Official Confirmation

...that the Euro may have had -- and continue to have -- a bearing on the American designs for the Middle East.

The Celebrity Cameo Design Pattern

Intent
Milk a sitcom for some more rating points

Also Known As
Don't-they-have-any-shame-whatsoever Pattern

Motivation

1. A show has been on the air for longer than anybody would have wished, and the writers have long since run out of good storylines. But the channel does not want to risk taking it off the air and replacing it with something unproven, thereby losing its primetime spot.
2. The lead actors are beginning to have weight problems.
3. Things are not so hunky dory since the sickeningly cute child star hit puberty and looks plain sickening, instead.

Applicability
Typically applies to sitcoms where each episode is self-contained, thereby affording easy entry and exit of, say, one of the main character's childhood friends or estranged sister.

Consequences

1. The show in question loses even more credibility
2. The actors are richer by another million dollars

Known Uses
Brad Pitt in Friends; George Clooney in Friends; Christina Applegate in -- where else -- Friends.

Related Patterns
Air-cuts-from-old-episodes-as-flashbacks Pattern

Non-alignment and Quining

'Non-alignment is not an empty slogan' is an empty slogan.

Manmohan Singh's personal integrity may be beyond reproach, but his political integrity has been pretty much shot to pieces.

I think there is a lesson here: Both our President and Prime Minister have impeccable characters, yet their honesty has had practically no influence on the government's actions. Probably indicates a) the depths to which politics has sunk in our country and b) that nice guys have no place in politics.

Confessions of a leecher

I downloaded the first CD in Mandriva 2006 via BitTorrent a couple of days ago, and, being a bit impatient, I terminated Azureus before the share ratio turned green. I also deleted the .iso file after writing it to the CD.

I am downloading CD #2 as I type this, and seeing the aborted upload in the lower pane, I decided to soothe my conscience and put up the ISO file again for upload. Only problem is, running mkisofs on the CD contents produces a .iso file alright, but this file is not identical to the original one, as evidenced by the MD5 checksums. I am therefore hesitant to put this up in case it is an invalid file and my karma goes south.

Movie Review: Fun with Dick and Jane

Trust Jim Carrey to carry the entire movie by himself, never mind that the storyline is pretty silly and requires a firm suspension of disbelief.

The best scenes in the movie are those in which Carrey and Tia Leone bumble their way into perfecting a career as holdup artists ("Mercedes, off"? LOL!). [Update: How did I miss the R Kelly 'I believe I can fly' elevator scene?)

The climax is torturous; I still haven't fully convinced myself that Carrey & Co really pull anything over the evil CEO (speaking of Alec Baldwin, I wonder why he said yes to such a nothing role).

Two-and-a-half stars out of five.

Let me get this straight...

Iran should not acquire nuclear weapons because Sunni nations cannot tolerate this and would also try to get nukes, leading to a new arms race, while the fact that Israel (whom they hate with far greater intensity) has had nukes for God-knows-how-long has not prompted them to do so.

Give me a break.

Staying on the topic of anonymity

... here is a way to conceal your identity effectively:

1. Install Privoxy and Tor.


2. Log in to yahoo.co.ar (yes, Argentina) and create an email address for yourself (with, of course, a handle that doesn't reflect your real name). [*]


3. If you want to enjoy the benefits of a Gmail account while retaining your anonymity, proceed to Step 4. Otherwise go ahead and put your Yahoo account to good (anonymous) use.


4. Assuming that you have a Gmail account with invites to spare, send an invite to the yahoo.co.ar email address created in step 2. If you do not have a Gmail account, wheedle one from a friend or an acquaintance. We are basically establishing plausible deniability; in the event that the Yahoo email address is traced back to you, you can always claim that you sent the invite via Gmail Swap.


5. Use this invite to create a valid Gmail account, again with an untraceable handle.


6. If you are really paranoid, proceed to Step 7. If not, use this Gmail address to post anonymously to your heart's content.


7. Repeat steps 2 to 5 by creating a chain of shell Gmail/Yahoo accounts. Visit the Mongolian, Tadjik and Burkina Faso versions of Yahoo. Be creative.

[*] Yahoo currently permits you to create an email account without specifying another existing and valid email address. If this policy ever changes, replace Yahoo with some other free email service that doesn't impose such a restriction. The idea is not to leave any trace or log of your real email/IP address anywhere in the 'system'.

On the Joys of Posting Anonymously

Today I posted anonymously to a discussion forum. Nothing inflammatory (it was a technical discussion), but man, it felt good for whatever reason (probably the same one that prompted Calvin to play low volume Muzak as a form of protest against his parents). Different kicks for different folks, I guess.

Cognitive Dissonance and You

I periodically receive letters from CRY asking for support. The fine print in all these letters say that CRY does not ask for cash donations; then why do they only contain different options for support, i.e. support one child for a year, three children for a year, etc. which of course entail monetary contributions?

He's not the one who needs help, actually

Hamas and the ANC

Bill Kirkman has this to say about Hamas' election victory:

... South Africa, where those fighting apartheid concluded that they could not successfully do so by democratic means, because the processes of democracy -- notably the vote -- were denied to them. Hence the African National Congress's (ANC) use of violence. The dramatic change in the political scene in the early 1990s led, of course, to victory by the ANC in the 1994 election. That changed the situation. Violence was no longer appropriate for people who had acquired the responsibility of government.

It's apples and oranges. When ANC won the election, it won complete control. In the case of Hamas, when Israel still controls the West Bank (and withholds tax receipts to boot), it's only responsibility; there is no -- or rather limited -- power to go with it.

Rigorous Intuition

There's no question about it: Jeff Wells' blog is the scariest thing I have ever read on the Internet. I have been spending the last two weeks reading all the archive posts; it was almost like reading a crime novel, the only difference being that this is real life we are talking about.

Some of the comments left in the blog and the associated discussion forum seem to be pure evil, purportedly containing triggering signals that push abuse victims over the edge and bring out their alters. Not since I spent a late night watching The Blair Witch Project alone after eating something dodgy have I been this spooked; I think I'll get over this soon, but for the time being I have taken to ensuring that there is at least one other light on somewhere else when I switch off the light and leave my den.

Abramovich

Passing reference to Abramovich here in connection with nefarious things like drug trafficking and international terrorism.

SeaMonkey 1.0

The more things change, the more they remain the same. There is practically no difference between SeaMonkey and Firefox, except for the animated image at the top right of the browser and a different way of setting options.

Alright, there is one difference: I'm not able to access Gmail, either directly or from the notifier extension.

Movie Review: Transporter 2

I didn't really expect much from the movie, other than something to do on a lazy Saturday afternoon, so it was a pleasant surprise that it wasn't too sucky. In fact, there are very few moments when one feels bored; the action is non-stop, and there is always something or the other happening, never mind how outlandish it is or how clichéd the dialog is in some places. I'll just mention two gems:

1. The way Jason Statham removes the bomb placed under his car by executing a somersault and using a crane hook to prise it loose


2. How he uses an iPod to transfer a picture from a PC to a Unix machine at the police headquarters (that his French sidekick somehow manages to hack into in a matter of seconds).

Ontology, taxonomy and etymology

In addition to having a lot of O's, these words have something else in common: their meanings have to be looked up every time you encounter them. You come across them in the course of your reading, a dim light goes off somewhere in the recesses of your brain, but it's not bright enough to avoid a lookup, and off you go to reference.com.

I used to consider semantics in the same category, but nailed it firmly by taking recourse to XML: if an XML document is well-formed, it's syntactically correct, while it has to be valid (i.e. satisfy a schema/DTD) to be semantically correct. I guess there is something to the rumour that XML can solve world hunger, if only we would let it.

The Cobra Event

I am reading Richard Preston's The Cobra Event, or I should rather say "was reading", because I have no intention of finishing the book. Ignoring the demonising of Iraq (this book was written much before the American invasion, so whatever one reads about Iraq's WMD capabilities must be seen for what it really is), I didn't really like the style of the prose, with it's a) over-reliance on the knowledge of esoteric matter to carry the plot and b) the soapboxing. Here is an instance of the second kind:

It was Charles Darwin who first understood that evolution is caused by natural selection, and that natural selection is death. He also understood that vast amounts of death (vast amounts of natural selection) are required to effect a small permanent change in the shape or behavior of an organism. Without huge amounts of death, organisms do not change over time. Without death, life would never have become more complex than the simplest self-copying molecules. The arms of a starfish could not have happened without countless repetitions of death. Death is the mother of structure. It took four billion years of death -- a third of the age of the universe -- for death to invent the human mind. Given another four billion years of death, or perhaps a hundred billion years of death, who can say that death will not create a mind so effective and subtle that it will reverse the fate of the universe and become God? The smell in the Manhattan morgue is not the smell of death; it is the smell of life changing its form. It is evidence that life is indestructible.

Replace death with life, i.e. that natural selection is the rewarding of fitness with life, and the above paragraph's basic premise is still valid, but the sentence about the Manhattan morgue doesn't have a leg to stand on, showing that the mini-lecture about natural selection is pretty much extraneous.

Is it just me

... or does listening to some of Coldplay's songs feel like having a bored sheep piss on you :-) ?

Slovak, anyone?

A post in a Slovak Linux forum has a question related to my Conexant page. My Slovak being a bit rusty (non-existent, rather), I don't know what the question is and whether I need to update my instructions.

Najde sa niekdo kdo mi pomoze?

Best. Ad. Ever.

The NikeFootball.com ad with the laughing baby doll taped to the garage roof. Call me a sadist, but the little girl's expression as she watches her brother(?) and his friend hammer the doll is absolutely priceless.