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.