The surreal world (being revamped to accomodate a hyperspace bypass)

Do the Dew

2007-07-05T19:01:00.000+05:30

Presenting the first ever snaps on this weblog. With a self-explanatory title to boot. The camel was very reluctant to begin with (and rightly so) but looks like Mountain Dew is very popular. Across species.

Acid Test - 2

2006-03-12T21:48:00.000+05:30

Web browsers make a nice quiz connect question. They also have had the distinction of uniformly flunking the the Second Acid test, making the standards police go berserk. Long long time ago, I made this note on acid tests and web browsers. One more has apparently passed and the others claim to come close (not the ones I use obviously). Good work. Except the wholesale binary replacement part.

There has been considerable anguish as to why such posts are being churned out from my current location. I completely understand. (Mail in if you still do not get the joke)

Wimp

2006-03-09T12:21:00.000+05:30

Can this stack hold a Lamp to the more popular ones? We will find out soon.

XLII - 2 (conversations with god)

2005-11-30T21:00:00.000+05:30

One can now get answers to questions requiring deep thought over MSN messenger. Simply ask encarta as before. Content is still king.

Here's a pretty enlightening conversation I had with a little help from here. Even Yahoo! Helper wasn't this much fun.

[askencarta: italics me: non-italics (I am not in Rome)] Do I know you? Welcome back, H. I dunno. I don't think so. who am i? You are H. Do you know the internet oracle? I don't think I know The Internet Oracle Oh, I see i c 2. can i fly? You want to fly? am i god? I doubt you're god. are you god? Let's see... Am I god? am i god? You were god, but you're not anymore. [Revelation. Enlightenment. Smugness] what is the answer to life, the universe and everything? Forty-two. 42? 42 is fourty-two... Not sure I understand what you mean. but why? Because... That's the way it is, I suppose. [you are no deep thought] know thyself Let's try looking in Encarta. => huh? Yes? why? Because that's the way things are. do you know anny by any chance? I don't think I know Anny By Any Chance. she has been spamming me on this blog Hmmm, that's something I can't find an answer for in the encyclopedia. What is the largest country in the world? If you don't know, just ask me. but she has been spamming me Unfortunately I don't think I can answer this, even with the help of a good encyclopedia. oh! I am very good at math. If you have trouble with quadratic equations, I can help you with them. Type "solve x^2+3x=10" and I'll show you how to do it. eh? very well, goodbye I'll be seeing you later H. Good talking to you.

So there. So disjointed. So surreal.

Update: The reference to God is in no way related to self-deification, theology, ego, alter-ego or other associated terms. For further clarifications, refer to the title summary of the blog

goto

2005-10-29T15:36:00.000+05:30

Inactivity breeds hyperlinks. Visit Vista.

300 years

2005-10-11T12:52:00.001+05:30

300 years to organize the world's information. Just makes me wonder if efforts of this magnitude by various crusaders will remain in beta for that long as well! Indexing a gazillion things and providing 3.14 petabytes of storage and counting... please wait till we index all the world's information and bring it to a computer near you.

Roadhouse blues

2005-10-10T17:07:00.000+05:30

You know it is going to hit you soon when: The car ploughs across to save a crawling king snake slithering desperately across a deserted temple road. And your moped decides to give up just ahead of a huge volvo trailer. And most definitely when your cab skids to a halt doing a nice about turn on a fully loaded highway.

Keep your eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.

GTalk

2005-08-24T10:10:00.000+05:30

Yet another widely anticipated beta from Google. With lines blurring between IM and voice services, this line at the bottom of the downloads page is loaded with caution against FCC VoIP rules:

Google Talk is not a telephony service and cannot be used for emergency dialing.

Read on.

Prison diary

2005-07-21T00:20:00.000+05:30

Meet Prasad Bidapa. Fashion guru. Fresh after a break at the Al Rashidiya Detention Centre in Dubai. After dishing out valuable tips on modelling to jailbirds.

"It reminded me of my hostel days. It was like a very good hostel".

Why should this paper be even carrying this feature? But for the tone adopted by the article, I would have concluded that competition (the one and only) is wearing it down for good. I simply can't wait to watch the movie he plans to make out of this awesome experience. Jailhouse rock rocked. Jailhouse ramp anyone?

[Back post: 20050822]

I am an A4 sheet

2005-07-17T09:18:00.000+05:30

I just realized a lot of things about myself in the last three weeks. I learned to self-introspect, to be ultra-vultura-competitive and to pack a few years of my life into an A4 size sheet. I even had a shot at bloating the few serene, uneventful and blissful years in my life to a largely action-packed, back-from-the-brink cliffhanger episode in which I saved the world thrice over in 20 minutes and 2 seconds.

The previous paragraph is all hogwash, by the way. Or so I would like to claim. The very first question that came floating around in a nice round thought bubble was "Why am I here?". The question was effectively answered in the mugshot on my id card. And then came the question, "Where am I?". Heck, I don't know. This place is a maze in more ways than one. Harry Potter would have found it easier to negotiate those revolving stairs than the IIMB corridors. I still do not know the way around to the classrooms. Or to the computer center. That forces me get to class a full five minutes early (sic) by following the largest bunch of people walking in any given general direction and hope that they too are heading towards the class. A successful attempt would mean that I get to hear pearls of wisdom from my prof on reliability and if yours truly had chosen to follow a different group from a random sample trooping out of nowhere, what was the probability that he would have gotten around to signing the attendance sheet?

It's been fun in any case. A different kind of fun - from getting to know people whose A4 incarnations look the same (if not better) to generating publicity for an event to actually studying before classes. Being off the net for a long time has been like drinking decaf in rehab. No news feeds, no blogs, no arbit site hopping and no programming. I really hope I get hold of that promised dinkpad sooner.

For more fun, one must trivialize these quotes from A Beautiful Mind by offering them space here:

(Speaker:)
Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.
(To RG:)
Terrified, Petrified, Mortified, Stupified... by you
(I really wish)
Adam Smith... was wrong.
(evil laughter)
It's the same with your dreams and nightmares. You have to feed them to keep them alive.

This is getting too long for a post on this blog, really. Let me just stop here by pointing out that my effusively sentimental post still holds good. I regret that indiscretion. For now.

Disclaimer: This blog has a mind of its own to morph itself into a two year journal of woes at an academic institution. Not yet, dear blog. There are better things to do in life.

No more

2005-06-03T18:00:00.000+05:30

A lot of things will no more be applicable from today. Going, in the hope that I will get to know more. Sigh. Letting go is difficult, but postponing it is really easy. Will do that, as is usual.

Viva Wikipedia

2005-06-01T12:31:00.000+05:30

All your passwords are belong to us. Looks like communism. But I really can't share my passwords. No, thanks. Reminds me of the halcyon days when someone took great pains to send across a bunch of totally useless unix passwords to a lot of folks back at college.

While I go off to change a great many of my account passwords (useless accounts at that, so that the folks I am 'networked' with don't get messages), one may start here:
Got a Wikipedia Account? Vandals Got Your Password
Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/User:Tim Starling/Password matches

Mandatory Disclaimer: I am not responsible if one forms visions of an impending doom after reading other comments in the links I post. No Password was stolen while this blog post was being written or published.

Space barred

2005-05-29T13:14:00.000+05:30

The lesson learnt is that getting a grip over the bowling ball (cannonball?) is tougher than performing the ctrl-alt-del magic. Ouch,Icanthitthespacebar. Some day, things will grow to specifically insure the fingers of folks who write code to save the world.

Eye candy link train

2005-05-19T19:35:00.000+05:30

[Solid internet connection required to click away from this post. Best viewed on your exploder and above.]

More official eye candy is being doled out all the way up from down under. No Aqua. No Bluecurve. Not even looking glass. Tis Bliss Royale!! The theme contains one of the most useful signposts that you would never want to encounter.

One has to wait for some more time to get to see the Red Screen of D and this is turning about to be much earlier than predicted. Heck, even this catastrophy is happening. The skynet style prediction missed SpyNet^TM, though. Makes me wonder. (Tech) 'Visionaries' have to be prescients or astrologers or good old weathermen - for all that is envisioned may be leading us here.

Autocomplete

2005-05-18T20:11:00.000+05:30

[The rate at which I am adding links to every post, this spot is well on the way to putting other linkbots to shame.]

The news is that my desktop owner has been granted a patent related to treating email addresses as objects (the one with '@' and other nasty symbols). Visions of a global monopoly over e-mail loomed large in front of the screen. The whole thing seemed simple enough to be read through. What has been claimed looks to be related to features that I see in Outlook, little information symbols and other bells and whistles in preview panes and mail displays. In fact, the Office suite 'researches' things for you (from 'trusted' sources unlike most linkbots). Other email readers, personal information managers beware.

What next? Waiting for the worms, of course - to show their solidarity by launching a righteous attack against all the email addresses of the world.

Acid test

2005-05-17T19:54:00.000+05:30

All of them flunk the test by far. But in the land of clunky web browsers, the tabbed version is king. Few things that I am looking forward on my exploder eagerly. I could even consider restarting my computer for all security updates instead of wholesale binary replacements.

Red room, Green room, Blue room

2005-05-05T14:21:00.000+05:30

This is the perfect time to resort to some flashy click tricks. Break out of the Crimson red and Viridian blue-green rooms. Don't sue me if this makes your computer a zombie. I am bankrupt already.

XLII

2005-05-02T19:04:00.000+05:30

It turns out that some search engines are more improbable than others in finding out the answer to the ultimate question. It is known that Google calculates the answer but MSN simply knows it. Owning content is sometimes better than aggregating it. The others are still working on it and do not want to throw in the towel yet. They obviously know a towel is very handy.

Rooters Rappers

2005-04-19T15:08:00.000+05:30

Information deluge is taking its toll on us humans - the one excuse that can be dished out by the organizers of the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI) [or whatever that is] for accepting this auto-generated paper.

"Rooter" features such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions." - Reuters

Of course, no engine can ever beat the rap generator. To keep up with the times, you should feed it through the ebonics translator.

Coctane

2005-04-11T01:00:00.000+05:30

For no reason, this vivid image of 100 Octane's lead singer popped up. The wonderful band that performed at Oasis a few years ago, we addressed them affectionately as Coctane. Just before they opened, Rotten tomatoes or some other funky ketchup guys were entertaining a completely stoned out clown (he was on Coctane presumably) moving a steel chair up and down the audi. The rotten guys gave up after deciding the clown simply could not stop rocking. We were all ears and earmuffs when the bespectacled lead singer, impeccably attired in a t-shirt and a pair of jeans with a short haircut to boot, started addressing us folks. In a solemn manner he delivered news of the loss of some band member (for the concert or forever, can't recollect which) in some accident. What followed was an improvisation of whatever they did at this fest.

Drive safely people. We do not want mourning bands on stage venting their anger on souls blissfully sleeping in the audi through a rock concert.

Foxed up

2005-04-05T10:27:00.000+05:30

With increasing market share comes great scrutiny. Secunia has put up a demo (?) for a mozilla javascript 'flaw' (patched on All Fool's day). Try it out - it's fun reading your inbox directly from memory. Works best if you are a fan of tabbed browsing and put all your browser windows in one basket.

ADVT

2005-04-01T10:52:00.000+05:30

It all started with ADVT. An innocuous four letter word buried under a rather credible sounding news story. One must trust ToI to change the rules of the game and put in incredible news stories (no link) on April Fool's day. Right on the front page. Dan Brown claims Kashmir on the basis of Kentucky. We are not surprised that you have been inspired by National Treasure. I suspect that this news item is already being decorated and sent to my inbox as a revelation and an act of God. Dear Sania Mirza, did you sit with the editorial team to edit the Serena Williams news story? Apparently, the possibility of your beating Serena Williams is a big joke. Be proud of your journo backers.

ToI missed to print today's paper on Foolscap (hint hint!) and then put a donkey and Laxman's common man across the ears of the front page (more hints!) to ensure that the readers are suitably impressed of these gala times. The column fillers will never learn to deliver more value than a cutting chai, which is more f(l)avoured and tasteful at the same price.

WordPress

2005-03-31T20:28:00.001+05:30

Apparently, Wordpress - your friendly neighbourhood GPL'd blog publisher - has been using a not so nice mechanism to generate revenue. This reminds me that nothing can actually be free and trust is something that google cannot take for granted, even from prominent sites. The irony here is that even if search engines blacklist the original site (in a feeble attempt to penalize), umpteen crosslinks from blog sites will lead them there anyway. One must definitely trust all blogs, because they are the most authentic source of information, aren't they? Why doesn't the blogger stick to good ol' notepad or <your favourite editor here>?

No news

2005-03-22T19:01:00.000+05:30

The AFP wants itself delisted from the google news index. The French seem to be as litigious (they simply strike, don't they?) as the folks across the Atlantic. All that crawling of other subscription services is bound to keep Google news in the news, I guess.

Undo

2005-03-20T18:33:00.000+05:30

If feed readers picked up this one in the wrong blog, remember that exploder's cache and random mouse clicks from a spotless mind can be real dangerous. And that a lot of caffeine never did anyone any good. My Reply-Alls have all successfully acted out my best nightmares in technicolor. If you took proper care of your mailbox, you would know.

One day, I intend to personally plug in this ultra-cautious dangerously-paranoid piece of software that takes care of this clicky issue - something stated here under the Principle of Safety - it just asks "are you sure?" a thousand times before I get to that inviting red button.

Sheer Columny

2005-03-20T17:45:00.000+05:30

There is never a right time to write about cricket, is there? Things keep happening all round the year and people keep speaking about all the time - so any time is the right time.

Inzamam's men tasted a bit of Eden's hallowed turf in a well-fought match. Coach Bob is going to be under a lot of fire, no doubt. Ex-coach Miandad has been firing on all cylinders for some time now at the coach's preoccupation with newspaper columns. In his support, Miandad mentioned John Wright being debarred from attempting any such thing. If only someone could point out the sheer injustice meted out to John Wright in this regard. What else is he supposed to do when he actually has no team to coach, with the squad busy writing columns in the newspapers or giving match reports beamed into your telly by news channels? We empathize with you coach, you sure must be toiling hard on the Indian team's ability to play to the crowd. The aggression is really evident in players driving cars for team you-know-what, in letting out team strategy as a sort of advance warning on the third day and sometimes in winning matches. Go for it Coach. This is your chance. You do have a laptop, don't you?

Sukhoi Shakers

2005-03-12T16:48:00.000+05:30

A captivating plane tale by Shekhar Gupta. The intended targets seem to be our wrangling political leaders. I am no expert, but the Sukhois are turning out to be one of the better ones (on paper at least), what with our good old MiGs taking a liking to the ground instead of the stratosphere. Had an issue been made out of it, the establishment would have had to wait for a Kargil as in the case of Bofors. Worse, if they chose to invent one.

Peek-a-boo

2005-03-09T02:01:00.000+05:30

The best part of peddling the security-is-a-mirage story (without substantiation) is that every now and then you get free weapons to back you. So, a whole bunch of university systems running similar software get hacked - hacking has reached such levels of 'sophistication' that changing a couple of query strings is often enough. These systems happen to be the ones storing information about admits to their respective b-schools in the US (elite ones, that). One of them has decided to shoo out the entire list of applicants who sneaked in to take a look. Boo! No lollipop for you, the missive from the university said.

Has anyone ever had any real trouble clicking a link that says "Do not click"? Here's the narrative of a person who seems to have clicked and chose to write about it.

I will forget to lock my door. Do not enter. If you do, you are a thief. Seems to work on the internet pretty well.

Knock Knock

2005-03-07T18:56:00.000+05:30

This vagabond across the mindless telly space landed up to refuel at this auto-cum-money-cum-profit-from-it show. The anchor was discussing the merits of anti-knock agents and how we were moving up the value chain (by burning holes in the environment and in our wallets). Excuse me lady, but our neighbourhood bunk owner gives a wonderful mix of pure adulterated gasoline, kerosene and cheap metal parts made of lead and sells it as TurboSpeed Premium. Smells like Teen Spirit and makes your vehicle run like a turbocharged Luna.

My innate ability to sit through junk paid off as this wonderful graphic came up refreshing my fundas like no other programme could. There it was, all the knowledge that you needed to maintain the vehicle. Knocking. Why not Methane? Fractional distillation. The works. Like Methane contains one Carbon atom, Ethane two, Propane three, Butane Four.. and then Octane eight. Wow. That's news. Octane, that wonderful thingy, the anchor said with a flourish as additional Carbon atoms merrily bonded themselves and danced across the screen. Kekule, who conjured up snake dances in his sleep would have given up research altogether. I am not even talking of Buckminster Fuller.

Knock knock. Who's there? Octane. Sorry, no knock.

Fiefrox and Ta

2005-03-02T19:28:00.000+05:30

I am still a part of the large majority using exploder for all practical and useful purposes. So zealots sporting Spread Firefox on their sites are exempted from reading this. For those hell bent on using Firefox, one needs to get 1.0.1 anyways that mostly has workarounds for security holes. The grim truth is that some cannot be fixed in a sane manner at all, just like Microsoft's patches. Spread Fiefrox.

Fiefrox 1.0 is so dyslexic with Indic languages that it has led to edit-thrashing in Wiki, complaints on blogs (where else?) and so on. I wonder if it was a ploy to increase the visual co-ordination and reading speed of surfers. It is OK to conform to standards, but it is a different ball game in showing it right without luser intervention, which IE does by the way.

To be fair, loads of work is happening to support Indic Languages like Tamil on both open and not-so-open software. I am not going to debate on why this should be done for the web in the first place - there is no reason not to do it - you can jump out now or even use a politically correct Tamil google to find out.

Cheque, Please

2005-02-24T19:37:00.000+05:30

A consumer court has ruled that cheques written in Sanskrit should be honored after all. What could have been an interesting departure from routine cheque clearance morphed into a violation of the official languages act!

Terming the conduct of Andhra Bank as "highly deplorable and capricious", the commission observed "if there was difficulty for the official to decipher the meaning of 'Panch Sahastra Matra' he could have got it clarified from a person having adequate knowledge of the language.

There are "around" 22 languages recognized by the Indian Constitution. Maithili anyone? For the active and the activists, the incident happened in 1991 and it is quite likely that it has taken this long for a verdict to be passed.

Reinvent

2005-02-09T22:14:00.000+05:30

HP's board has asked its CEO to step down. The powers that be have indicated that a kaleidoscope does not offer a great vision.

I liked their latest ad campaign anyways. Hope they manage to keep pace with the on demand world trying to be always on and convert my potential into your passion. They make great products that look good on paper at least.

Optimally loaded

2005-02-08T18:20:00.000+05:30

Blogs are like yawns. You know why. Blogs are viral as well. Faster than blaster. So much so that people deeply believe that the Nicobarese could have been saved had an alert blogger posted from Phuket. Blogs are banal. Very much like this one.

My current impressions of an optimally loaded blog, inspired by Madhur Bhandarkar's Page 3 for self-referential digs.

You must have a sidebar. A sidebar that must invariably be longer than your post.The easiest thing to do on this arm of the milky way.
The post contains more hyperlinks than content. Readers having an obsessive compulsive disorder that makes them double-click randomly on the page, will suddenly find themselves embarking on a journey into uncharted territory. Also offers them easy exit options.
You have a message board installed. You even get advertisements for expanding all sorts of things on them.
You have at least three site counters that increase the number of bored people in the world each time you reload the page [more on this when I get into a really bad mood]. You could possibly psyche your readers out by putting up the webpage they came from as well.
Your template loads from at least five different URLs served from three different parts of the world.
Your blog offers your readers the choice to comment in two different popup windows. One can even put in snazzy html.
You have adsense installed.
Your blog is served up from a gazillion feed servers.
Your blog expresses solidarity with the world in general and promotes 100% recycled karma as part of a worldwide web ring.
Your blog is mostly on blogging, its side-effects, where you blog from, why you blog and how it has contributed to your mental, physical and metaphysical well-being.

I power blogger.

Out with it

2005-01-23T15:37:00.000+05:30

Here's to the all new bloggers for getting themselves on the nerves of a number of people. The variations of the word blog made it to this list of banished words. That could possibly explain why Merriam Webster got so many hits for the word - no one ever understood what it was anyway.

Comment:

I think the words ‘journal’ and ‘diary’ need to come back.

Like it is going to.

Among my other favorites are "You're fired" (futile attempt), "Pockets of resistance" (wish my wallet was inside one of these) and "Battleground state" (we have more than 25, did you know that?).

Ride of his life

2005-01-20T22:07:00.000+05:30

I was quite surprised to see the bike Robert 'Bob' Pirsig rode as he was thinking of ways to multiplex quality, his motorbike and rants on fellow (?) philosophers. For one, that sort of explained why his son acted the way he did all along the journey. It must have been a real effort to actually stick your neck out to see what's ahead, and to get that wind blowing all over you feeling. Biking can be a pretty egoistic thing.

I realized that though it was informative and interesting, I had lost a very significant thing by the way - my very own notions and impressions about his bike, his ride and to a certain extent, his ramblings. It's akin to the director's cut that lands on a favorite section of a book that you like. I sort of felt that a still picture influences even more than a movie. Every picture alters a thousand tales.

212.173

2005-01-20T21:52:00.000+05:30

Need to trivialize something fast and really badly? You could take some help from me.

212.173 is completely obvious, overly publicized and utterly calming and fits in one or two teaspoons. Please note that this number can still be used to figure the question.

Having lots to do in life, I searched that the 212.173 block has been assigned to a bunch of schools and streets in the UK. As you can see, some ips have to be more powerful than the others. Here's a xeroxish warning for the search engine used. Can you see anyone else making money apart from the lawyers?

Hard Court

2005-01-20T09:00:00.000+05:30

Sania Mirza has entered the third round of the Australian Open. Good thing. Hope she plays a good game - apparently she is carrying the hopes and aspirations of a billion people, the AP government's good wishes, AITA's felicitation and things like that.

Things that have to be mentioned before I start reading up on the next dose of painstaking analysis by our eminent sports commentators:

ToI is trying desperately to make her the Indian you-know-who-ova (link not worth providing). Poor Sania.
The Indian Express has published the reality bytes. I am sure she’s heard of me.

I have no inclination to write on the result, even if Serena gets beaten.

Woods and pieces

2005-01-14T20:16:00.000+05:30

I have no clue who is behind all this wholesale cleanup happening all over the place. The famed lime tree in the Kent Cricket ground decided to bend itself twice over in deference to strong winds. BBC article:

Kent's Cricket Tree ground is over. It is stumped. May it rest in pieces.

Cricinfo reports that the selectors have decided to axe the tree (stump) after its double century stand, and reduce it to collector's items.

All things must go.

Patch me if you can

2005-01-11T19:00:00.000+05:30

[This has been a draft for quite some time and hence is more of a news digest.]

Just as folks at Microsoft were busy putting out patches (on the double) to keep sysadmins happy over the new year, Secunia announced new exploits. Microsoft was not amused.

Security big shots and startups alike, have caught on to this new fad - publicizing vulnerabilities (with demos thrown in for the paranoid) after finding them. That just not quite security, is it?

Crusader Secunia has put up an advisory again, warning of extremely critical what-nots against my favorite exploder. It's party time for Firefox folks, but they are not gods either. It is not nice for Joe average User to know that he has already given out his credit card number before he could use it to order their browser cd.

Better still, this commentator suggests using lynx, and practising "skeptical computing". Fair enough.

I hope some of the security researchers who do not colloborate with the bugmaster (aka developer), land up in a soup like this.

College Advice

2005-01-04T21:26:00.000+05:30

Lots of people read Joel Spolsky's articles. I am one of them. Not because he once worked here and (apparently) cooked up some pretty good stuff, but because he seems to write sense and promotes his venture only at the end of the article.

Joel has advised college students (CS) on how to get things going for them later on. To make it easier for me to fill up space on my blog, let me paste them here and add in some gems of my own. Sounds like fun.

Learn how to write before graduating.

done

Learn C before graduating.

Learn microeconomics before graduating.

Don't blow off non-CS classes just because they're boring.

Take programming-intensive courses.

Stop worrying about all the jobs going to India.

No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.

Swades

2005-01-04T21:08:00.000+05:30

Lesson [re]learnt: Do not waste your time reading film reviews.

I liked the film. If one thinks that the film is didactic and preachy, I feel that it is quite likely the person needs the sermon more than anyone else. Lagaan = Apple, Swades = Orange.

Let me stop right here, for any attempt at analyzing the film would be an injustice. Not every Friday is a movie released that is worth more than its parts.

Resolve this

2005-01-02T12:00:00.000+05:30

It's back. The same old question. Gnawing at you like a background process, eating away brain cycles [I know, that's a bad comparison].

It is about new year resolutions. The cliched statement goes something like this: "A resolution not to take any resolutions this year." Isn't that weird? Why cannot it be as simple as "I have no resolutions this year"?

Quake 9.0

2004-12-28T20:07:00.000+05:30

The quake has now been passed by eminent seismologists with distinction, making doubly sure that it is counted among the biggies.

Only God could possibly know how many of those who are reported missing are actually alive, and how many are actually dead but not even reported to be missing.

I actually have no business typing away some junk on this tragedy. But there will always be folks who aim at making a difference and folks who think they are making all the difference by beaming it on TV, by blogging about it and by cordoning off the affected areas for the Zzzz.. category VIPs visiting the victims.

Reporter (inside what remained of a hut, belonging to a clearly traumatised person who had lost many of her relatives): So.. the wave came in here and took your relative from that corner? (Pan to victim) (Pan to reporter) (Pan to person prompting the victim to say Yes) (Background prompts from local activists in local language to say Yes)

Do these fellows know when or what the next big thing is going to be? Setup your studios now. Better still, send a couple of reporters to Terra del feugo. We need Real Live TV.

Catch some real action happening through blogspot at The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog.

Here's a quote that I caught somewhere in the bytestream.

Strange as it may seem, we understand the distribution of matter in the interior of the sun far better than we understand the interior of the earth - Feynman

Quake 8.9

2004-12-26T16:41:00.000+05:30

[No, I don't cover calamities as of now.]

Mother Earth wants to assert herself every now and then. One small nudge and we are swamped. (BBC). Timely reminders that however proud that we may be of our 'achievements', we are but dancers to Nature's tunes.

Lucy: "You are the tiniest speck in an enormous universe."
Snoopy: "Then I might as well go back to sleep."

Mud on your desktop

2004-12-20T21:14:00.000+05:30

Vulnerability reported in Google's desktop search. Though G oogle has reportedly patched it up in quick time, one might still be running braindead versions. Here's a critical take. Also remember that your dirty 1's and 0's might already be on BitTorrent. One could probably pick a copy from Google's Cache in some time.

Wah, Taj

2004-12-15T20:42:00.000+05:30

The new seven wonders of the world. Sounds enterprising.

Taj Mahal lags behind. There is a full year to go. The email forward. The luser. It's back. With a bang. The eloquent appeal. The URL. You can even SMS your vote. Spend some money for India. Forward this to all Indians. Oh dear, China is ahead of us. We need to restore the Taj Mahal's pride because some virtual vote click is promising to rewire history.

Oh, and did you know that the Madurai temple is lagging behind as well? Shore that up (people did). We definitely need cult status.

Innumerable reposts. And Us. Insane. Incorrigible. http://Dont.click.this.link/

Waiting for the sun

2004-12-07T19:40:00.000+05:30

Typing out long blogs during winter is a painful thing. Not because one is holed out inside a 4x4 tent in the middle of Antarctica, but simply because it is painful.

Big Brother's highway to the South Pole is promising to deprive mankind (that includes all kinds) of a really cool place to get lost.

My fingers are already in click mode for those online petitions, so that I can clog a little more space on umpteen databases. I am also wondering if those timeless forwards could prove with the help of satellite pictures of the marked road that the world has been flat all along. Well not exactly, but as flat as a toroidal solenoid could get.

High five analysis

2004-11-25T06:00:00.000+05:30

After running through all those mouse-clicks required to find out my six degrees of separation from other anonymous cowards, I stumbled upon a fairly objective comparison of all these social networking sites. The authors must have really clicked through to put up this interesting analysis.

Coming to think of it, the multiplicity of these sites themselves perfectly fit the network of networks theme that characterizes the Internet. More interoperability wars and revenue models in the offing, I guess.

Internet Wannabetas

2004-11-14T06:00:00.000+05:30

This is the age of the launch early and launch often - learn from your mistakes on the field, be it spaceship one or orkut. Being apologetic about it eases the pain, running a beta service gives you the god-given right to be beautiful about it and being part of the latest offering from the internet company waltzes you into instant web hits and flaky web servers.

No one is to be blamed for this evolution. The street has every right not to invest in you if your product cannot make money. You want a foot in the doorway to megabucks, launch it now and improve it often based on feedback. Still can't make money? Keep it beta. Keep innovating. On the internet, one gets thousands of partner companies to sort out your mess.

All that one can think of is identity hijack, scrapbook scramble, testimonial trash - the next obvious step is to automagically report your account as bogus and self-destruct. Better still, remain and watch the fun unfold - the internet is a surreal world.

Look who is peeping - 2

2004-11-07T13:03:00.000+05:30

Let me clarify a bit on my apparently myopic and alarmist take on Keyhole. No one can deny the creepy feeling when the Internet works were truly in place: ask someone whose cdrom was remotely opened, bank balance wiped out and skeletons brought out of your closet. Or when spiders (legally/illegally) started crawling your computer for information that you never wanted to be collated in the first place. The question is: Can you lock yourselves out? Can you secure yourselves? Not if you want to exist in this new ecosystem. Security and privacy in this system is a myth - it will endure like a bad dream, but will never become reality. One has no other way out other than submitting to the whole new paradigm - a publicly accessible (paid / free) information store, with a slew of processing capabilities. As long as I dont have the option of choosing if I want to be tracked or not, I can as well jump in instead of being stamped out.

Look who is peeping

2004-11-01T18:59:00.000+05:30

Ever heard a knock-knock joke? So these fellas at Keyhole are feeling lucky that google bought them out. Their frontpage reads thus:

Fly from space to your home town. Visit exotic locales such as Maui, Tokyo, Rome and Paris. Satellite imagery makes it real. Explore restaurants, hotels, parks and schools. Think magic carpet ride!

Huh? When did a damn good 1 meter resolution map to a school building? You could fish the principal out with this. I have been thinking over how big brother can remotely sense me out. And now my professed non-existence can possibly be invalidated for 30 bucks a year. Osama, show me some place to hide in your (Karachi / PoK ??) cave. Also stepped on an interesting case filed by a city: Town Fights FOI Request for GIS Data and Images

The X-flavors

2004-10-10T22:26:00.000+05:30

Finally, someone volunteered to put it down all at one place. Will help display things better. http://fooishbar.org/daniel/blog/tech/x/xserverTrees-2004-03-12-00-21.html

===============

OK, listen up kids, 'cause I'm only going to say this once. I think.

DIX: Driver-Indepdent X. Anything that isn't server-specific (extensions, core functions/structures, et al), goes in here.
DDX: Device-Dependent X; the inverse of the above.
XFree86: They still exist. They just released 4.4. The XFree86 distribution contains a DIX, a DDX, X libraries, X apps, fonts, and docs.
X.Org: They have a tree forked from XFree86 that contains all the same stuff, and still uses imake. They're working on a release. They're open and stuff now.
xserver: The freedesktop.org xserver project has a DIX and three DDXes - KDrive, Xizzle, and XWin. That's it.
KDrive: 'Keith's Driver', formerly known as TinyX. A completely separate DDX to XFree86 - very small, used as a testbed for stuff like RandR, Composite, Damage and Fixes. Good for embedded machines.
Xizzle: A fork of the XFree86 DDX, built with autotools, et al. Only just starting to link an actual binary, doesn't work yet, but is moving very, very quickly. Also, the binary is half the size of XFree86's. Pronounced 'shizzle'; mea culpa.
XWin: Cygwin's server for Windows.
freedesktop.org: We have xserver for the server, xlibs for the libs, and xapps for the applications. Everything's modular: the release schedule of the ATI driver is no longer tied to that of the X wire protocol, or some random fonts. Word.

Reservation

2004-08-22T19:13:00.000+05:30

It has been a long time since I added to the entropy. I have been tracking certain articles on the reservation policy in India with (renewed) interest. Many more dimensions are being added to this 'issue' - making it all the more difficult to argue completely for one particular theory / solution.

I do have my personal opinions on this very sensitive and emotive topic, and I could (potentially) write / type out pages filled with the english alphabet on this. But as always, opinions change over time and swing badly days after reading strong arguments. And on such days, it is better to keep one's mouth shut firmly for fear of being branded a well-rounded moron (Is that an oxymoron?).

Jump to these pages sequentially. All of these are posts to the open page in The Hindu in reply to the original article. The posts are by themselves 'critiques' of the well-written (that's relative, mind you) article.
Social justice and reservation scheme
What about discrimination within caste?
The concept of affirmative action

Of course, my post has been inspired by the latest drop-down in the reservation menu - job reservation in the private sector.

What a bloody mess

2004-06-27T22:35:00.000+05:30

I felt bad (and sore) at the (honorable) high court order to change the admission modality of my alma mater at the last moment, with an indifference and callousness unparalleled in recent times.

To those who might read this (I suspect none at all), I do have a vested interest. But this is not about that, is it? This is about the surreal world. Read on.

If you want change in a system, work within the system to change it, do not ever try to work the system itself for making the change. One will make very bitter enemies for life (in the surreal world, of course).

Conspiracy theory #1

According to the Times of India @ Hyderabad (which I do not like, BTW) - when all the buffoons were filing PILs across the country resisting the IIM fee cut, there were this bunch of intellectuals @ the HRD ministry trying to tinker with yet another tried and tested system.

Agreed the system had (has) its shortcomings, and people differ fundamentally in what goes into deciding the intellectual capability of an engineering aspirant (an entrance exam, the board exams or an entrance + board exam combo). The folks at the CBSE decided that the engineering entrance exam conducted by them was the second best to JEE (no one wants to tinker with that, but why?) - and notwithstanding a shameful paper leakage in its medical exams, have constantly wanted the 'next best' institute to admit students based on their system.

Conspiracy theory #2

I do not care if I am paraded as a standing example of regionalism with a parochial outlook, but it is given that students from the southern states DO take their board examinations quite seriously. To the extent that the AIEEE notification is treated as yet another advertisement (yaa!), and their passport to entering the realms of a big institute goes like this:
if (CBSE) {
do_jee(<depending_on_locale>); do_decently_in_board(); do_state_entrance_exam(); get_into_jee/bits/state_college();
}
if (STATE) {
do_jee(<depending on locale being chennai/hyd/bang/guntur/vizag etc.,>); crack_board(); do_state_entrance_exam(); get_into_jee/bits/state_college();
}

Now, there are these bozos strewn around in India, who do not accept the legitimacy of board exams and do not provide an _immediate_ alternative for such a large student community - training students to do well in entrance exams, no doubt about that. These bright fellas (location: nuclear power plants / steel plants / up-and-coming planned cities) want to have the cake and eat it too, and seem to be trying to push people into an institute which gives exactly two hoots to the (current) entrance exam system.

In the first place, changing the BITS admission modality _this_ year is fundamentally flawed. Let it remain - if it aint broke, dont fix it. You and I may differ in what constitutes 'broken', though. Have the powers-that-be taken into consideration the fact that they are forcing a sizeable number of students passing out this year from all over the country forego the chance of getting into BITS - to feed the aspirations of the privileged few who get the best coaching, best resources (and probably the best insights into the paper setting too ).

Why meddle into the affairs of one of the few standout examples of private enterprise in education, one that has given meritocracy a definite thumbs-up? Why try to impose the notion of one-entrance-fits-all in the country. Let your entrance exam convince a good institute to come into your fold, not coerce it.

Which language do you think in?

2004-05-31T20:49:00.000+05:30

I posted this poll to the wing groups. Pretty intriguing and a departure from the mundane. The replies were as expected, though. I love posting polls. It narrows down diversity (though mine had 15 choices), and (sadly) reduces threads in which at most 4 people post. Good for 4 MB mailboxes and packed schedules.

When perl crawls

2004-05-05T19:05:00.000+05:30

When perl is not fast enough

Internet exploder fundae

2003-05-07T17:46:00.000+05:30

Read more on my exploder: http://www.grotto11.com/blog/?+1039831658

Excerpts from the article

Internet Explorer on Windows always seems either to run impossibly fast (page requests are fulfilled almost before the mouse button has returned to its original unclicked position), or ridiculously slow (as with the weird stalling-on-connect problem that many people, including myself, have noticed).

One possible explanation is something that my team and I noticed a couple of years ago, in analyzing packet traces of IE's connection setup procedure. Microsoft might have fixed this since then; I'm not sure. But it's a possible culprit.

GOA

2003-05-06T16:17:00.000+05:30

Been to Goa lately. Great place - period.

Snide remarks

2003-04-24T19:26:00.000+05:30

Oh, I forgot to add this - Chaos rules is the blog I have been making snide remarks at.

Monday morning blues

2003-04-14T20:17:00.000+05:30

No Monday morning blues!! The sky is a perfect blue, though. I have been refraining from mails to avoid over-exposure ;) and working on framing a comprehensive FOGOU input / output / throughput mechanism. The way things are shaping up, I am also fairly sure that this blog is going to be a higly stupid anachronistic journal

Hello World!

2003-04-10T14:51:00.000+05:30

The internet is a surreal world. Hello World!