Congress' Death Wish

The Congress Party's insistence on pushing the nuclear deal through even at the cost of losing power at the center has always been puzzling; the single word that kept coming to mind was 'blackmail'. Now Bharat Karnad (don't bother going to the link; Deccan Chronicle's enlightened web designers have successfully ensured that the link will become stale tomorrow) weighs in with a somewhat similar opinion:

It only deepens the mystery about why it is that the ruling Congress party is trying so desperately to shove this deal down the nation’s throat, even at the cost of being thrown out of power. It must be some very powerful set of personal and collective motivations indeed, which the US official documents declassified 30 years hence or sooner (courtesy the Freedom of Information Act) will no doubt reveal.

Guffaw

On the other hand, China is completely immune to the (anti-semitic) slur. Mention the Holocaust to the Chinese and they’ll think you are referring to the Rape of Nanking.
-- Xymphora

Twenty20

From an article on the Twenty20 format:

Every conscientious lover of cricket cautioned against the inherent risk of the format: in a pool of adrenalin-filled moments, how does one sift the outstanding from the irrelevant? With every six hit, every wicket taken, every catch snagged celebrated homogenously [sic], how does one determine the context?

Well, duh, the context is 13 needed off the last over; the context is scoring 36 runs in the penultimate over to post a competitive target; the context is...

I cannot for the life of me understand how paid columnists get away with this crap.

Quote of the day

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it's not real?"
-- Albus Dumbledore

The Celestine Prophecy / New Age crowd could not have come up with a more inspirational defining statement of their philosophy if they had tried.

I initially wanted to do a review of the book, but considering that it took me something like a month to finish the goddamn thing -- man does it drag in the middle -- it's probably not fair.

One positive outcome of finishing the book is that I can now go ahead and read Stephen King's review without the fear of running into spoilers.

Movie Review: Chak De India

Eminently watchable, mainly because Shah Rukh Khan doesn't have much scope for the kind of histrionics that make my hand start twitching involuntarily for the remote. Though there are some scenes -- the slo-mo stride through the tunnel after the melee at the McDonald's, for example -- where the usual Bollywood macho BS is evident, such scenes are mercifully few in number.

The barbs at cricket, though well-intended, seem overdone and artificial; especially the way the cricketer boyfriend is spurned in front of the paparazzi.

If you set aside the fact that the undisciplined-underdogs-transformed-into-champions by-coach-with-something-to-prove motif has been (ab)used by Hollywood at least 1372 times, Chak De... is definitely an entertaining watch, with the added bonus of rekindling some much-needed patriotism in the viewers as well.

Note to some folks in audience: guys, it's a given that India will win the championship -- it's Bollywood we're talking about, after all -- so don't tell me you *really* didn't know that the goalie saves the final penalty stroke?

IT superpower my a$$

The other day somebody was telling me how a typical day at work goes for him: come to work at 2 PM for the afternoon shift, log in remotely to 32 servers, check the CPU utilisation, check the memory utilisation, clean up system log files older than three days...

Oh, BTW, he has a masters from one of the top colleges in the country.

Adieu to Conexant

Well, I finally got an Ethernet modem, and the much-loved Conexant-based USB modem was retired from service. Bittersweet feelings as I unhooked its cable and stored it in the cupboard (sentimental guy that I am, I ensured that the ISP guy didn't take it with him; turns out I had paid upfront for the modem, so there were no issues). Seems like my only connection to the modem is going to be my instructions page.

Achievements

Political parties have a habit of taking out full page ads trumpeting their achievements during the first 'n' days in office ('n' is typically 100 days if you are ru[i|n]ning a state; 365 days if you have been given a mandate to screw over the whole country). If you pay close attention to these achievements, you'll find that more than half of these are not really achievements at all, since they are nothing more than statements of intent or, worse, hollow promises. Case in point: some of the 'achievements' of the Mayawati government:

• Police administration given strict orders to protect people belonging to the poor and downtrodden sections of the Sarva Samaj


• Decision taken to set up power plant

And, incredibly, these gems:

• Demanded Rs.800 billion from the prime minister for a special development package for Bundelkhand and Purvanchal regions


• Demanded Rs.22 billion from the central government for flood relief

So true

From an article about the intrusion of Blackberrys into our lives:

The mobile device was sold as a form of liberation: now your office can be the beach. The trouble is, it’s turned the beach into the office.

Granny's got a gun

It's all well to give guns to villagers for their protection, but who's there to protect these guys when the militants turn on them with doubled fury after one of their folks are finished off by a lucky shot from granny's gun? The disastrous Salwa Judum initiative in Chhattisgarh is a case in point.

An 'Oops' Moment

Telling the IT support person that you are able to tunnel through the corporate firewall because he has opened port 22 for your machine's IP address, hearing that the port has not yet been opened, scratching your head in puzzlement, only to realise a second later that the tunnelling is possible because you were sneaky enough to install corkscrew in Cygwin, and keeping your fingers crossed that he doesn't probe further, and hanging up at the earliest chance you get...

Much as we appreciate your patriotism

... don't you think you can put your time to better use, like, I don't know, preparing for your frigging board examinations?

$CATCHY_TITLE

Somebody tells you to obey whatever instructions they give you, no matter what. Assume for the moment that, for some reason -- love, loyalty, respect, life-and-death situation, whatever -- you are willing to go ahead. The first instruction is for you to do something, and keep on doing it even if that person subsequently asks you to stop. You say OK, and proceed to do the thing, upon which he/she immediately cries for mercy and begs you to stop, saying that the thing you are doing is too painful. What do you do?

The obvious answer is to persist, because didn't the person ask you not to stop, no matter what? Not so fast. If you have go by the meta-instruction -- "Obey whatever instruction I give you" -- what prevents you from obeying the second instruction?

I don't think there is a logically sound answer to this [*]. I am at home on sick leave, so I don't have the energy to think this through, but things like self-referentiality, meta-levels, and the fact that it is impossible to completely answer the question "What is truth?" (maybe Godel's Theorem as well?) come to mind.

(Context: I am about 530 pages or so into Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the scene where Dumbledore and Harry Potter are attempting to destroy one of Lord Voldemort's Horcruxes. Sheepish grin).

[*] On second thoughts, there is a logically sound answer -- keep obeying the latest instruction till the requester drops dead or at least loses the ability to issue further instructions -- but this doesn't really serve the purpose.

The Left is at it again

...running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. They will oppose the 123 Agreement, but if it comes to a vote, they will walk out of the house, in effect an abstention:

Communist Party of India (Marxist) Members of Parliament will walk out if there is a vote on the 123 agreement with the United States, as sought by the Bharatiya Janata Party, according to veteran Marxist leader Jyoti Basu.

“We are critical of the nuclear deal …but will walk out in the event of a vote on it,” Mr. Basu said after a meeting of the party’s State Secretariat. He reiterated the Left parties’ demand for a discussion in Parliament on the agreement.

And you guys wonder why you have zero credibility?

Dolphin Smalltalk discontinued

Considering that they had to compete with the 800 pound gorilla that is Visual Studio , it is to their credit they hung in there for so long.

BTW, their intense dislike of OSS is surprising; it's OK to believe that the OSS model is fundamentally flawed and is at odds with viable commercial software development, but the intensity of the dislike is a bit, well, intense.

How to handle sarcasm

For some reason, I cannot stand sarcastic people. If you want to say something, be man enough about it and say it straight; don't beat around the bush. If you want to prove how witty you are, get a fricken blog or become a comedian.

The best way to handle sarcasm is to play along. When I was in college, I once went to a workshop class not wearing the requisite khaki uniform (I forget the reason -- most probably because I hadn't done my washing). The instructor smiled very sweetly (now that I think of it, he could have auditioned successfully for Professor Umbridge's part in OOTP; yeah, I know that Umbridge is a woman) and asked me whether it was raining, the implication being that my uniform hadn't dried in time for the class. I quickly said no, I had washed it, it had not dried in time, and so on. In hindsight, all I should have done is smile back even more sweetly at the bastard and said yes.

Here's an example of this technique in action:

Bruce Schneier: By today's rules, I can carry on liquids in quantities of three ounces or less, unless they're in larger bottles. But I can carry on multiple three-ounce bottles. Or a single larger bottle with a non-prescription medicine label, like contact lens fluid. It all has to fit inside a one-quart plastic bag, except for that large bottle of contact lens fluid. And if you confiscate my liquids, you're going to toss them into a large pile right next to the screening station -- which you would never do if anyone thought they were actually dangerous.

Can you please convince me there's not an Office for Annoying Air Travelers making this sort of stuff up?

Kip Hawley: Screening ideas are indeed thought up by the Office for Annoying Air Travelers and vetted through the Directorate for Confusion and Complexity, and then we review them to insure that there are sufficient unintended irritating consequences so that the blogosphere is constantly fueled. Imagine for a moment that TSA people are somewhat bright, and motivated to protect the public with the least intrusion into their lives, not to mention travel themselves. How might you engineer backwards from that premise to get to three ounces and a baggie?

Ouch, didn't see that coming, did we?

Way to go, Xymph

Hilarious stuff:

I note that the agreement still has to make it through the Occupied Territories, aka, the American Congress.

and

Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, and, needless to say, Tom Lantos (all D–Tel Aviv, ...

Time may not exist

If only they had listened to me. Could've saved themselves the, umm, time and effort.

By the way, here's something ironical: I was searching my blog for the post I've linked to, and found that nearly all my posts contain the word "time". We sure use the word a lot, even though we can't seem to define it.

Wireless

One year after getting myself a laptop, I decided that it was high time I started treating it as one, instead of shackling it to my table in order to stay connected to the Internet. Here are some insights and lessons learnt from my attempt to free the laptop:

1. Wireless routers are a Good Thing, even if you screw up and don't get a modem/router combo and end up having no USB slot on the router to stick your old, tried and tested ADSL modem into.


2. Setting up wireless networking in Windows is a breeze. Not so in Linux (well, Ubuntu at least; much easier in Suse). I still haven't managed to get the ipw220 driver in 2.6.20 to connect to the router without hanging the machine, forcing me to fall back to 2.6.17.


3. Laptops come with a button for switching off the radio/wireless. This is to conserve battery power. Pay more attention to the output of tools like iwconfig. When they say 'no radio', they are trying to tell you something important.


4. In my current setup, the old IBM PC is connected to the Internet via the USB ADSL modem; the laptops -- plural because the Windows laptop from work has also been commissioned into the home LAN -- use the Internet connection (I'm running Privoxy on the PC) via the wireless router.


5. Accessing the Internet from behind a proxy is no fun, even if you have full control over your Proxy server. All software depending on access to other ports (most notably P2P) will stop dead in their tracks, unless you bone up on things like SSH tunnelling. The sooner you get an Ethernet modem and retire the proxy, the better.


6. Though Gmail is my preferred email application, I still like to have offline access to my emails by pulling them from Thunderbird. Problem: how to access Gmail's POP server from behind a proxy? Solution(s):
   
   
   • Run a POP3 proxy
   
   
   • SSH tunnel through the HTTP proxy
   
   
   • Export your Thunderbird email folder in your laptop via NFS to the PC, and run Thunderbird once a day on the PC (replicating the Thuderbird profile to all your Linux installations does come in handy, after all)
   
   Naturally, I opted for the more complicated, unorthodox solution, i.e. the last choice.
   
   
7. The Switchproxy Firefox extension is worth its weight in gold.


8. I don't know if my rudimentary networking knowledge is a contributing factor, but both Privoxy and Squid have some DNS issues; I tried all these combinations: starting my Internet connection manually before starting Privoxy/Squid manually, starting the proxy manually before connecting to the Internet manually, sticking the connection script in /etc/init.d/boot.local and starting the proxy automatically using YAST System Services, but I invariably ended up with "Could not resolve..." errors. The solution finally was to compile Privoxy from the sources and run it manually, after connecting to the Internet manually. Whew.

Filing your tax returns online

I filed my tax returns online today. Impressions:

1. You need Acrobat Reader 8.1. Since only 7.0 is available for Linux, you need Windows. Big bummer.


2. Don't try opening the PDF in 7.0, either in Windows or in Linux. Acrobat will chew your RAM up and pretty much freeze your machine.


3. v8.1, while it does the job, is still not perfect. The first time I was in the middle of filling the form it crashed on me, forcing me to reenter all the data (Note to Adobe developers: it's not cricket to raise the hopes of users by volunteering to recover the lost document and not fulfilling your promise).


4. Doing your own taxes is not a cinch, but is still doable, provided you are willing to invest the time (three and one half hours in my case).


5. The surcharge is 10% of the total tax; the education cess is 2% of (tax + surcharge). This one stumped me for a while (the education cess bit, that is).


6. When you are Googling for tax slabs and such, make doubly sure that you are looking at the figures for the correct year, or you'll end up tearing your hair out, trying to match the numbers obtained from a tax calculator for 2002-03 with your Form-16.


7. I don't understand the need for having something called an assessment year. Why can't we just say we are filing the returns for FY 06-07, instead of saying AY 07-08?


8. You still cannot avoid standing in a physical queue, unless you digitally sign the form.

Fool me once

Here's a scam to watch out for the next time you fill petrol for your car.

You stop at the pump, roll down your window and tell the attendant how much petrol you would like: say, a thousand bucks' worth. All modern pumps have a facility by which the attendant can set this amount on the display and then proceed to fill the tank; the pump automatically stops the flow of the fuel when the amount reaches the Rs 1000 mark. The attendant sets the amount, but before he starts pumping the gas, his colleague approaches you and asks you some seemingly innocent question, the real purpose of which is to distract you while the first attendant surreptitiously resets the pump display to zero. He then commences the filling, and as the reading approaches say, Rs 900, the second attendant once again distracts you, this time with a query about the bill or the credit card. While you are busy answering him, the first guy stops the pump and quickly sets the reading manually to Rs 1000. Congratulations: you've just been scammed out of Rs 100.

I was scammed out of Rs 85 by a bunch of scumbags employing this M.O. at the petrol pump in Indira Nagar. I couldn't do much about it then since I was in a hurry at that time; I also felt that if I took up the issue, it would be the attendant's word against mine.

Anyway, I resolved never to fill petrol there again, but, as luck would have it, I was very low on gas one day and had no choice but to pull into the same thieves' den. This time I parked my car at a different pump, and things started out normally; I mentioned the amount, the attendant punched this number in, but before he could start, up came his accomplice with some stupid question, and what did I see on the display when I looked up after answering the bastard? You guessed it: 0.00. That did it for me: I got out of the car and planted myself about 18 inches away from the display, and didn't take my eyes off till the last paisa rolled up on the screen.

On second thoughts, I am still not sure whether I got my money's worth of fuel; folks who resort to such scams probably adulterate their stock, too.

I'm no fan of the BJP

... but is this all you could dig up on Shekawat?

1. He served in the police force under the British during 1942-1948.


2. His state government was dismissed after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, as part of the bid by the central government to be seen to be doing something, no matter how tangential and ineffective it was.

But come to think of it, why do we want the President of the country to be a person of impeccable character, integrity, and so on? Why can't he/she be more like the rest of the scumbags? In other words, let Pratibha Patil become President; she'd fit right in with the crowd.

Oh, by the way...

I've not taken a sudden liking to Bollywood music. The Last.fm tracks displayed at the right are not mine, they are my SO's.

Ta Ra Rum Pum? I'd rather shove a stick in my ...

Killing hope

Every month I get The Anti-Empire Report newsletter from William Blum, and it never fails to make me disgusted; not at the author, but at the actions of the sole superpower and its allies. The newsletter is all the more damning because nearly all of its references are 'impeccable' news sources like The Washington Post, The LA Times, and so on.

No Linux in corporate laptop

Our IT department is currently setting up my laptop, and I asked them about the possibility of creating a separate partition in it where I can install Linux.

Nice try. Corporate policy prohibits dual boot machines, it seems. If required, they can install Linux, but only Linux, no Windows. Heavenly though this sounds, this is not an option for me, because I need to have access to Lotus Notes for corporate email. I think POP3 support is provided by our email server, but then I will not have any way to access already archived emails. I have decided to run Linux from VMWare for the time being.

The no-dual-boot restriction smells like an MS dirty trick as part of the corporate licensing deal; however it could simply be a requirement to push standard corporate images on to machines.

What's worse than

... getting a big dent in your car because some moron crashes into you?

Getting a big dent in your car because some moron has just learned driving and doesn't know how to park yet and bangs into your car (which is quietly enjoying an afternoon nap in the parking lot) and doesn't even have the courtesy to leave a sorry note.

And what is even worse? When the above moron is not some random stranger, but your coworker.

Item #12, coming right up.

Is it time to unsubscribe from the RI blog?

Habits are hard to let go, but for quite some time I have been noticing that RI forum posts are way more interesting than Jeff's blog. No offence, but there's only so much occult and UFO stuff that one can take. I can't even believe half the things there, anyway. Another nit is Jeff's non-usage of blockquote tags, which makes it very difficult to separate what he says from what he quotes.

(This post was triggered by a post expressing a similar sentiment, albeit for different reasons)

Quote of the day

From an RI Forum post:

... dubya will probably be reborn as a slug, or a worm, and probably stay there for several lifetimes. Good hard work building up the soil will be a starting point for his long journey back to sentience.

Movie Review: Ocean's Thirteen

Maybe it's the geek in me, but any movie that has scenes involving computer messages like 'Transferring file from FBI' (gag) instantly loses two stars, notwithstanding the fact that it boasts of a star cast that includes Al Pacino, Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

There's nothing new in the story -- hi-tech gang targets Casino/Bank/Museum and walks away with a gazillion bucks, with the roll of the dice favouring it in all the -- ahem -- dicey situations. I am also fricken tired of the too-clever dialogue, the main purpose of which is to show how smart and clever the characters are, rather than providing entertainment for the audience.

Here's a plot idea for Oceans' Fourteen (do you think we'll get off that lightly, with only two sequels? Oh no): Willie Banks and Terry Benedict join hands together and start a casino on Mars, spending something like a trillion dollars. The casino also serves as a Swiss Bank (should I say Martian Bank) and houses the bestest and the most famous precious stone in the world. The security of the casino/bank is ensured using unbreakable quantum cryptography, developed by a quadruple Nobel/Fields prize winner. Well, unbreakable for mere mortals, actually, for Ocean and his buddies travel back in time and bring back Schrodinger's cat, whose left pupil has the amazing property of decrypting quantum cryptography beams by diffracting with the above diamond's light rays...

Goodbye, Oracle

Well, today seems to be a day of goodbyes.

About six months ago I had wished that we had opted for PostgreSQL as our database backend instead of Oracle, and I'm happy to say that the wish has been granted. Not exactly granted, because moi had a say in pushing for a move away from Oracle and towards Postgres, but I'm not complaining. Our enterprise app has been migrated to PostgreSQL without any hitches. Hibernate and minimal reliance of Oracle-specific features probably contributed a lot to this.

Having worked with Oracle for practically all my professional career, there is an element of bittersweetness about the whole thing (not to mention an erosion of my Oracle skillsets value), but open source is open source, baby.

Goodbye, SUSE

After a long stint with SUSE (and KDE), it's time to bid adieu. openSUSE 10.2 is probably the most bloated and buggy SUSE version I have used till date (for what it's worth, 9.1 was the most solid and polished distro during its time). I am now running Feisty Fawn; I had downloaded 6.10 a while back, and wonder of wonders, it had an option to upgrade to 7.04.

Two things I'm missing in FF are a) its inability to use a higher resolution than 1024x768 (Update: Turns out there is a simple fix for it), and b) the Ubuntu equivalent of Kinternet (I've heard of something called Modem Lights, plan to look into it). But these are more than made up for by Ubuntu's blazing speed and GNOME's simplicity (I know, I have said dirty things about GNOME in the past, but you reach a point in life when you are tired of all the bells and whistles and want to return to Simplicity (tm). Anyway, there was always the nagging but unstated thought at the back of my mind about not staying true to The Unix Way and taking a liking to something like KDE).

Well, talk about irony. I learn the correct way to capitalise openSUSE after I ditch it for good.

Kodai blogging

The helmet controversy

From a letter to The Hindu:

In a democratic society, the view of a majority of two-wheeler riders ought to be the basis for any rule. I am sure most of the two-wheeler riders are not for the compulsory helmet rule. By not wearing a helmet, one does not cause any harm to anyone else. Why should it be forced on the people?

Since I consider most two-wheeler riders to belong to a life form slightly lower than an amoeba, I'd be willing to agree to this sentiment -- I'm all for it if they want to commit harakiri on the streets of Chennai and voluntarily reduce their population, but for the fact that it is not strictly true that they don't harm anybody else by not wearing a helmet. If a helmet-less jerk gets into an accident, he causes more trouble to the other party if he croaks off in said accident than if he suffers only minor injuries.

Swing mini design pattern

I don't know whether this qualifies as a design pattern, but here goes anyway.

Intent/Motivation
You have a Swing MDI application with the main window managing the lifecycles of the child windows. When the user selects a menu option, the corresponding child window should be displayed. But no action should be taken if the menu is selected when the child window is already displayed. We cannot check for the null value of the child window data member (and spawn a new window) because there is no way for the child window to set itself to null when it is closed.

Applicability
Swing MDI applications where only one instance of a child window should be displayed at any point in time.

Implementation
Have the main window class implement a callback interface:

public interface CallBackHandler
{
    public void call(int ID);
}

public class MainWindow implements CallBackHandler
{
    //repeat for each child window
    public static final int CHILDWINDOW1 = 1;
    private ChildWindow1 childWindow1;

    public void call(int windowId)
    {
        //repeat for each child window
        if(windowId == CHILDWINDOW1)
        {
            childWindow1 = null;
        }
    }
        ...

The child window constructor is passed the main window reference (but is only bound to the CallBackHandler, though nothing would prevent a ctor defined with a parameter of type MainWindow and accessing MainWindow's (public) members).

        ...
        //code to invoke child window
        if(childWindow1 == null)
        {
            childWindow1 = new ChildWindow1(this);
            childWindow1.show();
            ...
        }

public class ChildWindow1
{
    private CallBackHandler cbh;
    public ChildWindow1(CallBackHandler cbh)
    {
        this.cbh = cbh;
    }
        ...
        //code in listener that handles window closing
        cbh.call(MainWindow.CHILDWINDOW1);
        ...
}

The Ugly Indian Motorist

As promised. The Ugly Indian Motorist:

1. Will not take his hand off the horn even when he can see that there is no fricken way for the car ahead of him to move even an inch.


2. Will think nothing of driving on the right side of the road in order to overtake a vehicle.


3. While performing the aforementioned overtaking maneuver, will end up blocking the opposite traffic. Everybody sits and cools their heels while UIM sheepishly tries to merge back into his own side of the road.


4. Is under the impression that all vehicles with horsepower less than his own will have to give way for him even if they are already struggling to cling on to the margin of the road.


5. Will respond with a blank stare when posed the term "lane discipline".


6. Ditto for "signal" and "speed limit".


7. Most probably does not know how to read.


8. Most probably drives somebody else's vehicle. In other words, is not responsible for its upkeep.


9. Terrorises hapless vehicles in front of him by revving his massive engine while waiting at the signal (the Big Red Light one needs to stop for, I mean).


10. Chuckles to himself when he thinks of the stupid bureaucrats who have planned for zebras to cross the road when we all know that zebras live only in Africa. Duh!


11. Is geeky enough to sport a bumper sticker that says "No place like 127.0.0.1", but still doesn't know that to turn right, one has to stay in the, um, right lane. On second thoughts, Mr UIM's son in the States probably sent the sticker to dad.


12. Does things like this.

You could've knocked me down with a feather

Congress meeting authorises Sonia to decide on chief ministerial candidate.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

No, this is not turning into a literary blog. Came across this news item, that's all.

What's with Indians and queueing?

Let me qualify that; not Indians in general, but the 'educated', young IT professionals.

There is a coffee counter at the cafeteria at work with three sides from which the vendor can serve customers. Always, and I mean always, my beloved coworkers take up positions on these three sides, not caring about niceties like allowing the vendor to serve others who came before them.

I always make it a point to stand in a queue of sorts, taking care that I don't barge in front of somebody already there. People do cut in front of me, of course, but I limit myself to a dirty look at them and questioning their parentage in my mind. But yesterday I decided to confront one of the jerks, and asked him to join the queue behind me. He did give in to my request, but the look of horror and indignation on the faces of his companions almost made me feel as if I had insulted their mothers.

And to think these are the cream of the shining India, who are powering us into the 21st century.

Tomorrow we will turn our attention to another Ugly Indian, the Ugly Indian Motorist.

Don't you guys have any shame?

As usual, the CWC abdicates all decision-making to the uber-extra-constitutional power.

The Soul of a New Machine

The Soul of a New Machine arrived last Saturday. The story of how some of Data General's smart engineers became disillusioned and quit the company after a pet project of theirs got cancelled reminded me of Cringely's latest essay. Just a coincidence, I thought, until I came to this, at the beginning of Chapter 4:

A young computer engineer, known to be one of the most skillful in Westborough's basement, said he had a fantasy about a better job than his. In it, he goes to work as a janitor for a computer company whose designs leave much to be desired. There, at night, disguised by mop and broom, he sneaks into the offices of the company's engineers and corrects the designs on their blackboards and desks.

Hmmm, I could swear that I've heard this story before.

Looks like a lot of folks drew -- ahem -- inspiration from this classic.

Warning

Eating halwa may be injurious to your health.

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?