The easiest way to drive me up the wall is by calling me sweet and addressing me with a Hai (sic). Everytime I read something like this addressed to me, my barometer drops to either zero, or crosses threshold, not to mention the additional torture of my wife's giggles over the funny email messages I receive.
I am not sweet! Stop calling me that! I swear, I'll throw something the next time I hear that dreaded word.
Every once in a while I listen to soul stirring music, not just for its melody but for those touching lyrics. Like this one, for example, called He thinks he'll keep her by Mary Chapin Carpenter.
Wonderful track.
Browsers are finally waking up to rendering the XML code instead of spitting them in the brower content area. Internet Explorer 7 Beta now has a nice rendering of feeds and, Firefox 2.0 is going through a similar route with additional Subscription options now being built in.
At last, normal people are no longer intimidated, and geeks don't have to repeat this: feed links are not actually meant to be clicked, but should be copied—instead—to be used in feed readers.
As always, folks at A List Apart produce some wonderful, thoughtful, tried and tested articles. I am a cautious optimist in trying this four-day week thing out.
While my Friday may not be a day-off per se, unlike the author of the post suggests, I could use it to channel my thoughts to improvise on my work, have some quality time to think of better, simpler and intelligent ways to get things done and reflect upon.
I came across this excellent Readability test online (via Lifehacker). My blog's test results are as follow:
| Summary | Value |
|---|---|
| Total sentences | 511 |
| Total words | 4293 |
| Average words per Sentence | 8.40 |
| Words with 1 Syllable | 2867 |
| Words with 2 Syllables | 895 |
| Words with 3 Syllables | 402 |
| Words with 4 or more Syllables | 129 |
| Percentage of word with three or more syllables | 12.37% |
| Average Syllables per Word | 1.49 |
| Gunning Fog Index | 8.31 |
| Flesch Reading Ease | 72.60 |
| Flesch-Kincaid Grade | 5.22 |
While this test is unable to judge the quality of content, it provides a fair idea about how easy or difficult it is to read what you write. It turns out that my blog's readability is between that of reading Reader's Digest and Most Popular novels.
Sometimes I think whatever good stuff we think about is already written. Older posts continue to fascinate me, because they are so applicable even in today's breathtaking speed of feed-sync. Look at Clay Shirky's essays or this post from Jon Udell for example:
Semantic-Web naysayers think people and organizations can't be bothered to assert machine-readable facts about themselves. And, today, that is undoubtedly true. But when others assert facts about you—as they increasingly will—the tide could begin to turn. Individual acts of self-defense may ultimately combine to bootstrap the semantic Web.
A colleague of mine pointed out to me that the community photos that we hosted on Flickr for sharing were not accessible. He said and I quote:
We are not able to open the photos here as the service provider in UAE is blocking this site.
BBC is running a story that says Net censorship spreads worldwide. Is the net beginning to cripple? Thanks to the idiotic demands of repressive regimes met by the internet giants in their short-sighted approach to gain market share.
Actually, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google put these regimes into the driver's seat by letting them dictate the terms of censorship. China became an ace example for everyone in the middle east to follow suit. I'm sure certain parts of Europe would be next in embracing censor and serve. Sick!
My previous hosting solution might end sooner than expected. So, if you're reading this via a feed reader, I request you to check the feed address subscribed for this blog. If it shows my previous domain address, then you should change to the following:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/chetan
Because if you do not, sooner or later my old domain would cease to exist and thereby stop redirecting to my above feed, and you'll end up getting a 404 error.
You might be one of my very early subscribers who were being redirected to my Feedburner powered feed address (above), via a plugin. Hence, please check and update (to the above address), if necessary. I apologize for making you do this.
If you're the browse-in type (I am), then this blog is now actually here: http://ch3tan.blogspot.com/
Incidentally, it is also the first ever URI that I owned as a blog, back in October 2001. I feel nostalgic already.
No, I'm not talking about that Franco Nero starring western classic. Django is a framework that Python maniacs and web application developers are chanting these days.
Here's something to cough-up over your coffee, like the Thomson and Thompson brothers.
..you’ve recreated Wordpress in 13 lines of code. Okay, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration — but these 13 lines are truly the most difficult thing a non-programmer will have to do to get a basic blog app running in Django.
Jeff Croft, a web designer recently unveiled his website powered by this framework. Look up his post called Django for non-programmers.
Pretty interesting, indeed.
When FeedBurner came on radar, most people—myself included—signed-up for serving feeds via this service, simply because it provided us feed statistics. Since then, FeedBurner has evolved. Now, there are some amazing goodies—most of them free—to mix and roll your feed out to your subscribers.
But, this post is not about all that excellent (and mostly free) stuff that FeedBurner offers to all content publishers, but something very basic, something that we take for granted, or are even unaware of. Like identity. Like staying connected with existing subscribers transparently.
When I decided to move from my host and continue my blog here, I had two choices: One was to inform all my subscribers to change the feed address to point to the new one here. The other, I'd do it myself without bothering my readers.
I could run with the second choice only because I was serving my feeds via FeedBurner. As you can see, I'm on a service now, unlike a hosted domain. I.e., no .htaccess, no re-write rules and no-redirect. In addition, I was able to keep the so called "anonymous" tag.
I am especially partial to readers subscribed via the feed or by email because, they are not just browsing your site casually, but are subscribed to whatever you're producing. And, you've got to pay them that due by not making them do things, like, change feed link just because you felt like blogging some place else.
I could plumb the new feed (generated by my blog software or service) into FeedBurner's console and the content would still flow transparently through the common address provided by FeedBurner. My feed count shows that I never lost a single reader subscribed via feed during transition.
With a common feed URI like mine, I have the freedom to move between hosts or services, and still be connected with my audience like I had never left the place. Tomorrow, when I might want to change my host or service to something else (and for whatever reasons), my loyal readers are never disconnected.
So, to me, my feed is really my homepage, thanks to FeedBurner. If you're a content producer, I have no hesitation, whatsoever, in recommending this wonderful service.
When someone called The Cave a snore-fest when compared with The Descent, I had to see it.
The Descent, to me, proved to be more of a movie with disgusting scenes—with elaborate blood bath and uglyness of the unknown—than a horror flick.
Douglas Bowman has some nice tips that you can use with Google Calendar. I added one of my simple-bare-necessities: the local holidays, which I always forget. Here's how:
To automatically add local holidays specific for your country, click the "Manage Calendars" link below your list of calendars. Under the Other Calendars section, click the Add Calendar button, and you'll see a "Holiday Calendars" tab that displays a whole set of calendars from which to choose.
Update: Another bare necessity— The to-do list. Possible via a Greasemonkey script which adds to Google Calendar. Yeah, now we're talking GTD.
To all the idiots who drew first blood:
Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarizes a series of passages from Megan McCafferty's teen novels "Sloppy Seconds" and "Second Helpings" for her debut novel: "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." After the story breaks, McCafferty's publisher starts huffing and puffing and threatening legal action, Viswanathan apologizes and goes on the Today show, her publisher Little Brown (which is incidentally my publisher too) withdraws her book from the market, Harvard launches an "investigation" and Viswanathan gets pummeled by a hundred angry columnists, pundits and bloggers.
Can someone tell me why? This is teen-literature. It's genre fiction. These are novels based on novels based on novels, in which every convention of character and plot has been trotted out a thousand times before. If I wrote a detective story, set in 1930's Los Angeles, about a cynical, hard-bitten private eye, with a drop dead gorgeous secretary and a series of lonely housewife clients, would anyone bat an eye? Of course not. It may be a stolen premise. But we accept that within the category of genre fiction a certain amount of borrowing of themes and plots and ideas is acceptable-even laudable.
Calling this plagiarism is the equivalent of crying "copy" in a crowded Kinkos.
Update: Gladwell does a somersault by saying he was wrong. Well, I don't know why he doesn't believe that he got it right the first time. We are talking plagiarism here in context not replaced synonyms, and I quite understand that when you're discussing mundane things, there cannot be a simpler way of explaining some things. Look at the Indian cinema for example, it's wash, rinse, and roll.
If the somersault was the effect of his publisher going on record on Newyork Times, then I've got nothing to say. I guess, the heat was too intense for either of them to take a stand. So, go with the crowd pleaser. Pity. I thought Gladwell was one those rare breeds that stuck out his neck against all odds.
I have used 3D home modelling systems before, they were fairly easy to use but, unfortunately, not free. Google SketchUp, however, is not that easy to use. It takes time and a fair bit of instruction-reading before you can make something as simple as a window.
The good part, however, is that there is a helpful tutorial for every icon, telling you exactly what you can and need to do.
My first creation – a single floor apartment was a little tough to achieve because, instead of creating walls, I made one whole concrete block. I later deleted the structure and made another one by making walls. The next part was making the windows; I made a rectangle in one of the walls and used the push/pull tool to give it some depth. Then I filled the rectangle with transparent glass, tinted blue.
SketchUp is brilliant because its approach to 3D-modelling is innovatively different. You should start at the macro level and then go on to micro level of small things. Otherwise, SketchUp's ingenious technique is wasted if you use the conventional method of modelling. SketchUp is a rapid modeler. The author in the quote above got it right the first time when he created the block, but didn't know how to convert the block into walls.
SketchUp revels in extrusion technique.
So which one is better? Building walls or building a block first and then carve out the excess to get walls? If you're sane, you'll get to the latter, and you'll get it at the fraction of time you'd spend building walls.
I kicked my domain. I swore I'll never come back. Two weeks go by and I can't resist the thought of reclaiming my space on the web.
I can almost hear you say Geez! Is this guy ever serious about anything?
It's a dilemma, alright. On one hand, I am perfectly content with Blogger. The low tech, off the hook, without a care in the world. All the basic stuff is on your plate. (The feeling is exactly like that of Angela Bennet in the last scene, where she has just a laptop instead of an array of computers on her workstation.) On the other hand, I miss the geekery of Wordpress, the hacks, the ifs, the works.
Honestly, I love both. They give me a challenge to change things. Some of the templates available on Blogger are highly underrated, almost always taken for granted. The one I have here by Dan is simply gorgeous. And it feels especially so when you haven't spent a drop of sweat over it yourself.
I can quite imagine what it is to truly find a perfect template that you really love and admire. I think, I'm always content when I use others' templates. When I'm on mine, there is this perennial itch to change, tweak something. That is draining. It takes away the time and effort from the real part of it all: writing.
There's another choice to make: anonymity vs. being known. I am always of the opinion that people scale you when they see your picture or stuff you put up about yourself. I find it limiting, sometimes. Tell me I'm wrong. Of course, not that it really matters, when you write for yourself.
Then, there's this most important catalyst called audience. Now, having an audience is a funny thing. If you don't have them, you're free. You think, oh, no one's reading, and by which sometimes, you produce better stuff. On the other hand, there's this 'hollow' feeling about the lack of'em.
My audience influences me in many ways. I do study topics that show up higher in my stats, especially when I am not expecting them to be rated well. And many a times, I think I've had a good piece, but it fails the stat test, i.e., no hits. Curiously surprising and funny. Private posts get an awful lot of hits. What is it that people want to know so much about your life and your family? I gather, it is the human tendency to dig into that which is obviously not easy to get.
At the moment, I have not made a move to switch domain or a host. Neither have I renewed my domain or hosting plan. But, not a day goes by without reflecting about my immediate previous thoughts on the issue. Funny as they get, they're never the same in sequence. I guess I'm going through a bitter sweet experience of to be or not to be.
For now, I let it linger on.
My parents' place. It took me slightly over an hour to make this. If I were to do this on a board with vanishing points, it would have taken me a minimum of two days. No, correction, I never learnt the perspective with three vanishing points. So, this aerial view would not have been possible by hand at all.
Update: This three-dimensional model was done in SketchUp Free version that Google released today.
A great day for 3D: The new Google SketchUp is for the do-it-yourselfer, the hobbyist - really anyone who wants to build 3D models for use in Google Earth. Go ahead and model that new kitchen, or deck, landscape your virtual garden, or impress your teacher with a roller coaster or medieval castle. When you're finished, place your model in Google Earth. There! The beginning of a virtual world. Warning: don't start messing with this stuff after dinner because your first experience could be an all-nighter.. making an idea come to life in 3D can be very addicting.
Fantabulous!
Blogosphere's speculation about a free version was right after all! I download the pack and tried it just now, and I must tell you, it's really really awesome. Not only that, even a six year old kid can do it. That easy! Yes, I know and before you say it, I am feeling like one. Architects would—I think—wet their pants in joy. I am now!
Loading time is a killer. The previously discussed technique works best if you plan to list fewer links on your blogroll. For some good examples, both Kyle Neath of Warpspire and Khoi Vinh of Subtraction display links-along with their associated favicons-in their blogrolls. (I think their versions are either manually created or they use a server-side script to generate the same effect.)
I just bumped-up my blogroll. There are now about 100 links. These numbers would surely keep my site on an endless loading (favicon from source site) session. So, I went for a quick fix. Go with a simpler blogroll version, while just changing the javascript in the template.
The simpler one-as used on this site-is as follows:
<h2 class="sidebar-title">News</h2>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/ch3tan/news?count=100;sort=alpha"></script>The advantage of using del.icio.us is that at the click of a button, you can add links to your blogroll, just like Blogrolling. While del.icio.us does not show updated blog list like Blogrolling does, it enables you to create different lists based on the tags you choose. Since I don't need to know which blog has been updated recently via my blogroll (I'll leave that job to my feed reader), del.icio.us option is the best I can have.
Update: How not to visit every site to add links to your blogroll using del.icio.us if you have too many to add? You can import from your browser bookmarks. Now, I didn't have bookmarks, because everything is in an opml file that has site feeds (xmlUrl) as well as site links (htmlUrl).
You can either grep htmlUrl and save it as a list of dl and dts to a file called bookmarks.html, and then upload to your account via del.icio.us import.
If you're unfamiliar with grep, then another way: Open Firefox, install Sage, import your opml file. The list contained within the opml file goes-up in your Bookmarks menu in Firefox. Now export your bookmarks to say bookmarks.html to be used in del.icio.us bookmarks import.
Further, links imported thus are not shared by default, you'll need to click on each link to make them shared. But that's easy due to AJAX interface. Most of it is done without the reload. Just a note: pay attention to the bookmarks.html file. (I don't know why Sage drops the htmlUrl and only retains xmlUrl. If that happens, then you'll need to edit each of your links to remove the feed extension. Most of them are simple: site.com/feed or site.com/index.rdf; just remove the feed part of the Url.)
