Firefox breaks 50,000,000 barrier

MasterCard ad redux

Value of possessions lost in tsunami:	Rs 20,000
Value of government aid expected:	Rs 5,000
Receiving Rs 2 instead:	Priceless

Quote of the day

"... most modern politicians would rather plead the fifth amendment than directly answer even the simplest of questions."
-- Brian Sedgemore, British MP

There are also some great putdowns:

"(To) describe him as bloody useless would be to heap high praise on him."

"(Gordon Brown) has a massive intellect but no backbone"

"He is in office, but not in power"

Chelsea 0 - 0 Liverpool

An absorbing match, even if there were no goals. Just goes to show that even goalless draws can be exciting if you are in a knockout tournament. Compare this with the dull affairs in the Premier League when neither team has an incentive to go for a result.

If Liverpool is able to fully leverage its home advantage in the second leg, we might even see Chelsea knocked out (from my lips to God's ears :-) )

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

I am sure Tiger is great and all that, but both these sentences seem straight out of a PR press release:

Spotlight can rapidly find almost any file, any time -- even years after it was created, and even if it is hidden among tens of thousands of other files.

and

Spotlight could spark a major change in the way people use computers.

'Meta' is a dangerous word

I have two reasons for coming to this conclusion; the first one frivolous, the second a bit more serious:

1. When used to denote higher levels of abstraction, it causes confusion and a lot of hair-pulling.


2. There seems to be a link between this mode of thinking and the subject-object dichotomy that the mystics are forever asking us to step out of. This dichotomy arises because we think about something ('about' being the operative word here), rather than experiencing reality as it is. Come to think of it, isn't 'meta' the opposite of tathata, Sanskrit for suchness?

XMI interoperability

I had to export a class diagram in XMI format from ArgoUML to Poseidon today. The export/import went through without a hitch; only problem is, the graphics disappeared somewhere along the way. All the model objects were faithfully reproduced in the explorer window on the left, but no boxes or lines. Looks like neither of these tools implement the diagram interchange specification. To be fair, I don't know whether this spec has been adopted by all the tool vendors yet.

The reason for moving to Poseidon is that there doesn't seem to be any way to specify user-defined stereotypes in ArgoUML (or, if there is a way, I couldn't figure it out). Anyway, Poseidon, in addition to having this feature, also feels slicker and faster. The only catch is that even the Community Edition seems to be limited by an evaluation key and trial period.

Milan 2 - 0 PSV Eindhoven

The scoreline, taken with the first-half action, would lead you to believe that Milan had it all sewn up, but it wasn't so. PSV had a number of chances in the second half (they really turned things around after allowing Milan to dominate them in the first 45 minutes). Had they not conceded a 'soul-destroying' second goal, things would have been pretty even going into the second leg. It could still turn out alright for them, but beating Milan's defences twice in a game when Milan has an ongoing seven-game shutout streak looks unlikely.

Movie Review: Hitch

1. Some of the dialog is really sharp and fresh (case in point: when Will Smith meets Eva Mendes for the first time).


2. Kevin James' bumbling antics are worthy of some laughs.


3. The scene where Will Smith makes up with Mendes is incredibly lame.

All in all, if you have nothing else to do on a Saturday evening, are a Will Smith fan and are looking for some mild entertainment...

Benedict prayed 'not to be Pope'

Pardon my French, but what a crock of shit. If he didn't want to become Pope, why didn't he just decline it? Methinks it was more likely that he was secretly praying that he would be the chosen one; the reluctant-prince-act is just a sham.

Alonso wins at Imola

At long last, I got to watch a thrilling F1 race. There were times when it looked like Schumacher was going to pull it off, but Alonso held his nerve and didn't allow himself to be passed, unlike Button.

I initially wanted to link to the official Formula One site, but those bozos have disabled right-clicking altogether, making it difficult to even copy a hyperlink. Instead, they display a stupid message that says that the contents of the entire site is protected by copyright (I've got news for you guys: it's not very difficult to re-enable the right-click).

Roadkill

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Gmail POP3 goes crazy

When I retrieved my emails from Gmail from Thunderbird, for some strange reason it started resending older emails which I had long ago retrieved, from as far back as last November. Hope this doesn't recur; imagine the bandwidth costs if my entire 160 or so megs of emails get pumped back to me. Probably this is why they still call it beta.

The Zone

Athletes often speak of being in "the zone" -- a state where the energy and will expended by them appear to come effortlessly and lead to record-breaking performances. From The Celestine Prophecy: An Experiential Guide:

"The athlete goes beyond herself; she transcends the natural. She touches a piece of heaven and becomes the recipient of power from an unknown source...the performance almost becomes a holy place -- where a spiritual awakening seems to take place. The individual becomes swept up in the action around her -- she almost floats through the performance, drawing on forces she has never previously been aware of"

and

"Skiers tell of the magic moment when you are right on the mark, when everything falls into place and the only sensation you feel is the ecstasy of what you are doing. Skier, skiing, skied are one."

Capra speaks of something similar, too (the reference here is to archery):

"...to draw the bow 'spiritually', with a kind of effortless strength, and to release the string 'without intention', letting the shot 'fall from the archer like a ripe fruit'. When he reached the height of perfection, bow, arrow, goal and archer all melted into one another and he did not shoot, 'it' did it for him."

Though I have become skeptical of touchy-feely New Age crap in general, I think there is something authentic going on here. I have sometimes experienced this feeling when driving. There comes a time when the whole world is defined by the contours of the car's windshield (or by the edges of the helmet when I am riding my bike); the only sounds you hear are the purring of the engine and the occasional swooshes of vehicles from the opposite direction. You perform the various actions like braking, shifting gears and changing lanes with a complete sense of detachment. Though these actions don't seem to have the conscious approval of your brain, they are the 'correct' actions. You don't want this feeling to end, ever, because if this isn't living in the present, nothing is...

Model Driven Architecture

I am currently reading Model Driven Architecture by David Frankel. Notwithstanding its small size -- 300 pages, this is one helluva deep book. Some parts (especially those not targeting PHBs) have to be read more than once to wrap your mind around the concepts. The chapter on the Meta Object Facility is a case in point. There are so many levels and metalevels (the MOF model is actually a meta-metamodel) that it's very easy to lose track of the context unless you pay very close attention.

On a side note, this brings to mind an experience I had when I was cramming for the JEE. There is a hefty volume by M L Khanna that is sort of a bible for the JEE maths exam, which contains a challenging section on probability theory. I remarked about this to a friend who was also preparing for the exam, and he advised me that it was a pretty small section (I think it was around 30 pages or so), and, considering that probability theory was expected to fetch about ten marks in the exam (ten marks may not seem like much, but are absolutely crucial in an exam as competitive as the JEE), I'd do well to read it even ten times, if necessary, to ensure that I grasped the concepts thoroughly; which I did, though I didn't have to read it ten times, of course. Though I have pretty much forgotten all the maths I had to learn then, this piece of advice has stayed with me all these years. Both of us cleared the exam, BTW.

The best thing I like about Model Driven Architecture is that the author doesn't have any axe to grind or any hidden agenda. He takes a no-nonsense approach, stating clearly the areas where much work remains to be done; there is no hype that MDA is the best thing since sliced bread, it's going to take the field of software engineering by storm, and so on. In short, short on hype, but long on facts.

I am a dumbass

All the great Firefox extensions are also available for Mozilla.

Since 1.7 is most likely the last release, it is only fair that I install it and give it a whirl, for old times' sake. Who knows, with all my favourite extensions, I might even prefer it over Firefox.

Jo Coke chahe ho jahe

Alexander Cockburn writes about the harm Coca-Cola has inflicted on marginalised Indians.

Firefox 1.0.3 released

Bloglines down again

Not able to log in manually, but the Bloglines notifier is somehow able to get through and report that there are 21 unread items. Here's where Technorati's real-time blog monitoring comes in handy. You can see others blogging about it as well and are assured that you are not the only one with the problem.

Further proof...

that Microsoft doesn't have anything new and great to offer:

A "quick search pane," for example, allows users to type queries and instantly see matching files.

and

...Allchin stressed that Microsoft has broken new ground in Longhorn. For example, document icons are no longer a hint of the type of file, but rather a small picture of the file itself

If they expect people to upgrade to Longhorn just for these bells and whistles, they have got another think coming. BTW, Gnome and KDE have had equivalent features for quite some time.