I have this queer interest in following US politics which I sometimes cannot adequately explain. It is somewhat the similar interest that people probably had some years back in Soviet Union. It was an example of a socioeconomic setup which tried so hard to be pure in their intent, but kept hobbling on its path as it found out that extremities either way, left or right, are difficult in any social setup.
The other day I discovered reCAPTCHA , one of those really innovative nifty little ideas that warm my heart. Everyday all of us netizens use so much of our energy fighting the evils of spam - service providers keep warding off waves of attacks, while the users keep assuring providers through various means that they are not bots working on behalf on the dark side(read spammers).
One of the ways of ensuring that the person accessing a web page is actually a human is to pass the CAPTCHA test.
Joel has an interesting post about a current Excel 2007 bug.
Here is the short explanation given by Joel. What is 3 x 1/3, if I ask you? You would rattle off “1, of course”. What if I tell you - “note down 1/3 in decimal on paper, then multiply by 3” ? Now since there is no finite decimal representation of 1/3 on paper(you will keep writing 0.333333333333 …. forever), you will stop after a few decimal places.
After a long while managing my own instance of wordpress, I have finally moved my blog over to wordpress.com. This site gives you wordpress hosting for free, but I opted for the additional paid option to use my own domain. Cost me $10 a year to put up my future blog URL - http://blog.sandipb.net .
There are quite a few limitations from using this hosted service. For one, they have a very limited set of themes for you to use, and most of these themes are non-fluid(i.
Stop! I get too many forwarded jokes on my mail/cell already.
And then there are those valiant souls who take upon them the moral responsibility of their entire generation by laboriously collecting snippets on a daily basis from all their “sources”, taking care day after day that their “friends” don’t miss any of the gems. As some of them have said, this is just to show that they care!
The emotions I go through when I see each forwarded joke is indescribable and extremely moving.
I finally figured out why I kept seeing a mysterious “J” frequently in mails. I use Thunderbird, and it never struck me that what was common between all these mails is that they are all from Outlook users. It seems that in all its wisdom, Outlook converts any smileys (like : - ) ) in the plain text mails to the letter “J” in Wingdings, which stands for the smiley in that font.
Yesterday, I saw this very well made documentary on CNN called “The land of missing children”, part of their series “World’s untold stories”.
The documentary was about underage sex workers in the brothels of Kolkata and Mumbai, a dark side of our society which many of us simply keep themselves blissfully ignorant about. For the first time, I saw and heard things I had previously only knew in bits and pieces from newspapers.
Mark Shuttleworth writes in this blog post on a topic I get really emotional about:
We have to work together to keep free software freely available. It will be a failure if the world moves from paying for shrink-wrapped Windows to paying for shrink-wrapped Linux.
Go to any Linux event in India and you will find the sales force of Red Hat spending oodles of time pushing their “enterprise” Linux (nothing wrong with this) and trashing their free offering - Fedora (this is bad).
A Bollywood actress caught saying
so-and-so is amazing as a director. He can make even a black African look pretty".
A Bollywood actor saying:
(I knew) it was time to leave Shanghai and Hong Kong after six weeks of stunt training and go home when his eyes started “turning into little slits like the Chinese”.
Source: http://www.asiansinmedia.org/news/article.php/television/1404
As the BBC critic of Indian origin remarks, these are not unsurprising remarks. As most Indians know, we make these remarks all the time and either don’t realize these are offensive, or just don’t care.
Haven’t written in ages. So thought I would write down something that I am really looking forward to right now. My distro of choice Kubuntu/Ubuntu is releasing their latest on October 26. From this blog, the RC will be out on 19th Oct. I started using Dapper from RC release itself, and that is what I will be doing this time too.