From a recent letter to The Hindu, on the issue of how God, if He existed, allowed so many innocent people to be killed in the tsunami disaster:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?

There are two ways that believers answer this:

1. Karma: People, though they may be innocent in this life, would still be held accountable for the bad karma accumulated during their past lives.


2. The 'equilateral triangle' argument: Once someone is part of this physical world, there is no way he can escape any of the tribulations and suffering that living in such a world entails (it's called the 'equilateral triangle' argument because once God creates an equilateral triangle, even He doesn't have the power to make its sides unequal; this book has an excellent essay regarding this issue).

There is also a third argument: life as we know it is nothing more than an illusion; the pain and suffering that we endure in this life is akin to what we experience in a dream. Once we awaken from this 'sleep', we will realize this and simply shrug it off as we would a bad dream.

The folks over at alt.atheism will have some (not so pleasant) things to say about this, of course.

Disclaimer: I am not an atheist myself, though I have pretty much abandoned the concept of God as a deity listening to people's prayers, doling out wishes and punishing evildoers.

MyBookmarks.com has screwed up my bookmarks. The site was down yesterday for maintenance. When it came back online, I found that it had replaced my current set of bookmarks with an obsolete one; all my changes over the last month or so seem to have been lost. I am currently engaged in reapplying these changes as well as making a backup of these bookmarks in Firefox itself. An hour of fun and frolic ahead...

Looks like Bollywood has stolen a march on Hollywood when it comes to tackling piracy.

Mobile phones have a mode of text entry called iTap (mine does, anyway) where the software in the phone tries to guess what word you are typing. For example, if you want to type in the word 'while', you type 'wggjd' (these letters are the first of each letter group in the keypad - wxyz, ghi, ghi, jkl and def); the software interprets this correctly. Really speeds up your typing.

I was reminded of this when I discovered a similar feature in OpenOffice. I typed in 'pers' and this was completed as 'perspective' (don't ask me why it didn't select 'perspire' -- probably 'perspective' comes out ahead in some frequency analysis) which was the word I wanted. Pretty cool feature; imagine the amount of time I could save by having the software helpfully filling in words for me. The only problem is that I don't use OpenOffice at work. Time to investigate whether MS Word has this feature (knowing what a piece of monopolistic crap it is, it probably doesn't).

One should not judge a person by his or her looks, but I am willing to make an exception for Condoleeza Rice. This lady radiates pure evil.

I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but these people are a shoo-in for the Darwin awards.

My home page has been given a makeover. The new layout is actually from a blog template. This has got me thinking: why not change my blog's template to match this one as well ?

Update: Makeover complete.

Six Gmail invites available. Send me an email if you would like one.

Two weeks to go for the elections in Iraq. Some predictions:

1. Violence will continue unabated.


2. Voter turnout will be abysmal, but this will not prevent the authorities from declaring the election a success.


3. Allawi will continue as the prime minister (I think a form of Murphy's law is at work here: the caretaker prime minister (or president) will always retain his post after 'elections').


4. US troops will continue to remain in Iraq.


5. No change in the status quo as far as the ordinary Iraqis are concerned.

Robert Fisk on the current climate of fear in Baghdad:

So, "full ahead both" for the dreaded 30 January elections and democracy. The American generals - with a unique mixture of mendacity and hope amid the insurgency - are now saying that only four of Iraq's 18 provinces may not be able to "fully" participate in the elections.

Good news. Until you sit down with the population statistics and realize - as the generals all know - that those four provinces contain more than half of the population of Iraq.

This is the most important thing in the world right now, when 150,000 people have recently lost their lives in a horrific tragedy.

In case you missed it, that was sarcasm.

Having read Lila recently, I was impelled to pay another visit to ZMM. An excerpt from this venerable classic (I am yet to finish the book, so I am sure there will be more such passages to come):

The first problem of empiricism, if empiricism is believed, concerns the nature of "substance." If all our knowledge comes from sensory data, what exactly is this substance which is supposed to give off the sensory data itself? If you try to imagine what this substance is, apart from what is sensed, you'll find yourself thinking about nothing whatsoever.

I don't remember this passage from my first reading, so I am all the more surprised at its similarity to something I posted a while ago.

Finished reading Optimizing Oracle Performance yesterday. This book presents an unconventional way of getting better performance out of an Oracle database, throwing statistics like buffer cache hit ratios out of the window. Instead, it focuses exclusively on the response time a user action takes and how this response time is split among the various database calls and wait events. It's a well-written and authoritative book (the author is an ex-Oracle Corp employee with quite a lot of performance analysis experience). Some nits:

1. The chapter on queuing theory could have been moved to an appendix (or even have been skipped altogether).


2. The chapters targeting PHBs could also have been condensed.


3. Unless you have an automated profiler tool (not sure whether the author's web site provides this tool for free), you are not going to get at the response times from voluminous trace files that easily.


4. You will need additional sources to delve deeper into the ways of correctly interpreting the response times (and fixing the underlying causes) -- Rich Niemiec's "Oracle 9i Performance Tuning" is probably a good resource for this.

When I was in the ninth standard, our English teacher posed a question to us: What happens when we listen to good music? One of the replies she got was, "We forget ourselves." I had never thought of music that way before (to be fair, I was barely into my teens then -- all the more credit to my friend who was smart enough to come up with this answer). A prime example of Dynamic Quality. This is what you experience before your intellect kicks in and you start thinking about the music at a 'meta' level, i.e. who made the music, what emotions it triggers in your mind, what you think of the musician's decadent lifestyle ;-) and so on. The problem is, the Dynamic Quality component of your listening experience diminishes successively each time you listen to the song, till it becomes practically zero (if this were not so, a great song would probably never fall off the charts).

One of the main goals in the practice of Zen Buddhism is to never let go of the Dynamic Quality (they don't call it that, of course) in each and every action that you undertake. Easier said than done...

Wired.com has a hilarious article about how Indian policemen are not properly equipped to tackle cyber crimes. Excerpts:

Cybersecurity expert Raghu Raman said in 2004, police squads were known to confiscate evidence from some offices, returning with monitors and leaving computers behind. Computing teacher Vijay Mukhi said two years ago cops in Mumbai seized pirated software floppies and stapled them together as though they were documents, destroying the material.

A sleuth from Mumbai's high-profile Cyber Crime Investigation Cell once told Wired News how he planned to tackle hacking: "Let hackers know that some tough people are out here.... I have killed Naxalites (regional terrorists who wage guerrilla warfare against police in some Indian states) in Andhra Pradesh (a state).... We cops have seen such tough situations that we know how to handle boys."

I have been bombarded with SMS messages from my mobile service provider, warning me that sending MMS/SMS messages containing porn is punishable under some draconian Penal Code section with a stiff fine and/or prison sentence. This is an offshoot of the MMS porn scandal involving the Delhi school children (considering the act they were engaged in, is it right to call them 'children'?) Anyway, my question is, does ASCII porn also fall under the category of SMS porn?

New blog look courtesy of this collection of free templates (thanks!).

Update: Pretty short tenure for the new look, BTW.

Biting the hand that feeds.

Google Groups has recently been revamped. It has also been integrated with Gmail. Can't say I really like it. The earlier interface was much cleaner. The only positive thing is that messages posted with the X-No-Archive header are also displayed, albeit for a short duration (six days, I think). Oh, and Firefox doesn't display the new page layout properly, either.

Have to agree with the Rude Pundit: it has been a fucked-up scrotum gnasher of a year.

Quite an eloquent explanation of how foreigners are subsidizing the American economy:

Many of the $100 bills circulating throughout the globe are essentially loans that we never have to pay back. Americans use them to buy goods, services, or other currencies. But many of those bills never return to our shores to be redeemed for anything we make or produce. Instead, they stay under mattresses in Bogotá, circulate in Iraq, and are stashed in bank accounts around the world.