind, like I've forgotten to zip my fly or something.

Couldn't agree more

From a Squeak blog via James Robertson:

The Smalltalk community, while small, is one of the most intelligent, kind, supportive, and fun communities I have ever been involved in.

Staying on the subject of Smalltalk, the VisualWorks JSON implementation is done. Don't know whether it is worthwhile (or good enough) to submit to the public repository.

Freakonomics

How has my life changed after reading Freakonomics (I am through with the book; reading the bonus material now)? Let me count the number of ways:

1. I have gotten to spend a pleasant three hours or so -- the time I took to finish the book


2. My wallet is lighter by Rs 273


3. I have added the Freakonomics blog to Bloglines


4. I am wondering what's the reason for the shortage of Aavin ghee in Chennai

Bleh.

On a more serious note, some of my opinions with regard to gun control, money winning elections and so on have changed. But without the data and the tools and techniques available to a trained economist, I see no way for a layman to find answers to whatever novel questions he can come up with.

Suse 10.2 - No sound? No problem.

Run Zen Updater, sound gone
No, speaker not muted
Volume all the way up
No messages from dmesg
Alsamixer
Headphone -> line-in? WTF?
Happy happy, joy joy

World Cup 2007

Some passing thoughts:

• I can't for the life of me imagine how Lasith Malinga has been allowed to continue to perform in international cricket (I have similar thoughts about Murali, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt)

• The farcical way the tournament ended has sealed my view that cricket is undeserving of even passing attention; it is a game of, by, and for moneygrubbers

• This paragraph succinctly sums up why Indian cricket will never, ever reach the heights scaled by the likes of Australia:

  No moment in Gilchrist's innings, however, revealed more about Australia than the delivery before his dismissal. Ricky Ponting tapped a ball fine. Gilchrist made the call and ran like hell. If the throw had hit he was out. To run that single for his partner when he was 149 made it clear what this was all about.

  The fundamental difference between an Indian batsman and his Australian counterpart is that "running for his partner" is an alien concept to the latter. You run for your team. Period.

Windows Networking

I (re)installed Windows in my old PC today -- don't blame me, it was the missus who wanted MS Office -- and realised what a PITA it is. After installation I wanted to configure the network so that it can connect to my laptop, but found that the network configuration wizard wouldn't start at all, complaining that my network interface/hardware was not present. I haven't figured out how to get it working; a Google search with the exact message is probably in order.

Compare this to the ease with which the Suse installation manages to hook up to the laptop with no fuss. Not just Suse, but all the distros I've so far tried out in the PC.

Just thinking out loud...

I see that a Squeak package exists for JSON, so is it worthwhile writing a JSON library for, say, VisualWorks?

Maybe I'll just go ahead and do it just for the heck of it.

Movie Review: The Namesake

This is my first Mira Nair movie, and I must say that it bettered my expectations, since I've always considered her movies -- at least her recent ones -- to be controversy magnets and nothing more Update: Oops, it was Deepa Mehta I had in mind.

Having said that, I spent a good portion of the movie wishing it would end quickly. At times it just drags on and on, with nary an idea of where it wants to go (to be fair, maybe it did, but whether we wanted to go along with it was another issue).

The movie did pique my interest in the second half, after Tabu's character matures and starts asserting herself. Speaking of Tabu, she's probably the classiest, most poised lady I've seen in an Indian movie for quite some time.

Re: the protagonist Gogol, he comes into his own only after he bonds with his father and realises that there is another side to his family, i.e. its Indianness. Nothing great from him till then.

Favorite scene(s): when the Ganguli family visits India (for the first time?)

Least favourite scene: when Maxine breaks up with Gogol. Man, talk about stereotypes and cliched dialogue.

OpenSuse 10.2

Well, Suse continues to be the best distro I have tried till now -- it got sound working out of the box, after all, unlike certain other *ahem* distros -- but its package management sucks quite a lot. As I type this, the message "Transaction failed: Resolvable gstreamer010-plugins-base 2992-0 (http://download.suse.com/update/10.2/) not found." is staring me in the face, courtesy of the automatic update tool. I don't know if it is because I have added all the package repositories, but the tool seems to be finding new things to downloads every fricken day, too.

I used to be able to make Kinternet auto-connect to my ISP in 10.1, but have been unable to make it work in 10.2

All in all, a pretty mixed experience so far. Oh, and I forgot to mention this: Suse continues to be s.l.o.w.

Way to go, Robert Fisk

... using a pretty minor detail (i.e. that one of the groups participating in the smear campaign against Taner Akcam is into Holocaust denial) to start the article on a sensationalist note:

Could it possibly be that the security men who guard the frontiers of North America are supporting Holocaust denial? Alas, it's true. Here's the story.

The only reference to Holocaust denial in the article is this:

"Allegations against me, posted by the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, Turkish Forum and 'Tall Armenia Tale' (a Holocaust denial website)..."

The end is the beginning is the end

This has got be some sort of a record: five distros in three weeks.

I started with Ubuntu 6.10 (couldn't get it to display higher resolutions; GNOME sucks), moved on to Mepis 6.5 (great distro, but no sound, no go), followed this with Mandriva 2007 (first step towards using it: it should, well, install), turned to Gentoo in despair (no comments, except to say that once you are used to the ease of installation of the mainstream distros...), and finally returned to OpenSuSE, albeit to 10.2.

One disturbing thing I noticed is how some of these distros glibly overwrite the existing GRUB entries. Not nice, and not something any self-respecting Linux distro should do.

Yeah, it's their war, alright

From the field manual on counter-insurgency produced by the American army (quoting Lawrence of Arabia):

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.

Pray tell, where was this war prior to 2003?

MEPIS

Continuing with my policy of not staying in the comfort zone too long with any distro, I looked around for something to replace OpenSuse with. Ubuntu 6.10 was the first choice, but I quickly got tired of its limitations (GNOME, Ubuntu's inability to exploit the higher resolutions of my laptop, etc.). I decided to give Mandriva another try, but the installation CD refused to go beyond the first (gaudily yellow) screen. The funny thing was that the same CD installed successfully in my other computer -- an old IBM ThinkCentre.

Next choice: MEPIS.

MEPIS seems to be a great distro, except for the fact that I cannot get sound to work, no matter what. Reminiscent of the trouble I had with Kububtu 6.06, which was in fact the prime reason why I moved to OpenSuse.

As a last resort, I am downloading the latest kernel sources as I type this; let me see if this brings the speakers alive.

Bingo!

I've always had my suspicions about all the high-profile hobnobbing and rubbing-shoulders-with-powerful-people, and I guess this proves it. Why settle for just being one of India's richest men when you can aim for the title of Leader of a Billion People (tm)?

Bah.

(Come to think of it, this is going to put ideas into a certain bearded industrialist's head. *Shudders*)

Much as I hate Windows...

This is a bit rich:

All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s. So not only does the desktop no longer matter, no one who cares about computers uses Microsoft's (sic) anyway.

(I know, I said I don't read Paul Graham's essays anymore. I came across this via Reddit)

The Robert Fisk articles blog

As a first step towards returning to the blogging world (no, I will not use the term blogosphere), I updated the Robert Fisk articles blog. It looks like Fisk has been quite prodigious in his output: there are 21 articles since January 26, which was the last time I posted an article of his.

It would have been really helpful if I could have just right-clicked on a link and say 'Post to blog', and have it appear directly on blogspot.com. I daresay a Firefox extension exists for this, but in my case the added complexity is that I need to circumvent the captcha that Blogger so helpfully sets up for me to jump through.

Amma

S.Vijayalakshmi23/4/1942 - 1/4/2007

The most evil, duplicitous statement of all time

We have given to the Iraqi nation more than any other nation could have asked for in the world.
-- Richard Durbin, US Senator

So much BS, so little time

I came across this article about the calibre of students from IIT.

Let me start by taking a deep breath, exhaling slowly, and calling BS.

The real reason companies like Tata Steel don't recruit IITians is that they will not join them if offered employment there, and not because we are not good enough. (Disclaimer: I was not considered good enough for Tata Steel during my campus interviews at IIT Madras; I had already gotten placed at SAIL, and Tata Steel was my -- ahem -- dream company then).

Re the ranks of IITians being filled with crammers from coaching centers: I have said this before and I'll say it again, no amount of coaching in the world can polish a turd into anything else.

While I do concede that getting through four years at IIT is a lot easier than passing the JEE, one cannot get by without knowing the subjects at least a bit intimately; "the students were able to clear the tests without having to read books..." sounds like an extreme generalisation to me. It is possible to get passing grades with minimal study, but to go from there and extrapolate this behaviour of a minority of students to the entire bunch is not correct.

To narrate a personal experience, some students from IIT Madras interned under me recently, and I could find a marked difference in the way they were able to understand and tackle problems when compared to others. I'll take this affirmation of the continuing excellence of the students any day over a brief, non-representative experience mentioned in the article.

And what about this:

Instead of giving ranks purely on the basis of JEE performance, IITs can adapt multiple criteria, giving a weighted score. Some of the criteria are JEE test scores, some marks for showing leadership qualities, marks for demonstrating social concern and talents in sports, music, arts, etc.

Here's a suggestion: why not go one step further, and rename the IITs as "Indian Institute of Performing Arts and Social Sciences"?

Lies

From a Microsoft anti-piracy ad:

Pirated or counterfeit software could have critical bits of code missing, allowing viruses and other malware to enter your IT systems easily, putting your data at risk.

(Falls off chair. Gets up, dusts self, and reads on)

With original Microsoft software you are assured of a highly reliable & secure IT environment.

(Falls off chair again)

He gets paid to write this crap?

From Paulo Coelho's column in DC:

A lion met a group of cats having a chat. "I'm going to eat them," he thought. But then he began to feel strangely calm. And he decided to sit down among them and pay attention to their conversation.

"Good God," said one of the cats, "we have been praying all afternoon! We beg you to make it rain rats from the sky!" "And up to now nothing has happened," said another. "What if the Lord does not exist?"

The sky remained silent. And the cats lost their faith.

The lion rose and went on his way, thinking, "Funny how things are, I was going to eat all these cats, but God stopped me. Even so, they stopped believing in divine grace. They were so worried about what they were lacking that they did not notice the protection they received."

Reminds me of a story I submitted as a kid to a competition that, in its entirety, went something like this: Ramu was a bad boy, God punished him, Ramu became a good boy. But there were two differences: a) I didn't win the competition b) I was five years old at that time.

Movie Review: Music and Lyrics

Hugh Grant with his understated British humour
Drew Barrymore - oh I wish I could do 'er

The movie was very good, felt my S.O.
While I thought it was only so so

Good in parts, but never rises to great heights
Wish Ms Barrymore had worn tights

Can't hold a candle to Love, Actually
Come to think of it, neither to A Lot Like Love, actually

What's with all the crappy verse, you ask...

(runs out of rhyming lyrics)

thecinema.in

I came across Bruce Eckel's post on Flex yesterday, and this brought to mind my recent e-commerce experience with Satyam Cinema. The site uses Flash and is a good example of how an RIA should be done. It was easily the best online shopping experience I've had in quite a while.

Note to self: Movie review of Music and Lyrics due on Friday

Helmets

From a letter to The Hindu:

Helmets may bring down the number of fatal accidents but they will certainly increase the number of accidents, given the weather in south India, especially during summer. Most of those who advocate compulsory wearing of helmets travel in air-conditioned cars and hardly have any first hand experience of wearing a helmet and riding a two-wheeler.

In any case, what is the need to wear a helmet in cities where the roads are in such a pathetic condition that speeding is impossible?

(Cough. Splutter. Clears nose of morning coffee)

1. Pray tell, what is the connection between summer weather and helmets and accidents? Poor visibility due to sweating?


2. I rode a bike for eight years before changing to a car, and I wore a helmet for all of those eight years.


3. Roads in pathetic conditions lead to the two-wheeler rider falling and hurting his ...

Why do I even bother replying to shoo-ins for the Darwin award?

It had to happen, didn't it?

Bloglines introduces something called The Wall of Images, you click on it and are shown a collage of interesting and not-so-interesting thumbnail images, changing in real time, but wait, after a minute or so you see a preponderance of pictures of breasts, which are from a porn site called Goddess. Sigh.

The Tao of the Cube

Be bent, and you will remain straight.
Be vacant, and you will remain full.
Be worn, and you will remain new.
-- Lao Tzu

I bought myself a Rubik's Cube the other day. I was never very good at solving the darn thing when I was a kid; I could only get one side right however hard I tried, so I wanted to see if I could do better now. It looks like my cube-solving skills as an adult are even worse, but I devised a better way to have fun with the thing: instead of trying to solve it, why not try to unsolve it, i.e. tweak things such that one ends up on the other end of the scale, with maximum entropy? My first goal was to end up with nine unique colours on each side, but a quick calculation indicated that there are only six colours to play with (duh). I have a feeling that this is easier than it sounds, but let's see how it goes. One way to spice it up would be to achieve maximum entropy in the least number of steps.

More Kalam-bashing

Here's yet another inane quote from you-know-who:

Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life.

Holy matrimony, Batman!

Regular posting will resume shortly.

BlogMailr

I registered with BlogMailr and tried to email a post, but gave up after I received 38 (!) automated replies that informed me that they were unable to post my messages after several attempts. Ignoring this for the moment, the following are my initial impressions with BlogMailr:

• The customised email address is too complicated to remember

• There are no instructions on how to compose your email so that it is fit for publication

The POP protocol

I recently upgraded to Nokia N73 and set up email on it yesterday. I was able to retrieve and view new messages (Gmail), but there's a problem here: when I try to retrieve messages from Thunderbird, these new messages are not retrieved because they are no longer new. The issue (I think) is that the 'state' -- i.e the ID of the most recent message that a POP client has retrieved -- is not stored in the client but in the mail server instead. Therefore we cannot synchronise multiple POP clients simultaneously with the contents in the server. I've read that IMAP is a superior protocol, so maybe it has this feature.

Cult of personality

Sri Sai Baba is spending ten days at an ashram very close to where I live. The entire area is chock full of cars parked at every available space and there are hundreds of thronging devotees. This puts us residents to a lot of hardship, because we have to a) convince the policemen/volunteers that we do have business in this area because we have been living here for something like ten fricken years, and our vehicles should be permitted to enter the side streets around the ashram and b) wend our way through already-narrow streets narrowed even further on account of the parked cars.

Having said this, I must mention the excellent behaviour of the volunteers -- whom a part of me considers as cult members, with their all-white attire and weird blue scarves -- who are very courteous and well-mannered as they go about controlling the traffic and the crowds. I really don't know more about Sai Baba to comment further, but it looks like a lot of good work is being done by channelling the devotees' energies. More power to them.

Paging Freud

I have noticed something of late: when I open my desk drawer to take something out, I invariably forget to close it. This is not general absent-minded behaviour, because I am not forgetful about other things. Oh well.

Nitpick

If you click on any of the Blogger labels, the URL is of the form <blog address>/search/label/<label name> (e.g. http://shikantaza.blogspot.com/search/label/stupidity) but where is the search here? Since I don't have any option to search for a term in posts within a label, shouldn't it be 'browse' instead?

Some more Kalam-bashing

President Kalam recently gave a speech that attempted to lay out the new challenges faced by law enforcement personnel and how they can better equip themselves to tackle these challenges. It was a very insipid and inane speech, with generous dollops of vague generalities and cliches. Some samples:

Our police force needs to be friendly, corruption-free, responsible, tolerant of ambiguity and pressure, and must have compassion and empathy for the people. It should be efficient and time conscious, stress tolerant, mentally and physically fit and robust, able to provide high quality leadership potential at all levels of the hierarchy, and be a model for conduct and discipline.

If wishes were horses...

Those who threaten our security and our peace often can intermix with our public and may become indistinguishable particularly in the cities. They use very high-end technologies. Innovative flow charts have to be evolved with experience to find how this phenomenon is taking place and how intelligence agencies can counter it.

Innovative flow charts? Huh?

One of the major revolutions in information has been the advent of the World Wide Web. It contains a vast amount of information.

No sh*t, Sherlock.

A master plan for a city traffic system should be evolved for the short term, medium term, and long term — using a mathematical model ... Long-term infrastructure development for traffic decongestion has to be planned and executed, taking into account the growth of the city's population ...

Well, duh.

Why I think India will continue to remain a developing country

Yesterday I was waiting behind a car at the traffic lights. A hand appeared outside its driver's window and casually dropped a matchstick on to the road. I was mildly disgusted by this uncivic behaviour, but worse was to follow: a couple of seconds later, the still-smouldering matchstick was joined by an empty cigarette packet.

To add insult to injury, a big plume of smoke then emanated from the car, even as the culprit gave me a bored look in his rear-view mirror.

Migrated to new version of Blogger

Well, it happened finally: an easier, two-step process to migrate to the newer, better version of Blogger.

President Kalam poses question on Yahoo Answers

With all due respect, aren't there better ways for him to spend his time, instead of posing such questions? I'm sure he would be monitoring the answers too (Kiran Bedi, Leander Paes and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar have posted answers -- which brings me to my next question: don't you guys have nothing better to do?), so that's even more time spent unproductively surfing the web, when he could have been creeping small schoolchildren out instead.

Politicianspeak

Here are some choice phrases from Sajjad Gani Lone (vis a vis the Kashmir issue):

The People's Conference formula was multidimensional and dealt with evolution of power in both parts of Kashmir, and not devolution.

and

The context of the dispute was historical till 1989 and sacrificial since.

Fine prose that means diddly-squat.

I don't get it

If the motive of the Americans was to remove the Saddam threat permanently, wouldn't it have been simpler to fake an encounter at the time of his capture -- a la Uday and Qusay -- and finish him off without any fuss? What was the need for a 'trial' and an execution? The only conclusion left is that they wanted to use his death to further the sectarian divide.

I call BS

I wanted to blog about this yesterday itself, but couldn't get around to it. In the meantime, the letters to the editor at The Hindu have already responded to this more eloquently than I ever could. To set the context first, a couple of army officers were thrown into jail by the police for allegedly misbehaving at a party. Their comrades came to know of this, and arranged a delta force to storm the police station and 'rescue the hostages'. Here are snippets from a couple of officers' letters defending this action:

It is quite natural for army men to rescue their comrades in distress. They are trained to do so.

and

I only see the display of camaraderie among officers and swiftness of action.

Easy there Sparky, a couple more incidents like this, and all the remaining goodwill and respect we civilians have for men in uniform will vanish completely.

A violation of the mind

From yesterday's Hindu:

Narco-analysis is not used in many countries, including the United States, which resisted changing the rules of interrogation after the September 11 attacks despite pressure from some authorities -- including former Central Intelligence Agency chief William Webster -- to use 'truth serums' on uncooperative Al Qaeda and Taliban members.

The editors at The Hindu are usually unimpeachable with their facts, so I'll take their word for it, but my impression was that the American government were/are using truth serums on Al Qaeda suspects.

Guards taunted Saddam in final seconds

Saddam may have been a brutal dictator and may have deserved the death penalty, but the way his execution has been carried out has made me lose what little sympathy I had for the Iraqis -- I don't mean the innocent Iraqis caught in the crossfire, but the insurgents who are fighting each other and the American occupation. The bottom line is that these guys have no sense of nation or patriotism; only sectarian and tribal loyalties matter to them. If these guys don't care about their own country, why should the rest of the world give a damn when Iraq implodes?

Compare this sordid affair with the way the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa managed to put the bad blood behind them and move on. The difference is that they had a Nelson Mandela with the moral authority to pull it off; here we have just a bunch of vengeful killers.

Here's a tip

If you don't want to subject your offspring to eternal ridicule, don't name him with the feeling you experience as you consummate your relationship with said offspring's mother.

(There's a player called 'Climax' in either the Mahindra United or Dempo Sports Club teams; too indifferent to figure out which one)

Tale of two animals - Part 2

East Coast Road. 6:25 PM. 60 kmph. Bunch of ladies trying to cross the road. Horn. Brake. Confusion. Ladies go ballistic and run helter-skelter. Shakes head in disgust.

East Coast Road. 6:26 PM. 40 kmph. Lone cow trying to cross the road. Slow down. Lone cow calmly assesses options, stops and decides to cross after car passes through. Shakes head in wonderment.

What is the world coming to?

I recently rescheduled an Air Deccan flight and was to receive a refund because of the difference in the fares. I expected another delay, but found that my Visa account was credited with the refund the very next day.

I also had a nice trip with them on this flight, and so have booked another trip.

Staying on the subject of air fares, it's amazing how much variance there is between the fares across different airlines for a given route. Forget different airlines; the price varies significantly even for the same airline for two different flights on the same day. For example, a ticket from Chennai to Mumbai costs Rs 1000 more if you opt for the evening flight instead of the morning one. Welcome to the world of we'll-charge-you-as-much-as-we-can-get-away-with, a.k.a. demand and supply, I guess.

Too close to call

Man United are leading the EPL at the halfway stage:

United has 47 points and Chelsea 45. In the past, every club with at least 47 points after 19 games has gone on to win the Premier League.

Much as I hate Chelsea and wish that this statistic would be borne out this season too, I don't think Man United are going to win the league that easily. Things are going to really heat up as we enter April/May.

Chidambaram fractures toe

When I read that Chidambaram had broken his toe in the melee that ensued when he and his entourage objected to his picture being taken by some photographers, I really couldn't understand what the fuss was all about, until I read this:

Police sources said that being on a private outing, Mr. Chidambaram was in an attire different from his usual white dhoti and white shirt.

Oh yeah, now I get it: he was wearing something that was at variance with his public image. Being photographed in that outfit would have shattered the carefully cultivated persona that he has nurtured for so long.

"Global flu pandemic would probably kill 62 million"

More fear-mongering:

Christopher Murray, from Harvard University, and colleagues looked at death registrations between 1915 and 1923 in places around the world where the data was believed to be at least 80 per cent complete. By looking at deaths before and after the pandemic and comparing them to the rate during the pandemic, they calculated the increased mortality caused by the disease.

Extrapolating that death rate to 2004, the authors calculate that between 51 million and 81 million individuals will die around the world if a similar virus causes a flu pandemic now. They say that there is no logical or biological reason why mortality should not be higher than in the Spanish flu pandemic, severe though that was.

How can anyone claim with a straight face that the conditions obtaining in the early 1900s can be compared to the present? Haven't medical science and technology undergone such quantum leaps in the last eight decades as to mitigate the effects of a similar pandemic? Unless, of course, their extrapolation made specific provisions for the increased opportunities for the virus to spread, what with all the international travel.

You can teach an old mobile new tricks

I have been using my Motorola C350 (or is it C35? I can never quite remember) for more than three years, and never knew that it had this feature: if you are exchanging a lot of SMS messages with someone, there is some point at which it realises that what is happening is actually a chat, and changes to chat mode, with an interface that is functionally identical to an IM chat screen. Neat.

Thank you IBM

... for trying to impart the gift of 'computing education' to students who need it like a man needs a third nipple. What India needs desperately is more eServerWebSphereRationalTivoli (tm) middleware drones. Really.

Pot, meet kettle

Rohit Brijnath's sports wishlist for 2007 contains this item:

17. Someone explains to us finally why wushu is at the Asian Games. And soft tennis. And trampolining. What's next? Ballroom dancing? Ludo?

Hello? We introduce kabaddi into the Asian Games, and we have the gall to complain when other countries do something similar?

What labels?

It is now supposedly possible to add labels to one's posts in Blogger, but I am not able to see the option for this.

Update: It looks like I need to log in using my Google account to access the new features. I did this, but Blogger started treating me as a new user; no way for me to link my Google account to my existing blogs. There is supposedly a migration path, but since I don't have a Master's degree, I couldn't figure it out. Couldn't the mighty brains at Google have come up with something simpler? Sheesh.

Labels: Where, is, the, frigging, option?

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.