Blog zeitgeist

Earlier it was Miss Jammu porn; now it's the turn of Sania Mirza's breasts. I am referring to the search terms that inadvertently lead to my blog.

Here's a really productive way...

to spend a lazy Sunday morning: learn French by having Google translate one of your older blog archive pages and trying to figure out what you were saying. Trust me, it's not that easy, especially when you are looking at posts that don't have any easily recognisable words.

Hoary Hedgehog

Ubuntu 5.04 has been released. Though I have no intention of switching from Suse, I kicked off a download all the same (I have an unused 6 GB partition in the Suse machine I thought I would put to use for this). After a 10-hour download and a one-hour installation process, Hoary Hedgehog is up and running. Some (very preliminary) impressions:

1. The installation process is not as slick as that of Mandrake or Suse. Same old Debian character-mode installation.


2. Something went wrong with the part where we choose the screen resolutions; the input areas (the ones with the asterisks) were sort of garbled. I don't know whether this is the cause, but when I boot up, the resolution always defaults to 1024 x 768 even if I explicitly set it to 800 x 600. Update: for some reason, the system caught on the second time I set the screen resolution. BTW, I also had to manually adjust the screen positioning in the monitor.
   


3. Firefox 1.0.2 is the default browser. Good thing.

Back in business

As usual, the problem took care of itself. I took out all the IDE cables in the computer and re-plugged them back in; the machine promptly started working again.

Dabblers and Blowhards

Looks like I am not alone in my criticism of Paul Graham's essays.

Hardware woes

My Linux machine is on the blink. It stopped working all of a sudden; on restarting it, it kept emitting long, periodic beeps and doing nothing else. After a while, even that stopped. Opening the CPU case cover revealed that the power unit was functioning alright; the CPU fans were spinning and the network card LEDs were also on. After poking around a bit (and getting some mild electric shocks in the process) and checking the wiring, I could not find anything wrong.

I think I will give it some more time and switch it on tomorrow; most of the time, such problems disappear as mysteriously as they appear (due in no small measure to my good karma ;-) ). Let's hope this is one of them.

My experience with assembled PCs has always been like this; they work fine 99% of the time, but behave unpredictably once in a while. Leads me to think that the components these PCs are made of didn't pass that rigorous a QC test as would their counterparts in a branded PC. Since I bought most of these components in Richie Street (the electronics grey-market district of Chennai), this is quite a real possibility. Having said that, these components do give value for money when compared to their overpriced brethren from the likes of IBM.

In the meantime, I have regressed to being an unwilling Windows user. Sorely missing the Bitstream Vera fonts...

Update: I have installed the Bitstream Vera fonts in Windows as well; still not as nifty as they are in Linux.

What gives?

Google is now running Buddhism-related ads on this blog. Go figure.

See blog title

Quite a number of visitors to my blog arrive here by googling for 'shikantaza', so I thought I would avoid the bad karma of disappointing them by providing some information about the term (from The Three Pillars of Zen):

...shikan-taza is a heightened state of concentrated awareness wherein one is neither tense nor hurried, and certainly never slack. It is the mind of somebody facing death. Let us imagine that you are engaged in a duel of swordsmanship of the kind that used to take place in ancient Japan. As you face your opponent you are unceasingly watchful, set, ready. Were you to relax your vigilance even momentarily, you would be cut down instantly. A crowd gathers to see the fight. Since you are not blind you see them from the corner of your eye, and since you are not deaf you hear them. But not for an instant is your mind captured by these sense impressions.

The Pope was not a saint?

Some articles with an alternative viewpoint regarding Pope John Paul II.

And for comic relief, here is The Rude Pundit's take on things.

Liverpool 2-1 Juventus

I feel sorry for Scott Carson. But for his blunder, Liverpool would have been sitting pretty going into the second leg next week. After they scored their second goal, it looked like they were going to walk all over Juve, but Juve managed to pull themselves together in the second half, even though their goal was a gift.

BTW, the commentators should go a bit easier on their praise of Gerrard. He's good, but not that good. The way they were wetting their pants every time he passed the ball (no matter that the passes failed to find their intended targets half the time) was irritating.

Conventional wisdom says that Juventus will win 1-0 in Turin next week and enter the semis.

Linux USB ADSL modem -- not yet

Chennai is experiencing thundershowers as I type this. There was some pretty awesome thunder and lightning near my home yesterday . Anyway, my USB ADSL modem (the one I have written so much about) was taken out because of this. After the tech support guy from Airtel replaced the modem with another one and got things working, I wanted to revisit the possibility of using the DSL connection directly from Linux. A Google search confirmed that there are Linux drivers available for it (the modem is based on the Conexant AccessRunner chipset).

Long story short (I have to leave for work): need to do a lot make this happen:

1. Extract the modem's firmware binary from a Windows file using a utility that is still under beta and which may or may not work.


2. Compile the kernel with the modem driver sources.


3. Figure out how to set up ADSL in Suse.

Had I still been using Debian, I wouldn't have given a second thought to jumping right in and giving it a go, but after moving to Suse, I no longer have the stomach to roll up my sleeves and start hacking around (and breaking God-knows-what in the process). I have also been spoiled rotten by YaST.

Movie Review: Finding Neverland

Finding Neverland starts out pretty slowly (not that the action ever gets too hot), but manages to retain viewer interest. Though the storyline is pretty thin, it never gets too boring.

I was worried at one point that there might be a pedophile twist to the plot; there is no love interest between Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet, so I thought may be the director was going for something saucier -- one of Depp's friends even says that tongues were wagging that he (Depp) was getting too close to Winslet's children -- but good thing this didn't pan out (pun unintended). Similarities to el freako's current predicament and his predilection for Peter Pan and Neverland also came to mind.

I would give this movie three stars out of five. One minor quibble is that Dustin Hoffman really shouldn't agree to such nothing parts. He's too good an actor for such roles.

Puff piece

The summary of the article describes it as "John Simmons on the way the search engine managed to dominate its market - and get up Microsoft's nose", but the article doesn't really throw any new light on Google's strategy. It's not a book review either, though it mentions a book called "Search Me". Makes me question its whole intention: is it just a means to generate page viewership by hitching on to Google's popularity?

Clusty extension for Firefox

I downloaded the Clusty extension for Firefox recently, and I must say that I am pretty impressed. I especially like the dictionary feature: you highlight a word, right-click and select the 'Dictionary clip' menu option; a small window appears with the word's meaning. Much better than the Dictionary Search extension, where you are taken to the reference.com web site with all its attendant annoyances.

Newcastle brawl

Folks, why take out your frustrations on the opposite team's players, when you can beat up your own compatriot? I have always considered Lee Bowyer to be a slightly unstable character. I still vividly remember one of the goals he scored recently, where he rudely clambered on top of his own team mate to head the ball in. It was a great goal alright, but the way he scored it was slightly scary. Not having watched the match, I don't know who started the punch-up, but I strongly suspect that Bowyer would have had a big role in escalating things.

Gmail and Fractional Reserve Banking

Google increasing Gmail's storage capacity has an interesting parallel with fractional reserve banking.

Fractional reserve banking refers to the phenomenon wherein banks are required to maintain only a fraction of the depositors' funds with them; the rest is lent out or invested so that the bank earns some money out of the deposits. The underlying assumption is that this fraction is enough to service the all depositors' withdrawal requests at any point in time; not all depositors are expected to turn up at once and demand their money (if this happens, a run starts on that bank; it's not very easy, even for a financially sound bank, to stave this off).

In the case of Gmail, though each user is right now presented with two gigs of storage, most of the users are unlikely to have used up more than a small fraction (I am currently at 8% myself, BTW). So it's not even required that Google should have two gigs of hard disk space reserved for each user; they can very well claim to provide this without doing so and still not come to grief (what would constitute a 'run' in this case? All the users suddenly deciding to store their porn in Gmail?)

Morbidity

This is getting morbid; each time the Bloglines notifier announces that there is a new unread item from BBC's front page feed, I keep thinking that this the end, the Pope has passed on.

April Fools' Day stories on Slashdot

I think the Slashdot editors have gone overboard with their April Fools' Day stories. It's pretty irritating to come upon a seemingly never-ending stream of inanely stupid things like NASA builds the world's largest paper plane, Information does not exist and so on. Cut it out, guys.

Gmail storage has been increased to 2 GB...

but my account displays only 1495 MB. Where's the rest?

Update: Now I have 1811 MB of space. Looks like Google is incrementally increasing the storage capacity.

Web annoyance

There are some web pages where, no matter which part of the page you navigate to, the annoying ad in the sidebar follows you. You scroll up, you scroll down, you think you have lost the bugger, but no, the ad always catches up with you, notwithstanding the fact that it ends up wheezing and panting in the process.

You are basically not in control. You have no power over it. You can block the ad, of course, but nothing can be done if it is an integral part of the page, like Google Groups' Go to the top feature. That leaves you feeling hopping mad. Which is certainly not the state of mind the advertiser wants you to be in when you are looking at his product...