Some more on Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves

Chapter 7 is devoted to the author's publishing experiences. We learn that Sex, Drugs... was rejected by Atria books, Warner Books, Newmarket Press, Thames & Hudson, Pelican Publishing, Red Wheel-Weiser-Conari Press, Coffee House Press, Verso, Rutgers University Press, Adams Media, Princeton University Press, Kensington Publishing Group, Prometheus Books, McGraw-Hill, Chronicle Books, Andrew McMeel Publishing, Simon & Schuster, Johns Hopkins University Press, Berkeley Books, HarperCollins, University of Chicago Press, Vintage, MIT Press, BenBella Books, NYU Press, Knopf, Beacon Press, Soho Press, Routledge, Workman Publishing, Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, Harcourt and Tarcher/Penguin.

Now he tells us.

And no, I don't buy the argument that other great books have been rejected by unwitting publishers; there is no way this book can even be mentioned in the same paragraph as War and Peace or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Thumbs up to the Amazon reviewer 'No thanks' for going against the grain and telling it like it is, when all the other reviewers (lemmings) gave this book five stars.

The Intelligent Voter

With election season upon us, I thought I would say something about the Indian voter and how "intelligent" he is. You see things like

The majority of Indian voters may be illiterate, but they cannot be fooled that easily. They know how to send a signal to their political masters, by voting for some party but stopping short of giving it an absolute majority, in effect sending a message that they are putting the party on notice...

When I go to the polling booth, I have a pretty clear (mostly binary) choice: vote for Party A, or Party B, and so on. There is no way in hell for me to coordinate my vote with the millions of other voters so that we turn in an "intelligent" vote.

It could be possible that intelligence is displayed unwittingly due to statistical effects, but this makes the voter no more intelligent than ants in a colony. But I am not inclined to trust this analogy too far, as the ants' behaviour is something that evolved over a much longer time period and is honed by things like survival, foraging for food, etc. Thinking about whom you are going to vote for once in five years is simply not on the same level.

Know Your English

Question: What is the meaning of 'what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander'?
Answer: http://www.google.co.in/search?q=meaning+
of+what+is+sauce+for+the+goose+is+sauce+
for+the+gander&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&
client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

Question: What is the difference between 'semblance' and 'resemblance'?
Answer: http://dictionary.reference.com/search?
q=semblance and http://dictionary.reference.com/
search?q=resemblance

Question: What is the meaning of 'nuts and bolts'?
Answer: http://www.google.co.in/search?
q=meaning+of+nuts+and+bolts'&start=0
&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&
rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

That wasn't really that hard, was it? Does it need a postcard to The Hindu, the anxious wait to see if your question is considered for publication, and finally the joy of seeing it in print? Unless, of course, that's the whole point, and improving your English is only a secondary goal.

Movie Review: Underworld: Evolution

Underworld: Evolution is easily the worst movie I have seen this year. There are still nearly nine months to go in 2006, but something tells me that this one is still going to be at the top of the list, come December.

Blood, disgusting creatures, blood, confusing story, blood, lots of noise, blood...

Sex, Drugs, Einstein and Elves

I waited more than a month for Fabmall to import this book for me, and the wait has simply not been worth it.

The book seems more like someone took Pickover's blog posts over the course of a year and printed them out. I have read 126 pages, and the single overriding theme of the book -- till now, at least -- is that people have weird experiences and see weird stuff because of a) consuming psychedelic drugs like DMT or b) being afflicted with certain brain syndromes. A typical quote:

Why do drugs and brain syndromes continually bring us back to elves that also appear to permeate the folklore of many cultures?

Well, let's see, could it be because

1. All humans are pretty much identical in terms of the way their brain functions


2. People over the millennia have been getting stoned using the same sh*t and therefore have the same experiences which have been passed down as folklore?

And what's with the cheap, titillating title?

Movie Review: Zathura

Question: You are standing on the porch, gravity holding you firmly down, your house is floating in outer space, and you send a gob of spit out of your mouth. What happens?

Reasonable answer: The spit falls, depending on the effort you put into it, one to three feet away from your feet, after describing a parabolic trajectory.

The Zathura answer: Your gob of spit joins the ranks of objects floating weightlessly on an infinite zero-gravity orbit.

Zathura is still a fun movie, if you overlook such defiance of physics and the whiny little younger brother. I was quite surprised at how the story was spun in such an engaging manner given the severe limitations vis-a-vis location.

Confirm via HTTP GET (sort of)

There was a recent discussion about this in JoS. The problem is that users simply click on a hyperlink in an email message, and their subscription is automatically confirmed, their membership is automatically activated, and so on.

The implications of doing things this way was brought home to me rather unexpectedly recently. I received an email from Yahoo Groups about approving a membership request, but the person making the request didn't actually want to apply for membership: they were simply trying to get in touch with an existing member. I dutifully forwarded this message to the entire group, leaving the acceptance/rejection mechanism in place. To be fair, these are mailto: links, but I think this still qualifies as a vulnerability, since the email address is a specially constructed one that triggers the required action when a message is sent to it.

You want a movie-plot threat?

How about this? Make Bush President-for-life.

Cause terror? Check. Make the American people notice? Check. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy? Check. Change the political landscape, or the culture? Double check (why does life always have to be about either/or choices? Think out of the box, people).

Service Oriented Architecture

I have spent the better part of the last two days working on an FAQ for Service Oriented Architecture, as part of an effort to help my group understand what it's all about. Truly a unique experience, I must say. I had to set aside my not-so-charitable opinions about SOA and put on my most expansive pseudo-evangelist smile as I blathered on about how SOA is more than just web services, how you may already have an SOA and not know it (God, that makes it sound like it's an STD), and so on.

Who knows, if nothing much comes of the FAQ, I might even release it out into the wild and watch with glee as it gets mauled by a pack of disgruntled programmers.

Loose Change

Well, it looks like Google Video has been made available in India.

First, must-watch video: Loose Change

How to create a torrent and share your seed

Practise celibacy for six months.

(You expect me to see a title like that and let it go?)

Gnome peeves

[Note: I plan to keep adding to this post as I go along. I may have become inured to the KDE way of doing things, so I am going to persist with Gnome 2.14 for a while more.]

1. There is no way to set the font for the time/date display in the panel.


2. The date occupies premium space in the panel by appearing adjacent to the time instead of below it.


3. Most of the configuration dialog boxes have no 'Apply' button, but directly apply the changes


4. There is no option for a slideshow of wallpapers by specifying a directory of images.


5. The option to toggle desktop icons is not available in the context menu when you right-click on the desktop. You have to invoke the Configuration Editor and dig into the settings to do this.


6. Nautilus opens new windows for each folder as I navigate into a folder hierarchy.

Middlemen

Admiral J.G.Nadkarni (retd) has written an op-ed piece in DC in support of legitimising middlemen in arms deals. Going by its contents and the logic employed, I am glad that he has retired from the navy and no longer has any say in the way defence matters are being run.

The essay starts by incorrectly comparing these middlemen to dealers in car showrooms and travel agents. This comparison then neatly segues into kickback territory by including the shady operators in the RTOs who enable people to bypass the system and obtain driving licenses illegally. The implication being that people in the first category are no different from those in the second.

He then argues that ever since the government has banned these middlemen, the defence establishment has found it very difficult to obtain spare parts, since the middlemen performed this service admirably when they were allowed to ply their trade. What a load of crock. If you buy something from somebody, it is only reasonable to expect them to provide after-sales service and support; there is no role here for the middleman. It's not like it's very difficult for the arms manufacturers to do this on their own.

Next comes this:

The embargo on dealers is based on a number of myths. It is generally believed that agents bribe their way to procure orders ... While this may be true, the elimination of middlemen will not stop corruption. There are even major bribes when governments deal with each other.

So it's not really a myth. Also, if we eliminate middlemen, at least some of the corruption would go away? Sounds like a good deal to me.

Finally, there is this gem:

If the government is confident about the integrity of its staff where is the question of corruption?

I believe this is called 'the fallacy of many questions'.

Here's a chance

...for Tendulkar to turn things around and shut his critics up once and for all: a match-winning century tomorrow. The non-believer in me pipes in that he won't, though.

Humphrey is dead?

Who is Humphrey? He's not a person? Oh, you mean he's a cat? A very special cat? In what way? I see, he was a politician's pet? 10, Downing Street, you say? Very impressive. Did he die there? No? Did he live there recently? Oh, you mean to say he used to live there, but Tony Blair kicked him out in 1997? Now, since he wasn't living there since 1997, do you think it's really honest to say that Downing Street will no longer be free of mice? I'm sorry, what was that again? I'm afraid you'll have to speak up, I can't really make out what you are saying when you hang your head and mumble like that.

Gnome 2.14

I am currently engaged in a mini-project of sorts: build Gnome 2.14 using Garnome. I started this on Saturday morning, and three days later, I still do not know how far I have progressed. But I feel much more in control of the process this time as compared to my aborted attempt about a year and a half ago. However, the compile was (is) not that straightforward, though; there was this really unique error, which was not fixed by installing some package, or fixing something else and rerunning make; instead, I had to keep running make again and again (four times, actually) until the error was fixed. The error had something to do with the 'no' command not being found; there is a web page somewhere which explains why this approach works, but I'm too tired to find and link to it.

I had wanted to make a note of all such interesting things so that I can record them here, but none of them come to mind right now. Maybe later.

Movie Review: Just Like Heaven

Just Like Heaven is a very good movie, except for the contrived ending. I don't like Reese Witherspoon very much, and I was a bit pissed off on seeing that she was the lead actress (I knew practically nothing about the movie except its title when I walked into the theatre). The hospital scene at the beginning didn't do much to change my opinion either.

However, things improve once she makes her appearance as a 'spirit', and the scenes involving her and Mark Ruffalo really sparkle.

Goof (sorta): How is Elizabeth able to physically control David in the bar when it has been shown earlier that she has no ability to interact with solid objects?

Goof (real): When Elizabeth tries to get David to sleep with the hot neighbour, you can see the microphone at the top of the frame.

Never give up

Watching South Africa chase down successfully the humongous target of 434 yesterday has had a deeper impact on me than I thought.

Yesterday's match was one of the very few times when Life says "This is the situation; the odds of you overcoming it are, like, one gazillion to one, so why don't you just curl up and die?", and though the pragmatist in you knows, in your heart of hearts, that Life is correct, after all, and why don't you just accept things and not dare to dream of glory and success, somewhere inside you there is a kernel of irrationality that says Screw it, I am going for it, and you go for it, and then it's seven needed off the last over, then it's two off three balls, and finally it's one off two, and then the ball is racing towards the long on boundary and you have done it...

I know that the inexorable law of averages will assert itself with a vengeance and the euphoria will not last long, but while it does, I am going to play myself some Diamonds and Guns, Land Down Under and Happy People and be a Believer for just a little while.

Google Video Tip

Google Video isn't available for India yet, but since the decision to serve the video or not is based on the requester's IP address, you can pass this check by using Privoxy and Tor so that the request seems to come from some other IP address [*]. But the speed takes a hit, though.

[*] This assumes that the Tor node is from a country that is currently served. Probably a fair assumption to make.

Best One Day International Ever

Australia	434/4 (50 overs)
South Africa	438/9 (49.5 overs)

I guess the ghosts of World Cup '99 can now be laid to rest.

Quote of the day

(Steve) Jobs is so anal-retentive he probably awakens each night wondering if anal-retentive should be hyphenated, or not...
-- from a COLA post

Five reasons why I think The Da Vinci Code is a piece of crap

[Warning: spoilers ahead if you are one of the lucky few who have not yet read the book]

1. For such riveting prose (Langdon has just learned that he is to be accused of murder and is trying to escape from the museum):

   Langdon looked displeased. "I'll meet you there on one condition," he replied, his voice stern.
   
   She paused, startled. "What's that?"
   
   "That you stop calling me Mr. Langdon."
   
   (Sophie) felt herself smile back.

   (I still get goosebumps when I read this)


2. Sophie's grandmother and brother are living in Scotland in a well-known place, one that Sophie would very likely visit in her professional capacity, and yet she has no idea about them.


3. After dispelling the reader's suspicions that Sophie might have a royal bloodline, finally revealing that the reader's suspicions were in fact well-founded. That was indeed a cheap trick to pull.


4. For going out of the way to stay on the right side of Opus Dei, while using them as a whipping boy.


5. Dude, why don't you decide once and for all whether you are a suspense thriller writer or a Simon Singh wannabe?

Two interesting news items from DC

The first one is a contender for tongue-in-cheek-report-of-the-day; it's about the canines that are part of Bush's Secret Service:

Sources have confirmed that these dogs, with ranks of sergeant-major, first lieutenant, second lieutenant, third lieutenant and fourth lieutenant, will have rooms on the same floor on which President Bush is likely to stay ... "We were told to be careful while addressing the animals and not call them dogs. These sniffer dogs are an integral part of the US President's security team. We have been instructed to address them as per their ranks," said a member of the Maurya Sheraton hotel staff ... It could not be ascertained whether Indian policemen would be required to salute these sniffer dogs.

The other news item is from the sports page. It looks like a correspondent has reported on an off-the-record conversation that he had (more likely overheard) with ex-England captains Hussain and Atherton where they question Flintoff's leadership qualities:

Then the topic shifted to Flintoff and the mantle of captaincy that has fallen on him. Hussain shrugged off by stating that he is no good for the job and Athers shook his head in the affirmative.

Mystery Solved

If all goes well, I will be in possession of a free USB drive from the Evil Empire in about six to eight weeks' time.

(I wanted to post the image of Garfield with an evil grin, but couldn't locate a suitable image)

Faux news item of the day

(In other news) India hooked up a generator to Gandhi's spinning body and shortly afterwards announced they no longer needed the US civilian nuclear power deal.
-- Michael Rivero on Bush laying a wreath at Raj Ghat

[Never mind that Gandhi was cremated :-)]

Questions

My IBM ThinkCentre has been freezing at least a couple of times a week, ever since I wiped the OEM hard drive that came with it and installed Linux on it. I don't think the problem is related to Linux because I encounter this with all the three distros I have (Mandriva, Suse and Kubuntu). I felt that a BIOS upgrade might fix things, so I paid a visit to the IBM site. This site contains the bootable disk and ISO image versions of the upgrade program, but you first need to download and run a Windows executable to create either the bootable diskette or the ISO image. What if you are not running Windows? Is the assumption that if you are not running Windows, you must then be knowledgeable enough to know about things like Wine?

If there is a technical reason why a direct download of the ISO image cannot be provided, I can't figure out what that might be. Does the executable they provide dynamically generate the ISO image based on a scan of my hardware?

Is this the Indian equivalent of borowitzreport.com?

The newspapers are all chockful of budget-related items, but this post is not about any of them. Instead, we will focus our attention on the IIPM ad (yes, it's a full page ad; do you even have to ask?) that shares the space with the budget analyses; in particular, let's look at one of the essays in the ad. Here's a quote from the essay:

We live in a country where democracy is a farce, however much anyone sings artificial praises of a democracy called India. Who then is being penalised the most in this pseudo-democracy? Well, arguably the business community. They are the favourite exploitees of the political community and the bureaucrats... And they are the ones whose buildings can be demolished most cruelly and ruthlessly...

Arundhati Roy rips him a new one

I dare say it must look like a sieve by now.

Movie Review: The Chronicles of Narnia

Stunning visuals? Check. Endearing characters? Check. Magical land whose discovery is the dream of every little boy and girl? Check. Morality play between good and evil? Check.

In spite of all these things, there is a certain je ne se quoi whose absence stands in the way of considering Chronicles a must-watch movie. The presence of the lion, majestic though he is, somehow doesn't fit in that well with the rest of the characters. I also feel that the movie would have been better served if the witch's character had been played by someone like Glenn Close (a la Cruella de Ville). In the final reckoning, the movie neither belongs to the LOTR genre (although the witch's minions remind one of orcs -- especially in the scene in which the lion is 'sacrificed') nor is it an out-and-out children's fairy tale.

Microsoft Certified Child Prodigy

There's a news item in today's The Hindu about a child prodigy who became a Microsoft Certified Professional when he was only ten. Leaving aside the fact that he has gone over to the dark side, I consider this remark of his more dangerous:

So where does he see himself in a few decades? "In the presidential seat. Because I am inspired by President Kalam's journey from Ramanathapuram to the Raisina Hills," he says even before the question is completed.

Folks like these who have such an overweening ambition (especially one involving a 'prize' that depends more on other people's goodwill and your equations with them than on your own inherent abilities) usually leave behind in their wake quite a few bodies with knives sticking out of their backs. Moreover, going by Kalam's track record, even an honest and dedicated non-politician occupying the highest office doesn't seem to have made any difference to the way the country has been governed (let's face it: what has Kalam really achieved as President, other than scaring the bejesus out of school kids with his creepy smile?), so it is hard to treat such an ambition on a par with, say, inventing a cure for AIDS or finding an alternative fuel to petroleum.

Quote of the day

"How can anyone wake up in the morning next to a woman whose face is like a donkey?"
-- Mohamed Al Fayed on Camilla Parker-Bowles

Fuel

I wanted to check out how Amarok handles audio CDs, and gave Something Like Human a whirl. After playing my regular favorites like Bad Day, Down and Innocent, my eyes fell upon Hemorrhage. Though a part of me wanted to eject the CD, I went ahead and played the song anyway, and boy, did it bring back some memories. This song used to be something of an anthem for me; there was a period when I listened to it practically every day. Funny thing is, it wasn't even pleasant listening (great though the song is); it felt like undergoing a very painful experience which, for some strange reason, I wanted to inflict on myself

Over and over and over again...
Don't fall away
And leave me to myself
Don't fall away

Anyway, coming back to the present, listening to the song now feels good; though a bittersweet feeling lingers, I am now able to enjoy the song for its own sake.

Plato said that?

Your intrepid host functions as the coordinator of his alumni group in his spare time, in which capacity he received an email on behalf of a newly floated political party called bharatudaymission.org. The email asked me to spread the word among the group members about the need to bring probity into Indian politics, halt the degeneration, and so on.

Nothing wrong with this, except that the email contained a quote, purportedly from Plato, that went something like this: "Those who condemn politics to be the last resort of a scoundrel are bound to be ruled by scoundrels".

Wait a minute. Ignoring the fact that the original quote referred to patriotism, and not to politics, unless Plato had mastered time travel in addition to being a great philosopher, I very much doubt that he uttered these words.

Update: Two seconds after posting this, I found the actual quote: "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." Well, at least it got the spirit right.

Labour liberalisation

If someone were to ask me to summarise, within 30 words, what's wrong with world trade today, I doubt that I can do it better than this:

So long as some people's pocket change can feed other people's families for a week, labour will seek and deserve all the freedom of movement that capital has been granted.

Friends

Zee English are going to broadcast the final episode of Friends this Sunday. I have said nasty things about Friends, especially the later seasons, and I stand by that, but I can't help feeling quite a bit sad. All said and done, it was a great show and it will definitely be painful to say goodbye. It's not even the case that the ending is a and-they-lived-happily-ever-after one, like that of a good movie; we have the characters saying goodbye to each other and to their favourite haunts as well.

I haven't decided yet whether to even watch it; what with Sunday afternoon not being my favorite time of the week, I don't think I'd want to ruin it even more.

Update: Went ahead and watched it anyway. Wasn't so bad, after all; at least Ross and Rachel get back together.

Quote of the day

Q. What is the nature of Scottish involvement in world politics ?
A. We supply the whisky to every G8 conference.

(from a post in the RI forum)

Official Confirmation

...that the Euro may have had -- and continue to have -- a bearing on the American designs for the Middle East.

The Celebrity Cameo Design Pattern

Intent
Milk a sitcom for some more rating points

Also Known As
Don't-they-have-any-shame-whatsoever Pattern

Motivation

1. A show has been on the air for longer than anybody would have wished, and the writers have long since run out of good storylines. But the channel does not want to risk taking it off the air and replacing it with something unproven, thereby losing its primetime spot.
2. The lead actors are beginning to have weight problems.
3. Things are not so hunky dory since the sickeningly cute child star hit puberty and looks plain sickening, instead.

Applicability
Typically applies to sitcoms where each episode is self-contained, thereby affording easy entry and exit of, say, one of the main character's childhood friends or estranged sister.

Consequences

1. The show in question loses even more credibility
2. The actors are richer by another million dollars

Known Uses
Brad Pitt in Friends; George Clooney in Friends; Christina Applegate in -- where else -- Friends.

Related Patterns
Air-cuts-from-old-episodes-as-flashbacks Pattern

Non-alignment and Quining

'Non-alignment is not an empty slogan' is an empty slogan.

Manmohan Singh's personal integrity may be beyond reproach, but his political integrity has been pretty much shot to pieces.

I think there is a lesson here: Both our President and Prime Minister have impeccable characters, yet their honesty has had practically no influence on the government's actions. Probably indicates a) the depths to which politics has sunk in our country and b) that nice guys have no place in politics.

Confessions of a leecher

I downloaded the first CD in Mandriva 2006 via BitTorrent a couple of days ago, and, being a bit impatient, I terminated Azureus before the share ratio turned green. I also deleted the .iso file after writing it to the CD.

I am downloading CD #2 as I type this, and seeing the aborted upload in the lower pane, I decided to soothe my conscience and put up the ISO file again for upload. Only problem is, running mkisofs on the CD contents produces a .iso file alright, but this file is not identical to the original one, as evidenced by the MD5 checksums. I am therefore hesitant to put this up in case it is an invalid file and my karma goes south.

Movie Review: Fun with Dick and Jane

Trust Jim Carrey to carry the entire movie by himself, never mind that the storyline is pretty silly and requires a firm suspension of disbelief.

The best scenes in the movie are those in which Carrey and Tia Leone bumble their way into perfecting a career as holdup artists ("Mercedes, off"? LOL!). [Update: How did I miss the R Kelly 'I believe I can fly' elevator scene?)

The climax is torturous; I still haven't fully convinced myself that Carrey & Co really pull anything over the evil CEO (speaking of Alec Baldwin, I wonder why he said yes to such a nothing role).

Two-and-a-half stars out of five.

Let me get this straight...

Iran should not acquire nuclear weapons because Sunni nations cannot tolerate this and would also try to get nukes, leading to a new arms race, while the fact that Israel (whom they hate with far greater intensity) has had nukes for God-knows-how-long has not prompted them to do so.

Give me a break.

Staying on the topic of anonymity

... here is a way to conceal your identity effectively:

1. Install Privoxy and Tor.


2. Log in to yahoo.co.ar (yes, Argentina) and create an email address for yourself (with, of course, a handle that doesn't reflect your real name). [*]


3. If you want to enjoy the benefits of a Gmail account while retaining your anonymity, proceed to Step 4. Otherwise go ahead and put your Yahoo account to good (anonymous) use.


4. Assuming that you have a Gmail account with invites to spare, send an invite to the yahoo.co.ar email address created in step 2. If you do not have a Gmail account, wheedle one from a friend or an acquaintance. We are basically establishing plausible deniability; in the event that the Yahoo email address is traced back to you, you can always claim that you sent the invite via Gmail Swap.


5. Use this invite to create a valid Gmail account, again with an untraceable handle.


6. If you are really paranoid, proceed to Step 7. If not, use this Gmail address to post anonymously to your heart's content.


7. Repeat steps 2 to 5 by creating a chain of shell Gmail/Yahoo accounts. Visit the Mongolian, Tadjik and Burkina Faso versions of Yahoo. Be creative.

[*] Yahoo currently permits you to create an email account without specifying another existing and valid email address. If this policy ever changes, replace Yahoo with some other free email service that doesn't impose such a restriction. The idea is not to leave any trace or log of your real email/IP address anywhere in the 'system'.

On the Joys of Posting Anonymously

Today I posted anonymously to a discussion forum. Nothing inflammatory (it was a technical discussion), but man, it felt good for whatever reason (probably the same one that prompted Calvin to play low volume Muzak as a form of protest against his parents). Different kicks for different folks, I guess.

Cognitive Dissonance and You

I periodically receive letters from CRY asking for support. The fine print in all these letters say that CRY does not ask for cash donations; then why do they only contain different options for support, i.e. support one child for a year, three children for a year, etc. which of course entail monetary contributions?

He's not the one who needs help, actually

Hamas and the ANC

Bill Kirkman has this to say about Hamas' election victory:

... South Africa, where those fighting apartheid concluded that they could not successfully do so by democratic means, because the processes of democracy -- notably the vote -- were denied to them. Hence the African National Congress's (ANC) use of violence. The dramatic change in the political scene in the early 1990s led, of course, to victory by the ANC in the 1994 election. That changed the situation. Violence was no longer appropriate for people who had acquired the responsibility of government.

It's apples and oranges. When ANC won the election, it won complete control. In the case of Hamas, when Israel still controls the West Bank (and withholds tax receipts to boot), it's only responsibility; there is no -- or rather limited -- power to go with it.

Rigorous Intuition

There's no question about it: Jeff Wells' blog is the scariest thing I have ever read on the Internet. I have been spending the last two weeks reading all the archive posts; it was almost like reading a crime novel, the only difference being that this is real life we are talking about.

Some of the comments left in the blog and the associated discussion forum seem to be pure evil, purportedly containing triggering signals that push abuse victims over the edge and bring out their alters. Not since I spent a late night watching The Blair Witch Project alone after eating something dodgy have I been this spooked; I think I'll get over this soon, but for the time being I have taken to ensuring that there is at least one other light on somewhere else when I switch off the light and leave my den.

Abramovich

Passing reference to Abramovich here in connection with nefarious things like drug trafficking and international terrorism.

SeaMonkey 1.0

The more things change, the more they remain the same. There is practically no difference between SeaMonkey and Firefox, except for the animated image at the top right of the browser and a different way of setting options.

Alright, there is one difference: I'm not able to access Gmail, either directly or from the notifier extension.

Movie Review: Transporter 2

I didn't really expect much from the movie, other than something to do on a lazy Saturday afternoon, so it was a pleasant surprise that it wasn't too sucky. In fact, there are very few moments when one feels bored; the action is non-stop, and there is always something or the other happening, never mind how outlandish it is or how clichéd the dialog is in some places. I'll just mention two gems:

1. The way Jason Statham removes the bomb placed under his car by executing a somersault and using a crane hook to prise it loose


2. How he uses an iPod to transfer a picture from a PC to a Unix machine at the police headquarters (that his French sidekick somehow manages to hack into in a matter of seconds).

Ontology, taxonomy and etymology

In addition to having a lot of O's, these words have something else in common: their meanings have to be looked up every time you encounter them. You come across them in the course of your reading, a dim light goes off somewhere in the recesses of your brain, but it's not bright enough to avoid a lookup, and off you go to reference.com.

I used to consider semantics in the same category, but nailed it firmly by taking recourse to XML: if an XML document is well-formed, it's syntactically correct, while it has to be valid (i.e. satisfy a schema/DTD) to be semantically correct. I guess there is something to the rumour that XML can solve world hunger, if only we would let it.

The Cobra Event

I am reading Richard Preston's The Cobra Event, or I should rather say "was reading", because I have no intention of finishing the book. Ignoring the demonising of Iraq (this book was written much before the American invasion, so whatever one reads about Iraq's WMD capabilities must be seen for what it really is), I didn't really like the style of the prose, with it's a) over-reliance on the knowledge of esoteric matter to carry the plot and b) the soapboxing. Here is an instance of the second kind:

It was Charles Darwin who first understood that evolution is caused by natural selection, and that natural selection is death. He also understood that vast amounts of death (vast amounts of natural selection) are required to effect a small permanent change in the shape or behavior of an organism. Without huge amounts of death, organisms do not change over time. Without death, life would never have become more complex than the simplest self-copying molecules. The arms of a starfish could not have happened without countless repetitions of death. Death is the mother of structure. It took four billion years of death -- a third of the age of the universe -- for death to invent the human mind. Given another four billion years of death, or perhaps a hundred billion years of death, who can say that death will not create a mind so effective and subtle that it will reverse the fate of the universe and become God? The smell in the Manhattan morgue is not the smell of death; it is the smell of life changing its form. It is evidence that life is indestructible.

Replace death with life, i.e. that natural selection is the rewarding of fitness with life, and the above paragraph's basic premise is still valid, but the sentence about the Manhattan morgue doesn't have a leg to stand on, showing that the mini-lecture about natural selection is pretty much extraneous.

Is it just me

... or does listening to some of Coldplay's songs feel like having a bored sheep piss on you :-) ?

Slovak, anyone?

A post in a Slovak Linux forum has a question related to my Conexant page. My Slovak being a bit rusty (non-existent, rather), I don't know what the question is and whether I need to update my instructions.

Najde sa niekdo kdo mi pomoze?

Best. Ad. Ever.

The NikeFootball.com ad with the laughing baby doll taped to the garage roof. Call me a sadist, but the little girl's expression as she watches her brother(?) and his friend hammer the doll is absolutely priceless.

Security Through Obscurity

I didn't get the receipt for an online insurance premium payment that I had made recently, so I went to the LIC home page to find a phone number I could call regarding this. But instead of a number, I found something even better: a link called 'Next Due', which would tell me the status of my payment without my having to talk to someone. On clicking on this link, I was prompted for my policy number (note: no login/registration required), and on entering the number, I was shown the premium amount, the date of the most recent payment and the date by which the next premium was due.

Neat. Only problem is, this information is available for the whole world to see.

Quote of the day

If this was the Middle Ages, and Magellen was an American, and we sailed around the planet and found out it was round instead of flat, we wouldn't tell anybody so we could attack from the rear.
-- William S Burroughs

Distro Promiscuity

Well, after finding an easier way to integrate the Conexant modem into the kernel, I have made Kubuntu (the distro on which I piloted the approach) my primary distro. Coupled with putting my data and software in their own separate partitions, accessible from multiple installations, the move from Suse to Kubuntu was pretty much seamless. Though it feels good to be back to a 100% non-commercial distro, I might continue playing with other distros, seeing as to how easy the switch has become.

Speaking of Kubuntu, it has come a long way since my last brush with it. Definitely ready for prime time.

Some More Chess

No, I'm not going to post any more smartass Tao quotes.

I have gotten quite good at engaging the computer. I even managed to obtain a legitimate draw last week (albeit by means of a perpetual check, but a draw is still a draw).

The secret of this success lies in my decision to stick to just one line of openings; I have resolved that I will open all my games with d4 (i.e. the queen pawn). The computer reacts to this in a pretty standard and predictable way, so I have managed to steer clear of errors and reach a balanced middle game most of the time. Research reveals that there are only about 13 openings involving 1.d4, so boning up on the main ideas and objectives behind them shouldn't be too much of a task.

Using only a little knowledge,
I would travel the Great Way
And fear only of letting go.
The Great Way is very even;
Yet people love the byways.
                  -- Lao Tzu

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

Mindlessness

I have posted about this before, but thought I would mention it again in a related context. One of the 'no-mind' [*] activities that I engage in quite often is ironing my clothes. It's usually a mechanical activity, and I don't give much thought to it, but looking back over the years, and paying more attention recently, I realise that in addition to getting to wear neater clothes, I have benefited in other ways as well: for someone like me who spends most of his time in left brain activities, the fifteen or so minutes I spend ironing a shirt provides my mind the rare opportunity to wander unfettered. Mind you, this is different from meditation, where the objective is to quieten one's mind. The benefits also seem to differ from the rest obtained by the mind from a good night's sleep.

[*] I am using the term 'no-mind' in the inaccurate, but nonetheless common, sense. It has a wholly different meaning in Buddhist philosophy.

Related thought experiment: how would it be like to go through a whole day without any kind of verbalisation: no talking, reading, programming, not even 'thinking in words' (i.e. practising the real 'no-mind')?

Of Kernels and Modules - Part II

A quick and dirty way of doing things is in place. I still get "LCP terminated by peer" errors when I try to connect after installing the driver this way, but this may be a problem with my set up, since the modules get loaded properly and the modem firmware is also loaded. Still working on it.

Update: Got things to work. Had to set up the connection using pppconfig.

Of Kernels and Modules

Taking a fresh look at my instructions for setting up the Conexant AccessRunner modem in Linux, I realise that they don't address a quite common scenario: what if you already have a kernel later than 2.6.10? Some digging around reveals that it is not very difficult to compile a module into an existing kernel (this page provides good instructions). I'm going to give this approach a shot and post the results, both here and on the How To page.

Oh, and I finished reading LOTR. As a mark of my respect and appreciation, my posts for the rest of the month will be in the style of Westron or the Common Speech.The title of today's post is an attempt in that direction. Just kidding. Verily.

King Kong

I watched King Kong yesterday, or more accurately, King, since we left the theatre during the intermission. We could only manage front row seats, and that too at the edge of the screen. If you have not experienced this situation, trust me, it's no fun craning your neck upwards at an unnatural angle and turning your head this way and that all the time to stay with the action. The closeups of the hideous natives in the island didn't help, either.

Iran and WMD

There's an article in today's Hindu about Iran's nuclear ambitions and how we have not really come up with a consistent way to handle atomic energy. It makes for some pretty depressing reading. An analogy that comes to mind is the way my jousts with the chess computer have been ending of late: I am about 25 moves into the game, all the pieces have been developed (to the best of my abilities), and there are no immediate threats to deal with. But there is something structurally wrong with the whole setup; I do not seem to have many options. Any option I consider seems to have some negative implication, some gotcha that seems insurmountable. The only way out is the meta-solution, i.e. the reset button.

The problem with the current situation is that instead of a reset button, there is only a big, red one.

Google Earth on Linux

Following the instructions in the Gentoo wiki, I managed to install and run Google Earth in Linux, but only after trying my luck with three different Wine versions (0.9.4 did it for me, finally).

After going through all these troubles, I must confess that all the effort seems to have been in vain (sort of): though I am able to zoom in and out and twirl the globe with my mouse, the menu items and the navigation buttons appear only when I hover the mouse over them. I also haven't figured out how to input coordinates and zoom there directly, if that is at all possible.

Put me down for Less Than Impressed.

Smeagol, my precious

I am nearly through with LOTR, and the action is pretty much over: the ring has been successfully destroyed and the characters are well into singing their songs of glory, and guess what? The one thing that sticks to my mind, the one thing I'm sure I'll remember long after I forget everything else in the book, is the Gollum character. Tolkien's writing really stands out in Gollum's utterings; one is filled with delight and tender pity for the wretched creature, with its soliloquies and peculiar way of talking.

Robert Fisk on Ariel Sharon

Mandatory reading.

MBAs and Distributive Justice

There is yet another full-page ad for IIPM in The Hindu today. I am not going to say much about the solicitation for admissions, except that it seems inappropriate for someone to call the IIMs and their ilk "the MBA mafia" and at the same time use their name in their advertisements ("Dare to think beyond the IIMs..."). My post is about an article that appears as part of the ad. The article can be found here.

1. The article (IMHO) correctly recognises that unbridled capitalism is not a Good Thing (tm) and must be tempered by humanism, which it claims is the "social vision" of IIPM. But distributive justice, the proposed remedy, and "to each according to his need" seem too close to communism for comfort.


2. The reason given for the faster expansion of business in China seems pretty weak and nebulous:

   ... present MBA course structure concentrating only on market segments by individual profit making units. This fails to explain the potentiality of market expansion through distributive justice. Potentiality of business is always in harmony with growth rate of national economy. That is why business expands much more rapidly in China compared with expansion of business seen in India in the past.

   though I do agree with the ultimate aim of "raising the living standards of the people at the bottom".


3. The footnote claims that the column has a monthly readership of 75,000,000. I am not sure whether this astronomical figure is for the online edition or for the print version. In any case I would like a cite before taking it seriously.

Cruelty to Animals

In the end, only kindness matters.

-- Jewel

A sight that one often comes across on the roads of Chennai (or, for that matter, on any Indian road) is that of an emaciated bull struggling to pull an overloaded cart, frothing at the mouth, while its master keeps whipping it in order to spur it up the incline. The only way I can reconcile this injustice in my mind is by taking recourse to karma: may be the bull had done some evil things in a previous life for which it is now payback time. May be it was a Hitler, or who knows, it could even be that it played the role of the cart-driver in an earlier avatar. But even assuming that this 'explanation' is true, the current suffering of the poor creature still doesn't seem right. Screw karma.

The Tao of Chess

The knight is without a place to thrust its dagger
  The rook is without a place to affix its claw
The queen is without a place to admit her blade

Why is this so?
 Because your pawns are strong.

Commentary: Avoid standard pawn weaknesses: the isolated pawn, the backward pawn and the doubled pawn.

Lead the organisation with correctness.
 Direct the military with surprise tactics.
Take hold of the world with effortlessness.

Commentary: Always make moves that either win the initiative or maintain it.

... to rise above people,
One must, in speaking, stay below them.
 To remain in front of people,
One must put oneself behind them.

Commentary: Avoid moves that impede the development of other pieces.

Evolved individuals regard the center and not the eye.
 Hence they discard one and receive the other.

Commentary: Control the center (the squares d4,e4,d5 and e5).

A good lock has no bar or bolt,
 And yet it cannot be opened.
A good knot does not restrain,
 And yet it cannot be unfastened.

Commentary: Make sure that all your pieces are defended at all times.

(Apologies to Lao Tzu)

Accurate-but-unintentionally-funny definition of the day

Tax'i·der'mist n. Someone who mounts animals

The Lord of the Rings

After watching Parts 1 and 3 of LOTR, I finally got around to reading the book. While I do concede that it is good (I am about 350 pages or so into the book, so this opinion is subject to change -- for better or worse), I am yet to see any justification for the cult status that the book and its author enjoy. One positively irritating thing is Tolkien's presumptuousness (if that is the right word): the way he goes on and on about how the chronology of the entire thing was recorded for posterity by various people, the elaborate family trees, indices, appendices and so on. It's almost as if he knew beforehand that the book would become a bestseller, and he decided to milk it for all its worth. People who are just interested in a compelling, well-told story simply do not care about these details (they care even less when one of the innumerable characters bursts into long-winded, crappy poetry -- some of it not even in English, but in some made-up language the author came up with when he was probably stoned).

So does that mean I have what it takes?

Since I got right three of the four questions that Joel posed here? I don't know JavaScript and hence didn't attempt Question 2, so I guess I should feel even more snotty :-)

To be fair, the two C questions are trivial to anyone who has done anything worthwhile in C. The Scheme question was a bit trickier for me, since Scheme syntax is slightly different from Common Lisp, but again, nothing an average Lisper would find too challenging.

On a related note, it's getting quite predictable:

1. Joel writes something controversial


2. His acolytes jump in and express their concurrence enthusiastically


3. A few nay-sayers pipe in with their objections and


4. A legion of geeks go to bed that night, satisfied that they have done their bit to uphold their geek cred

How to touch Reader's Digest for Rs 150

1. Start with a common saying or idiom, say, "quitting when ahead".


2. Modify this slightly so that it is still grammatically correct, but has an altogether different meaning. Example: "quitting when a head".


3. Think up a contrived, patently unfunny story that has the above phrase as the punch line:

   Finally, after six girls, Luke's wife had a boy. But he had only a head - nothing else. Luke didn't care, though. He was just happy to have a boy.
   
   On the kid's 21st birthday, Luke took him to a bar. "A shot of your best Scotch," he ordered.
   
   The boy drank it, and - POOF - he grew a neck. Amazed, Luke then ordered another and - POP - a torso sprouted. "Keep 'em coming!" Luke shouted. Eventually, the boy had a whole body. Everyone cheered.
   
   Tipsy, the boy stood on his new legs and stumbled to the left ... to the right ... out by the front door and into the path of a truck.
   
   The bar fell silent.
   
   "He should've stopped drinking," the bartender said, "while he was a head."



4. Submit this story as a contribution to Laughter the Best Medicine


5. Wait patiently for the Rs 150 cheque

Book Review: Mystic River

Imagine that you somehow get talked into going to a B-grade action movie. You sit through the entire movie, fidgeting, and finally get to the climax, in which the villain and his minions have the hero at their mercy, with the hero's sweetheart writhing helplessly in the hands of two leering henchmen. The villain starts his standard heh-heh-I-got-you-what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it spiel, and though you know it's a cheesy flick, you start to look forward to the hero escaping from his bonds and start kicking some serious ass.

What happens instead is that the villain finishes his speech in his own sweet time, asks the hero to say his prayers, and after waiting for the customary ten seconds, pulls the trigger and the hero drops dead.

Cut to the villain riding off into the sunset with the hero's girl by his side (who has quickly adjusted to the turn of events and is in fact wondering what she ever saw in such a good-for-nothing bloke who can't even best a B-grade villain, who, by the way, doesn't seem that bad, if you think about it).

Now what has all this got to do with Mystic River, you ask. Nothing, except that I felt the same way after finishing the book as you would feel walking out of the theatre after seeing said imaginary movie.

(Alright, I admit that this doesn't exactly qualify as a book review)

Damn he looks young

Boys and girls, now you have the pleasure of having a face to go with all the witty, incisive and informative commentary that's been inflicted on you for the past 18 months or so: I have graciously decided not to withhold said pleasure any longer and have added a mug shot to my Blogger profile. Incidentally, the picture is from a recent trip to the Hogenakkal Falls.

White to play (and win?)

After mucking around with Knights a bit, my passion for chess was sort of rekindled, and I dusted off my trusted old Radio Shack 2250XL and fired up a game. I usually consider myself lucky if I manage to stay 20 moves in the game without committing some egregious mistake like losing a piece through oversight or tying myself hopelessly in knots, but this time I surprisingly found myself in an interesting position: I breached the black king's defences with some pretty bold moves and won a rook and a pawn in exchange for a bishop and a knight.

I stopped the game at this point and went to bed, with hopes of finding a winning combination over the weekend. But it turns out that I underestimated the computer's resilience, for, on resumption, the bastard managed to neutralise my initiative within a couple of moves and I found myself back on equal terms.

Not willing to let such a potentially winning opportunity turn into a loss, I magnanimously offered a draw, which the machine gratefully accepted (translation: I pressed the Reset/Clear button).

Coming soon: "Chess: Tips, Techniques and Strategies" by Rajesh Jayaprakash (ELO rating 1650)

Wasn't he servile enough for you?

With the UN's reputation pretty much in tatters vis-a-vis the oil-for-food scandal, James Bone has every right to ask questions about Kofi Annan's son. Mr Annan should either answer the question, offer a 'no comment', or, if he is so indignant, sue the reporter. The one thing he should not do is call the reporter an overgrown schoolboy.

BTW, looking at how the sons of politicians invariably turn out to have reached their station in life via pater's influence, Plato's model, while a bit extreme, seems more attractive than ever:

The guardians (i.e. the rulers) will have no wives. Their communism is to be of women as well as of goods. They are to be freed not only from the egoism of self, but from the egoism of family; they are not to be narrowed to the anxious acquisitiveness of the prodded husband; they are to be devoted not to a woman but to the community. Even their children shall not be specifically or distinguishably theirs; all children of guardians shall be taken from their mothers at birth and brought up in common; their particular parentage will be lost in the scuffle.

In the market for a notebook

I sent the following email to Dell, Acer and Toshiba:

Hi,

I am looking for a notebook with the following specifications and
would appreciate it if you could provide me with a quote:

AMD processor (32 bit)
80 GB hard disk
512 MB RAM
DVD/CD-RW drive
No operating system, no other system software
Linux-compatible

Thanks and regards,

Rajesh Jayaprakash

The folks at Dell and Acer have responded. Toshiba (more precisely, their resellers in India, HCL) have not condescended to send a reply. However, even in the case of Dell and Acer, the responses were more along the lines of 'let us know your contact details and we'll get in touch with you'. Looks like they do not want to send quotes to an email address. I then sent them my address and phone number, but haven't heard from them yet.

There's an ad today in The Hindu for a Thinkpad that costs about Rs 34,000 and pretty much meets my specs. I am not very satisfied with my earlier IBM purchase (the ThinkCentre I am typing this from), and with IBM selling its PC business to Lenovo, I am hesitant to turn to Big Blue again.

Smalltalk Sudoku Solver

Seeing the huge demand for a Smalltalk Sudoku Solver, as evidenced by the number of Google searches that hit my blog (well, it was actually one stray hit yesterday), I have put up my solver here. It was developed on VisualWorks 7.2, but the non-GUI part should be 100% portable to other Smalltalks.

How to think like a conspiracy theorist

Facts:

1. The Congress Party have egg on their faces owing to the Volcker report


2. The questions-for-money scam arrives at the right time, affording them a way out and putting BJP on the defensive instead.

Naive Conspiracy Theorist: "The questions-for-money scam was engineered to bail out the Congress Party."

Realist: "The sting operation was more than six months in the making, so there is no conspiracy."

Seasoned Conspiracy Theorist: "The Congress Party engineered the whole thing as a sort of insurance policy, to be used in case some scandal breaks out, so there."

Realist: *shakes head and mutters something incomprehensible under his breath*

My Air Deccan Experience

1. The Travel Department send me an e-Ticket, which is nothing more than a web page print-out. The e-Ticket contains a lot of intimidating stuff like how I should check in two hours before the departure time, flights are subject to cancellation with no obligation on their part other than a refund and so on. Alarm-O-Meter reading: Slight Concern.


2. I call Air Deccan at 1 PM to confirm my flight and am informed that the departure time is 9:15 PM, which is 15 minutes later than the scheduled time. Alarm-O-Meter reading: Heightened Concern.


3. I receive an SMS message at 4 PM advising me that the flight has been rescheduled to 8:40 PM. Alarm-O-Meter reading: transitions to Faint Alarm.


4. I reach the airport. The lady at the counter has just finished having a spat with her colleague and doesn't seem very eager to see me. In addition, she says that my rather small suitcase cannot be considered as cabin baggage as it weighs 12 kg and will have to be checked in. Alarm-O-Meter reading: Since I have managed to successfully obtain my boarding pass, drops to Mild Concern.


5. As I wait to enter the security check-in, I receive another SMS stating that due to operational reasons, the flight has been cancelled, and can I please contact the given number? Alarm-O-Meter reading: May Day!


6. I approach an airline personnel, who quickly asks me to ignore the SMS message and assures me that the flight is on schedule. Alarm-O-Meter reading: climbs down to Mere Panic.


7. Just as I am about to board the plane, I am asked to hold on for a second. A young kid scurries out of the plane with the trash. Alarm-O-Meter reading: Shakes Head (Why do you even bother)?


8. There is only one stewardess, a pretty, innocent-looking, sweet young thing. AOM reading: Enters positive territory for the first time


9. The stewardess further endears herself to me, with her broken and lispy English. AOM reading: Nods Head Approvingly.


10. The pilot is a very cheerful bloke and seems quite talkative, giving a pretty thorough update of how high we are flying, the weather conditions, etc. More importantly, he makes an immaculate landing, much better than most of the landings I have experienced with the bigger airlines. AOM reading: Give Air Deccan another chance. They do get the important stuff right.

Off to Hyderabad

...for four days, followed by another three-day trip. No blogging for the next week or so (like anyone really cares).

Lisp and Elegance

Disclaimer: I am new to Lisp, and the idioms and syntax are still somewhat alien to me, so there.

I am in Chapter 9 of Practical Common Lisp, in which Peter Seibel develops a unit testing framework to build on the concept of macros. By the end of the chapter, we end up with just 26 lines of code that is quite powerful (albeit slightly arcane) and elegant (apologies for the horrendous formatting):

(defvar *test-name* nil)

(defmacro deftest (name parameters &body body)
  "Define a test function. Within a test function we can call
   other test functions or use 'check' to run individual test
   cases."
  `(defun ,name ,parameters
    (let ((*test-name* (append *test-name* (list ',name))))
      ,@body)))

(defmacro check (&body forms)
  "Run each expression in 'forms' as a test case."
  `(combine-results
    ,@(loop for f in forms collect `(report-result ,f ',f))))

(defmacro combine-results (&body forms)
  "Combine the results (as booleans) of evaluating 'forms' in order."
  (with-gensyms (result)
    `(let ((,result t))
      ,@(loop for f in forms collect `(unless ,f (setf ,result nil)))
      ,result)))

(defun report-result (result form)
  "Report the results of a single test case. Called by 'check'."
  (format t "~:[FAIL~;pass~] ... ~a: ~a~%" result *test-name* form)
  result)

All well and good, and I appreciate the way in which we ended up with this code, starting from a simple definition of the problem, recognising repeated patterns and refactoring them via macros, but my grouse is this: from a maintainability perspective, the final code, while very powerful, and well-commented to boot, still contains none of the thought processes that led to it. May be it's alright if the same person who wrote the code is also doing the maintaining, but IMHO, unless they are documented somewhere, another person will definitely have trouble grokking things.

This has always bugged me

How can Eriksson be coach of the England team and lead it against his native country, Sweden, without any questions of conflict of interest? Which comes first, patriotism or profession? Remember the stick Wasim Akram got when he did nothing more than pass on some informal bowling tips to Irfan Pathan?

Slashdot = Tabloid?

Slashdot content has become very predictable of late: most of the stories look to be either designed to start flame wars or to report sensationalist news items. They seem to fall in one of these categories:

1. Is XYZ all that is cracked out to be (replace XYZ with the flavour of the day - AJAX, Google, OSS, Evolution)?


2. Beating a dead horse, something that is universally reviled by the Slashdot regulars -- like Microsoft, DRM, SCO, patents, et al


3. The latest shiny object unveiled by Google or Firefox

The articles that don't belong to these categories are either boring (Jupiter's 14th moon is discovered to contain traces of methane? Really? How could I possibly have made it through life without knowing this?) or plain sensationalist.

The reason for my rant is one of today's /. items: a Japanese bank loses a lot of money because of a typo. Nothing wrong with reporting this, but, never being one to let facts stand in the way of a good story, they hype it up so:

1. The amount of money lost due to the typo is not $3 billion, as the story's headline misleadingly indicates


2. No shares were sold at the price of one Yen

What's more, in the age of RSS, when one subscribes to the blog feeds of people like James Robertson, Bruce Schneier and Joel Spolsky, in addition to providing interesting insights, they also serve as an unintended filter on stories reported by Slashdot: if they blog about it, it's definitely worth knowing about (notwithstanding the argument regarding gatekeepers and all that). I might as well unsubscribe from Slashdot's feed and still not miss anything really relevant.

One thing Slashdot really excels at, though, is the quality of the comments. Provided you browse them at 3+, you get to read some very Informative/Insightful/Interesting/Funny stuff.

A koan for modern times

This is from one of David McGowan's older newsletters:

Imagine that you are Jacobo Arbenz in the 1950s, or Fidel Castro in the 1960s, or Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, or, skipping ahead, Hugo Chavez in the present day. You're trying to get a fledgling administration off the ground and you've got a big problem: the institutions of your country are littered with assets controlled by Western intelligence agencies.

The CIA, for instance, has moved into town and set up shop under various assumed names to operate an 'opposition' press, which daily agitates against the sitting government with heavy doses of manufactured 'black' propaganda. If you take any action against these operations, you will be vilified via the entire Western media establishment for brutally censoring the opposition press and crushing free speech. If you do nothing, the problem will continue to fester and grow. What do you do?

Now consider this:

Kyogen said, "Zen is like a man up a tall tree hanging from a branch by his teeth. His hands can't grasp a bough, nor his feet reach one. Under the tree a man asks him the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West. If he doesn't answer he fails the questioner. If he does answer he will lose his life. What should he do?"

The similarities are pretty striking, aren't they?

I had a dream last night

... that I wake up late on a Sunday morning, finish reading The Hindu, turn my attention to Deccan Chronicle for some comic relief, and in the course of flipping through its pages, land up at Indira Bhangar's column, where somebody writes in that they had a dream that Sania Mirza had married Irfan Pathan and would Ms Bhangar please interpret this dream for them, and I fall off the bed, rolling with laughter, and injure myself.

Oh wait, that wasn't a dream.

The world is flat

Watch the Hazard music video on VH1, realise you would like to get the MP3 version, fire up LimeWire^H^H^H^H Apple iTunes, and two minutes later, you have the song streaming out of your computer speakers.

Yup, it's a flat world, alright.

Obscene political cartoon of the day

:-))

Aniel Matherani

I have two problems with Matherani's statements:

1. If you read the entire transcript carefully, you realise than he doesn't even have any direct accusations; everything is innuendo. Examples:

   Q: How did the allocation of oil vouchers take place?
   
   A: When Natwar Singh introduced his son and Sehgal to all the Iraqi officials he didn't have to say anything. All that he needed to do was to show that they were in the delegation, that they were his son and his cousin, and therefore it was confidential. They could go later and do whatever business they wanted to. You don't have to say anything to the face. The fact that they were introduced was a clear signal to the Iraqis.

   and

   Q: What were Jagat and Sehgal doing all this while?
   
   A: After the meetings, they would disappear. Nobody knew what they were doing. They kept to themselves. Natwar, Jagat and Sehgal. What they discussed was confined to Natwar's room. It was a very closed group. By that time it was becoming quite clear that they were looking for trade.

   There is therefore some truth to Matherani's claim that the conversation was quoted out of context and was supposed to be off-the-record (watch him get his ass sued for libel in double-quick time if he argues anything to the contrary).


2. Deccan Chronicle claims that

   Mr Matherani's controversial remarks come two weeks after he dismissed the allegations by the Volcker Committee as a "campaign of lies, deliberate falsehood, distortion of facts and baseless conjectures."

   My first impression was to think that this totally shredded his credibility, but I realise that this statement was on-the-record, so he was basically doing his bit for the cause, defending his masters. The story would have probably ended there, but for the deviousness of the India Today reporter.

Strike two for Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk on the Internet:

Look, if I use the internet, and email, I'd never get out of Beirut. I'd never finish my work. If someone actually wants to communicate, they can call on the phone, which costs them money, or they can write a proper letter which costs them time and effort. Most of the stuff I've seen when people show me emails are misspelled, ungrammatical, and stupid, and I'm not going to waste my time with it. I haven't got time. I simply haven't got the time. I want to work.

Easy there, Sparky, I am *this* close to deleting the RSS feed.

IIT student found dead

Predictably, the focus is on how the inability to match up to high expectations in the IITs and/or peer pressure is "an emerging and frightening phenomenon". While I agree that there may be cases where this is true, they do not constitute a trend in any way. My own experience has been quite the opposite. JEE is a bitch, alright, but once you are in, the effort needed to get by with passable grades (meaning a CGPA greater than 7.0) was nowhere near the effort needed to get in [*]. More than a decade has passed since I graduated, and the competition an IIT aspirant faces has gotten fiercer with every passing year, so I feel that my point still has validity.

To be fair, there are students who need special attention, and I have heard some of my friends complain about the pressure they felt immediately after a mid- or end semester exam, when the conversations in the hostels were all about the question paper and who did what to which question, but the situation was never so bad as to warrant such an extreme decision.

[*] On a personal level, I averaged something like 7.5 in the first two years. I was practically cruising the whole time, revelling in the joy (more accurately, the relief) of getting in, but I realised that there is a life after four years at IIT, and that I might brighten my prospects if I brought my CGPA to more 'respectable' levels. I started attending all classes (though minimum mandatory attendance during those days was -- gasp -- just 55%) and began to maintain class notes religiously. I also made it a point to work through all the tutorial problems. Sure enough, these actions had the desired effect: I was ranked in the top five in my class during the third and fourth years (I even managed to climb as high as third in the sixth semester). The point is, I never had to stretch myself beyond this; no all-nighters, no studying extra material, and so on.

The fact that in the final analysis, a) the law of diminishing marginal returns ensured that I could only bring my CGPA up to just under 8.0 and b) neither my grades nor my field of study have diddly-squat to do with what I do for a living now is another story altogether.

Firefox 1.5

...has been released. I am sticking to 1.0.7, however. Reasons:

1. Applets don't display (both JDK 1.4 and 1.5 plugins; could be a problem with my setup)


2. The Greasemonkey and DictionarySearch extensions are not compatible with 1.5


3. Neither is the Mozilla Modern theme (though, thankfully, Qute seems to have become the default theme)

On a general note, I didn't see that much of a difference between 1.0.7 and 1.5. Seems to me like they have hit a plateau in terms of differentiators, what with the farming out of most of the interesting functionality to the extension writers.

P.S. I wanted to write something about the Catholic Church doing away with the concept of limbo (the spiritual equivalent of the location of Schroedinger's cat, you might say), but I couldn't really figure out what that something was. Never mind.

Milestone

As of 1 December, 2005, India joins an elite group of industrialised nations who have made remarkable strides in accurate, comprehensive and sophisticated weather forecasting, by adopting the practice of assigning catchy-but-completely-unnecessary names to the tropical cyclones that batter our coasts. Congratulations!

If I were a PR hack

... how would I go about promoting my blog? Here are some ideas for the blog title:

1. The world according to Rajesh


2. The bestest blog in the wholest world!!! (apologies to the endearing Mahir Cagri)


3. One man's journey in search of himself (and some eyeballs)


4. Blogging in a not-so-free world

and finally, my favourite:


5. 658 blog posts. 19 months. 2 readers.

:-)

Movie Review: Red Eye

Though the storyline is quite thin and not very believable, Red Eye manages to hold one's attention pretty well. The way the plot develops is very natural -- I especially liked the conversation in which the villain (Cillian Murphy) exposes his plans to Rachel McAdams' character. Very slickly done.

Going by Murphy's performance in the first half of the movie, I was on the verge of anointing his character as one of the classic villains of modern cinema, but he totally loses it in the second half, almost being reduced to a caricature, croaking and stumbling around in the climax like a clown.

Speaking of the climax, I can't believe that a director of Wes Craven's calibre would go with such a cliched ending. Come on, the girl being chased by the crazed killer never runs up the stairs (didn't one of the characters in Scream -- also directed by Craven -- say so?). The phone ringing during those tense moments also reminded me of Scream, by the way.

Some Practical Lisp

My work on Vajra has sort of come to a standstill, what with the amount of time I have been spending taking care of the hardware issues. The most recent work (as revealed by the CVS commit comments) was an earth-shaking enhancement to a string utility function.

Anyway, I am reading Practical Common Lisp now (a quick micro-review: should have started with it instead of Paul Graham's On Lisp), and an idea for a worthwhile Vajra enhancement just occurred to me: write a Common Lisp library to extract class files as byte streams from JAR files. I am using Arun Sharma's ziplib utility for this currently, and while it's a great utility, there are some issues with it (Valgrind reports quite a few memory-related problems).

The plan is as follows:

1. Write a CL library interfacing with the zlib routines


2. Write a C++ class that wraps the CL library (it can wrap the zlib functions directly, but what's the fun in that?)


3. Become a Lisp hacker in the process of implementing steps 1 and 2


4. Take over the world

Understanding Power

This is not exactly a book review, but I have only about fifty or so pages left to read, so I decided to put down my thoughts all the same.

Most of what Chomsky says is just confirmation of what I have already known or have at least felt intuitively to be true, but he provides plenty of footnotes as evidence (pity the footnotes are not available in the book itself -- you will have to visit the web site for this, but the fact that they exist is comforting enough; going by Chomsky's reputation, they are sure to be rock solid).

Chomsky is under no illusion that he is somebody around whom like-minded people can rally and look to for guidance. He simply claims to be playing the role of an observer who brings things to people's notice; it is up to them to decide how best to act upon this information. Having thus established his role (since he is no messiah, don't look to him for quick and easy solutions to the mess we are in), he is then free to take a pretty pessimistic outlook on things. By the time you reach the end of the book, you have gained a lot of insight and knowledge, but there is no sense of hope, that things are on the right track and will get better and so on.

BTW, even if one dismisses the book as the ranting of a liberal firmly on the left of the aisle, I would consider it to be mandatory reading, at least to disabuse one's notions about how the global capitalist economy really functions and how free the 'free markets' really are.