The incompetency of our police and government in handling our security is often sought to be hidden by fear mongering. Knee jerk reactions like banning liquids in airlines, utterly stupid checks while entering malls, and the topic of this post, actively discouraging photography at all public places. Citizens and private organizations, getting these clues from our public administrators, in turn have made life hell for amateur photography enthusiasts worldwide.
Some years back, I was almost handed over to the police by some folks in our neighborhood for “suspiciously” taking photographs in streets in the night. The fact was that I had just bought a new camera, and was learning how to take photos in the night(This was the photo that I was trying to shoot).
The state of health care insurance in this country is turning as pathetic as some other countries that we know of. The private health insurance companies being the pests that they are, have already decided that theirs is a no-risks, high gain game. Their business plan is that the people who need the highest medical attention are the ones who should have the biggest problem in getting insurance, if they are given any at all. That is how the private insurance sector works, and we all know that given the lack of regulatory teeth that our government has, this is what privatization of health care insurance would eventually get us to.
ILUGD is presently furiously discussing a legal procedure to get refund for the Microsoft Tax applied to all desktops and laptops that you buy from the branded market in India.
The Microsoft tax is an unofficial, but commonly used term that refers to the licensing fee that Microsoft charges major suppliers of personal computers for each unit sold and that purchasers thus usually pay for such computers, regardless of whether or not they want or intend to use a Microsoft operating system.
Watching Arun Jaitley’s interview about POTA, and his criticism of the PM’s idea of a federal investigation agency made me recoil with disgust at the games these political parties play.
POTA was created during the NDA rule in 2002 as a replacement for the much maligned TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act) which was allowed to expire in 1995 during the Narsimha Rao government. It was created not after some major event in India, but after 9/11! Some of POTA’s “features” include:
I was quite irritated to find out recently that if you have a Google hosted domain and use that to login to Gtalk, you cannot communicate with Twitter without jumping through a few hoops, and even then, only under certain conditions. My first thought was that “these sort of things” should just work (tm). Turns out I was really wrong …
Unlike what is probably thought by some (like me earlier)Twitter is not logged into Gtalk to talk to you. It uses XMPP/Jabber to talk to you. If you have logged into gtalk with your own domain name, how do you think twitter knows that it needs to send the message to gtalk’s servers? As Joe Beda explains, it is almost like SMTP. So instead of MX records, Twitter looks up your SRV records from DNS. So to talk to Twitter (and other such apps that will be using this mechanism in the future), you need to setup SRV records for your domain. And that means you need to have complete control over your domain’s DNS records.
I was looking around tonight to check out some celebrity blogs out there. It seems to be a fad nowadays - celebrities blogging is now almost a statement!
Here are some that I found, and I will be adding more to this list when I find more:
Aamir Khan: Aamir’s controversial blog which keeps making headlines. No blogging software used. The code looks like generated from some offline data. No comments on the blog page. No feeds. Some nice guy has tried to create feed for the blog by scraping it, but it seems a bit outdated. Interesting thing about the hosting of the blog. www.aamirkhan.com is hosted on a freebsd machine. However, the blog content is picked up from a CentOS linux machine elsewhere. Another weird thing - I can’t see any comments on the blog (I use firefox). But the page source shows comments by users.
Just now got an invite to Pagii, from some stranger, sent directly to my office email. Bad, bad.
This turns me off such ventures completely. Getting invites from known folks who are trying out
different YASNs, is irritating but not completely obnoxious. However this is.
Looked around a bit to see what this is about. Turned out this is a social venture from
Freewebs, and descriptions from various places on the net
makes it out to be a place where you can make fancy home pages in ajiffy, and comment on other’s.
Not too exciting. But check out if this interests you.
