January 15, 2006
Blog Mela - Sankranti Edition
Welcome to the Makar Sankranti / Pongal / Lohri / Bhogali Bihu / Bhogi / Sakarat / Kicheri edition of the Bharateeya Blog Mela. Isn't that amazing? Seven different names for a festival. It happens only in India.
Apologies for the delay. Blogging has been pretty low this week and I had to spend quite some time scouting for the best and unique ones. Not to mention, that 24x7 blogmela, Desipundit, makes my life more difficult :-). But as anyone can agree, it is all fun in the end. So now that the Sun has begun its northward journey, let's begin our journey into blogistan.
Searching for something
Akshay Mahajan is out on the streets of Mumbai searching for the Byculla Soufflé. And the best samosas in town. Ram talks about his visit to the historic Ajanta & Ellora caves. Varnam writes that the recent discoveries in archaeology may just prove that Indians are the oldest farmers.
Books and related
On what is the one of the firsts in the Indian blogosphere, Sonia Faleiro podcasts an excerpt from her recently launched book The Girl. Amardeep Singh points out the recent additions of Indian-oriented works at Project Gutenberg, the free online ebook project. Vikrum Sequeira reviews his recent read - Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality.
Tech peck
Arnab Nandi lists his reasons for not liking the new Intel Macs. Michael Parekh talks about a non-obvious solution to managing the tons of gadgets and their accesories you have in your drawer. Amit Agarwal has a nice photocasting guide for those unfortunate to not own a Mac (Photocasting is the photo equivalent of podcasting). Veerchand Bothra talks about the mobile industry crying foul over piracy. Notice how they all come up with the same failed solution to counter piracy. And you'll know the losses they project will have a margin of +/- 50%, once you read what Rashmi Bansal has discovered.
On current stuff
Samanth expresses his dissappointment over the Hindu appointing their "internal independent ombudsman". Ashish points out the problem in Tavleen Singh's fallacious arguments in support of free irrigation. Aks analyses the larger trends in how the CAT has evolved.
Naveen Mandava talks about the archaic real estate laws in the country being a major hurdle, rather than politicions, to the boom of the economy. Nitin Pai wonders whether cricket has ever helped India-Pakistan relations. Nandan says it is not the monetary compulsions but maintaining the old lifestyle is the reason why bar girls refuse to go out of news.
Spaceman Spiff proposes an idea for eliminating caste based discrimination, thereby removing the need for reservations. Shivam Vij has an interesting discussion on the possible conflict between labour reforms and reservations in the private sector. Gaurav Sabnis hates the word 'caste' itself.
Society, culture and related
"Objective art is meditative art, subjective art is mind art" - Karamadude attempts to explain these words of Osho. (I'd tend to agree with him.) Neelakantan says Shubh Labh epitomises capitalism more than anything else. Crystal Blur writes about a terrible disease on the loose, especially in the recent times - Sanctimonitis. Curious gawker writes about the irony of Indians celebrating on the inclusion of Hindi as a terrorist spoken language by the US. Sakshi Juneja informs us about celebrities participating in the Mumbai Marathon.
There we are. This week's short and sweet blogmela. Enjoy! The next blogmela will be hosted by Spaceman Spiff.
November 29, 2003
iTunes to go
With a month and a half of using, I am convinced iTunes for Windows is the Music Jukebox app I was always looking for. A combination of simplicity and rich features is what iTunes is all about. After using and dumping Musicmatch, Creative Playcenter and a host of Music and Tag management software, iTunes is here to stay on my Windows desktop for a long time. Read ahead for my detailed opinion on iTunes.
Read More (938 words) »»
May 08, 2003
The Zen of MP3
One of the great desires of a music buff who is also a technogeek is to own
an mp3 player which can store his whole music collection in a single place.
Well,
I have
realised it sooner than I expected it to happen. The Creative
Nomad Jukebox Zen 20GB is a perfect balance between affordability, quality,
storage and features when it comes to handling MP3s. If you wish
to put yourself in
misery for not owning one, here's my biased review of this techno toy.
Read More (1264 words) »»
January 04, 2003
Swarming, KM and Reliance
Although I am not a KM buff, I discovered today that Swarming is a very interesting concept in KM(via Smart Mobs). There is a programming paradigm similar to this - Swarm programming, what my friend Selvin seems to be doing.
Much has been talked about the Reliance way of management. Not having figured that out from the day I joined, I often wondered how such a huge company with all its internal chaos, petty squabbles and inflated egos manages to keep posting profits year after year, blowing away all myths and defying all market predictions.
What am I talking about? Why am I relating Swarming with Reliance's management? I swear there seems to be a relation between the two. Here are some of my observations (Well, even if you don't give a damn about Reliance) »
Read More (1456 words) »»
December 16, 2002
Super Ragged Floats 2
Looks like I am obsessed with ragged floats. Yes, absolutely. Why wouldn't browsers have a simpler way of wrapping text around images? More research on ragged floats lead to this spanking new approach to wrapping around irregular outlines. This one uses pure divs and no backgrounds. Plain simple images and plain simple divs. Read More »
Read More (671 words) »»
December 10, 2002
Super Ragged Floats
First
there was slantastic
and then curvelicious.
Then came ragged
floats and then finally here is Super Ragged Floats, advanced
CSS for your viewing pleasure. If you have used Eric Meyer's method
to wrap around images, you will like this too. Here is a simple
tutorial on how to use CSS for wrapping text, but not by slicing.
An alternative to Eric Meyer's ragged floats. And a live example
can be seen here. »
Read More (762 words) »»
November 29, 2002
MTBlogTimes
Inspired by Brad
Chaote and Adam
Kalsey's never-say-not-possible MT plugins, I came up with a wierd thought
of plotting the post times of my blog in a timespan of 24 hours. And I knew
it might not be impossible, even though I had never ever peeked into the MT
code and plugin API. And here I am, after 3 days of poking and probing through
MT plugin API and Brad and Kalsey's plugins. This goes miles to prove how very
well Ben Trott has created the MT API. They are damn easy to code!
MTBlogTimes creates a chart which plots the time of your posts(in
a specified period) on a bar of the 24 hours of the day. I haven't found any
apparent advantage of doing so. Well, probably someone will devise a way of
using this too. Say like, analysing the blog patterns for various blogs (provided
everyone shared their blogtimes) .. or like finding out a true blogomaniac,
a person who blogs all day... Nevertheless the resulting graphic looks cool. Check it out -
Read More (1043 words) »»
October 31, 2002
M$ Undoing
Off late, if you must have observed, Linux is gaining followers
among governments of the developing nations. Because of its cost
factor, configurability, academic significance, open standards,
it is steadily gaining popularity. This seems to have frustrated
Microsoft to no limits. MS has put up a site called Initiative
for Software Choice(ISC) demanding "fair" software
procurement practices from governments, saying that choice of Linux
is not fair. Linux evangelist Bruce Perens was not far behind. In
retaliation, he created a site called Sincere
Choice. Here is his analysis
on ISC.
MS is trying hard to strike back this time using negative tactics.
Steve Ballmer has been constantly harping on his 'Linux
is a cancer' theory. And the most glaring example being a Congress
member calling on to the US Govt to ban the GPL. Using poor
examples and statements that look straight out of MS PR handouts,
they say that licensing terms such as "those in the GNU
or GPL" are restrictive, preclude innovation, improvement,
adoption and establishment of commercial IP rights. How ridiculous!!
But then, you see its a part of their job, after all
the support Micro$oft has given them. The US seems to be the
only govt so much in love with MS. Not even
the Europeans are so comfy with Microsoft. MS has even gone
to the extent of blocking
GPL source code being used with windows programs.( Their Royalty-free
CIFS license.) For your surfing pleasure, Related - one,
two,
three,
four,
five, six, seven, eight.
If you actually were to compare the GPL
License and one of the Microsoft software licenses(couldn't
get the links, and morover they constantly change),
you yourself can decide which of them is the real cancer! All this
and not to mention the countless antitrust cases against the software
firm.
Update: The latest addition to the growing list of countries rejecting MS is Namibia. Check this The Register article.
October 27, 2002
Referrer Rats
After all those email spams, pop-up, click-thru, pop-under campaigns,
all those 468x160px banners, the <center>400x400px</center>
screaming ads, those spamming rats have
come out with two new innovative ways of marketing on the Net: Comment
Spamming - Spamming a weblogger's post with unrelated comments
more so for advertising or marketing. Examples: Waxy.org,
Kiruba(Kribs,
your archives, get them up!). And Referral Marketing
- publicising your site thru referrer logs. And both these are targeted
more towards webloggers than anyone else. That's the matter of concern.
We already had the Weblogs.com directory spamming
incident. And now this. Referrer logs are getting blasted with
links to unknown urls. The poor weblogger tries to find out who
visited his site by visiting the url, only to find a porn-site popup.
Spammers are actually
minting money out of
this! Links - Wired
article, Torrez.net,
Blogdex,
Blogroots,
Kuro5hin
. Little did I know
earlier that all this was not for fun.
As Mo Margan has observed
- "...you can always tell when a particular technological
idea has taken hold by how it is abused". We have had
email spamming, netbios
spamming, weblog directory spamming, comment spamming and now
referrer spamming. What next? trackback spamming? Oops, did I mention
something? ;-)
October 19, 2002
From the Vedic Perspective
What is an ancient Indian technique that is being taught in schools
in UK but not in India? What is it that beautifully corelates all
the mathematics operators if they were never different. What is it
that allows you to solve quadratic equations using differential calculus
yet still do it mentally? You guessed it. It is Vedic Mathematics.
This long forgotten technique for mathematical calculations is gaining
popularity by the exponent.
Read More (741 words) »»
October 12, 2002
People, not Technology
I am wanting this book of Crypto-guru Bruce Schneier - Secrets
& Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World. For the lesser
knowledgable souls, Bruce is the guy who invented the very popular
Blowfish
cryptographic algorithm and the Twofish
algo. Bruce says in this
very good article that people, rather than technology are important
in security. How true! A general perception exists that computer
systems should be fool-proof. But then they can never be. Instead
they should be fail-smart.
Read More (648 words) »»
October 10, 2002
Hi-Wi-Fi
Given the flawed
state of security in the 802.11b standard, a sane person would
be very reluctant to deploy a WLAN.
Wi-Fi
with all the initial hype is a letdown on basic security concerns.
Given that one can intercept,
insert, jam
or just passively listen
to WLAN traffic, how would my MD dream about ubiquitous computing?
Sitting in the garden and accessing Internet, doing a conference
call with a guy sitting halfway across the world? Is that really
possible while being reasonably secure?
Read More (551 words) »»
October 06, 2002
Invisible Web
The latest issue of Businessworld India (14th October 2002) has
a very interesting article on web searches (page 50). Charles Assisi
has given some very good site links for searching what the everyday
Googles and Altavistas cannot give you. Even me, with a 61/2
year web experience, never came across some of these links!! For
you lazy bones who do not want to get off the keyboard, I put it
all in brief with my perspective.
Read More (562 words) »»
September 24, 2002
Digital Divide Or Not?
If you know about the Simputer, you will feel really sad, reading this article at WorldTechTribune. Scott McCollum hasn't even tried to understand the purpose of the creation of the simputer. He is indeed behaving like the "dirty, rotten, filthy, stinkin' rich" as he himself has mentioned(albeit for a different reason) in the article. Vinay Deshpande from the Simputer Trust has given a fitting reply to the article. Read the mail thread on the India GII list ahead.
Read More (1818 words) »»
September 07, 2002
SVG Primer
SVG is the new in-thing
in graphical presentation on HTML pages. Like HTML is to content display, SVG
is to graphics display, in the same way as VRML is to 3D displays. So to get
you started, a brief primer on SVG »»
Read More (1879 words) »»
June 19, 2002
Virtual Private Networks
Today I was surfing around with just one thing in mind - VPN. And I came up with some amazing links. So if you are dead sure that VPN expands to Very Pleasant NeighborTM, here is something you need to know -
Read More (179 words) »»
