It's Ten Years Later

... and Bilic is now standing in the Croatian team dugout, not as player, but as team manager. Managers are getting younger all the time -- Southgate is another player-turned-manager who comes to mind -- but it still feels odd to see Bilic, earring and all, try to appear comfortable in a suit.

Incidentally, Bilic is best remembered (at least by me) for being given hell by the French fans in World Cup '98 for making Laurent Blanc miss the final because of an ill-deserved yellow card acquired on account of Bilic's histrionics.

My VA Smalltalk Experience

1. You need to register to download an evaluation copy. Strike one.


2. The setup program complains about the non-existence of '/usr/local/VASmalltalk/7.5', which needs to be created manually.


3. Run the setup program; hit error "Runtime Error -- couldn't open file with UnixProcess". Readme.txt says you need csh, or you can try fooling the installer by creating a symbolic link to bash and naming it as 'csh'. Strike two.


4. Not wanting to cut corners, you install csh. The error goes away, and you are able to complete the installation.


5. OK, how do we start VA Smalltalk? Turns out you are not done with the installation yet. Need to run a program called 'vasetup'. This creates a copy of the image and other files.


6. You try starting VA by running the command 'xterm -sb -e abt&'. Nothing happens, except for the screen flickering for a moment. Go back to the documentation, and find that there are a number of things you still have to do, starting with tweaking the abt.ini file followed by changing the ownership of the manager -- whatever that means -- and a whole lot of other things that may be necessary with Linux.


7. By now you are pretty much at the end of your tether and decide that it's simply not worth it. Strike three. rm -rf /usr/local/VASmalltalk
   

It's 2008, and the fact that I'm using Linux shouldn't mean that I need to jump through so many hoops. These guys need to make things way, way simpler. They can look at how VisualWorks does things, for starters.

The Left is at it again - Part 2

They will not be man enough to walk out of the government and bring it down, but still want to earn brownie points with the public through protests and bandhs against the fuel prices hike. Fscking hypocrites.

Blah?

I received the latest VMWare Corporate Email Newsletter today. By definition, there's bound to be a lot of corporate blah-blah in it, but it was quite surprising that somebody in VMWare itself seems to think so:



The culprit (if you could call it that) is Gmail; since it doesn't display images by default, the alt text is all you see when you open the email.

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Alien Skull

(I know, the name is not quite correct)

I've either reached the limits of my tolerance for these action flicks, or the latest edition of Indiana Jones really sucks. Either way, not the most enjoyable way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

For a change, let me try being more objective about my review; I'll lay down the parameters for evaluation and their respective weightages first, then rate the movie along these parameters ( * cough enterprisey cough *):

1. Ability to hold viewer's attention (25%)
2. Quality of stunts/effects/action sequences (15%)
3. Crispness of dialog (15%)
4. Clicheness index (15%)
5. Originality of the plot (10%)
6. Believability of the plot (5%)
7. Quality of the cast and their acting (15%)

Ability to hold the viewer's attention: Though the movie doesn't grab your attention and refuse to let it go, it doesn't drag on, either. Three stars.

Quality of stunts/effects/action sequences: I expected better from an Indiana Jones sequel. Pity that they couldn't come up with something decent even for the climax. Two stars.

Crispness of dialog: Some of the dialog between Dr Jones and Mike raises a few chuckles, but pretty lame otherwise. Two and a half stars.

Clicheness Index: Exhibit A: Old couple on an expedition bickering with each other even as they save each others' lives. Exhibit B: Expedition goes into a cave in the climax, expedition does something inside, everything comes tumbling down, expedition (minus expendables/villains) hauls ass. Been there, done that. One star (the parameter name is misleading, actually; the higher the stars, the better the movie. Please send me a change request -- please use form CCRF020 -- filled out in triplicate, and I'll see what I can do).

Originality of the plot: This is the fourth (?) movie in the franchise. Need I say more? Two stars.

Believability of the plot: I'm willing to cut some slack here, this is Indiana Jones, after all. Two and a half stars.

Quality of the cast and their acting: I like Harrison Ford quite a lot, but he seems to be getting too old for this kind of stuff. The rest of the cast just seem to be along for the ride, except maybe for the Russian lady villain. Two stars.

Overall rating: 2.2 stars

Now for the subjective part:

1. Is it just me, or was there an attempt to revive the Cold War propaganda? I'm talking about the evil Russians who slaughter innocent indigenous tribes and cut down the rain forests.
   
   
2. Which kind of idiot tries to use a snake as a rope to rescue people drowning in quicksand? Staying on the subject, Dr Jones' exposition of the difference between quicksand and drysand even as he is being sucked in was instrumental in taking away half a star from the Believability parameter.
   
   
3. Every movie has a satori moment, a sort of tipping point when (a) you realize that the money spent on the ticket was worth it or (b) you want to slap yourself on the forehead (a la Priety Zinta in the IPL semis). For me, this moment occurred with Professor Oxley's "They are in the space between spaces" comment. I leave it as an exercise to the gentle reader to figure out whether it was in the context of (a) or (b).

On second thought, I'm going to deduct 0.1 stars because I couldn't get the irritating theme music out of my head till 11:30 PM.

How does a breeze become a wave?

Is Thomas Friedman writing editorials for Deccan Chronicle now?

The question of majority thus satisfactorily resolved, the stage was set for the birth of the first BJP government in South India: the saffron breeze that swept the north has begun to blow in the south. However, no one will take a bet on whether the breeze will convert itself into a wave in the coming years and bestow on the BJP the status of a major political player in the South as well.

How to Retire Early

The latest issue of Outlook Money has a story on how to retire early (no, it doesn't advise a glass of hot milk at 8 PM). It features the stories of five people who managed to do this successfully. Being the skeptic I am, I didn't have much confidence in their advice, but I wanted to see what these five people had done.

To cut a long story short, if you want to retire early in life, do one (or all) of these things:

• Get a golden parachute, and let your wife continue to work (retiring early doesn't apply to your spouse, apparently)

• Spend a lot of time overseas, leverage the exchange rate, quit your high-paying job and become a consultant

• Make your fortune as a partner in a PE firm (that's private equity; yeah, three months back I too would have gone 'huh?')

• Buy two houses (live in one; use the rent from the other for living costs)

• Sell your stock options

In other words, if you want to become rich, you should make a lot of money. Gee, thanks a lot, I only wish I had known this when I was starting out on my career.

Staying on the IPL

... I think the way the commentators mention the name of the sponsors every chance they get ("DLF Maximum Sixers", "Citi Moment of Success" and so on) is simply disgusting.

Kapil on the IPL

Today's Hindu has an interview with Kapil Dev. As expected, it's about his take on the IPL. There is a hint of sour grapes ("What stops film stars from playing a T20 match in the IPL"), some doomsday predictions ("...club culture will command a bigger loyalty than State or even country") and a dash of wishful thinking ("The BCCI is finished as an organisation"), but we should give credit where it' due: no one can deny Kapil's efforts in lighting a fire under the BCCI's ass with his ICL initiative. To rub salt into his wound, some BCCI official even had the gall to say that he had been dreaming about the IPL for years. Considering Kapil's contributions to Indian cricket -- his 1983 World Cup triumph is about 1,743,449 times worthier that the Twenty20 World Cup victory, notwithstanding all the hype surrounding the latter -- the least the BCCI should have done is to have roped him into the IPL in some administrative capacity.

Amen to that

I've always felt that the talkers were winning (or have already won) the battle against the doers, and this quote from Sam Smith (via Xymphora) nailed it for me:

We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it.

India is not there yet, but give it just another decade or so.

WSIF Provider for Spring

Rather than have folks leave a comment or email me about my WSIF Spring Provider implementation, I have uploaded the files (sources and sample WSDL) to my web site.

KDE 4.0

Reasons I don't like KDE 4.0:

1. No way to customize the panel - can't change the size, transparency, auto-hide, etc.
2. No way to change the menu to, say, the classic view.
3. Speaking of the classic view, changing the icons does not change anything.
4. Limited options to configure the clock. It's now on a par with the %$^# Gnome clock (one of the reasons I switched from Ubuntu)
   
5. Cannot manipulate the contents of the system tray.
6. Cannot move the icons around in the panel.
7. Where do I specify shortcuts for the menu items?
8. The options for keyboard shortcuts is a subset of what I used to see in 3.5.
9. Where is the option to hibernate?
   
10. On the whole, it's just a Vista wannabe - widgets and all.

While I'm on the subject, I might as well bitch about Firefox 3 as well - the GrayModern2 theme is yet to be ported to v3; I am left with a poor substitute: Phoenity Modern.

Twitter

I'm on Twitter.

Heirs Try To Freeze Nizam's Funds

The heirs of the Nizam of Hyderabad are trying to get back the millions of pounds of family funds held in a frozen account in a London Bank. Reminds me of this great quote from a recent Anti-Empire Report:

"Get off this estate."
"What for?"
"Because it's mine."
"Where did you get it?"
"From my father."
"Where did he get it?"
"From his father."
"And where did he get it?"
"He fought for it."
"Well, I'll fight you for it."

StS2008 Coding Contest

I've been working on my entry to the Smalltalk Solutions 2008 Coding Contest for the past three weeks or so, and it's been a pretty good experience so far: at last, an opportunity to work on a non-trivial Smalltalk project. The decision to provide three months for the contest is a great one; it gives sufficient time to put together something worthy. I'm sure there are going to be some great entries, but I'd be more than happy even if I manage to submit only a minimal (yet fully functional) entry.

Movie Review: American Gangster

It happened with Just Like Heaven two years ago, and it again happened with American Gangster the week before last: one can see the microphone at the top of the frame in at least a third of the scenes. In fact, it was so bad at times that it would have been an improvement if they had handed out hand mikes to Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe. I doubt that the movie editors would have overlooked such an obvious thing, so the blame most probably lies with the folks in the theater projection room.

I initially thought I'd say something about the movie's plot, the characters and so on, but two weeks after watching the movie, the fiasco with the microphones is all that I can remember. Oh, and how the protagonists try to prove who's the most testosteroney of them all.

Quote of the day

A metamodel is a model used to model modeling itself.
-- MOF 2.0 Specifications

Moview Review: National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Cliched scenes, too-clever-by-half dialogue, lame sidekick, over-the-prime hero, a plot that requires one to a) leave one's incredulity at home with the family dog and b) be the village idiot to find interesting -- you name it, National Treasure has it. The saving grace is the climax; not a particularly engaging one, but nonetheless a huge improvement when compared to the rest of the movie.

Some scenes that stand out for all the wrong reasons:

• The ease with which the sidekick hacks into Buckingham Palace's network

• Photographing the wooden piece by making use of the camera at the traffic light (and of course getting the $%@^ sidekick to hack into the police database to retrieve the photograph)

• The absolutely irritating conversations between Ben Gates' parents

Playing the stock market

From William Blum's Anti-Empire Report:

...there are numerous significant information gaps and misconceptions in the choir's thinking, often leaving them unable to see through the newest government lie or propaganda trick; they're unknowing or forgetful of what happened in the past that illuminates the present; knowing the facts but unable to apply them at the appropriate moment; vulnerable to being led astray by the next person who offers a specious argument that opposes what they currently believe, or think they believe. The choir needs to be frequently reminded and enlightened.

He might as well be talking about the financial press. I have been following the stock market for the last month or so (not to mention losing some money as well), and the one thing that struck me after reading the daily reports on movements of the Sensex is how the reporters unquestioningly quote the market players' take on things. You either find incredibly banal, motherhood statements like "More than 50% of India's exports are to the United States" (to account for the fall in the stock prices of companies which rely on exports for their revenue -- conveniently forgetting that the same companies' shares rose yesterday when the state of the American economy was practically the same as today), or plain deceitful stuff like the now-infamous "decoupling" theory.

SMS Polls

Deccan Chronicle runs an SMS poll everyday, asking for readers' opinions on one of the burning issues of the day ('Do u thk v shd lynch SRK pblcly or in prvt?'). Now, what kind of folks take part in such polls? It's not like all the entries are placed in a lucky draw or something. If people still send in their votes, it's either because they are interested in shaping public opinion (i.e. vested interests), or they think voicing their opinions will lead to a more informed public discourse.

Both of these reasons don't seem plausible to me, especially in light of the poll numbers; invariably the percentages are too round for my liking, like 60% ayes and 40% nays: it's exceedingly unlikely that the total number of votes was a multiple of 100. Yeah I know, the stated percentage can be reached for any total, say, 50 (30/20), but this actually leads me to my postulate: I suspect that the totals are usually less than 100. Knowing DC, I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually in the single digits -- a DC reporter, his editor and the typesetter voting 'Aye', and said reporter's wife and dog voting 'Nay'.

A look at the results of yesterday's poll: 76% for 'Yes', 24% for 'No'. Hmmm, what's the smallest number that yields whole numbers for these percentages? 25, I think. I bet the DC folks are jumping with joy.