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. These are those weirdly distorted, often multicolored, mostly english words that you are asked to write down on various sites like Yahoo, Google, Orkut, message boards,etc.
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. And when you multiply by 3, you get 0.99999, which is not the same precise number as 1.
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.e. the web page layout doesn’t reshape to the size of your screen). The few widgets that are available are quite limited in use as I haven’t found a way to configure them(e.g. the Flickr one).
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. In fact nowadays I am mostly in tears to see so many of my relatives, friends, colleagues toiling day in and day out to let me know that I am loved and remembered every day. Who would have known how email and Internet has actually brought people closer to each other.
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. Thunderbird doesn’t get it - the change in font is quite surreptitious. It therefore renders the text in the default font - the puzzling ‘J’.
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. The episode ended with a raid on a brothel with the “help” of the local police, actually the police chief of the region himself. The raid ended with a farce, with the police letting all the apparently rescued girls run loose soon after discovering them.
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). Go to any Open source forums, and you will see holier-than-thou RH employees/fans talking about how Red Hat is committed to Fedora, and that they don’t see it as beta/alpha software.
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”.
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. Why, we have names for such obscenities. We call our north-eastern country-men(and women), or just any person with mongoloid features “chinky”. We call any white-skinned person “firangi”. Any person of African origin is still called a “negro”, decades after this term has been replaced by “africans” or “african americans” in politer societies.
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.
Here is what a search for KFC India brings up on Google.
I can understand that KFC is very bad in Google SEO and that is why there are no links to KFC homepage in the first page. But why does Google add an uncharacteristic link to mac donalds and suggest me about it in the middle of the result page? Giving me tips is an add on benefit, but the search engine has to primarily do its job - give me a link to what I want instead of other websites that has misused pagerank to shine.
