Paul Graham's essays

Of late, Paul Graham's essays have begun to put me off. I don't think it is because of any change in their style or content. May be it's just me, but I find a recurring theme in them:

1. How he has made it big because he's so smart and clever.


2. He doesn't want to come right out and say it, but he considers himself a great hacker.


3. Others would do well to pay heed to his advice (with regard to hacking, starting a startup, or becoming a good writer) so that they too can enjoy his success.


4. How the folks he hangs out with are such a cool, smart bunch of people.

Needless to say, I no longer subscribe to his feed.

Movie Review: Shall We Dance

Movie Direction 101: a movie should have a high point towards which the storyline builds, preferably with suspense. This high point is called a climax and should occur at the end of the movie. Any tension built up as we are led to the climax should be resolved then, ideally in a positive manner so that the moviegoers are left with a sense of wellbeing. Unfortunately, this basic principle is not followed in Shall We Dance; the climax occurs some 15-20 minutes before curtains, and doesn't have a happy ending, either. I'll just leave it at that, except for these comments:

1. What's up with the 'intimate' moment between Susan Sarandon and the private detective, when you are led to believe that they are going to kiss and start an affair? Other than cheap titillation, that is.


2. The second half (especially post-climax) is like a freaking documentary.


3. The scenes of camaraderie at the dancing school are the only watchable scenes in the whole movie.

Movie review: Polar Express

We had planned on watching Shall We Dance, but had to settle on Polar Express because Shall We... was cancelled unexpectedly. Good thing, it turned out.

Polar Express is a delightful movie. Though it is primarily meant for children (we were feeling slightly out of place in the theatre, being surrounded by kids -- most of the other grownups were escorts for their children), the story is handled in a pretty mature way; there is not much of the usual wheee-we-are-all-happy-kids-watch-us-fart-around-with-nary-a-care nonsense.

The animation is quirky, though. The action sequences involving the train were very good, but the facial expressions of the children sometimes made them appear, well, retarded.

Obligatory favourite scene: ski-ride on top of the train with the ghost.

Printing blues

I wanted to title this post as "Epson sucks" initially, but changed my mind, because, all things considered, I am pretty much satisfied with my printer.

All the cartridges in my Stylus CX4500 ran out of ink (more on that later). Since I don't do much of colour printing, I thought I would buy only a black cartridge. But when I fixed the new cartridge, the printer still refused to print. After a phone call to the customer help line, I learned that:

1. Epson printing technology is different; you need all cartridges even if you are only printing black and white documents.


2. You may think that you are not using up the ink in your colour cartridges, but if you print more than 15 pages per minute of black and white stuff, the colour ink gets used too (black is, after all, a mixture of all colours -- or is it white? Never mind).

Bottom line is, I have to shell out an additional 1125 bucks.

//TO DO: think of a nice title

I think I should be more selective in installing the patches suggested by Susewatcher. Since my Linux box is not directly exposed to the outside world (it sits behind my Windows machine -- I know, it should be the other way around, but since my DSL USB modem works only with Windows, I don't have much choice), the security patches aren't very critical for me.

In addition to incurring bandwidth costs, I suspect that some of these patches could be making the computer intermittently slower; when I perform some action, there is a two/three second delay, followed by a clickety-click from the CPU case and then the machine responds. It's almost as if the computer has gone to sleep and has to be woken up.

Narendra Modi and Henry Kissinger

At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if Narendra Modi ends up in the same predicament as Henry Kissinger, afraid to travel outside his country for fear of an arrest warrant being issued against him. There are enough expatriate Indians all over the world whose hackles have been raised by Modi's actions that this is a very real possibility.

Good old Mozilla

I (re)installed Mozilla today in order to try out Epiphany, since Epiphany uses Mozilla's rendering engine. After checking out Epiphany -- it's OK but doesn't have that much flexibility -- I did a bit of browsing with Mozilla; I have to say, its rendering is definitely faster than that of Firefox (BTW, Firefox 1.0.2 is out).

If it weren't for Adblock, Gmail Notifier and other goodies, I would definitely make Mozilla my primary browser.

VisualWorks is not just a GUI framework

This is an old article, but incorrect nonetheless:

This crucial ability, which is the impetus behind the Composite design pattern, is routinely implemented by object-oriented graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such as Swing or VisualWorks Smalltalk.

Backup for Bloglines

I have created an account with Newsgator as a backup for the times when Bloglines is down. Though I have subscribed only to 23 feeds, creating them in Newsgator was pretty painful. I realise that it is not in the best interests of the online feed aggregators to provide a common format for exporting/importing one's feeds (since this would prevent lock-in and force them to compete solely on the strength of their implementations), but it sure would be a nice feature to have.

Newsgator looks OK, but not as good as Bloglines. The default option is to retain all feeds as unread; one has to manually mark them as read. The site was also a bit sluggish, but this could just be a temporary thing. Though the UI is pretty neat, Bloglines' feels cleaner.

Indian government earns bad karma

Looks like the Lok Sabha has put a stop to the good work being done by the Indian pharmaceutical companies. While it is fair that the research done by pharmaceutical companies (not the Indian ones, but companies like Pfizer) should be rewarded in the form of patents, an exemption could have been made for the AIDS drugs at least; this is too serious a problem to allow profit motives to influence decision-making.

Yellow Times shut down

...due to lack of funding. I had stopped visiting this site a while ago, so I am not sure when exactly they folded. Hope this is not permanent.

Quote of the day

"...it's a sad commentary on the world today that the choice for leader of the World Bank is an Irish rock singer or Wolfowitz, Bono or Bonehead."
-- xymphora

The Broker

1. Grisham could have gone a little easier on the Italian-travel-guide motif.


2. This book almost seems to have been written with a movie in mind.


3. Towards the very end of the book, there is a small bit of corny dialogue: when Joel's son asks him what he planned to do, Joel says (paraphrasing slightly here), "Back to what I've always done, son. Cutting deals."


4. Definitely not one of Grisham's best.

Deepak Chopra and the EPR experiment

The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment is often touted as an example of the bizarre nature of quantum mechanics: two elementary particles with complementary properties (spins of +1/2 and -1/2) are separated by an infinite distance (well, not really infinite, but infinite for all practical purposes). We do not know (in fact, neither do the particles themselves) which particle has which property, but only that if one particle is measured to have a spin of +1/2, the other one will be found to have the opposite spin (-1/2).

After this separation, we measure the spins of both the particles simultaneously and find that the spins are as expected. The only catch is, since the particles themselves don't 'know' what spin they have, how did they coordinate between themselves (at a rate faster than the speed of light) and decide which of the properties each will exhibit? This sort of communication is termed a 'nonlocal' connection.

Deepak Chopra really goes to town with this nonlocal connection in his book Synchrodestiny, employing it to 'explain' such phenomena as how the human body performs the various metabolic activities so that one can enjoy a jog at the beach, how cognition is effected by the "'phase and frequency locking in' of the firing patterns of individual neurons in different parts of the brain," and so on.

I stopped reading Synchrodestiny after about a hundred pages or so. The problem with these books which attempt to draw legitimacy from science [a plague on your house, Capra, for starting the whole thing ;-)] is that you already have to be a believer to get anything positive from them. If you read them with an open mind, you end up shaking your head in skepticism at sentences like these, which have to be taken on faith, since there is no way to prove or disprove them:

We are both local and nonlocal, an individual pattern emerging from nonlocal intelligence, which is also part of everyone and everything else ...The personal, local part of the soul exists at the quantum level.

It would be worthwhile to keep these things in mind when evaluating any New Age mind/body/spirituality theory:

1. All our sensory experiences are electrical impulses carried by our nerve cells. If somebody claims to have experienced something 'special,' it simply means that the corresponding impulses were registered in his brain. Whether they came about because of a genuine experience or not is another story altogether.


2. What we call our 'mind' could be nothing more than the epiphenomena associated with the functioning of our brain.

BTW, I am not claiming that all the unexplained phenomena are hoaxes; just that some of the explanations need to be taken with a grain of salt.

Wanted: Paste and Go extension for Firefox

Title says it all.

Greek sprint duo cleared of doping charges

They did this, and were still cleared?

The pair then spent four days in a hospital, claiming they had been injured in a motorcycle crash.

Looks like somebody pulled some strings.

The Gorilla in the Room

Following in the footsteps of xymphora, here is another anonymous blogger with way more credibility than the MSM.

US denies visa to Narendra Modi

The American government has denied a visa to Narendra Modi. I think this indicates the seriousness of his crime; to get into the bad books of the American government which is as far as one can get from being a paragon of virtue takes some doing. And he has the gall to call this an insult to the Indian constitution.

Quote of the day

"I would agree with that statement. To privatise would be a no-brainer. It would only be thought about by someone with no brain."
-- Philip Carroll, former CEO of Shell Oil USA, on alleged plans of privatising Iraq's oil fields

BTW, this program (BBC's Newsnight) strengthens the claim that the decision to invade Iraq was taken well before 9/11.

Baramati Bus Stop: Web Documentary

Here is a post by Andy Carvin about a web documentary about teaching computer skills to children in Indian villages.