A recent study found out that 1/5th of all research papers are being abandoned because of conflicts with patent holders. One of the slashdot readers asked why. There was this remarkable answer, which was different than other normal economics drenched answers.
We have them because the average American wants to believe in a world where he/she can one day strike it rich by inventing some widely used product.
The problem is, the patent system doesn’t really work that way, no matter how much patent supporters pretend it protects powerless inventors.
Here is a great article on Linux Journal about the new Opendocument file format. For those who dont know much about this, think about the word .doc files that you have might have been using all this time. Opendocument is an alternate file format similar to .doc, for storing your word processing documents.
Opendocument file format is supported natively by a number of Office applications like OpenOffice2, StarOffice, KOffice, Abiword, eZ publish, IBM Workplace, Knomos case management, Scribus DTP, TextMaker and Visioo Writer.
India has one of the most expensive Internet bandwidths the world over, even if Indian ISPs command a significant amount of undersea cabling world wide. But we all know this - how Indian ISPs, by forming some sort of a cartel, and with the connivance of even government Telcos are holding broadband users country wide to ransom.
Why I mention this is because of a number of recent articles that I have read on the incredibly popular VOIP software - Skype.
Take a look at the following table showing the difference between similar ADSL broadband plans of BSNL and MTNL - the two public sector telecom companies of India. MTNL only operates in the cities of Delhi and Mumbai, while BSNL operates every else. Delhi and Mumbai are probably the two largest commercial cities of the country, but as the graph shows, MTNL believes that they should therefore pay twice as much as the rest of the country.
Seems that my blog is turning out to be a general gripe column. I don’t think I should be blamed for it though. Our country is full of technology companies who are only out to fleece people. When you use the services of a company who considers quality of customer service as a variable business decision, you know you have seen a company who is just after your money.
After my awful experience with Sify, I decided to try out Tata Indicom.
I have been busy in the last few days migrating my mind from web based apps to native apps. Currently, I am reading about wxpython as a possible answer.
Here is an interesting post on the wxpython mailing list on how to use python + wxPython + Twisted + zope + XSLT.
Also some discussion on the problems on using wxpython and twisted together because of threading conflicts.
A Serious XML-RPC bug has been discovered in PHP XML-RPC applications. Upgrade your PEAR library. Wordpress has come out with a new version fixing the problem. Unfortunately, they still don’t provide an easy way to upgrade. Here is the patch file to upgrade your Wordpress installation
How to upgrade Wordpress in one step
Download the patch file somewhere in your server. Change your current directory to your wordpress installation. Verify that your installation will get patched cleanly: patch -p1 --dry-run < /path/to/patchfile If no error reported in last step, finally patch the file: patch -p1 < /path/to/patchfile Yeah, I know.
I was in a quandary. I wanted the long permalinks for my blog posts,which made links self-describing and also search engine friendly. And I also wanted short URLs that I could pass on in emails. I share the sentiments of Andy Wibbels regarding TinyURL. Nothing against TinyURL personally, just that when you have your own domain name for your blog, wouldn’t you prefer using tiny urls using your own domain name?
After my terrible experience with Sify broadband early this year, I decided to stick to dialup - Reliance rconnect over FWP actually. But the idea of keeping a phone busy all day doesn’t appeal to me much even if the plan I have (Platinum) doesn’t have download caps or per minute call charges.
So today I decided to bite the “broadband” bullet once again, and registered for a Tata Broadband connection.
Here is an article that I have just written on using svnreplicate to replicate subversion repositories. svnreplicate allows you to have a single master repository, and multiple slave repositories.
The document uses a walkthrough approach to explain how to configure svnreplicate. I must warn though that it only demonstrates the concept using master and slave repositories present in the same system(reachable using file:/// URLs).
While I am sure that this should work over multiple hosts too, Yashpal Nagar, a friend of mine, is trying to get it to work over multiple hosts with svnserve.