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Best of AnthoBLOGy • Unripe
Revolution |
Computing, Libraries, Tennis, India & other interests of Vikas Kamat
| Myths about Gandhi |  | ||
| Great Archaryas of Hinduism No discussion of India's history, culture, or philosophy is complete without the mention of the roles and influence of the three great sages of medieval period. The three acharyas, Shankaracharya, Ramanujacharya, and Madhvacharya are primarily responsible for the survival of Hinduism, and I am very pleased to add their biographies to our evolving section on Bhakti- The Path of Devotion.
Myths Abouth Gandhi I sometimes get hate mail from Gandhi-bashers about our Gandhi section. They blame Gandhi for everything from Muslim appeasement to India's industrial backwardness to the division of India. They are entitled to their opinion of Gandhi, but most of them are misinformed or have misunderstood Gandhi. Myth 1: Gandhi was anti-Hindu Myth 2: Gandhi was against Science, Technology and Industrialization Myth 3: Gandhi Consented for Division of India into India and Pakistan
Educational Links on Hot Conflicts of the day
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| .NET or .NOT? | | ||
Links for the Day
Dot Net? or Dot Not? I am meeting a Microsoft.NET Evangelist tomorrow. In preparation for the meeting, I have read up quite a bit on Dot Net stuff. I am looking for some specific answers, most importantly why I shouldn't abandon Microsoft completely and build Java apps instead. If Dot-Net were to fly, much of my software will become obsolete. This is an issue that has occupied my mind for the last two years a lot, and I am eager to decide one way or the other... My Requirements (really, our customers' requirements)
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| Notes from .NET School | | ||
| Notes from .NET School
I met with a Microsoft .NET Evangelist and I learnt a lot about Microsoft .NET framework (Thank you Microsoft for enlightening me, and for delicious lunch). I liked some of the features (the cache API) and hated some of them ( those darn design-time-controls are back). The claims/complaints that .NET framework makes all existing investment in Microsft software obsolete, are indeed true. See the following Q&A (my real questions, and his real answers) for education and humor: (Demo of same code running on Windows2K, Windows XP, Web, Cell Phone etc) (Demo of implementing custom Event Log) (Demo of storing Session data in a StateService, or a Database) (Demo of File upload component and FrontPage Extensions) (Demo of long code to draw a bar chart on the fly)
See Also:
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| Wireless Blogging | | |||||||
| Wireless Blogging I finally got around to installing Wireless networking at home. I used the D-Link router and thier AirPlus network card. The networking part works very well, the wireless part works occasionally. But hey, nothing like blogging and watching television at the same time!
Once someone asked Jerry Seinfield (who has like 36 cars) how many cars he needs. "I don't need even one" -- was his reply. In that background, why two of us need six computers at home is answered here.
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| Elephants of Mysore Dasara | | |||
Elephants of Mysore Dasara
Advertisment-Free Dasara Greetings
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| Stories Behind the Switch Campaign | | ||
| Stories Behind the "Switch"
First, the models in Apple "Switch" campaign get cyber-stalked. I don't blame them, Janie is so lovable. Then Microsoft comes up with its own "Switch testimonial (link to Google cache, Microsoft has since removed the story due to embarrassment). The problem was that both the person in the photo, as well as the testimonial were fake. ("Just like the the tapes Microsoft produced during their trial" someone said at Slashdot). Ouch! Also, I noticed that one of the models of the Apple's Switch campaign is a Godse. Apple now has the distinction of using both Gandhi and a Godse in its advertising. (for the uninitiated, Gandhi was the apostle of peace, and Godse was the name of the man who assassinated Gandhi). Related Links:
• 75 years ago, on this day, oil was discovered in Iraq. • Chewing gum as a medicine delivery mechanism has lot of benefits. • Duct tape is an effective wart remover.
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| Dear Saddam, | | ||
| A Love Letter to Saddam Dear Saddam Hussain, I am writing to you in the larger interest of the people of Iraq. After all that has happened, I think you should consider retirement. Relinquish the ruling powers to Tarik Aziz, take a long vacation, and spend your last years in peace with yourself. It is immoral to cling on to power forever. The human is mortal, but his legacy is not. Your own personal safety, the interests of the Iraqi people, and of Arabs in general, is best served by your retirement. This will avoid war, and make you popular. More importantly, you will live, and will demonstrate that you are wise. It will deny your enemies the opportunity to strike, and in one brilliant move, you would have shut 'em up forever. I also highly recommend Disney World as a vacation spot to take your grand-children. All the dictators who hate America, vacation there secretly anyway. -Vikas Kamat
Iraq and Pakistan Both Iraq and Pakistan have weapons of mass destruction, both are ruled by ruthless dictators. Whereas Iraq is not infested with Islamic fundamentalism, Pakistan is. And Iraq is our enemy, and Pakistan, our friend?! From what I hear, the forthcoming war is not about Saddam or terrorism. It is about USA occupying an oil rich nation, and establishing a very firm foot in the neighborhood of Israel. I am pro-war. But let it be known what the war is for. Let us have a war for restoring of people's rule (hence the regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Pakistan also need to be overthrown), and for long-term peace in the world (we have to squeeze in some kind of justice for the Palestinians).
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| Search Engine Implementation Notes | | ||
| Simple Searches & Advanced Searches Some of you might know this: You can specify several additional parameters while searching Google. If one were to call these options as advanced features, then you have to call the guided search as the "Simple Search" right? But Google calls it the "Advanced Search"!! A friend of mine whom I admire greatly, felt that a system that holds your hand must be called a simple system, and system that allows powerful permutations based on human intelligence is a complex or an advanced system. So a point & click system would be a simple interface, whereas a Unix shell would be an advanced interface. By the same logic, he felt that the naming of the two is reversed in most search systems. We argued for a while, with me claiming one textbox search of Google is indeed perceived as simple. But you know, he is right. The Advanced Search as most people call them, where you can specify dates, categories, and other options, must indeed be called a Simple or Guided Search. So, here's a rare suggestion for user-interface improvement to Google: Rename your "Advanced Search" as "Guided Search".
This is another dilemma Web designers of large websites are always against. "If Google can search the whole world with one search box, why are you implementing so many Search Engines?" -- they are asked. On Kamat.com alone, there are five search engines (full text search, PICTURESearch, BLOGSearch, TOCSearch, and GlossarySearch). Does a personal site need so many search engines?! Perhaps not, but consider this. You are at a library looking for information on, say, Alzheimer's disease. The type of resource that you would be interested very much has to do with the scope of your interest. Are you a doctor? a student? a relative? are you looking for a book?, a journal?, a newsletter?, a database of citations?, news of the latest breakthroughs?, all of them? how much time you've got? And no, Google cannot make that determination for you, you must do it yourself. Consider that you are trying to locate a customer record, you are not interested in the customer's home page at that time. This is the reason why there are so many search engines. Hence, in a library, continuing my example, there's the search facility for the books, a search for subscribed journals, a search for non-subscribed journals available via Intra-Library loan, a search for newspapers and newsletters, a search engine for citations (known as database in the library industry), a search engine for abstracts etc. Of course, there will be one day where you will be able to specify:
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| India's Working Children | | ||
| Child-Labor in India My mother takes on a very delicate matter of Working Children in her blog. This is an important issue that brings a lot of negative publicity to India. While it is true that a lot of children are exploited in India, my mother has tried to separate out the causes, the history, and has tried to provide some insights.  I have long felt that one of the reasons why there is dignity of labor in America is that the children work from a young age. Youngsters in USA wash cars, baby-sit, clean garbage, or wait in restaurants for pocket money, and it will be very hard for them to look down upon a task/profession they had carried out in earlier years. I truly believe that exposure to real life problems enriches childhood, and makes one respect the fruits of labor. India has also had this tradition of exposing children to the professions of the parents. It is a tradition that has gone on for centuries. India always has been the country of self-employed, and the children were always asked to pitch-in for the family vocation*. The tasks included running errands, watching out the merchandise when the shop-keeper stepped out to lunch or for bathroom etc., It is absolutely true that the children who excelled in this "helping", were asked to discontinue school & play and instead absorbed into the family enterprise at a very young age. This tradition, while might seem unfair to an outsider, was a vital link of providing employment and sustenance of the family. Unemployment and Underemployment The unemployment numbers are very high in India, and especially disturbing is the problem of underemployment (a person not earning enough to be above the poverty level). To make the ends meet, more members of the family have had to work, including the children. As you can see, the problems of unemployment and child-labor in India have entangled relationships. If the parents had adequate employment, perhaps they wouldn't send their children to work. If so many children didn't work, perhaps there would be more employment opportunities for adults. If the children didn't enter the workforce at a tender age, they can command better wages. Even the two scenarios of child-labor (one meant for child's development, and another forced by the circumstances of economics) are interrelated.
* Unfortunately, as the caste system turned wicked, and problems of untouchability became prevalent, some of these professions lost respect. BTW, The loss of respect for some selective professions is one of the biggest problems of modern India. But that is a different problem.
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| Google Compute. No! | | ||
| Google Compute Google wants to rent your computing cycles. Don't let them. Not on your office computer, it might cost you your job! I recall a similar idea in the 1990s when a system administrator installed a screen saver that did massively distributed computing when every employee of the company went home. That was also for a scientific research project, but the administrator didn't obtain any authorization from the management. The organization (IMO rightly) determined that it was abuse of company's computing resources, and terminated him. I have nothing against Protein research. Do participate in Google Compute project if you own the computer, and if you are paying for the bandwidth. Please don't install it on computing facilities belonging to others (like libraries, universities, or customers).
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| Blog Stuff | | ||
| New Blog Words Link Slut is the blogger who provides a link to anyone who
asks (in the hope of a reciprocal link). I introduce a new term, Here are some more: DOS Blog -- The blog that mostly consists of text. Freebie blogs hosted on BlogSpot (that doesn't allow image hosting) are examples. Mainframe Blog -- The blog that mostly contains content in uppercase (like those mainframes). From what I have seen, all corporate blogs end up this way with product codes, and full of insider acronyms. Blog Royalty -- The handful of bloggers who get all the publicity.
I have made it easier for Indian bloggers to ping the Blog Portal. The Ping form now will now remember the URL, so you have one less thing to type. If you have a blog related to India (blogged from India, or blog about India), here's a pitch on why you should get listed in Kamat Blog Portal
Classifying Blogs When a customer wanted to use blogs in their enterprise, one feature they
wanted me to add was Classification of Blogs into categories. I believe Movable
Type has it. I have added that
feature now to blogs at Kamat.com. Here's a list of my blogs on
blogging, and
here's the category of Photo-Poem-Duet
Blogs. A blog built with my software can belong to multiple categories, and
a category can have blogs from different bloggers.
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| Kids Say Darndest Things | | ||
| Mama's Got the Magic of BOTOX! (and other embarrassing kid stories) My wife and I went to a party and complimented our host on her young
looks. Their child goes "oh that coz she got a facelift" ! My wife and I were playing with a friend's daughter (age 4), and she asked me "You know my dad?". I said "Yes, I know Dr. Oh very well". Then she revealed a family secret -- "He farts!" This happened to my colleague. Their four year old daughter walked in when they were
intensely intimate.
The title of this blog inspired by the following controversial advertisement. Mama keeps our house sparkling like sunshine
Links
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| Culture Clashes in a Global World | | ||
| Culture Clashes in a Global World The Wired has some examples of how the usage of words is causing conflict in the globalized world. It narrates how the word intimation (meant as in correspondence or notice, not as in intimidation or intimacy) was taken in offense. I have made the same mistake before. Another example I find hard to overcome is my usage of the term dress. See, the word "Dress" in India is used as synonym for clothing -- for men and women. So to say "My wife bought me a dress", is normal and not queer. I interact a lot with customers from Europe, and I am guilty of ridiculing them behind their back for their bad English, mannerisms and habits. Some examples.
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| Case Against RSS Feeds | | ||
| The Case Against Public XML feeds I know that people have been talking a lot about RSS (XML feeds) for the last two years or so, and every now and then I consider providing them, always deciding not to. Once I was narrating to my father, a
computer-illiterate, on how I am trying to optimize the search engine for
Kamat's Potpourri.. "Bappa, currently it takes over a minute to find
something on our website, and I want to reduce it to a few seconds". You must pardon my father, he didn't know anything about the Web at that time. But the importance of his opinion is not lost on me. I do not want to serve computer robots, or those who are impatient. I want to serve only those who are interested in our work. That's the real reason why there's no public feed of our site. Here are some more:
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| Static Sites Don't Need Database | | ||
| Database Outage Our Database server has been down for sometime. Hence the durable links to the blog and the Blog Portal are down. Much of the website is still up, thanks to the beauty of the Static Rendering.
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Update at 10:00 P.M. The database is back up.| More Page Views Not Necessarily Good | | ||||||||
| More Page Views Not Necessarily Better The other day I argued my case against public XML feeds. I continue my logic that more page views is not necessarily better, with a real example. In the early part of year 2000, one of my customers used to provide a great aggregating service on the web, free of cost to anyone who asked. All one had to do was fill up a form or call. During one of the discussions, a manager argued that more traffic to the website is not necessarily better for business, while a more dedicated audience is. It was a radical thought then, and it took a long time to convince the top management, but we implemented exactly that, and here are the stunning results:
Of course, some of you might feel that having a base of 10,000 allowed the company to identify the 2000 paying customers. I am not so sure I subscribe to that theory, because by the same logic, they could have continued to offer the free service to recruit the next 2,000 customers. No? I am not the only one who follows this logic. Alan Abbey, the new vice president of electronic publishing at Jerusalem Post is about to do the same. This is a very popular source of news from Israel, getting a lot of page views, but not resulting in adequate percolation of brand, or increase in growth of their business. What is he to do?
Over at Aperture Photo Blog, there is a variety of Deepavali festival pictures -- from a greeting card I made as a six year old, to Rangoli, and fireworks. FYI: This festival is known by several names and people use different spellings. I have tuned the search engine to accept the varieties by defining synonyms for them.
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