Venugopal
Saturday, January 31, 2004
The IEEE UAE Section homepage lists my father’s name. I stumbled on this today courtesy of the ubiquitous Google Search.
Tags: chaff
Vasundhara Raje
Saturday, January 31, 2004
I recently saw Vasundhara Raje in a BBC India Hardtalk session and she came across as a fascinating politician. It’s not easy to field questions by Karan Thapar or to get angry with him but she did both. I also don’t really like close-mouthedness in any person so it’s really surprising that she did two things: managed to come off as an enigma and as a captivating person.
Suave politicians and India? I thought the words were mutually exclusive.
Tags: chaff
This Easy
Saturday, January 31, 2004
Written as a poetry playact, has vague elements of sadomasochism.
[TXT]
Tags: writing
Tomorrow
Saturday, January 31, 2004
A dying man hopes for some love. This is a letter, a form of writing I explored quite a bit some while ago.
[TXT]
Tags: writing
Love; Sex
Saturday, January 31, 2004
About a continuing debate in my mind that I have yet to resolve. This story is short and concise.
[TXT]
Tags: writing
Leon
Saturday, January 31, 2004
Inspired by the movie: Léon, this vignette tries to capture a frame from the last scenes. As written by Leon to Mathilda.
[TXT]
Tags: writing
Assorted Poems 1
Saturday, January 31, 2004
A collection of poems I’ve written, some of them like LifeMoney I crafted first in this log. Some are new.
[TXT]
Tags: writing
truthout, News Politics
Friday, January 30, 2004
Whenever I get fed up of the mainstream media, I go to Truthout. Granted, it leans the other way a bit, but so few do nowadays.
Tags: politics
Vivek @Triglug
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Quoted right off the Triglug website:
Next Meeting 29 February 2004 5:30 PM:
Vivek Mohan will talk on his project Universal Disassembler For x86 running at Sarovar.org. The talk will cover the architecture and implementation of this tool . This talk will be especially useful for Computer Science Students and those who are working in architecture-specific projects.
Way to go Vivek!
Tags: chaff
Kelly, Kay & more
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
I can’t help be powerfully dissapointed by the Hutton report. How an investigating body - in this case a retired senior judge - can miss the whole point of the BBC report where the thrust was on the fact that many intelligence personnel within the UK disagreed with the validity of the government threat assesment dossier, is beyond me. The very fact that the 45-minute claim was based on a single uncorraborated source is not under focus - a fact that took the country to war - but the fact that investigative journalism was based on a single source is. Lord Hutton, do throw Alistair Campbell’s notes out of the window. Also, do throw out Dr. Kelly’s haggard expression as he left the government inquiry that day. In fact throw out everything except the Kay report which was almost being simultaneously broadcast on CNN and some passages from Kay’s speech:
“I believe that the effort that has been directed to this point has been sufficiently intense [..] And it is highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed, militarised chemical and biological weapons there. [..] It turns out we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that’s most disturbing [..] You will finally determine that it is going to take an outside inquiry both to do it and to give yourselves, and the American people, the confidence that you have done it.”
Lord Hutton should have focused on either the faliure of the intelligence community, or the fact that the dossier was indeed “sexed up” since many intelligence reports prior and after 9/11 seemed to point in a diametrically opposite direction.
It is indeed bloody sad that the BBC is the scapegoat of all this.
Tags: chaff
404?
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Take a look at Vysnu’s 404 page, inspired by an article in A List Apart: The Perfect 404. My solution is simpler and does not handle as many scenarios as the article describes mostly because Vysnu is too small to warrant more complex solutions =)
Tags: development • vysnu.com
Safari problems
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Boris told me that this site does not render well in Safari [Think KHTML]. It seems to be a problem in styling the first-letter psuedo-element of a heading-level block element. I style my <h2> using these css rules:
.post h2 {
clear: right;
}
.post h2:first-letter {
font-family: tahoma, arial, verdana, sans-serif;
text-transform: lowercase;
font-size: 2.7em; }
Safari seems to reproduce the entire h2:first-letter again as h2. It frankly looks very odd as my headings overflow all around the page. This seems to be a bizzare variation of the bug described by diveintomark here: Safari information for web designers (Scroll down to CSS Rendering bugs, no.2) and demonstrated here.
Some screenshots that Boris sent me: [Safari Bug SS 1, Safari Bug SS 2]
Tags: development
Neverwinter Nights
Monday, January 26, 2004
I started playing Neverwinter Nights yesterday and discovered a whole world of Dungeons and Dragons in hiding. Didn’t know that there were rules for that sort of thing. Or morals.
Tags: chaff
Featured @rahelB
Monday, January 26, 2004
rahelB has featured Vysnu as an ‘interesting layout’. Read up on it here: Endlich - die Headergrafik auf der Startseite, if you don’t speak German, here is a google translation of the page: Finally - the header diagram on the starting side. Here is what rahel actually says about Vysnu (pardon the translation) :
Very interesting layout - the starting diagram and the Logo take only times nearly the whole side. To the second [..] and only if one [..], one comes to the information. But the interesting Design always makes up for that!
Rahel’s site also has a very nice header logo, and if I were able to read German, then I would return the favor =)
Tags: me outside
Parading strength
Monday, January 26, 2004
Today is India’s 55th Republic Day. It marks the day of the largest number of organized parades in the world, from the biggest at Rajpath in New Delhi to the smaller but no less colorful throughout the country. I watched almost the entire parade on NDTV today - and while I don’t consider myself particularly patriotic (this is the first time I’ve taken an interest in it mostly because droning hindi commentaries on Doordarshan mostly make me gag) it was nice to watch all those ‘military might’ rolling down the red carpet. Which brings me to…
…military might in general. Parading strength is a good thing, remembering that you are strong is wonderful. But translating strength as weapons, armor, tanks and planes is silly. Sure, people need to know that the armed forces are wonderfully sleek and equipped, but a country holding a nuclear ace (if indeed that’s what it is) can afford more liberties with its parades - focusing more on what the country is about: I was more interested in the ‘floats’ that came after the guns, though as a rule they look more like colorful cartoons than living parts of a whole. Somebody should revamp those floats and make it glow. A mature country should celebrate its people, not its weapons.
Tags: musings
Technicolor
Sunday, January 25, 2004
the F
word they say is
in demand, cool -
ironic subtle distinguished rad
effective potent poignant virile;
A guy I wished I had met
told me the other day that Bush
and Blair and
t’em fucking politicians
should use it more often.
I nodded my head, convinced.
It’s better to lie in technicolor.
Tags: chaff
Seven, Chapter 3
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Set in the Kharke universe, this story continues the tale of Anaka as she trains hard at Azaho, and recovers from her wounds.
[Link removed, see this]
Seven, Chapter 2
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Set in the Kharke universe, this story continues the journey of Anaka from her village to Shinza’s guard. Sparks fly between Anaka and Zhrom, whereas Andori remains a distant mystery.
[Link removed, see this]
Seven, Chapter 1
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Set in the Kharke universe, this story starts off the epic about Anaka and how she became the icon of Kharke. Seven describes her awakening as a Sorceress.
[Link removed, see this]
Forgotten Fragments
Sunday, January 25, 2004
A robot story, and a David & Anita story. How they meet, and what they do.
[Text]
(more…)Tags: writing
Fishtank
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Fishtank is about relationships, a broken man, and some hope.
[Text]
(more…)Tags: writing
Dear Desmond
Sunday, January 25, 2004
‘Dear Desmond’ is a letter, a composition of love, a treatise on relationships and a very small fragment of time.
[Text]
(more…)Tags: writing
Towers of Hanoi
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Read the Towers of Hanoi post over at Sig9 Forums. Vivek’s solution is followed by my implementation in Python (which turned out to be insanely easy to do) and some great links on the matter. A must read.
Tags: development • me outside
Zeldman
Saturday, January 24, 2004
A focus on my favorite web developer is now online: do read. An extract:
In any evolved medium, art and editorial — pictures and words — work together, play off each other, enrich each other. This is also true on the web, which adds function (programming) to the equation. Getting only the text is not the same.
Jeffrey Zeldman, in case you weren’t aware, is credited with A List Apart, Web Standards Project, as well as Happy Cog and of course, the insanely popular Zeldman.com. The interview, which has very good questions and answers is at Under The Iron which seems to be a good site with lots of interviews with web developers. Take your time and read the interview with Zeldman, it is well worth it.
Tags: chaff • development
Kill Bill
Saturday, January 24, 2004
All other comments about Tarantino aside, I loved this movie. Go Kill Bill. Yay!
Tags: chaff
Richard Stallman
Saturday, January 24, 2004
Today was my first opportunity to use the met keyword of XFN, but I won’t, for reasons that I’ll elaborate. Read on.
Why does the Open Source movement still comes across as the realm of hackers, geeks and strange people with half grown beards? Why do some people refuse to consider the movement seriously? No offense to the big guy, but Richard Stallman may be one of the reasons why. I had the opportunity to meet a real, live hacker face-to-face, and it wasn’t something I could pass over. So Vivek, Nandu and I went over and listened to a big fat guy, belligerent, bloated and haggard, wearing a T-shirt that didn’t cover his stomach and a pair of sweat-pants that came up often as he bent down to scratch a leg, give a talk on ‘Software Patents’. It’s hard to take the guy seriously when he comes off as a joker at first glance, it’s harder to make him a hero.
What can I say? Illusions lost, lessons learnt.
Tags: chaff
Upgrade
Sunday, January 11, 2004
The things that power Vysnu are having its bowels re-ordered. Please wait while service resumes.
Edit: The rest of the upgrades will now be in-situ, the different sections like writing and reading will come up in a few days, and you’ll see a few other entry points as well. Meanwhile, the normal diatribe on life will continue. God save the site!
Meanwhile, some highlights:
- User-friendly URLs
- Resizable layout. Hint: Internet Explorer users, try setting your text size (View > Text Size) to something other than ‘medium’; Mozilla users press Ctrl + and Ctrl - to see the magic.
- Multiple categories
Tarantino
Sunday, January 11, 2004
Quentin Tarantino doesn’t impress me. I haven’t seen Kill Bill yet, but I did see his earlier two: Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. These two films play with the element of time, and I’ve come to understand that time is indeed his signature plot device. The films portray a small fragment of time of its characters and it flows like a comic book - in rapid spurts, with a clear delineation between scenes. That is unique, and original, but it doesn’t do anything to me. Acting in these films is nothing special - Uma Thurman has a particularly convincing drug-OD scene in Pulp Fiction, and Tim Roth’s dying scene in Reservoir Dogs is something special. Tarantino plays with violence and blood a lot, and he uses it to shock and humor his audience, and that is another facet of his movies that I don’t really like. I want to see Kill Bill though, because Quentin’s movies are orginal, even if they aren’t that nice.
Tags: chaff
Prayers, Learning
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Sanitized from an email I sent:
Recently I became interested in prayers and what they *really* mean and my mother and I talked about it quite a bit. There are a lot of gaps in her understanding (and her knowledge) of all these shlokams (stanzas) and condensations of nice little prayers. I learnt however to say the Ramayana and Mahabharata in ten sentences. But I’ve realized that my children won’t know a tenth of what I know. That’s a tenth of what my mother knows and that’s a tenth of what my grandma knew. Not that I’m going to compulsorily teach them anything, but even if they become interested I won’t be able to point them in any direction. Which is kind of sad, now that I think about it, since although most of the prayers are outdated and silly, some are really nice poems whose literary worth is often underestimated. For e.g., the translation of those ten sentences of Ramayana into English would be a lesson in brevity. I’m going to do that translation one of these days.
I hope somebody out there is collating all these word-of-mouth prayers and translating them to a live language, like English. But somehow I don’t think so; authors have better things to pursue. [..] One of the things that any school should do is to teach children the history of their locality - their city, state, country and the world - *in that order*. I don’t know a twang about the history of Kerala and I think it’s a huge gap in my brain. [..] I want to know a bit about this mainly because I’ve realized that however imaginative you are, writing about completely fictitious people is artificial. When I write about stuff that happens in America, I’m going by the 21-inch view that I get from the TV, and the even smaller (or the bigger) view I get from books and the net. Though some of that is close to reality, it’s a static one where the chain of motion is only in my head (and that’s limited since I’m only one.) When I write about stuff that happens around me, the chains of motion are infinite and unpredictable. I’m not hinting at a true story or an autobiography (God save me) but the fact that something which happens around you is closer and truer. I haven’t exactly written a story which is that true yet, though I’ve started experimenting in poems. [..] I have to edit what I said before, stories which have characters you don’t know, are artificial as long as you don’t know what will happen if those same characters were to be transplanted to your backyard.
Tags: musings
The very act of observation…
Thursday, January 8, 2004
The idea is quite simple, really: the very act of observation changes the thing that you are about to observe. When you connect an irate CRO to a perfectly correct circuit, you are in fact making that circuit incorrect. The only way to compensate is to make the circuit incorrect in the first place. Since grad students are taught to go for the answer first, their contraptions (which have these elaborate work-arounds) won’t actually work “in real life”. Scenario: “Damn, this reads well alright, but it breaks my radio!”
Solution, improve the curriculum, or better: buy a new, working, CRO.
Tags: chaff
Shellfront
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
The next statement is not true.
The previous statement is true.
That’s from Shellfront. Together with Blizzle, Loose Screws and Shell Shocked, they make a daily round-up for every self-respecting alternative shell user. Nix your Windows rather than nuke it.
Edit: Just found out that me and rootrider [Artysite] share the same birthday - 25th of Sep. That’s like…weirdly wow 
Tags: chaff
Link Button
Sunday, January 4, 2004
The standard link button is 88x31 pixels long. One of the things that you won’t learn except when someone tells you, or when you actually go about making one. Another popular size which is bannerisque is 234x60. What is it with web designers and odd numbers? I prefer the less common, but more geeky 100x25 buttons myself.
Tags: development
Autopilot
Sunday, January 4, 2004
I first read this in a Robert Heinlein novel (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), but I think I’ve always known this: people don’t really know where any place is, they just know how to get there. Take any place you know, and tell me, in absolute units, how far and in which direction, that place is. Quite right, I can’t expect you to bring me displacements, human beings measure distances more. It is interesting that the farther the place is, the less you know about its real position in the world. Take, say Beijing. If I had to walk, swim or fly from my house, I would have no idea how to reach there. But with my eyes closed, I can get on a plane that’ll get me safely and easily to the Tian’anmen Square. As the world gets smaller (vis a vis, transport gets faster, or communication becomes immersively instant) it will matter less and less where you really are. (Unless of course you are in the Kalahari and sweating your brains out)
This sense of transportation - the way we get from place to place - is also a fascinating thing to explore. My parents have a very good “place-sense”. Both of them can easily tell another person how exactly to go to another place. If you have to reach the Ferderal Bank, go to such and such a place, and then as you drive down, you’ll see such and such a building and immediately you can take a right and viola! I suspect most of the people in the world are wired this way.
I’m not. Not at all; I do most of my travel on autopilot, and the only way I can really understand and remember a direction is if I’m doing the driving and somebody is telling me exactly when to make a turn, and to really burn it into my head, I have to do it two or three times. I can’t find a place even if you handed me a map and marked a big red spot on it (especially then). I’ve thought about it and I think it’s because my ‘markers’ are more obtuse than the landmarks other people use that I can’t explain them (and I don’t consciously remember them). Most of the time, I make turns without thinking and I just know that the house in question is just around the corner.
Since I’ve now discovered this chink in my armor, I’ve resolved to correct this - the solution is pretty simple. Just pay more attention =)
Tags: musings
AudioScrobbler
Saturday, January 3, 2004
First Week of January, 2004
Discovered AudioScrobbler [about] today. It’s an open database of songs that people are playing. The service has plugins that integrates with your media player (mine is Foobar2000, plugins are also available for Winamp, Windows Media Player and XMMS) quite well and it submits anonymous (to the extent that you are not personally identifiable except by your IP) listening statistics transparently to the site. A nice thing is that once you have the plugin, AudioScrobbler doesn’t bother you at all - no popups, no ads, and nothing that’ll worry you, the process is entirely invisible. It also creates a cool personal page of the songs you are listening to, take a look at mine. It’s wonderful because Audioscrobbler stores your entire playing history. You may realize new things about your listening habits if you take a look at the list a year later, a thing that I certainly plan to do =)
Tags: chaff
Wordpress 1.0
Saturday, January 3, 2004
Wordpress 1.0 has been released. w00t!
I’m slowly working on a new layout and will switch to the new version when that’s done.
Tags: chaff
Dread
Friday, January 2, 2004
She
made
a brick
house: dreams,
love, children and hope.
He climbed her steps,
made away with
love, r i p p e d
out her
hope
and left her on a
precipice,
waiting to fall off.
Tags: chaff
Stray
Friday, January 2, 2004
Mr. Rahul! Is he an upright
Man! Ever Patient, Gullible
Morbid And Mad. Mrs. Rahul?
She swears by ethereal Gods
Astrologers, Demons, Sarees
and Soaps. Their Girl, Alas
takes to Thinkers and Prose
She strays, too much, way out of their Box.
Tags: chaff
Self Taught
Friday, January 2, 2004
I still think
good words stringed together
make music:
Today, I rose to find
red roses
waiting for me by a window.
I turned its pages and felt a breath blow out
my muse.
Whispering aloud, I knew
a string throb,
a metre escalate,
inarticulate throbs burn…
And then I shook away the delusion
My poem, ‘twas.
I wish someone would teach me humility.
Tags: chaff
Old
Friday, January 2, 2004
People tend to be very relative about the word ‘old’. It’s one of the words that would be untranslatable to a little green man. I, for one, think 25 is prime, 30 is middle-aged, and the rest of the life is a one-way street to ga-ga. My brother is 16 and I think he shares similar thoughts; this self-delusion (if it is indeed that) is a general malaise affecting all teenagers and like-minded people. Scratch that, it’s something affecting everyone. As you grow older, the word ‘youth’ grows older with you. Youth and Wisdom: can I have both, mama?
Tags: musings