Press releases and Yahoo

You come across a 'news' story, find that it's from the Yahoo domain, and think it's a legitimate bit of journalism. But look closer, and you'll find that it's a press release (a careful scrutiny would have revealed the presence of 'prnews' in the URL), not subject to the rigours of checks for accuracy and editorial oversight.

Browser rivals playing catch-up?

I don't think so.

Like great minds thinking alike, the Internet's two main competing browsers unveiled new improved versions just days apart last week.

Please, give me a break.

Both browsers now provide built-in search windows, so that one does not have to open a new Google, Yahoo or MSN page to search on a keyword.

Incorrect again. Firefox has had the Google search bar from, like, the pre-1.0 days.

I also don't think the emphasis on anti-phishing protection features is really warranted. Is this probably because Microsoft is touting this feature as a competition-beater?

Happy Happy Joy Joy

Well, finally I got it right and managed to download the right version of CD #5.

There was a twist in the tale, though; after downloading the ISO image, I found that I had run out of blank CDs. After a bit of head-scratching, I figured out the solution: mount all my five ISO files and make YAST use the resulting file system as an installation source.

Result: I've finally, yes, finally, managed to compile and install the Crystal window decoration. The effort was worth every bit of the struggle. Check out this screenshot.

An unintended benefit of permanently mounting the CD images in /etc/fstab is that my system has become very snappy as well, for whatever reason. Plus, installation of additional packages from the hard disk is, of course, much faster.

Replatforming

I heard this word for the first time this week, from two different people. Question: in what way is this different from, say, migration? If not, why do we need a new word at all?

Methinks this falls under the same category as re-branding 'Testing' as 'Assurance'.

Alright ...

... now I'm really pissed: SUSE-Linux-10.1-GM-i386-CD5.iso from here is actually the remastered version, but somebody mistakenly named it without the 'Remastered' tag. Another eight-hour download, only to end up with a file that I already have. Maybe I'm missing something here, but if the remastered version of the CD is identical to the original one, why is YAST not able to pick up packages from it?

Huh?

This has got to be the most inane and senseless letter to The Hindu that I've ever read (it's about the veil controversy in the UK):

Those advocating the removal of the veil feel the burqa hampers effective communication. What more is required to prove the degradation of values than the fact that we cannot accept a woman dressed decently and respectfully but would love to see her in indecent costumes? We put forward the most inane and senseless reasons to support our argument.

Straw man? Non sequitur? Slippery slope?

Remastered my ass

I have the first four OpenSuSE 10.1 CDs (did I mention that I'm now on an unlimited download plan?); I found that I needed CD #5 for installing the KDE development packages, so off I went to the download page. There I found that the ISO images were now adorned with the moniker 'Remastered', whatever that means. I didn't pay much attention to this and went ahead with the download. Big mistake. When trying to install the packages from this CD, YAST refused to proceed and kept whining that I was shoving in the wrong CD.

Googling reveals that the FTP mirrors contain the original ISOs as well as the 'Remastered' ones. Grrr.

Selling out to The Man

Considering how my Conexant How To page seems to be one of the main sources people turn to for installing Conexant USB ADSL modems, I've decided to try and make some moola off of it; I'm going to see if Google AdSense accepts the page.

Update: It turns out that there's no need to ask Google to accept my page; if I'm already an AdSense member, I can simply paste the AdSense code in any other page or site that I want (subject, of course, to Google's policies).

Firefox 2.0

I decided to wait till the dust settled down and 2.0 was well and truly available via getfirefox.com before downloading it. I had tried the release candidates, but didn't feel like abandoning 1.5.

There seems to be an issue with installing 2.0 over an existing 1.5 installation, i.e. an upgrade; updating my extensions or installing new ones failed with the 'installLocation has no properties" error. I ended up starting with a clean slate and downloading all my extensions -- ahem, add-ons -- again.

Anyway, 2.0 is way faster than 1.5, which alone is worth the cost of upgrading. Also, the spell check feature -- dotted red lines below misspelled words a la Microsoft Word -- is really really nifty. Makes posting to the blog a breeze.

Oops. When I click on the 'Check Spelling' button provided by Blogger (yeah, I'm like that), nothing happens. The error console says 'spellcheck is not a function'. Oh well.

Oh my!

From a COLA post:

>> The question isn't what matters.
>> It's the answer that matters,
>> you <expletive> moron.

> You know a person has no stance or
> debating ability when they
> consistently have to use
> personal attacks as part of
> their argument.

Those are called "ad hominems" there, wjbell. And you, without exception, have no stance or debating ability despite your refusal to resort to ad hominems, you microcephalic toad.

Explosions in Baghdad

Here is a video from an Arabic news channel about the recent explosions in an American base in Baghdad. There are all kinds of unconfirmed reports going around, claiming that the extent of the American casualties in this attack is being suppressed.

What stands out in this footage for me is the humongous explosion that you see at about 3:50 or so minutes into the video. Considering that the camera is quite a few kilometers from the base, I can't imagine how powerful the explosion must have been to produce that kind of a blinding flash of light. It was Diwali yesterday, so I guess I'm paying more attention to such things than I usually would have.

Here's a shoutout

... to anocturne :-)

Some Smalltalk

I have a small shell script that backs up my blog archives; it has a bunch of calls to wget for all the archive files since April '04, which is when I started blogging. Since I don't know shell scripting all that well, the script is not even intelligent enough to figure out the current month and use a for loop.

I decided to redo the script in VisualWorks. Problem was, I kept getting the exception related (I think) to Seaside that I mentioned earlier. I bravely stepped into the debugger, and I don't know what I did, but I now started getting another exception, something that seemed more fundamental; I wasn't even able to open the image successfully [*]. Back to a fresh base image (BTW, loading Seaside in this fresh image went through incredibly smoothly -- probably on account of all the downloads of the dependent packages the last time).

I managed to do nearly all the things I wanted to do, except for one thing: create a single tar.gz file that contains all the archive files. The GZipWriteStream class seems to create only single files. My not-so-elegant workaround is to feed all the archive files one after the other to the output .gz file's stream, in effect creating a single huge HTML file. Definitely not elegant.

[*] Coincidentally, Episode 6 of the Industry Misinterpretations podcast talks about image-based development and ways to recover from situations similar to mine.

Spelling bee contests

1. Why is ESPN, of all channels, broadcasting a spelling bee contest?


2. More important, why the hell am I watching it?

Both very valid questions, but my post is about the need for such competitions: the quirkiness of the English language. It almost seems like making a virtue of a necessity, and brings to mind the glorification of design patterns, when some people consider them as nothing more than ways to overcome the deficiencies of some programming languages.

What's happening in Georgia

There's an article in The Hindu today by Vladimir Radyuhin about the situation in Georgia.

Ignoring the pro-Russian bias in the article, what struck me the most about it -- apart from its incisiveness -- was this: how the big powers conduct their, for want of a better phrase, geostrategic business in such a brazen manner, readily discernible to any literate person willing to pay attention to these issues, and yet get away with pulling the wool over the majority of their populations with their fake concerns for things like democracy, human rights and free trade.

Staying on the subject of Russia, here's something from Rigorous Intuition:

You may know that Israeli President Moshe Katsav is facing indictment for the rape of two female staffers. Earlier this week in Moscow after a brief public appearance with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Vladimir Putin remarked "Say hello to your president. He really surprised us." The New York Times notes that the microphone "was quickly turned off as reporters were ushered from the room," but Putin was overheard to continue. "He turned out to be quite a powerful man. He raped 10 women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him."

There but for the grace of God go I

This is supposed to be funny, but sorry, not for me. People taking telemarketer jobs in the U.S. may not be that badly off, what with the general high standard of living, but when you consider their counterparts here in India, it's downright cruel to have fun at their expense or be rude to them. Come on, these are just people trying to eke out a living, people who have the same hopes and aspirations as you and me for a good life. I agree that they are irritating at the best of times, but that does not give anybody the right to treat them badly.

The next time I hear

... someone use the word 'metamodel' just to sound smarter than they really are, without knowing WTF the word means, I'm going to call them on it and ask them to explain themselves.

I attended a product demo webinar today, and something hilarious happened. The presenter was touting the RAD/MDA capabilities of the tool when someone asked him about support for AJAX. I don't remember the presenter's answer in detail, but the nub of it was that currently there was not much support. Nothing to get excited about, except that the questioner wanted to show how smart he was, and went on to say that AJAX was part of the upcoming World Wide Web Consortium's 2.0 specifications, and made it clear where he stood as far as support for such an important standard was concerned. At this point I backed away from the speaker phone, nearly crashed through the glass wall behind me, and ended up waking up the rest of the people in the room.

That's a good one

Afzal's death sentence should be commuted because otherwise the lives of the judges who sentenced him may be threatened by people seeking revenge.

Going by this logic, we might as well shut down all the High Courts and the Supreme Court.

By the way, is it just me or does Abdullah's statement sound like a veiled threat, something a Mafia don would say?

Movie Review: The Lake House

I have always had a fascination with looking at something -- a building, a work of nature, why, even the moon -- through another person's eyes, someone who has been there before me, perhaps even millennia ago, and wondering what they must have felt. Would they have thought the same thing and wondered about me, a fellow traveller further behind them on a highway called Time? Little wonder then that The Lake House struck a chord in me, as soon as I realised that it was not a romantic ghost story a la Just Like Heaven.

I know that any movie involving passing messages back and forth across time is bound to have logical paradoxes and things that are difficult to wrap your mind around, but even so, The Lake House is a beautiful movie. I still haven't figured out how exactly the happy ending is brought about -- a visit to IMDB.com is probably in order -- but this doesn't prevent me from anointing this my Movie of the Year.

(Hello there, Mr Sentimentality, how are you doing? Who's that behind you? Oh, it's you, Mr Senility)

More on the death penalty

One argument we hear against the death penalty goes like this: "So let me get this straight: you're saying murder is wrong, and must be punished with murder? Give me a break!"

Yes, I'm saying murder is wrong and must be punished. But is the punishment to be considered murder too? I don't think so.

Both the crime and the punishment involve taking a human life. But murder, by definition, is the taking of a life "under conditions specifically covered in law". So the taking of life in the second case is not murder. You may argue that the state is arrogating for itself certain rights which the citizen does not possess, but that's how government works.