Sep 28, 2006

Surveys

There is an AC Neilson survey on consumer optimism and confidence and opinions and other such things , the results of which have just been released. Indians are the most optimistic consumers, world index is at 98, India is at 131, Asia-Pac at 94, blah, blah and more blah. India this and India that. And how many people from India were polled? 506. Uh, oh, it's an ONLINE survey. Nice. And they have drawn conclusions about the country's consumer base from these 506 people who they found online. And they have published the results. And news outlets have picked up these reports and put them up for all to see, no doubt with optimistic headlines like "Indian consumers most optimistic" etc.

Art, especially the abstract painting type
Religion/spirituality
Surveys
Films/entertainment

What's the common thread running through all these?

Geeks

What would a normal email from a good friend of yours typically say? Here's an example from my life:
Did you manage to install VISTA RC1 32-bit?

Another example:
Asked him to get 2* 1GB sticks. But the damn thing won't overclock beyond 251 :(( .. Haven't tried to o/c with 2T ..

Us geeks are a strange kind. What does one normally do at 1 o'clock at night? That's right, figure out an xorg config to get Linux working with TV out, install Windows Vista on a desktop that does not have a monitor, reorganize the data on the external HDDs and charge the iPod and N80. And oh, for some reason Vista doesn't like my laptop.

Sep 26, 2006

UPDATE: Vista opens up from Tirunelveli

Follow the link and weep.

Anyway, I had written an email to the person who had been mentioned in the article asking for more details. He actually responded, saying something like "I will send the details to sir". But no details have been forthcoming.

What conclusion do I draw? Searching for the name of the software that he claims to have built brings up nothing other than the original story and links to people who have proudly put it up on their sites. Nothing else. Wonder if anyone from Microsoft would like to comment on this.

Sep 24, 2006

=^..^=

Time spent with cats is never wasted.
- Collete

No matter how much the cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.
- Abe Lincoln

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
- Mark Twain

How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven.
- Robert Heinlein

A cat is an animal who never cries over spilled milk.

Google posts court ruling on Belgian Web site - iht,business,Belgium Google - Business - International Herald Tribune

Google posts court ruling on Belgian Web site

In short, newspapers have suddenly discovered that search engines are searching the internet. For some reason, these newspapers think that if the "content" they provide on their news-sites does not appear on the google news page, they will get more hits. In other news,

Publishers aim for some control of searh results

which essentially says the same thing. "Content providers" want search engines to pay for searhing the information that they have put up on the web. Sounds strange to me. If you don't want people to see something then DON'T put it up on the web! If it's up on the web on a public webserver, why should specific people have to pay for looking at it? It's like standing in the town square and demanding that people pay up for looking at you!

Sep 20, 2006

Cricket

Welcome to rediff.com

I'm laughing my butt off.

In short, there was a cricket match between India and the West Indies today. India batted first, and put up a disappointing batting performance. At that point, a bunch of morons jumped up and berated everyone and their uncle for the low score. India then went on to win the match because of an even worse performance by the opponents. And hopefully those who posted their theories on the message board would have eaten crow.

I'm sick and tired.

Of armchair experts and media hype and frenzy. Of course, the hockey team has become a miserable outfit of late. But I wonder what qualifies a layperson to comment on how the team's fortunes can be turned around. Same for the cricket team. The message board is ample proof of how quickly the aam janata jumps at an opportunity to blast sportspeople. Yes, their performance hasn't been the best and they can do better, but unless you can stand up and perform in that sport I don't think you have any business to give advice. Lament, yes; curse, yes; show your disappointment, yes; but you have no right to give advice. How would you like it if Rahul Dravid walked into your office (or wherever it is that you work) and gave you advice on how to write software or make outbound calls or manage your employees?

Sep 17, 2006

Flashing in a party?

Misleading title again :) I faced a problem after I got my new Logitech G15 keyboard. I promptly unpacked it, plugged it into my laptop to see if it worked and then carried it over to the desktop with much fanfare. Unplugged the PS/2 keyboard, plugged in the G15 and booted up. Everything was fine, except that the mouse didn't work.

Now, I have a very nice 5 button PS/2 iBall optical mouse that has not given me much room to complain, so I wasn't about to give up without a fight. Plugging the PS/2 keyboard back in brought the mouse back to life, so it's obvious that the addition of the new USB keyboard was the problem, right? Back to google, and search after search brought up nothing. I finally found an IBM site that merely said that using a USB keyboard and a PS/2 mouse was not allowed on some model of theirs, but that hardly seemed to apply to me. Then it dawned upon yours truly that it may be the fault of unplugging the PS/2 keyboard rather than plugging in the USB keyboard.

Turns out that the version of the BIOS I had on my motherboard had a bug that would deactivate the PS/2 mouse if the PS/2 keyboard was unplugged. Fair enough. A BIOS update should fix that, since there is a later BIOS version that claims to eliminate this bug. Next choice - floppy based flash or WinFlash? I decided to go the WinFlash way, just because I am too lazy to unplug a floppy drive from an old desktop merely to flash the BIOS. So downloaded the BIOS, downloaded WinFlash, ran the update, rebooted.

Then, nothing.

Ooooooops... bad flash? That is a catastrophe, recovery is an involved process, that may or may not work. The status LEDs on the motherboard were all lit up and one of them was blinking. The solution is simple when I write it down, but it did take me some time to figure it out. Reboot, hold down the Insert key during the boot process and POST, then release it and hit Del to enter the BIOS settings, reset everything to normal settings, allow the OS to boot. Then you can always go and re-enter the OC'ed settings. I would have not had to go through all this had I reset the BIOS settings to normal before the flash, I think.

To jump to the end of the story, the flash worked and now I have a USB keyboard and a PS/2 mouse working just fine. Where does the party come in? DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D is the motherboard model.

"...the Opteron 165's overclocking prowess has earned it a rep for being more dangerous than Dick Cheney with a 20-gauge full of birdshot" says TechReport.com.

Black or White... what are you?

Black and White 2

That's what I'm playing nowadays. Good game, a bit heavy on the resources - takes up 50% of my dual cores and 50% of 2GB RAM! But runs like a charm with everything on high. It's a different sort of feeling, playing god. Here's a review of the game from GameSpot. Note: one of the first games I'm playing that require a minimum of a GeForce4, are the days of my very first video card over?


Next up, Call of Duty 2!

Marrying for money.

No, I'm not doing that. Yet.

I'm talking about some government plan to give a cash award of Rs. 50 thousand to couples that... er... perform an intercaste marriage. For those not in the know, India is a country stuck in the middle ages, where society is divided into castes and all citizens are untouchables, and people die of starvation every day, we haven't heard about electricity and I ride an elephant to work. Back to the point, the reason an intercaste marriage is such a big deal is because it is probably unacceptable to the families involved and in most cases unacceptable to the society in which they live, especially in non-cosmopolitan areas. Marriage is still mostly a group decision, where the immediate family plays a very important part, and the society in which the family lives or wants to continue living indirectly influences the decision. The "wants to continue" phrase creeps in because if one takes a decision against that society's norms you may be forced to move out (to a bigger city, where nobody cares) or you may yourself decide to move away to avoid nasty problems. (While the concept of an "arranged" marriage may sound funny to most Westerners, it may be the only way geeks can get married!)

So since an intercaste marriage is difficult for a person to enter, the government (in its infinite wisdom) thinks fit to pay out money to a couple which does exactly that. The purported reason for the incentive is that intercaste marriages somehow promote social equality and help to "eradicate the menace of caste". A noble reason, certainly. While fifty thousand rupees does not sound a lot, it may be a big sum to the people towards whom this scheme is targetted, the rural folk where the village opinion matters in day-to-day life and where caste-based discrimination seems to be entrenched as a way of life. To me, it's neither here nor there, because I will not get into an intercaste marriage for 50 thousand bucks, nor will I refuse an intercaste marriage merely because "society" feels unhappy with it. My main crib is about where the money is going to come from. That's right, the only place the guv'mint can get money if from me and you, via taxes. And when I get to this point, I really have to stop and wonder if this is the best utilization of my tax money.

It's not just the 50 grand. There will certainly be some guv'mint machinery set up for dealing with these "cases", people employed for doling out the money, politicians going to remote villages so that they can get photo-ops while giving out the large cheque to suitably impressesed couples, people to check whether the receipients are "valid" and "eligible", records to be kept, accounts to be maintained. Would it be worth it? Being the cynic that I am, I see a future where people will insist on intercaste marriages to earn the gov'mint dole, where people will keep the caste system alive just so that they can get married to someone from a different caste. We already see a rush by people to get themselves registered as "backwards", we will now see a rush for intercaste marriages; neither of the policies will cause the general public to ignore each others' castes.

Sep 14, 2006

Pinky and The Brain

Welcome to rediff.com

Rediff had a decent sort of article on the very confusing topic of choosing a CPU for your next PC upgrade. Of course, they have tried to cover too much territory in a smallish, one page article - but that sets me thinking. There has been a feeling, over the years, of computer jargon being too complex for the layperson to understand. This is true for any technical domain, but since computers have become pretty much like TVs or DVD players do we really expect a prospective buyer to actually go through and decipher the words that we use while specifying CPUs and RAM and HDDs? How does one explain FSB, multi-core, 32/64 bits, HDD rpm, cache to a layperson? And why should said layperson care about all these?

If you clicked on the link, you'd have seen that it doesn't take you to the article, rather it points to the comments on the article. As of writing, there was only one comment, and a rather strange one at that. (http://in.rediff.com/getahead/2006/sep/13cpu.htm is where the original article is.)

I spent quite some time thinking about what the writer of that comment had in mind. Is it a case of him not being able to express what he means? Or is he really completely clueless? Or has someone led him up the garden path?

Sep 9, 2006

AnandTech: PhysX Performance Update: City of Villains

AnandTech: PhysX Performance Update: City of Villains

One thing is clear, I won't be buying a Physics accelerator anytime soon. Dual core CPUs are probably good enough for me for the time being.