Dude, I think you're missing the whole point

From a letter in The Hindu:

Ajmal's trial is nothing but taking democracy too far. Only a person whose guilt is in doubt should be given an opportunity to defend himeself, not one who is is responsible for killing innocent people indiscriminately.

Pray tell, how do we decide that someone's guilt is in doubt or not, without going through the whole judicial process (a.k.a. 'trial')?

IPL 2.0

Random thoughts:

1. Quite a few of the umpiring decisions have been abysmal. Is it because they couldn't get the good ones to travel to South Africa at short notice?


2. Where did they get the cheerleaders from? Hookers 'R Us?


3. The commentators, as usual, outdo each other with their cliches and insincere attempts at drumming up the excitement (see #5 and #6).


4. You have great ads like the Vodafone zoozoos that cost next to nothing, and then you have Airtel's contrived romantic crap featuring jaded, overpaid stars.


5. A team needing less than ten runs in the last over with four or more wickets in hand does *not* constitute a thrilling finish in T20 cricket, contrary to what Ravi Shastri or Harsha Bogle says.


6. It's not a DLF Maximum, it's a fricken sixer, dumbasses.


7. It's been more fun reading the Fake IPL Player's blog than watching most of the matches.


8. Speaking of the KKR, I haven't experienced this much schadenfreude in a long while (evil grin).


9. Trivia: The father and son in the ad where the mother berates the father for being irresponsible are father and son in real life too. I think.

Easy there, Sparky

From The Independent:

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Revolution: check. Holy Grail: check. Massive interest among pundits: check. Evolutionary leap: check. New paradigm: check.

Boy, everyone must be breathless by now, from all the Web 3.0 bubble-blowing.

Reddit vs Slashdot

I had stopped reading Slashdot a while ago, as Reddit had started having more interesting/new stuff. Things have changed between then and now: Reddit has morphed into a sort of dumping ground for all kinds of crap -- witness the number of 'Vote up if you hate...' and 'Dear Reddit, I wrote a new JavaScript Sudoku solver. Tell me what you think' posts that make it to the front page. Slashdot continues to have more focus, with a much higher signal to noise ratio -- no doubt owing to more editorial control over the content. It also continues to be one of the few places where the quality of the discussion consistently exceeds that of the content.

To be fair, Reddit does provide some value with the NSFW^H^H^H^H funny pictures and videos, but a good source for the latest news? Not anymore.

Get off my lawn

I have been meaning to write about this for a long time, but considering that the size of my friends list in Facebook has exceeded the magical number of four, now is as good a time as any other: this may just be a generational thing, but every time I see a Facebook/Orkut page with the pokes, scraps and assorted other crap, my fingers start twitching involuntarily, trying to reach for the nearest neck to choke. The exposure of the messages in one's scrapbook/wall/whatever to everybody in the friends list is, to me, the equivalent of making the password to your email account public. Even if the messages are in the nature of 'Hi!!!! Great to get in touch with you!!! lol!!' (I'm not even going to comment on the language or the presence of the extra exclamation marks), I still consider such exposure a violation of my privacy.

P.S. And dude, there's a word for using $HOT_HOLLYWOOD_HUNK's picture as your avatar or whatever the fsck it is called: loser.

Gah.

Dear Tata Sky

The way you disallow any control of the content for the first ten seconds or so after switching on the set top box and ram your promos down the viewers' throats is extremely presumptuous and shows that you don't give a tiny rat's ass about your customers. Believe me, the last thing a person wants to experience just as he's sitting down for some hopefully decent entertainment is impotent rage at the non-functioning remote.

You give research a bad name

I don't think they could have picked a more irrelevant topic for research if they had tried. Coming soon to an academic journal near you: 'Correlation between the colour of the suits worn by CEOs and the year-on-year growth in the quarterly profits reported by their companies'.

Kamran reported

Rajastan Royals' Kamran Khan has been reported for a suspect bowling action. Excuse me, if Kamran's action is suspect, Lasith Malinga should be banned from coming within 100 yards of the bowling crease. I can't for the life of me imagine why no umpire has had the guts to report him so far (unless it's because of the power wielded by the Asian lobby in international cricket affairs). Staying on the subject of cricket affairs, Lalith Modi is beginning to look more and more like a Mini-Me version of Jagmohan Dalmia.

Government launches new pension scheme

Ignoring the convenient timing of the announcement -- frankly, the postponing of the announcement by a month doesn't really cut it -- the idea of a pension scheme in which one can invest up to 50% in the stock market is simply abominable. Here's a suggestion: why don't they rename it from NPS to 401K?

Update: Now the IT sector is contemplating a switch to the new scheme. The article touts a number of benefits of the new scheme over EPF:

NPS scores over EPFO on several counts. While EPFO follows a moribund investment pattern with no equity exposure, NPS allows members to design their own retirement portfolio and offers six different fund managers to choose from. EPFO's service delivery and account keeping is de-centralised and a recent audit found that over 90% of EPF members' accounts are inaccurately maintained. With a professional central record-keeping agency in place, NPS is better placed on this front.

Workers can check their pension fund balances online, far advanced than the delayed annual contribution slips EPFO sends.

Frankly, except for the better record-keeping, the rest of the reasons are in no way deal-clinchers (note how the EPFO's lack of exposure to the equity market is dismissed as a "moribund investment pattern"). Also, good luck with backing the horse -- aka 'fund manager' -- most likely to win.

The family that flips together

Check out this picture of Amitabh Bachchan proudly giving the bird to everybody (I couldn't locate the online version of the image where the entire Bachchan clan is indulging in unintentional rudeness). Somebody in the polling booth is having a good laugh about the whole thing.

Props to Priya Dutt for realizing the stupidity of holding up a finger (middle or otherwise) and showing her whole hand instead.

MARIE Simulator for VisualWorks

Here is a VisualWorks implementation of the MARIE Simulator that I put together. Compiler included.

Why am I not surprised?

After sleeping for three years, the CBI wakes up and questions the jurisdiction of the trial court hearing the case against Jagdish Tytler. Does this have anything to do with the fact that the Congress party feels that its poll fortunes are in jeopardy because of the clean chit given to Tytler? Of course not -- the CBI is an independent agency, not under anybody's control. Right?

Yeah, right

From The Hindu:

Real estate developers are warning that if (potential home-buyers) wait too long, there could be dire consequences for a number of support industries, millions of unskilled labourers and the wider economy itself... (Prakash Challa) warned that the confused consumer could push the market too far.

I don't even know where to begin. Now home-buyers are supposed to throw prudence to the winds and jump into the market in the broader interests of the economy, never mind the uncertainty over their paychecks and whether they would be able to afford the astronomical EMIs. Also notice how their caution is characterized as confusion.

Backups

1. Get hold of a Maxtor 320 GB external drive.


2. Plug it into Linux and find out that the capacity reported is actually 300 GB. I have experienced this before as well -- my Acer laptop's hard drive was touted as 60 GB while the partitioning software reported it as 55 GB. (Update: When it comes to disk sizes, 'giga' means 10 raised to 9, and not 2 raised to 30. Duh.)


3. My intention was to use the drive for both the personal and work laptops by dividing it into an NTFS partition and an ext3 partition. To do this you need to add NTFS support to gparted by installing the ntfsprogs package.


4. Use gparted to resize the existing NTFS partition and create an ext3 partition from the freed up space.


5. Using rsync to back up the data partition in Linux is a breeze -- the whole thing is over in about 15 minutes.


6. Now attach the drive to the work laptop and find that the drive is not recognized at all, except to report an unknown device called 'Maxtor Basics'.


7. Tear hair out for a half day or so trying to figure this out, including a) upgrading to Windows XP Service Pack 3 and b) running Mepis Live CD on the laptop and confirming that the drive is compatible with the laptop's hardware.


8. Fix the problem finally by deleting a file called 'infcache.1' in c:\windows\inf. Now the drive appears in both Windows Explorer and the disk management snapin. Also change the access permissions for usbstor.pnf and usbstor.inf, to be on the safe side.
   


9. Waste about half an hour trying to use the built-in Windows backup utility -- get errors like 'delayed writing failed', etc.


10. Download Cobian Backup and complete the job -- the backup process is nowhere near as fast as using rsync in Linux, but it does the job adequately.


11. One minor issue still remains; I'm unable to remove the drive in Windows using the 'Safely remove hardware' option -- Windows reports that the device cannot be stopped now and asks me to try later.

Why do I even bother?

Spotted in DC in an article about the rupee (italics mine):

In nominal terms, it has fallen from Rs 39.27 to the US dollar on January 15 to Rs 51.10 to the US dollar by March 3 -- a decline of more than 30% in less than two months.

The time it took for the rupee to fall 30% is actually 13 months, since the January 15 refers to 2008, not 2009. It wouldn't have mattered so much if this was from a regular news item (what with reporters facing deadlines and all), but the sentence in question is from the first paragraph of an op-ed piece, where one would assume more care would be taken to ensure accuracy.

Naked short selling brought down Lehman?

The Deep Capture guys must be feeling vindicated. On the other hand, is this just blame-shifting by the folks at Lehman?

How to spot a hidden religious agenda

From How to spot a hidden religious agenda:

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

Yes, you there in the last row, I'm talking to you.

Wild Fire

I have read a couple of Nelson DeMille novels before, and have found them quite readable. I picked one up -- Wild Fire -- after a long gap. I have not made it through Chapter 1 yet, but I have already been assaulted by a combination of cliches, trying-too-hard-to-be-clever quips, an overdose of testosterone and plain old jingoism. Some samples:

• "We are now a mostly paperless organization, and I actually miss initialing memos. I had an urge to initial my computer with a grease pencil, but I settled for the electronic equivalent. If I ran this organization, all memos would be on an Etch A Sketch."


• "Also included in our collegial group are people who, like ghosts, don't actually exist, but if they did, they'd be called CIA."


• "Also, this guy has a bad habit of coming back from the dead - he's done it at least once before - and without a positive body identification, I'm not breaking out the champagne."


• "My wife is a beautiful woman, but even if she weren't, I'd still love her. Actually, if she weren't beautiful, I wouldn't have even noticed her, so it's a moot point."


• "The message read [Ed: It's in all caps in the novel -- BTW, somebody please tell the author that normal people don't type in all-caps anymore -- but in the interest of not hurting the eyes too much, I've changed it to normal text]: Let's knock off early, go home, have sex, I'll cook you chili and hot dogs, and make you drinks while you watch TV in your underwear. Actually, it didn't say that. It said: Let's go away for a romantic weekend of wine tasting on the North Fork. I'll book a B&B. Love, Kate."


• "Like most men, I'd rather face the muzzle of an assault rifle than a pissed-off wife."


• "... who I strongly suspect was once romantically involved with my then future wife. This is not why I disliked him - it was why I hated him. I disliked him for professional reasons."


• Never referring to Osama bin Laden without the prefix "scumbag", a derogatory reference to the Middle East ("Sandland"). We get it -- you are a red-blooded American.


• "Not one of my better cases, but it brought me and Kate together, so the next time I see him, I'll thank him for that, before I gut-shoot him and watch him die slowly."


• "This was one of the reasons. we got divorced. The other was that she thought cooking and f**king were two cities in China."

I think it would have been easier to scan the pages and put them up, as someone recently did for a book with really bad porn.

Update: Surprisingly, the book turned out to be an entertaining read, the Bollywood style climax notwithstanding.

Investors' dilemma

Olga Tellis' columns (by the way, I've always wondered about this: what's a Russian doing, writing finance columns for Deccan Chronicle?) usually make a lot of sense, but I don't agree with this:

A study of asset class-wise returns between 1998 and October 2008 by Fidelity International shows that equity has out-performed all other asset classes, followed by gold, fixed deposits and lastly, gilt.

But one has to have a long term horizon of seven to 10 years.

Tell that to an investor in the Japanese stock market: the Nikkei, after reaching an all-time high of 38,957.44 on December 29, 1989, is currently languishing at 7,376.12. An investor with a time frame of say, 19 years, would be really sore from all the ass-reaming.

She continues:

For an individual, it is difficult to time the market, namely to buy at the lowest price and sell it at the highest.

One has to know one's risk and reward profile and invest accordingly.

That is why it is better to go through the mutual fund route.

Many mutual funds may be performing badly in the present scenario, but it is not true of all mutual funds.

There are several who are doing well and giving good returns even in this scenario.

A quick glance at the financial pages shows that there are approximately 57,483 mutual funds to choose from, run by fund managers with varying levels of competence. In what way is this better than choosing from an even larger list of individual company stocks? Also, unless a mutual fund is able to short stocks, I do not understand how it can give positive returns in a bear market; it's not a hedge fund, after all.

The more and more I think about the whole investing thing, I can't help but come to these conclusions:

1. Investing your money is not a way to become rich. Your aim should be two-fold: a) ensure that you don't lose your principal and b) beat inflation. A regular saving habit [putting your money in rock solid investments (and no, I don't mean mutual funds or stocks)], coupled with the under-appreciated magic of compound interest, will take you a long way.


2. Earn your money by the sweat of your brow, not by clever, get-rich-quick schemes.

If you feel that this advice does not hold good, and inflation is still going to screw you over, blame the government for its deficit financing policies and printing presses (I know, this is not a solution; but hey, there's always Kaun Banega Crorepati).

Quote of the day

Dude, feed him some moon pies and oxycontin and call him Mini-Me. As bread'n'circuses go, it couldn't be beat.
-- Reddit comment about Republican wunderkind Jonathan Krohn.