Jul 21 2009

Insult? Yeah…but…

Category: Politics — Suvir @ 11:52 pm

Abdul Kalam was frisked by Continental Airlines some time back in clear violation of protocol. Read here.

Well, I have been following this one of and on for the past few hours. Initially, I was disgusted that a person of such stature should be dealt with in this manner.

tangent : I am sure, the humble man he is, he will never raise his voice against an incident where he is treated like a common person. Even during his tenure as President he rarely lived in the grandiose of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, preferring a more humble abode nearby. BUT the point is that a person like him deserves to be treated with respect.

But a part of me also felt if it will be hypocritical not to apply the same law to all citizens of the country. This is like a perfect moral dilemma. You have got the law on one hand and your respect for the great man on the other. I think the point here is not that Dr. Kalam is an important person. What needs to be looked into are the reasons that he was detained in the first place. My gut feeling is that he is nothing but a victim of racial profiling. I know respectable people – doctors, homemakers etc. who have almost been strip searched on one or more visits to the United States. Its just something thats NOW in the news Because its happened with a famous person.

So, the question is, was the airline ignorant of his status? Did it decide to go ahead with a frisk not knowing about him? Or was it aware of who he is and still decided to go ahead with it? In all these cases, (hate to sound cynical but still) I feel one thing that is common is the preconcieved notion that a south asian man with a muslim name should be specially frisked. [Yes !! they always say its "standard procedure" yada yada,  as they said this time too ; they always do that!] But sadly, that is the kind of world we live in today. What happened is unfortunate but its not the first time a respectable man, this time a VIP, has been dealt with awkwardly.

With all this in mind, I’d say the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security is PROBABLY doing the right thing by filing an FIR and going to the full extent of the law to persecute the “unrepentant” Continental airline. But I am NOT totally convinced that its the IDEAL thing to do and thats simply because , unfortunately, such incidents are due to a mentality which is sadly nothing but the a product of the circumstances of the world we live in.

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Jul 21 2009

Microsoft contributes to Linux

Category: Technical — Suvir @ 2:30 pm

Check this out. Interested reading. Apparently MS last year became one of the sponsors of the Apache Software Foundation. And now it contributed 20,000 lines of code to the linux kernel to improve Linux Virtualization in Windows.

I can understand why the skeptics like Free Software Foundation say that MD shouldnt be trusted at all. But look at it this way, Linux is a great virtualization option and MS knows that. And MS also wants to sell its virtualization option to its huge business customer base. Its a win-win situation. And as long as its contributing to Linux for the better, lets accept its for the good (with a pinch of salt ;) ) .

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Jul 21 2009

Solar Eclipse of 22nd July ‘09

Category: Random — Suvir @ 1:45 pm

Wow, there is gonna be a solar eclipse tomorrow! Totality will be visible in India and China and apparently the best place to view it some god foresaken place in Bihar. It will just touch north-eastern Australia, too bad I am in Sydney.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_July_22,_2009 for more.

I have always been fascinated by a solar eclipse. I still remember a particular one somewhere around 1998 I guess. Mom let me look up at the eclipsed sun with a pair of Dad’s RayBan and good number of XRay sheet bundle. Talk about improvisation. I dunno how it looks like from those viewing decks with UV filter telescopes, but I still remember seeing a pretty cool eclipse, with the flaring ring around the sun and all.

All those who CAN see it, I’d say dont miss this one, supposed to be the longest one of the 21st century yet.

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Jul 21 2009

Google books

Category: Random — Suvir @ 12:01 pm

Wow..everyone seems to be doing some good..After Bill Gates, its google’s turn…adding to the already large number of books available for free reading at google books, its now entered into a partnership with barnes and noble. According to the deal, barnes and noble will commit another 1/2 a million books to google books. Good stuff!

http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/07/helping-more-people-discover-books.html

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Jul 20 2009

An itch i gotta scratch

Category: Politics — Suvir @ 7:22 pm

Well this is something thats occured to my mind often in the past few weeks.

It all started with the “racist attacks on Indian students in Australia”. Since I was in Sydney at that time, it struck me as a bit odd that suddenly a community was allegedly being attacked for no reason. Upon talking with people who have been here for many years, my suspicion was confirmed – media hype. Indians -or migrants in general -  have never had it TOTALLY easy here and there have been numerous attacks in the past too. The person I talked to had himself been beaten up once 9 years back. Come to think about it, Australia is a big country with cities that are quite cosmopolitan in nature. I just ask those who hype up these matters, which major western city does NOT have regular crimes against migrants. Dont New York, LA, London et al have crime problems. What the hell do you think will happen , if you put an Indian guy in a dark alley at 2 a.m??

What was worse, was the way the Indian students responded after their was a surge in attacks…They were saying things like “Indians work very hard!! We dont like to fight. Indians should not be attacked”. Just their tone – it wasnt right. The point is simple – nobody need hurt anybody. Nobody cares if Indians work very hard. AND sadly protests of the kind that these guys did over here, were in my opinion counter-productive.

When you know you cant defend yourself against someone, you dont protest and draw attention to yourself – get me if you can. This is not about “justice,freedom” or whatever utopian ideal one uses to justify protests of this sort.Its about being practical, you simply dont play fire with fire when your matchstick is too damn short. (EDIT : lol, weird metaphor O_o) You burn yourself.

And who the hell are we Indians to even mention racism? Why did some of us cringe when we heard Mayawati may be PM? Havent we been racist for centuries? We have discriminated not just against people of different colour, not just against people of different religion, not just against people of different states but even people of a different caste of our own damn religion. Nevermind the media, they never had much to do anyways except hype up non-issues. Lets not throw stones when we ourselves live in glass houses.

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Jul 20 2009

Richard Feynman Lectures

Category: Random — Suvir @ 6:47 pm

Read this off CNET..great piece of news…apparently Bill Gates has been busy after quitting the top job. And he’s been upto a lot of good stuff. Apart from the massive fund set up by the Gates Foundation to combat AIDS, he has also done something he had decided to do in the 60’s.

He has put online the entire Richard Feynman lecture series at the Microsoft Research website(http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html). Its really amazing quality and if you like physics but it was probably never presented to you the right way [like the kind of crap they teach in first year engineering], go check this out.

Great stuff, too bad it cant be downloaded. But you gotta appreciate Gates for actually buying the rights and putting it online for free viewing.Kudos!

P.S. Scribefire aint all that bad :)

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Jul 15 2009

Twitter ads

Category: Random — Suvir @ 2:42 pm

Hey guys, noticed something interesting on twitter and felt like sharing it. Its a scam! Yes its a scam! Well not a scam in the truest sense of the word, but it does involve people exploiting what they are given for profit. Well here goes,

On twitter, a measure of your popularity is the number of followers that you have. And the way this can be exploited for cash is : If I somehow get 20000 followers, then every single message that I send reaches 20,000 people. Now this is the crux : If I use these messages to direct people to certain sites and get paid by those sites, I can make a decent profit!

Not bad huh? So, even if an average “virtual” users tweet convinces 2% of his followers to click that link , that’s 400 people with just one tweet. “I can give you 10,000 hits a day” sounds good to any webmaster (wish I could afford it).

But the thing is, how do such’virtual’ tweeters ever accumulate followers? Well, its all in a script. The script makes the ‘virtual’ user automatically follow those people who tweet on a topic SIMILAR to the links it sends out usually. And believe me, if you are new to twitter, you don’t mind someone with a decent pic and similar minded tweets following you. AND twitter etiquette says that you follow back whoever follows you! So, they get one more potential ‘bakra’.There you go, its targeted advertising that just works!

Well , why don’t I like these guys?? I don’t like them because they are using something meant for simple communication between friends to make profit BY misleading their followers. I mean if I own a company and I advertise my own products, that’s fine! But this is just directing people to random unknown sites. The script even sends a great thank you direct message “Hey thanks for following me! Keep me in the loop with DMs ok? tc xyz”.Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhh!!!!

Some tips on spotting the fake tweeters: They NEVER tweet from ‘web’. Its always ‘API’ or twitterfeed’ (anything that can be programmed with the freely available twitter API).And there will always be this regularity to their tweets.After exactly two or three hours, it sends out some links.Not two hours 15 mins, not 16 mins, exactly 2hours!

I just don’t like any sort of advertisement on the web when I don’t wanna buy anything! As if google ads on every single web-page(even GMail) was not enough!  Hello, does my email SAY that I wanna buy xyz product that you want me to buy it??Just leave us alone!

P.S. I know that previously you had to sign in to comment but I’ve fixed it [ASSUMING that even one of you ever thought of commenting, which would be such a nice thing :) ]

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Jul 11 2009

Simple pleasures

Category: Random — Suvir @ 2:56 am

As we grow older, busy in our everyday lives, there are a few things that are almost universally common to all people..irrespective of race, nationality, creed etc. I am talking about simple pleasures that we all enjoy but probably rarely ever notice them. Not only notice, if you just realize it and think about it, it does make one feel good. Most of them lift our spirits, some inspire, some bring a smile.

I will try and list as many as I can :

  1. Unless you never get out of your house, there is a good chance you often walk by areas with loads of leaves just lying on the ground. Yes!! stamping on those dry leaves for the heck of it! And the added crackling crisp sound just adds to the moment. Its quite inconsequential and pointless, but I don’t we all do it. I’d probably rank this is one of my personal best compared to the upcoming ones.
  2. For this one, I am not just sure, I know all of you have done it at least once…after a great long warm bath…the mist on the mirror in the bathroom. Oh yes! some of us written our names on it while others might have done something more imaginative. And if you think about it, its not just bathroom mirrors, windows, cars…basically anything. There seems to be something quite universal about the itch in people to write their names in such places.
  3. Well, I experienced a lot of this staying in the hostel. Sometimes you just have to wake up at night to do what you gotta do, and often the walk is quite chilling to say the least (I am talking about a Chandigarh winter – often below 5 deg). But the comforting warmth of the bed and the pillow when you get back, its more than worth it. This actually rates highest on the “Satisfaction” parameter, if I were to rank this list.
  4. Feeling a cool breeze on your face in the evening of a summer day. Great feeling..
  5. This one is a bit subjective, but its still pretty…I’d use the word fulfilling…and I am talking about the time when you support the underdog, and he wins. It could be a sport, or even a corporate tussle, or anything else. There is something that everyone likes about the one who beats all odds and achieves something he was never expected to.

Well, I have made a list of 5 and I think they all live up to the description I gave in the first paragraph. But the list is by no means exhaustive. I do have a few more ideas in my head but I would like you dear reader, to leave a comment with your one of your ideas. If you don’t have a new idea, at least comment about one of the above or add something to them.

Have a good day…

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Jul 10 2009

Too little, too late…

Category: Politics — Suvir @ 1:06 am

The Hindu news feed reports :

Speaking to retired civil servants, who met him on Tuesday night to discuss national issues, President Asif Ali Zardari said militants and extremists had been “deliberately created and nurtured” as a policy for “short-term tactical objectives.”“Let us be truthful and make a candid admission of the reality,” the President told the retired federal secretaries and senior bureaucrats.

Seeing that there has been no denial or “I was quoted out of context”, we should believe that Zardari has openly come clean on his country’s behalf. There used to be a time when even a hint of such an admission by a Pakistani official (forget President) was unheard of. It was just something you did not do. India was perceived as, and by many still is, an existential threat.

But (am an optimist) it seems Pakistan has started coming to terms with the real threat – from within. The point is not the origin of the threat ( don’t we know that already), the point is that probably they have started realising it themselves. They too have seen a lot of violence perpetrated by people similar to the guys who they nurtured for “short term tactical objectives”. And it is probably not surprising how they have started cooperating with the US over the drone strikes in the North Western tribal areas. Although the huge amount of “foreign aid” certainly is a major factor behind the perceived increase in cooperation. Its probably also the best way US could get Pakistan to play along – carrot and stick approach.

I am sound cynical, but I wouldn’t read much into this till they actually take some concrete action. India has gotten itself burnt too many times, to get carried away by just another ’statement’. But still, lets ignore the grey cloud for now and look at that really dim (but there ;) ) silver lining.

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Jul 08 2009

Google Chrome OS!

Category: Technical — Suvir @ 10:40 pm

Just read the feed..Yes that’s right..google is coming up with its own OS called the Chrome OS.

Its supposed to be out by 2010 and it will be initially released for net-books. This seems like one good potential challenge to Microsoft’s monopoly on the OS market. Google already dominates the internet with its search engine and plethora of other useful apps, and this is probably the logical next step.

I wonder what the OS would actually be like.

My expectations from chrome..sort of a wish list..

  1. Good looks : Having seen google all this while, i dont doubt that.
  2. Resources : Should be easy going on the machine ( duuh, it first releasing on netbooks)
  3. Great interface : Of course, its google! I think it will be a neat minimalist interface. Probably X.org for graphic server and some google’s own desktop environment.
  4. Kernel : Hmm..would probably be the linux kernel itself
  5. Open Source : The press release already says that it will “allow third party developers to design compatible add-ons”. And I think that should be good enough for a start. But I hope it really allows you to get under the hood like linux and do what you want.
  6. Integrable with other OS : It should have some sort of greater integrability with windows, for those who want to use both. Something like what Ubuntu does, where you can launch ubuntu after booting into windows.
  7. Instant startup

The statement “We hear a lot from our users, and their message is clear: computers need to get better, Chrome is “our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”". Wow!

Let the long awaited revolution begin…

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