Hack on

MIT is at it again. "I know, geeks" is what people will say and shrug it off. But this thingie seems really cool, although it is one of the more serious ones MIT's done.

If you want to look at some serious pranks, try MIT hacks. MIT has the reputation for pulling some of the most awesome pranks ever, and the most surprising thing is that they manage to find time for it in spite of their crazy schedules. What, they don't sleep, you say? Ah. Now it makes sense.

Update - two days after I wrote a draft of this post:

Another addition to the MIT repertoire. A few grad students went ahead and wrote code to automatically generate a technical paper. It was even accepted in a conference. I find this absolutely hilarious, considering how cool I thought it would be to get a paper published as a graduate student.

Additions to the Blogroll

Microsoft-followers and developers have their favorite blog to counter Slashdot's rabid zealots. It is Channel9, populated by MS developers and run by the good folks at the company. The nomenclature is interesting - Channel 9 is the audio channel on a flight on which you can hear the pilots communicating. So, Channel 9 on MSDN is presumably where you get the dirt on Microsoft's offerings from the guys at Microsoft itself. Also, I add Robert Scoble, Microsoft evangelist, who also says that the Apple Powerbook is cool.

A couple of other blogs to add to the list, just as shameless self-promotion - the Web Transports group that I work with, and IE . Watch out for IE7, expected out by the end of this year. That will be interesting. The browser wars will be back, I promise.

And to top it off, an Alhad pick, Larry Osterman. Pure geek. Writes about software, and stuff. Fun to read, very insightful on programming stuff.

News for me

In the age of RSS syndications and content personalized to you, it is easy to get greedy. One does. I've started following many websites, esp. blogs just on the feeds, and it's great. No annoying popups, no ads hurting your eyes, and plain text reading. However, one always looks for more. It would be great if one could have feeds on websites for each columnist. The Indian Express has a set of columnists writing about issues that interest me, and these are brilliant writers. The same goes for the NYT as well. It would be great to have feeds so that I could read articles only by these people, bypassing the rest of the information. Just a thought. You end up missing a few articles if you forget to go to the website often enough.

State of Fear, or clever marketing ploy?

Michael Crichton's book "State of Fear" has generated its share of controversy. I know there are people out there who believe global warming is a bunch of hokum, and the book plays into their hands. I haven' t read the book yet, but the armchair critic that I am, it makes for some compelling observations.

Firstly, the vast majority (almost all of them agree on climate change, in fact) of climate theorists cannot be in a vast conspiracy to keep their jobs. Researchers tend to get into it for the love of the hunt (for knowledge) and not for world domination or whatever he claims is going on there. Secondly, there is of course the whole credibility issue. I happened to chance upon an article by someone whom Crichton interviewed while 'research'ing his book, and I didn't like reading his account of it. Crichton seems too ready to selectively quote from literature and interviews to fit his point of view better. Another interesting article referenced here.

A good counterpoint is here, to give a balanced perspective on the issue.

After reading "Prey", I am slightly skeptical of Mr. Crichton. It raised enough of a hoo-ha over nanotech for no reason. Climate change, the Kyoto Protocol and such matters of importance shouldn't be left to bestselling authors to trivialize.

What's cool

What's cool on TV this week:

Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" ( rock song of 2004, IMO) selling Sony's PSP. The PSP looks like a winner to me right now. The new iPod in the making? It has all the marks of one. It has proprietary media formats (the UMD, and a Sony proprietary memory stick). That's a gamble that'll pay big bucks if it works. If it doesn't, bummer.

Graphic novel meets big screen in Sin City. The previews look very interesting, and the star cast (Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Brittany Murphy, Jessica Alba....) is as big as it can reasonably get.

Seattle on TV in new medical drama "Gray's Anatomy". Obligatory Space Needle shot and Seattle skyline shot. Intense medical graduate school drama. I see no dramas on engineers yet while medicine gets ER, Jordan's crossing and now this one.

When engineers work, lives don't hang in the balance. And admit it, math formulas don't have heart-in-mouth moments like a vial of intravenous fluids and grand mal seizures do. Which might be why Numb3rs isn't half as compelling as ER is.

Not cool this week:

India lose. Again.Breaks the heart when the team plays this way. And could people get off Ganguly's back? He's going through a bad patch. Sachin gets so much support when he's doing badly. Ganguly gets booed. Give him a break. He's not on a decline. He's just hit a trough and will bounce back. If he gets a chance, that is.

Last night in the Garden State. Onwards to the Evergreen State, where new challenges beckon, and a new life awaits. Can't say am unhappy leaving here and moving on. But more than that, I am looking forward to going to the North-West. It is the most breath-takingly beautiful area I've seen in the US. Evergreen means that it doesn't lose its beauty in winter, unlike here, where the trees have all gone dry. Some more observations here.

Things I'll miss? The vicinity of the Big Apple for sure. I never went there as often as I should have and a million things about the city have been left unexplored.Little Italy, Chinatown. Greenwich village. Didn't watch a single Broadway musical in my time here, and I haven't yet been to the Statue of Liberty (I did take the tour on the ferry and saw it from up close in the water).

Other things I'll miss - the famed Oak Tree Road locality in Edison/Iselin - a feast for Indian food lovers. Specialty Punjabi, South Indian, Chaat and (believe it or not) Gujarati food in a 2 mile radius. All this 15 minutes from my house.

Things I did do here? The Times Square on New Year's Day (I saw the ball drop from two blocks away). The top of the Empire State Building. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. And stuff.

5 hours. 3 time zones. A new world awaits.

Modi-fied Policy?

Disclosure: I hate the guts of the man.

However, this article makes a good point about the fact that the US is being hypocritical and using a different set of policies by denying him a visa while people with equivalent or worse misdemeanors to their name come and go as they please. In fact, Larry Pressler makes a similar point in the NYT when he states that the US foreign policy has it all wrong- it is courting religious dictators (of the benevolent and malevolent kind) and not giving a religion-neutral('secular 'is so cliched) elected democracy with one-sixth of the world's population the respect it deserves. (I can almost see the twin jellyfish in Shark Tale going "Respect!").

I disagree with the article partially though. It doesn't state up-front that Modi is guilty. (The judicial enquiry is one thing - the rhetoric of the man itself tells us enough). And there is another problem. Just because most guilty people go scot-free and that the US visa issuing system is being selective in its enforcement of rules, doesn't mean anything. If he was in breach of a US rule or law, he better shut his trap and get a life. There are other diaspora to please. The pot can call the kettle black. Especially when the pot is the one issuing the visa, and the kettle is interested in the pot's dollars in FDI.

Apparently, the Indian radio station (1680 AM in Central New Jersey for those who are interested) in the area was fielding calls on the issue. Most calls were in support of Mr. Modi. When one man called up in support of the denial, his call was cut short. "We lost him" was all they had to say. How convenient.

Scratch n' loop

Hip-hop and rap, unlike other genres of popular music, are quite heavily dependent on a producer's skill. While a good (my emphasis on good, not the Spears and Simpsons of the world) pop-rock singer/group can generally get by with instruments without any electronics, (except the instruments themselves), hip-hop with its use of samples and loops of sounds from various sources lends itself to the skill of a completely different beast - one who is comfortable with computers and complex equipment with a bewildering range of knobs and weird lights. I'd go so far as to say that the genre doesn't exist without the producer.

However, that's not entirely true. Hip-hop started out on the streets, and it is the crass commercialization of today that has reduced it to merely being commercially successful with lyrical gems like "It's getting hot in herre, so take off all your clothes".Bleh.

Eminem and Jay-Z are notable exceptions (I really like a lot of Eminem's work, and I haven't heard the Grammy-award winner Kanye West), and there are great singles out occasionally that get your attention, but the rap genre is a great dance-floor (and album sale) mover with nothing much to say. Rock may be dead, but I still take some of today's rock bands over rap.

QOTD

Quote of the Day (or month or year):

" Most of the time you are neither as good nor as bad as people write and say you are"

- Rahul Dravid

Warning...fragile mind

A wonderful article at Cricinfo about one of Australia's most exciting batsmen at the time, Michael Slater.

The mind is notoriously fragile. Slater isn't the first genius to be bedeviled by an illness of the mind, and he certainly won't be the last. Genius seems to breed this, almost as if a great mind cannot bear the burden it places on itself (or the burden of expectations of others). What people (whether geniuses or not) need is genuine care and understanding. It is not easy for the normal person to understand completely the goings-on in an ill mind, but making fun is definitely not the way out.

What surprised me more was the fact that Slater's Australian team-mates had such an unsympathetic attitude towards him. Maybe it was just that they were uncomfortable with Slater's behavior, but you'd expect more from team-mates.

Indian society has traditionally taken a much dimmer view of mental illnesses, and a trip to the shrink, not that uncommon in western society is almost unheard of in India( maybe people do go, but we never hear of it). We need some of those blinders to come off.

Go West!

'tis time. This long hiatus is attributed to my trip out west (north-west, actually) to the famed land of Redmond, WA where the world's largest software company resides. An interesting time - a few observations:

Washington state is beautiful. Forget the rain, and the general cloudy-gloominess that seems to infest the air. The mountains that graze the skyline and the evergreens lend the area a character that is entirely its own.

Microsoft is big. Quite like a Tata Steel would have defined the ecosystem of a place like Tatanagar in Jamshedpur, the company defines an ecosystem for the area it surrounds, albeit on a smaller scale.

The company knows its employees are important and takes care of them. It is easy to see that geeks started the company and run it to the greatest extent. The only suits who are part of it are those who talk to the clients.

It is a company I've always grudgingly respected. The 'respected' part got a big fillip after meeting people there. Smart and committed. Willing to accept that they need to work harder to put out better products.

This is possibly the last I'll be talking about that on this blog. No work chatter here.

City woes

Dilip D'Souza is a fine writer. I don't always agree with what he says, but he is rarely uninteresting. In the past few months, he has written extensively on the slum demolitions in Mumbai, ostensibly to beautify the city and make it the new Shanghai.

Why Mumbai would want to be like a pretty-looking city in a repressive communist regime is beyond me. However, this post is one of his best so far. In addition to detailing what has been wrong in the urban planning in the past, it details some really nice ideas of what is important in the future for the development of the city. A point lost on our dear civil servants. Looking at the way New York City is evolving, and where Mumbai has stood over the past n years with respect to a lot of things, the potential for Mumbai to be better is breathtaking. If only someone were to do something about it.

A Google Approach to Email

The funny thing about great products (be it hardware or software) is that you never really get to appreciate them until you start using them more and more. It is power users who appreciate the finer points of software, rather than the regular Joe, for whom most of the functions will be similar in competing products.

Take GMail for instance. I shifted a lot of my mailing lists to it to start using and testing it(My family emails are still off it). As I started using it, I didn't like the paradigm of labels, since I make use of folders for record-keeping. I am also of a delete-dispose mentality, and I delete emails I don't feel the need to keep.

However, as time passes by, I find Gmail more and more useful. The conversation threading feature is of course a killer. As is the auto-fill for email addresses. I've gotten used to labels over folders, and funnily, it is even more useful. For instance, I have a category of emails, say X. Now, the category is important, but has grown big, and what is also important to me are emails from people of company Y. All of the emails from Y may/may not be in category X, and are all from different people within company Y. Of course, searching makes things easy, but if you categorize the emails with labels, you achieve an amazing amount of flexibility. Folders are hierarchical, labels are semantic, and the difference in ease-of-use is phenomenal.

Another such application is Firefox. While tabbed browsing is an obvious advantage, the search box with built-in Google search (I've added IMDB and CDDB to the list myself) adds ease of use that is visible only on repeated and highly intensive use. That I believe is great UI design. Achieving it is so hard, that when things work the way you'd instinctively want them to, it is almost magical.

As Arthur C. Clarke said - "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Snow is white. Blinding white. It is #0xFFFFFF. All the colors of the rainbow, put together and powdered into crystals, all of them unique. It rains down on a whim, rendering the area around it completely white and reflective. Going out on a day like this, with snow around and bright sunlight, means that you are wearing warm clothing and sunglasses. I, raised in the land of gulabi thandi - literally " the cold that makes your cheeks rosy" and mellow winter mornings (with the sun only making a friendly guest appearance), find it extremely ironic.

Winter days, drifting away, but, oh, those winter nights*. Sodium vapor streetlamps and yellow bulbs on doorways reflecting off snow make for the eeriest sight ever. The light is ghostly and surreal. Half-light with the promise of adventure. Adventure that should be manifested in the snowball fights of the carefree kids from the colony. Only, I don't see any. It isn't even a weekday. The tyranny of homework. Has anyone ever escaped it?

*shamelessly paraphrasing Grease

Time for a change

I've read some interesting books in the last few months, including Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, two of Lawrence Lessig's books on technology and law (Free Culture and The Future of Ideas) and a graphic novel (The Road to Perdition, the one on which the movie was based).

A genre of books left undiscovered so far is the modern science fiction genre better known as cyberpunk. While a couple of books I've heard a lot about (Neuromancer, Snow Patrol) weren't easily available in the library, Cryptonomicon was. The jacket decription looked interesting enough, so down the rabbit hole we go.

Note: Technically, Neal Stephenson is postcyberpunk. And talking of rabbit holes, Alice in Wonderland is a trip unlike any I've ever had. I'd love to know what Lewis Carroll was smoking when he wrote that book.

Adam Penenberg writes in Wired about how he feels that the WSJ is in danger of losing relevance online. Actually, this is a conundrum that I'm sure many respected paper publications face right now. The Wall Street Journal charges for everything. The NYT grants you access to the latest stuff with a free login, but archives more than a week old cost you money.

In the case of news, isn't the value chain exactly the reverse? The latest news is the most valuable, while the not-so-latest news is possibly not. Wouldn't it make more economic sense to actually charge for latest, to-the-minute access, and gradually make it free for everyone to access?

Not everyone can afford the prices these papers charge for online access, and that puts them in a bit of a spot. And as the article states, the blog ecosystem has no place for paid access, and a shift of power to increasingly influential bloggers means that these publications are losing out on potential customers.

Also, in this age with the markets being so wired, the potential customer for the WSJ or the NYT is not just in New York or the suburbs. He may be anywhere in the world.

The way forward for them would be to use ads, and the print edition to somehow creatively monetize their content to make money off it, and open access to older content. Maybe newer content (say: breaking news, today's edition) could be available for paid customers.

There may be better, more value-added things that they may provide for paid access. The Internet was meant to be a disintermediary - something that would remove the middleman. With the information glut we have now, we need intermediaries to process information again. (Look at the number of subscribers Hoovers.com has, when you can get a lot of the same information in raw form on EDGAR . Ditto for all the travel sites).

The WSJ of all publications is in the best possible position to be an intermediary to people negotiating the minefield that is business today. The NYT may not be as well positioned in this regard, but I'm sure they'll have some ideas.

Strike 1 for candor

The Indian at the Oscars has this to say about Bollywood:

"I think we should all accept that Bollywood just doesn't work there. There's all this talk of crossover films. Lagaan came close to being a crossover, but really, we've come nowhere on the scale of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. That was a huge commercial success, but we aren't even close to critical praise, with films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, or Amores Perros."

Attaboy. If all our papers and our media stopped the fawning publicity, we'd *maybe* get to a point where we are realistic about this. Let's accept the fact that mainstream Bollywood fare is a niche audience, and will appeal mainly to Indians, either at home or abroad. Ramanand also made a good point about how Indian(read: hindi) cinema is changing, but it's change from the outside by people who are considered outsiders. While SLB making Black without songs is a big deal for many people, wasn't it over 5 years ago that RGV made Kaun without songs?

And the killer:

"(Chadha's Bend It Like) Beckham was a British film, with some characters of Indian origin. It's not an Indian film. Why must we always appropriate? Why do we suddenly start claiming (M Night) Shyamalan as one of ours (laughs) when the poor man hasn't had anything to do with India for most of his life? Why do we want to bask in their glory?"

Tell it like it is, Ashvin Kumar. We need more of your type in the industry, to make some real hatke films.

Take it Easy

An observation about ads in the US: they seem to make everything so easy. The whole concept of "buyer beware" takes a new dimension in the US, because believing the ads means you better be extremely gullible.

Want to lose weight? Just take three pills of this at night before sleeping, and you'll lose weight. Work out using the new gizmo designed by the Baywatch lifeguard-lookalike babe and her hunky companion, and you'll be looking like one of them too. Just 15 minutes a day! As seen on TV! Of course there's the nutritional law-defying Atkins diet. Eat no carbohydrates -only proteins, and lose weight. Carb-counting made it seem like it would finally make the Americans excel at math again.

And, is there a limit to leveraging? Or do individuals with a debt-equity ratio of 5:1 at usurious rates simply emulate the government that taxes less and spends more? You've heard of a home loan(a mortgage, as it is more commonly known in the US) , but how about a home equity loan? You take another loan with your home as collateral, ostensibly to improve it, or to pay off credit card bills or simply to take that vacation you've always dreamed of! In India, having to put your house up as collateral is heresy( family izzat at stake and all that), but it seems to work here.

Need to buy furniture? Pay NOTHING for the whole of 2005! *

*Fine print: Pay 25% interest over the next 3 years after 2005. If you can't, nasty-sounding men will send you threatening letters asking you to pay up. Then if you still can't pay, nasty-looking men in overalls will come and take your furniture away.

Yeah, life in the US is easy.

Technology, plus markets

Reams (or is it megabytes? ) have been written on the drop in quality of content on the TOI, and it is impressively tiresome for me to go and dig up links for these again. If you landed on my blog accidentally, sorry. If you haven't, you in all likelihood have seen the 'raging' debate on the issue. At a micro level, I couldn't care less, honestly. I don't read the TOI, and they can shove their yellow rag exactly where you think I mean.

What is more interesting is the solution to this problem. The free-market-apologists say the market sorts itself out. Yes, it does, but quality suffers anyway. PBS isn't doing all that great in the US, and is in danger of being squeezed out of existence. The trigger being a dowdy-looking lesbian couple with a kid in Vermont on a show with an animated rabbit. But I digress. Fox News, of course,is going from strength to strength.

As a geek, I present the solution: the Internet! Voila! I, unlike Al Gore (sounds like an Kokanastha Brahmin Middle Eastern Terrorist outfit doesn't it? Al Gore, Al Kale... sorry) do not claim to have invented anything new. But the Internet gives a new medium for all of us to publish. Some of it is utter drivel, like this blog, and a few million other blogs which populate the blogosphere. Some of them are good. They even make money, via their Ad Sense, their Amazon referral codes in links, maybe even a PayPal account. I'll set up one. You pay me enough, I'll stop writing. I'll tell you how much is enough when we get there. Till that happens, keep the money flowing... I digress again. Sorry

An Indian short film at the Oscars. The Little Terrorist. You can watch it on WahIndia. Just under $2 to rent, under $5 to buy. Will this not at least make a bit of money for the film-maker, where earlier he would have had his documentary shown on DD on Saturday afternoon, with precisely 2.4 people to see it, and all interested people being unable to do so?

That should make us geeks and free-marketeers happy as can be. Interesting content, and no bowing to shareholders or LCDs. The HCF of "money for intelligence". Technology ensures a win-win. Again.

More information on long tail distribution (my favorite nightmare from network theory classes. Never thought it'd be so interesting in a real world, non-networking application)

Will the Engineer step into the light?

Finally, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn win the Turing Award.

For those who come in late, the Turing Award is the equivalent of the Nobel prize in Computer Science. It is the accolade for a computer scientist to win.

Cerf and Kahn are well-known in networking circles for having been the inventors of the TCP and IP protocols, the plumbing on which this Internet of today runs. What is most remarkable is that the underlying design of the protocols is still the same, almost 25 years later. No major changes in the protocols have been needed to make them work for an ever-increasing number of systems. Of course, it has undergone changes ( look at TCP Tahoe, Reno, or New Reno on Google or CiteSeer or somewhere), but the underlying design is still the same.

The Turing award has historically had a bias towards theory and algorithms (though the inventors of Unix and the RSA algorithm have been among winners). It's great to see some real-world engineering get recognition. As this NYT article says, the Internet does have many fathers, but IMO, these are a pair that deserve all the accolades they get. Try writing something technical that's still useful for a billion people after over 20 years.

For the uber-geek, RFC 791 and 793 .

Yesterday is a wrinkle on your forehead
Yesterday is a promise that you've broken
Don't close your eyes, don't close your eyes
This is your life and today is all you've got now
Yeah, and today is all you'll ever have
This is your life, are you who you want to be ?

- Switchfoot, This is your life

Are you living your dream? If yes, this isn't for you. If not, step back for a minute. Is there a reason why not? What compromise did a pragmatic mind take at some point in your life, which lead you here? Are you who you want to be? Or do you read the lines above, and wistfully think of what could have been?

What is the appeal of all those high school football and basketball movies? Of American Graffiti ? Of Remember the Titans?

The fact that the world in those movies seems alive. The stars still seem within your grasp. That elusive dream is just a leap of faith away. As time passes by, have we grown too cynical? Do responsibilities bind us down so much that a leap of faith now seems well nigh impossible? And, is being so practical really fun? Is life fun? Do you get up in the morning and still look forward to going to work/school/whatever it is that you do? Or are you a slave, a drone in a world of drones, no. E-133461 , not a name anymore, just a service ticket waiting in line to be resolved?

Is it really like Linkin Park says (albeit in a different context):

But in the end,
It doesn't even matter?

Grammy peeves

Is it me, or do the Grammys this year really suck? I don't know my R from my B, but did Ray Charles win because he died this year, or because his album was really good? Is Norah Jones' Sunrise really the best female vocal performance this year? Was Los Lonely Boys' Heaven really the best song by a duo or group?

Why is it, that every song that makes me change the radio station, or at worst makes me cringe go on to be great on Grammy night? John Mayer's done better than Daughters on his latest album. But the sappy song wins song of the year (erm..did the judges listen to Bigger Than My Body or to Clarity?) Maybe I'll understand when I have kids...but I don't think I care anymore

Or is it that songs with more..you know balls are only nominated in the rock and hip-hop/rap category? Maybe Eminem is the only one who can be politically incorrect, yet win by the truckloads?

Me i.e. the jury still out on Green Day - listening to American Idiot just now. I love U2 and all that, but Vertigo is no Where the Streets Have No Name. Maybe the judges got carried away in the iPod craze too.

And yes, the new artist of the year - Maroon5. I kind of like a lot of their songs. But I feel there has to be a law about radio stations playing a song repeatedly for more than a month or so. There's only so much one can listen to "She will be loved" before the hands starts itching to break something.

And yes, lower your head for the non-acknowledgement of anything from across the pond. No Joss Stone, no Keane, no Franz Ferdinand.

To the Seven Islands

Of course everyone knows that New York City has five boroughs. For those who don't, they are:
Manhattan( the most well known and yet the smallest) , Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx, and Staten Island.

But, but, but, did you know the seven islands that comprised Mumbai? (aka Bombay, aka Bambai, Bombai ...). There are different versions, but this is one that states the answer with enough authority.

Of course, acknowledgements are due. I owe this sudden intellectual curiosity as regards the history of one of my favorite cities to Salman Rushdie's seminal Midnight's Children. The mention of the seven islands there set me off. Blimey, I know the five boroughs of NYC off the tip of my tongue, but what about the seven islands ? So, I engage in trivial pursuit, in this case a trivial firing off of a Google query.

So, to Colaba, Old (Wo)Man's Island, Bombay, Mazagaon, Worli,Parel and Mahim. To all the islands that were added later. To the City of Dreams. To Bombay (or Mumbai, or whatever they call it now...)

Satire rulez!

I mean...the rules of satire:

Rule #1 : The only rule that really matters. Know your subject really, really well. If you do, whether it (the satire) works or not is strictly a function of your skill.

America, The Book succeeds at many levels on that front. The book by media's favorite liberal (no, not Michael Moore) and his cohorts over at The Daily Show is the classic coffee table book, the kind I'd never spend money on (this came from the library). Organized as a high school civics textbook complete with graphs and diagrams and class exercises, which include gems like "Disenfranchise a black voter in your class", this is classic comic relief for these troubled times. And, the writers know their American democracy from their apple pie and recounts.

The book's humor ranges from sharp and sarcastic to completely immature and sophomoric "South Park" type jokes (NAMBLA makes an appearance too). No Republicans or Democrats are spared, and a couple of pages take care of the third parties through the ages. One of my favorite cartoons shows the graves of all the third parties,with brief timelines and one-liners on the headstones. The one on the libertarian party's headstone says "Ahhh... we should've worn our seatbelts". Ouch.(I'm not a libertarian, but many blogs I am reading seem to go that way)

What amazes me about the US is how seriously people here take the freedom of speech thing. Any book with this many jokes about India's founding fathers and leaders would have been burnt on the streets by both the Congress and the saffron brigade. Now that would have been an achievement.

Great software options

I just tried AbiWord on my desktop PC as an option to Microsoft Word. It was functioning as a web browser/music PC without Office forever, and I kind of preferred not to put MS Office on it. It (AbiWord) rocks. No questions. The .doc format is not the easiest to reverse engineer, but AbiWord does a great job of it. It opened a particularly messy document (lots of font size changes, hand-formatted bullets) without breaking a sweat. I haven't tried editing any fancy table stuff yet, but the portents are good.

Next on the agenda: OpenOffice.

No Objective history?

A very interesting interview with historian Romila Thapar. There are three parts to this interview, with the third one yet to be published. But an insightful view on what drives the teaching of history. A lesson lies there in how our sense of history is shaped by those in power.

In the US of course, even science is not being spared.

Talking of ideologues, MSNBC won' t render a page correctly in Firefox. Copy-pasting the same URL in IE works perfectly. Not done, Bill. Well, we've been saying that for years. Fat lot of help it's been.

From the Archives

I wrote this sometime in 2002, when I was still in Pune, and the US of A was a million miles away. I somehow stumbled on this (I've misplaced a lot of my writing from my pre-Blogger days). Thought it makes for interesting reading, especially because of the last line. There was a column called "Good Morning Pune" in the Pune TOI then. This was of course before its extreme makeover.

For some reason, as I wrote this piece, ending it in a way similar to the way thebengali@indiatimes.com did made eminent sense. I don't know anymore, since I am hardly ever objective about my writing. Anyway, here goes:

Have you ever felt you were part of a big chess game? I mean, that there are too many things happening that you are not in control of, factors beyond your control, unexplainable things that take away your very sense of security nay your sense of well-being or even your sense of being by itself? I do. All the time. I have reached a stage in life where I feel that for every move I make, there are a thousand ramifications and implications that I am barely aware of( forget
comprehending them). Richard Bach's "One" makes sense in more ways than one. The hazaar possibilities and "what If?" s that cross my mind, are all too confusing for me to make out.

It wasn't always like this. There was a time when I thought that my life is influenced solely by my actions. I mean I believed in God and all that. But it was more of a inherited thing (my parents are very religious, God bless them) than due to my own self-belief. But adversity and a long tortuous process of self-discovery (which included a brief period of atheism) has brought me here, a middle path where you claim control of your whole life without discounting for external factors. I find some people's beliefs that they control the strings of their destiny (favorite quote - "I make my own luck") to be a bit ludicrous. Maybe they can even predict that they wont be run over by a truck the next time they cross the road (after all, it doesn't fit in with their plans) .

The Truth (as I see it) , is that you can at least control your reactions to the circumstances around you. Account for the fact that things may not work out the way you want them to. God forbid, if they don't, you can take a decision to take life's hard punches on the chin and move on. Or maybe wallow in self-pity - although it will take you nowhere. In this age of layoffs and uncertainty though, the best thing one can do is have a back-up plan (maybe two) for the future in case one goes wrong. Because, as has been famously quoted, "Shit Happens".

Good Morning, Pune (or now, should I say "Piscataway"?) . All I say is, hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.

PS - I hope there is no copyright on the phrase "Good Morning, Pune". If there is, I acknowledge it.

Waxing Nostalgic

It is incredibly peaceful to be up at night with you being the only one up for a long distance around. An occurrence common during P.L.s in India. The TV on low volume, set to one of the two western music channels serving as background music, propping my feet on the sofa, I'd be up trying to understand the inner working of the transistor (a two-semester torment), or some nifty Fourier transform fu. Fourier, of course, being a favorite of the time-frequency warp came back to haunt us quite often in both continuous and discrete forms quite frequently (pun very strictly unintended, though Alhad would be proud).

Times have changed. I am still sitting with my feet propped up, albeit with a laptop. The music channel still runs in the background. A bit older, a bit less worried about subjecting myself to the vagaries of the University exam. A bit more mature, knowing that this, too , shall pass. That maybe the best is around the corner. Maybe it isn't, but I'll believe it is. After all, what is life, but your perception of it?

Indian sports roundup

BCCI says "We are in it for the money". We agreed all along.

"The ICC is toothless" says rediff. ICC agrees.

After trying her hand at editing the TOI, Sania Mirza sings on rediff radio.

What next, Hrithik cavorts with Sania, singing "you are my Sania"?

And yes, a spot of cheer in the midst of this media circus - the fastest Indian gets his spot in the sun against the world's fastest.

Un-f'ing-believable. The Tata logo on a F1 car? The Indian tricolor at Indy this year? Gotta make it there baby.Never thought I'd ever root for Jordan.

Yay!

COEP is back.

Ramanand reports from the trenches.

AwAz kuNAchA ? COEP chA

Correction thanks to Ramanand again

Apple, Google and a few million 'jobless' techies

I use 'jobless' here in the typical way most people from Bangalore or thereabouts use it - someone who is 'vela' or has nothing better to do.

Tech forums like Slashdot, and respected tech columnists from all major news portals have nothing better to do, but follow Google and Apple like fanatics.

Google recruiting fiber/backbone specialists? Maybe they are entering VoIP. Apple will enter the Video-On-Demand business next, since the Mini is their answer to the Media Center PC. The iPod Video is definitely next on the agenda. Google hired Firefox's leading developer? Get ready for GBrowser. Google hired Rob Pike, one of the original UNIX team from AT&T? Get ready for the Google OS.

Give me a break. Apple is secretive enough to shame the CIA. The only speculation from last year that worked was the flash-based iPod shuffle. This was based on real information that Apple was lapping up flash memory in semiconductor markets in Taiwan and elsewhere. The Mini of course was subject to a leak, and no smart guessing helped with that.

If just hiring a person with great programming, design and engineering skills causes a splash, it's extremely tiring. Of course Google registered GBrowser. They don't want someone squatting and causing them a copyright headache later that they pay thousands of dollars in lawyeer fees to settle. A few dollars a year to VeriSign takes care of the domain for them. Maybe they will come out with a browser. Doesn't make sense to me, but then I thought that 1 Gig of email space was a hoax.

This quote in the NYT left me reeling.

"Yahoo says, 'Where is the mountain? Let's climb it,' " Mr. Sullivan said. "Google says, 'Maybe we want to go up the mountain and maybe we want to go surfing.' "

Like Google got to be the biggest thing in search by employing surfer dudes with a bad attitude. They've surprised the market and upped the ante once in the past year with e-mail, prompting the storage glut we have now. They recently doubled the number of pages they serve, and are probably working on a bajillion different things right now, but just keeping it quiet. They managed an extremely complicated IPO recently, and more people, not less seem to be using AdSense every day.

I'm happy Yahoo and MSN are working on search, as we need more and more innovation, and it would be great to have more and better search options. But stop hounding Google. They are too busy working hard and having fun to really care.

And yes, I am waiting for the next big thing from Google to shake up the market too. Only, I am not speculating what it would be.

Update: I wrote this yesterday, but put off posting it. Google obliged: They are now a domain registrar, and they plan to give stock as reward to their best employees. Of course, they had to announce record results too.

Felt I had to react to Gaurav's post.

I get his point about TOI changing the media landscape in India considerably. Their diversifications are pretty impressive. They have been successful at it as well.

I still feel that a drop in editorial standards need not accompany it. Everything need not be an 'either-or' compromise. The TOI has survived for over 150 years. Editorial policies change, but not as drastically as this decade has seen.

"Adapting to the times"? Do we mean to say that we as a generation are less intelligent than what we used to be? There is a concept of market segmentation, that I'm sure Gaurav knows more about that than me.

Fortune is your regular business magazine. They probably cover a lot more technology or rather New Economy stories now, but they have a separate magazine (Business 2.0) to deal with it. While dealing with the leading edge of technology there are different requirements and a different audience, and the Fortune format was not flexible enough for both. If you read both the difference in format, and the target audience is obvious.

A newspaper has the flexibility of adding glossy supplements, or additional segments to meet specific audiences. The TOI was doing this pretty well with the suburban sections in B'bay and specific sections for cities like Pune and Ahmedabad catering to different audiences. There is no reason they cannot meet the LCD (lowest common denominator) crowd's expectations with this.

In fact, on fortune.com (or was it on forbes.com? I forget), the website wanted to monetize keywords so that they could link keywords in article text to advertiser websites. You can see annoying examples on some websites even now. Finding that it took away from the reader experience, they decided to do away with it, though it would have made them buckets of money.

If, in the TOI today, one cannot make out the difference between content and advertising, then is there a point left at all?

Isn't full disclosure something Indian publishers (read:TOI) understand? Many journalists writing about stocks actually disclose if they own stocks they are discussing in their columns. Is it unreasonable to expect that TOI disclose if an article or any publicity was paid for?

Admitted, a company's primary responsibility is its shareholders. Read my post on this issue a few months back. But don't most companies have a mission statement, which includes something about the quality of their products and customer satisfaction? By customer, I mean the intelligent reader, at one time the mainstay of the paper.

"Giving users what they want" is a slightly complicated thing when it comes to content. If a generation of readers is raised on a lower standard of journalism (as they are right now), they'll expect it to be normal. Witness Fox News' definition of news in the US. A whole lot of Fox News viewers have very interesting ideas of the Iraq War and the (non)discovery of WMD among other things.

I find the use of Ayn Rand's essay as an example frightening. 'Selfishness' and 'Greed' have been reduced to their basest expressions by other Ayn Rand readers I know too. If you are giving an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, you better have read "The Fountainhead", (a better book IMO) especially Howard Roarke's closing argument in the end. Is the TOI today closer to the first-hander Howard Roarke, or the second-hander Peter Keating? Isn't life about finding your highest ideal (to paraphrase Richard Bach?). And, isn't good journalism a journalist's highest ideal, if not that of his moneybag boss?

In the interest of full disclosure: I don't read the TOI. Unless someone specifically links to a TOI article, I vote with my mouse.

Geek Yoda

do() || do_not(); // try();

As seen in the signature of a Slashdot user.

Lawrence Lessig had this great column on Wired a few months back. I've been meaning to link to it since forever, but it kind of got left out.

A great blurb:

"Think about our behavior over the past four years. We have cut taxes but increased spending, benefiting us but burdening our kids. We have relaxed the control of greenhouse emissions, creating cheaper energy for us but astronomically higher costs for our kids, if they are to avoid catastrophic climatic change. We have waged an effectively unilateral war against Iraq, giving some a feeling of resolve but engendering three generations of angry souls focused upon a single act of revenge: killing Americans. And we have suffocated stem cell research through absurdly restrictive policies, giving the sanctimonious ground upon which to rally, while guaranteeing that kids with curable diseases will suffer unnecessary deaths. In each case, we have burdened children - that one group that can't complain - so as to supposedly benefit those of us who do.

This is the shameful application of a simple political truth: The future doesn't vote."

I can't help but agree with him. And, Lessig does well in taking both sides (R/D) to task.

Of Teacups, Storms and Being Politically Incorrect

This is the most balanced of opinions I have seen over the past few days about the Harvard President's remarks that women may not be as mathematically and scientifically inclined as men.

Honestly, I think the issue got blown way out of proportion. This was a remark by an esteemed academic, no doubt. But it wasn't as if he made sweeping statements with nothing to back him up, or that he said women scientists weren't good enough. He cited real studies where women seemed not to be performing as well as men.

He did give the example of his daughter. That was a bad idea. Anecdotal evidence in such a scenario makes it a generalization, whatever may be his intentions. And if, in his experience, he has found that women he knows are unwilling to put in 80 hour weeks, it's his opinion and he can make it. Did I hear something about it being a free country?

The poor fellow had to apologize. Twice. It would have been funny, if the matter hadn't been so serious and the man so accomplished.

We still have a long way to go before women receive the same respect as men in many fields. Attitudes definitely need to change. But this definitely isn't the way to go about achieving this.

I dug up this article from BusinessWeek that I remember reading about two years back. It talks about how girls are getting better and taking the lead in all spheres of education. From being class president, to debating to dramatics, to being the ones getting into college, "boys are the second sex" now. For some reason, this doesn't seem to manifest itself in engineering and the sciences.

If they are doing so well at everything, what are the reasons keeping women away from engineering then?

Nature? Nurture? Social pressures? The fact that being in a man's world makes it likelier that a woman will be discriminated against?

Everyone has their opinions, and probably the answer is a combination of these. I agree with Dr. Summers and what the quoted NYT article states. We need more studies to get a conclusive answer. Maybe, on an average, guys ARE better at this stuff naturally (that doesn't preclude girls from being good at it. I've met enough girls smarter than me to say otherwise) . Is that such a bad thing? Women are apparently better at "people skills", and it is PC to say this. Again, this doesn't stop guys from being good with people.

If my opinion makes me politically incorrect, so be it. (dodges)

As Paul Graham says " There is something wrong with you if you don't think things that you don't dare say out loud." Touche.

Happiness,Inc.

One doesn't expect to wake up one day and find one's fundas on life validated by a Harvard professor. But here I am. All I think of Happiness And Life As I See It vindicated by Daniel Gilbert, Professor of Psychology at Harvard:

The Article

Choice quotes:

"Research suggests that human beings have a remarkable ability to manufacture happiness."

"Things do seem to turn out for the best - but studies suggest that this has less to do with the way things turn out than with our natural tendency to seek, notice, remember, generate and uncritically accept information that makes us happy."

This does put paid to the romantic notion that things will turn out fine. It turns out that things don't turn out fine, but people do. This places a greater onus on us (I like that, onus on us. Recursive alliteration ?) to make things work in our mind, rather than hoping that they'll turn out OK.

Bummer. The responsibility is killing.

Make way for the fashion statement of the month. It's ...sweaters. As the mercury went south all the way to the Antarctic here, the warm woolies are out more than ever, even in the warm confines of the office. A casual walk down the corridor shows more men/women in their fleece sweatshirts and turtle-neck sweaters than ever before in my brief time here.

This place is nowhere close to Pittsburgh on the snow quotient (proximity to the Great Lakes being a great factor there). But with the temperature touching 0 Fahrenheit here, the very few cold-lovers must be happy. Mainly skiers are happy with this kind of weather. No one else seems to like it much. To paraphrase an ad I heard on the radio,a snowboarder will be "Down in the garage, giddy as a schoolgirl,polishing his snowboard".

Waiting for the snow to thaw, and glorious spring to arrive. Not that I'd mind skiing (its on a list of things to do, this winter or next), or the snow so much. I don't mind this weather so much except for the fact that it is so goddamn disruptive. Going out means scraping 3 inches of snow off the car and driving 15 miles slower than the prescribed speed limit. No walking outside, unless you want to freeze and risk the loss of a digit (or a limb). No food places or coffee shops with outside seating. You are stuck inside unless you can lift yourself off your rear and drive 100 miles to the middle of nowhere, pay through your nose and ski.

Seeing people (read: pretty girls in summer. I leave the rest to your imagination) on the roads and outdoors is much more fun. Not to mention some real greenery, as compared to the really depressing dried trees I see outside my window right now.

Too young to comprehend, too proud to complain

I read someplace a long time back that one should not read important books at too young an age, as the impact of the book is not what it would be. (that is, IF you could really comprehend what the author meant)

Being a somewhat prodigious reader as a kid meant that I was reading books way before they were supposedly 'appropriate' for me. By the time I was in college, classics like "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" had already been devoured and swallowed whole by this voracious reader.

Swallowed whole is more appropriate I guess, because these books did not affect me the way they 'should' have, considering the impact they have had on readers worldwide. I simply didn't 'get' them. I did 'get' and love most of Ayn Rand's work, including 'The Fountainhead' and 'Anthem'. (I do think 'Atlas Shrugged' is about a thousand pages longer than it should be though.) And I loved, and still love Richard Bach and pretty much anything he puts to print, including his Ferrets series.

I also have my reservations about the whole "critically acclaimed" thing, with me not agreeing often with what the critics say. Heck, I am a software engineer who reads, so my opinion on what good writing is or should be hardly matters to anyone but me. But 'acclaimed' books like 'The Interpreter of Maladies' and 'Life of Pi' by Yann Martel left me disappointed. I liked only the first story in "The Interpreter of Maladies" about the couple in a fight in the middle of powercuts in the US (yes, they do occur, VERY rarely where I live though). 'Life of Pi' began interestingly enough, but towards the end, the drama of the tiger and Pi in a boat loses steam, and I was really looking forward to the book ending.

Maybe its just me.

Now that I am on the right side of 25 and supposedly 'mature' enough( by what standards
I ask?), should I go back and revisit some of these, if only to see how growing older affects your insights and if there are more 'a-ha' moments, richer of experience that I am now?

Do Not Go Gentle Into the Night

Do Not Take the Easy Way Out
When it is the most tiring, push the hardest.
Let your thoughts be interesting, insightful and funny.
Never let your music be "Easy Listening".
Do not Go Gentle Into the Night.
Put up a fight.
There has to be something worth fighting for.
There has to be something worth dying for.
If there isn't, is this existence worth anything at all?
Keeping regular hours is boring
Sleeping at the same time every night is frightening.
This is the time to be passionate.
A time to make mistakes.
To take life's blows on the chin.
To live fully, to love unreservedly, and to laugh wholeheartedly.

The Fighting Temptation

The unimaginable has happened - a sub-$100 iPod. Small capacity - 512MB, but I don't need a freakin' extra hard drive. I only want a music player, which will play a few hours of music for me, and will be something that I won't mind shelling out money for. Will work with the nice iTunes interface, making syncing a breeze.

And this is it. Finally...




The iPod Shuffle

Strap yourself in for 6-month waiting periods on this baby.

R.I.P.

A colossus rests...

http://www.rediff.com/movies/2005/jan/12puri.htm

Movies to see

Good special over at rediff about the movies coming up next year (make it this year). A few
obvious pleasers: Johnny Depp and auteur extraordinaire Tim Burton combining after a sweet Edward Scissorhands and a dull but gorgeous-looking Sleepy Hollow to bring us the Roald Dahl favorite, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". Time for a library trip to read up on the original? Or should I do it the LOTR way, the movies first, and the books later ? (actually, I haven't read the books yet)

Batman begins, this time with a Goth feel, more than the campy feel it's had over its past reincarnations. I did like a couple of the Batman movies (whats to not like about Alicia Silverstone in a catsuit) , but I think this revisitation to the franchise will be worth it.

Then of course, there is a very interesting looking Sin City , a real graphic novel meets big screen, and one I am really looking forward to - "Be Cool". John Travolta redefines cool (when he gets up on the right side of the bed, that is), and him on the dance floor with the Bill Killing U in a Pulp Fiction after-party is to look forward to.

Favorite dialog: "Do you dance?" " I am from Brooklyn"
Well, Saturday Night Fever had his character based in Brooklyn too.

An interesting study - movies based in New York, versus movies based in any other city in the US. I think NYC wins 2 to 1 at the minimum. Maybe, someone more statistically inclined might be interested.

But, there is that one movie based across the Hudson River in the Garden State - Spielberg's new "War of the Worlds". Well, Tom Cruise was all over the papers when he shot in the Newark area for the movie. Which left Alhad, formerly from Los Angeles, California - Home to Hollywood in considerable mirth.

Quicktime Trailers at www.apple.com/trailers

Incredible Dilemma

Much has been written about "The Incredibles" and the philosophical questions it raises. I admit, I am not entirely uncomfortable with all of them myself. The character of Syndrome has a beginning that is not entirely unlike that of many geeks - super-intelligent with visions of heroism. While the do-gooders get their due glory, a rejected-in-childhood Incredi-boy becomes Syndrome, intent on turning the world into a celebration of mediocrity. The "everyones' special" refrain of parenthood today in the US is played on very smartly.

My audacious question is: is that so untrue? It's not my case that we celebrate mediocrity like the ridiculous ceremony for Dash's 4th grade graduation. However, as a generation that really knows no better , are we in a position to judge what gifts people are born with?

And what about hard work? Many gifts, including the holy grail of geekdom - hacking, are not purely birth-given. They are acquired through hard work, through all-nighters with caffeine and ramen noodles for company.Where does a world with the Incredibles(who don't really have to work at it) leave these people?

Time to watch the movie again.

Update:

Found this nice review, which partially agrees with my POV on the intelligence of Syndrome and the problem it raises within the whole premise of the movie.

In hindsight, I feel a bit silly. All this over an animated film. Well, at least I don't try to learn Klingon, and do a few million silly things that the Star Trek crowd seems to think cool.

Perspective

While in graduate school, I was going through a period of angst that was quite unlike my usually easy-going character. Various reasons including the usual - funding, money and the quest for employment were all part of the equation, and the overriding question was "Is this all worth it? "

Sid, a voice of reason in the most irrational of times had the answer as always. He said that working with underprivileged children at Akanksha among other things had given him an appreciation of life as we have it. Having so much and yet not being appreciative enough is a theme that has recurred strongly in my mind in the past few days since the tsunami struck.

Impossibly cruel, but true:

"Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you"

Various Artists - Do They Know It's Christmas?

The Return of the Prodigals

Even as Australia showed why they are the best, halfway across the world, a challenger rose. It's been a good run by the English. They have shown as much (maybe more) promise as the Indians did in the golden Australian summer of 2003, when the Indians almost did the unthinkable -beating Australia in their own backyard.

There are no reasons to think this run may last longer than the Indian one did. But, I feel that India were done in this year by what I believe was a combination of statistical anomalies. So many top batsman losing form at the same time combined with bowlers being injured at the same time did take its toll.

But England seem (I say seem, as cricket for me is what I follow online) better poised this time around. I am writing this as we still go into the fifth day of what has been an intense Test match so far.

This summer's Ashes promise a tough fight. I know the world's waiting for someone to give to Australia as good as they get, and I sure don't mind it being the limeys.

Observation

As I sit at a PC typing into an Emacs window, a thought strikes the mind.
Why is it that my code looks clean, and someone else's gobbledygook?

To wit:
Kya mera khoon khoon, aur baaki sabka paani hai?
Mera code maintainable, aur sabka spaghetti hai?

Help

As the world celebrated yuletide, thousands died, and millions wept.

http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/

Memories

My U2 "Best of 1980-90" cassette broke two weeks back. Made me kind of sad. I dont have a CD player in my car, and my old cassettes give me good company during long drives.

A lot of my cassettes have special memories associated with them. Especially because as a student in Pune, Rs 125 on a cassette was a guilty pleasure. You couldn't buy these too often without making a dent in your "allowance money".Actually, I didn't have a fixed allowance, but my parents had a good idea of how much money I'd have to spend per diem in Pune as a indigent hostel student.

Not that they'd mind me buying music. But, with other indulgences including movies, concerts, (and dinner outside on weekdays when the mess food was bad, which was often) supported on the same budget, buying cassettes was a special occasion, something you didn't do on a whim.For instance, my Bon Jovi "Crossroads" was among the first albums I bought after starting engineering. It was in a hole-in-the-wall place somewhere on M G Road. Then of course, there's Scorpion's "Acoustica" bought at the MusicWorld near Blue Nile, just before a long train journey to Chennai.

The advent of MP3s changed that to a great extent.But, there is something distinctly boring about a Gig of songs with plain file names. Unnamed actors in a plain iTunes window.They don't speak to you the way a well-designed inlay does.

So, I am returning to the old days -with CDs this time around. I somehow missed the album covers, and neat inlays with lyrics and notes. Pearl Jam's "Ten" cover is enough justification for the love affair to begin again.

Woo Hoo!

Talk about good Christmas presents. My cousin just gave me 50 free credits on his Napster account, ones that he got on his Creative Nomad.

50 songs for the buying...

I've already used up 9 credits. 41 more to go before the year ends and they expire...

Addendum: Napster is pretty neat, though the whole environment reeks of a iTunes rip-off all the way. Well, nothing beats free and legal.

Tracks so far: 2 from Howie Day, 4 from Goo Goo Dolls (including the divine Iris) and 3 from Vertical Horizon.

I am the kid in the candy store.

Microsoft has been under fire due to the security flaws in their products lately, especially in Internet Explorer. Enough has been said about that. However, its latest move to acquire anti-spyware software maker Giant doesn't look good on its resume. The key to secure software is prevention, and Microsoft of all people has no right to complain of a resource crunch.
They have the money and the (highly skilled) manpower to throw at this problem. Absolutely necessary is a drastic reworking of the browser - a la SP2, where they let applications break, but put security first.

Even more galling is the possibility that they may charge for this software. The reason spyware exists is because of the bad security model that Microsoft used for IE. I don't say this - CERT does. ActiveX, and the whole "zones" model is completely broken. In a recent statement, Microsoft said that spyware was the users' fault, not theirs. Yeah right.

In most cases, maybe. But I've been infected by spyware without ever clicking "OK" on anything. It was due to streaming music websites (before you think of other, more "unclean" reasons). I'm not that dumb. I used Firefox then too, but my realplayer plugins didn't work cleanly on it then. Valuable lesson learnt: NEVER use IE-only sites, unless they are your bank or something and you have no choice.

Another pet grouse to get off the chest: For those who say that all of Microsoft's problems stem from marketshare, I call their bluff with two words - Apache and Oracle. I don't even remember the last time a major Apache server or an Oracle database (both market leaders by a wide margin) was taken out by a vulnerability. Slammer, of course is fresh in everyone's mind.

Complacency is one thing open-source can do well to guard against though. It wasn't so long ago that Debian's servers were hacked into just days before a major release, rendering the whole source of Debian vulnerable to tampering. Mercenaries are exactly that - they have no respect for authority or principles, making open-source software an equally good target if the incentive's right.

COEP(IET) Blues

I link to Ramanand's keen insight on what's wrong with COEP ( PIET, since they insisted on effacing any history we ever had) , and what can be done to fix it

I can't say it any better, so here goes

It's been interesting over the past few days to see the obvious influence of Andy Warhol on popular culture and art as it stands today. A trip down a good music store's aisle showed me at least 2-3 albums with covers influenced straight from one of Warhol's prints. Problem is, I cannot remember the album names, nor did googling help very much.

A typical example is linked here from the Warhol store:


Then I saw this. A tad on the expensive side, but a nice nod to pop culture as would be defined by Indian cricket fans.

Amit Varma writes in Cricinfo about choking, and how it is related to implicit versus explicit learning.

hmm...worrisome. Definitely worrisome for someone who's stumbled through life more or less on what is called "implicit learning" that is.

This may explain why for some inexplicable reason I've lost the plot at times I'm not supposed to, as also why I revel in the same ulcer-inducing conditions at a different time and place.

Actually, this does make sense. I've looked back at times in my life when I've done well, and honestly, I have no f*&^ing clue what I was thinking of then. Which makes that success irreproducible. (Heisen-success anyone?). The heartening part is, it's happened enough times for me to know that it isn't all uncertainty.

But I do need to bone up on that "explicit learning" part he goes on about.

Read the article for sure.

Someday I'll fly

Someday I'll fly...

Someday I'll soar...

Someday I'll be so damn much more...

'cause I'm bigger than my body gives me credit for.

- John Mayer "Bigger Than My Body"

Rage against the system

A wonderful article about why today's metal and hip-hop music is so violent and depressing. Traces this right from Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder, thru hip-hop icons Tupac, Jay-Z and Eminem.

Eminem is Right

via Amit Varma's (of Cricinfo fame) wonderful new blog: The Middle Stage

Writing

When was the last time a piece of writing brought a lump in your throat, made you appreciate life all over, AND re-affirmed your faith in words like hope, optimism and bravery?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4058063.stm

I hope this does some of that. Ivan Noble is a writer for BBC who was diagnosed with a brain tumor. He has been undergoing chemotherapy and underwent surgery to be cured.However, his tumor is in remission now. He writes every week about his struggle with the disease, his pain, and
his hope for the future. All without sounding maudlin.

A toast to courage.

Hackers Part Deux

Paul Graham certainly has some interesting things to say. Actually, he says things that I've thought of at times, but never really articulated, because these things weren't all clear in my mind. (If they were, maybe I'd be a genius of his caliber) But his essay here on hackers is remarkable.

After my previous post on hackers, this makes for an interesting sequel. I've met people who fall in this category, and I know what it entails on their part to be that way, and though I am not half as good a coder, the attitude rubs off.

And this guy writes well: "At our startup we had Robert Morris working as a system administrator. That's like having the Rolling Stones play at a bar mitzvah." Amen to that.

For those who don't know Robert Morris, here's a blurb: The man wrote the first ever worm, which accidentally spread so far and wide that it brought down the Internet as it stood then (in 1988). He was sentenced to 3 years of probation. Finding the last refuge of true hackers, he is now a Professor at MIT.

Time to face the moojik

It's amazing when you realize that a decade passed you by, with an alarming lack of exposure to quality contemporary music.

I am referring to the blighted late 90s and early zeros, when we had the pleasure of MTV and Channel V with a disgraceful mix of boy bands and bubblegum pop princesses passing off as "Music" (this, in addition to a few dozen punjabi singers and the drivel they pass off as remixes). I didn't notice too much, maybe because I was hardly at home, and also because my hostel and friend network provided me with enough classic rock to sustain me through the blues of COEP.
A good ride on Internet radio over the past few months has left me with a long list of bands/singers from the last few years that I'd like to hear more of:

Green Day
Goo Goo Dolls
Matchbox Twenty
John Mayer
Sarah McLachlan
Evanescence

Great Quote

U2 frontman Bono at a Labor Party Conference a few months back:

"Excuse me if I appear a little nervous. I'm not used to appearing before crowds of less than 80,000."

"How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" - their new album is out today. USA Today calls it their best album ever. Tall claim that - beating "The Joshua Tree", or even "All That You Can't Leave Behind" is not going to be easy.

Top-down, bottom-up

I read We, the Media recently. The book is available at the website for free download.

This is an interesting and thought-provoking look at how new media is changing the equations on content and news.It talks of, among other things, the rise of of RSS news feeds, which allow you to have a greater say in the news you get, and its relevance to you. (similar to the push vs. pull case I made a few weeks back - it was probably before I read the book. Great minds do think alike.). Importantly, it talks of grassroots journalism, and the rise of blogs and things like the Wikipedia, online content that is driven from the bottom-up.

Adding to this theme, I now realize how easy and cheap it is for anyone to really get information out there today. Two technologies on the Internet make this cheap: the first is, of course, freely available blog sites like this one. The second one is BitTorrent. While most people associate it with downloading pirated movies, and software, it is turning out to be an amazingly effective tool for distributing content on low budgets. (I got my latest linux isos, and firefox downloads via bitTorrent - almost as fast, and a bit less server load for the orgs.)

Note: If you don't know about BitTorrent, do check the official FAQ. The protocol's darn impressive. According to some studies it accounts for one-third of the traffic on the Internet today

Imagine an incident like the Rodney King incident happening today. An ordinary person could get the word out, and if s/he has a digital video of it, it could be downloaded by millions without grief to his/her bandwidth bills, simply by posting a BitTorrent link online. With official media increasingly reluctant to take on the government in the US, especially on anything related to "security", this may be prove increasingly important in the future.

For an insight into how news-reporting is giving way to increasingly biased reporting, watch this interview footage from Outfoxed.

NOTE TO SELF: I am beginning to sound like a radical left-wing loonie here. But I 'd like to think I stand by facts, and I like my news like the beeb delivers it. Give me healthy skepticism over "You're with us, or you're with them".

Red, Blue and Purple

An increasingly fractured country?

The Republican and Democrat candidates this election looked increasingly similar on many policies including the war in Iraq and gay rights. However, most maps show the US in sharp relief, neatly dividing up the country into red and blue - with the interiors mostly red, and the north-east and the west blue (literally and figuratively, after the elections). But this link gives a very good insight. Using some neat map techniques, the US map has been transformed, so that population density and margins of victory are given importance too. And they used purple too.

The U.S. of A is nowhere as close to fractured as the mandate made it out to be.

In other news, Ramanand added me to his blogroll. The number of COEPians (even only among the ones I knew) blogging is pretty impressive. I'll get around to a list of blogs on the LHS of this page sometime soon. Maybe some stat counter too. (Ego trip? Maybe. What the heck)

And yes, South Park rules.

You will respect my authoritah.

The curse of the Bawa, and amending religions

An interesting article over at rediff. Talks about how the Parsis are dwindling in population. Having one good Parsi friend (from whom I have a lot of inside dope on the issue), this did make for a good read.

An important point (that at least I wasn't aware of) raised in this article is the difference between religion and ethnicity. Parsis are Zoroastrians, but all Zoroastrians are not Parsees. Complicated? Kind of. With these being synonymous in India (like Punjabis and Sikhism for most people south of the Vindhyas) , it's easy to make the mistake.

For those who come in late, Zoroastrianism is very rigid. Women who marry outside the religion, 'leave' the religion, and if men marry outside, the wife is never inducted into the religion. The children of a woman marrying outside can never take up the religion, though children of men can.

A non-Parsi is not allowed in fire-temples. This means that a woman marrying a Parsi will be effectively excluded from all religious rites involving her children, from the baptism to the funeral. Obviously, a woman married to a Parsee may not necessarily be very enthusiastic about allowing her children to take up a religion she won't be part of. There have been attempts to change this, but this has divided Parsi society right down the middle, with many people both for and against such reform. That there may not be much left to reform in a couple of generations is an entirely different issue.

This does make for a bigger philosophical question. Are religions rigid, strictly defined by the Holy Books as they stood maybe a few centuries ago, or can/should be they adopted to meet the needs of the time?

The whole gay marriage issue in the US, shifting social norms over the world, and a stronger awareness and assertion of women's rights make this question all the more relevant.

If the US has painted itself red and blue over same-sex marriage and abortion, India too has a strong debate over the Uniform Civil Code and rights for women in poorer, less educated societies, both Hindu and Muslim. Ridiculous cases like this beg the question: is faith an artifact of our mind, or is it ordained from above, something that is 'there', strong, unassailable, unchangeable? I personally think the answer will vary with religion too. In fact, interpretations of religions themselves may give you different answers to this high-level question.

Arguments may never end, and what is sinful and 'out there' today is normal tomorrow, but these are questions that need to be addressed. The answers may not be to everyone's liking, but they're important.

Firefox 1.0

I could not let the day go by without my review of Firefox 1.0 , the much awaited browser from the Mozilla community. It is arguably the best project in terms of ease-of-use to come out of the open-source community.

The upgrade from 1.0 PR was tried in multiple ways - install over an existing version of 1.0 PR on my laptop, and upgrade using the 'check for upgrade" in the options menu for my desktop in office. Happy to say that both went off smoothly.Unhappy, however to say that googlebar did not port over as smoothly.

Quick notes:

1. First loading is slower than PR. Dunno why. Once loaded, is nice and snappy.

2. Multiple tabs open smoothly, even for 6-7 bookmarks using the "Open in Tab" feature. Neat for opening all mail accounts , or all news sites at one go.

3. Nifty small features - search for eBay and Creative Commons part of the standard search options. Added IMDB and AltaVista to the list myself.

4. Neatest feature new to 1.0 - can open links from external programs (say, mail client) in new tab in the same window instead of a new window. Perfect for me at work, when I have multiple emacs windows open, and would prefer only one browser window for all web-related work.

5. Still cannot subscribe to all RSS feeds. Less forgiving compared to regular RSS Readers.

6. Wish I could save passwords for things other than websites on the password manager. I need like a dozen passwords for the various applications/sites in use in my office. Many of them are IE-only, which makes it very inconvenient.

Overall verdict? Highly recommended. Security is of course a prime consideration (just found a couple of tracking crap on my computer last week - am positive it came from a streaming site which was IE-only. Permanently off my list now). It just sets new standards in ease of use.

Take back the Web.

Film-making in my opinion is composed of two important parts: the first is the art of telling a story, of making authentic characters, and of a logical progression which makes a movie fit together as a whole. The second part is the visual part - what kind of vision can the director
impart on the screen.

There are directors who have a sense of one without the other, and vice-versa.


George Lucas fits into this mould - a grand visionary with a bad sense of story. Star Wars pushed the right buttons for me visually, but did nothing for me in terms of the storyline. The good versus bad allegories were lost. I feel I am being unfair on the movie as I saw it on video and not on the big screen which may actually skew my opinion a bit.

But Spielberg fits the bill of the complete director. Seeing "Minority Report" a few months back reiterated that fact perfectly. Again, I saw this on DVD. The idea of the world in the future was simply fabulous. Intrusive, in-your-face advertising based on biometrics, and the ideas of public transportation, plus the way Tom Cruise and the other cops orchestrate the thought projections was simply impressive. In addition to the eye-candy, the story-telling was what it needed to be. It was tight, and kept you hooked. I haven't been on the edge of the seat for a movie since forever. But this movie had me rooting for Cruise and the Minority Reporter (Samantha Morton) till the end. Her being pre-scient adds to the fun. Check out the neat scene where she makes him release the balloons at the perfect moment, to fool their pursuers.

The movie which kind of re-inforced my two-pronged view of cinema was "A Beautiful Mind". Showing schizophrenia on screen is a tough thing to achieve. However, Ron Howard does an incredibly good job of it (He did win an Oscar for his effort, so I am in great company on that judgement). He manages to convey how newspapers and seeminly innocuous blobs of text have
special meaning for Nash through the use of light and special effects very ... well, effectively.

Looking forward to watching "The Incredibles" for more of the same. (the word incredible probably appears on my blog an incredibly high number of times)

I am a sucker for good animation. Pixar's never disappointed me, though Disney's had some serious lemons in the past few years. (Sinbad, for instance).

So, Mr. Incredible, Dash, Elastigirl and Violet (that shows you how many reviews I've read online), looking forward to meeting you.

Ray of light

"Ray" with flavor of the year Jamie Foxx in the eponymous role makes you laugh, cry and sing along. With an incendiary performance by Foxx, a set of songs from his early days peppering the soundtrack, and very good direction, this movie is easily among the best this year. Foxx is a shoo-in for an Academy nomination, and I won't be surprised if the director and screenplay pick up nominations/awards too.

The story focuses on Ray Charles' early years, from his losing his sight in early childhood, to his arrival on the vibrant Seattle and then New York music scene. It's an uncompromising and yet celebratory look at the genius (and the man behind the genius, warts and all). His fight with drugs and philandering as he rose to fame make up the bulk of the story.

Although a tad on the longer side, a non-linear narrative, with the use of flashbacks to show the loss of his sight, and his mother's tough-love upbringing, makes this film eminently watchable. If you don't have a thing for the blues or R&B, this might just make you interested enough in Charles' music as it uses his songs to great effect to enhance the narration. The ending to me was a tad reminiscient of "A Beautiful Mind". However, I'd say it was more of a nod to it, since like "A beautiful..." , it was a decision to focus the movie on the part of his life that was the most difficult.

An interesting sidelight was the executive at Atlantic Records who notices Ray's talent and nurtures it. I don't know if such scouts exist in the record industry anymore. Maybe they do, because we still have good music being made. But the amount of bad (or simply mediocre) music on the airwaves means that these people are few and far between. With the focus shifting from music to the bottomline, the big labels are on their way down musically.

Incredible!

It's the only word one can use for India's victory in this match. All the grouses about the pitch are just whining. Like Durban or the WACA's "where's a lawn-mower when you need one" pitches allow matches to be played over 5 days.

Australians are too good a team to accuse of the sour grapes phenomenon.But they did miss Warne. Like we missed Harbhajan in the last game, and Pathan in the last two games. But one thing is affirming itself, that this test rivalry has been incredible over the past 3 years. Overshadowing the Ashes? hmm...that will have to wait till the next Ashes, since now Australia will have a new England to contend with.

Outfoxed!

A set of interviews from a now-famous documentary about Fox News and its "unbiased" coverage of the news and government.

Link is here. Licensed under Creative Commons' Sampling Plus license

Random observations on a New York weekend

Going to "the City" as everyone in a 100-mile radius of NYC refers to it, is always an interesting experience. The influence of the Big Apple on everything in the vicinity is evident from the banners at NJ Transit stations advertising Broadway shows and financial institutions.

Like the eager kid I used to be when going to Bombay(now Mumbai), there is a certain buzz of anticipation you feel as you approach the city. There is an effervescent spirit in New York City, that constantly reminds me of my nanihal, the city of dreams that Mumbai is. The City is (in my own words) a zoo, with the most interesting set of characters you will ever get to meet. Unlike the fairly sanitized interiors of the East Coast where two colors of skin abound (with a smattering of brown Indian software engineers and doctors), the city is a riot of colors, the quintessential melting point, where mainstream radio plays Punjabi MC with as much enthusiasm as punk rock.

The city prides itself on being culturally progressive.The kind of clothes most people wear is (in my opinion) a reflection of that. On weekdays, the dark, sober colors of corporate America seem to dominate especially in the business district. But venture out on friday evening and thereafter, and there is a distinctly eclectic blend of couture on display. People seem to pride on an a la carte approach to dressing , and on stamping their individual brand on what they wear. A refreshing change from sale-rack fashion for sure.

So, we did the usual and the unusual. An afternoon in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking at Mughal miniatures, sacrophaguses (or is it sacrophagi?) and an amazing collection of Monets, Renoirs and Rodin sculptures. And dinner at a place in Greenwich village selling Kathi rolls, quite like those we used to eat in Pune. Apparently it gets so crowded with drunken patrons from nearby pubs/clubs at night, that the owner has a bouncer to keep a check on things after 11 PM.

Then, it was onto a club with a Bollywood style theme night. The guy collecting the entry fee was wearing an Indian cricket jersey . On it, he had pinned on a Vote John Kerry badge. Talk of interesting combinations.

However, the number of non-desis at a Bollywood theme party at a nightclub was surprising. The party itself was a true Bollywood one, with theDJ playing bona fide 70s and 80s hits and not the remix trash that clogs Indian airwaves today . Assuming that these (non-desi) people are here with Indian friends is taking the easy (and plausible ) way out. But this proved not to be completely true.

The night's bill:

Dinner bill for 3 in Greenwich village - ~$30 (for 3 people - cheap!)
Entry at the club - $12 ea.
Catching a cab to get home - $15.
Hearing an American PYT say on the phone " Bollywood was awesome"? Priceless.

Today, New York...tomorrow, the world? Muwaahhhaa( evil Bollywood villain laugh)