A major component of web 2.0 or social web as it's more popularly known is the enabling of active participation of website visitors in discussions started by any kind of content created and published online. The earliest implementation of this was the commenting system, most commonly found in blogs that have become one of the easiest and most widely used platform for publishing a layman's presence online.

This entry describes a problem i face when commenting randomly on a number of various articles spread across the blogosphere. People who religiously follow only those blogs which are on their blogroll don't really face this problem that badly. The problem is how do you keep track of all comments that you have posted to numerous blogs and articles hosted on CMS? How do you find out if there were any replies/follow-ups to your comment? How do you even keep a track of all the permalinks you visited and commented on (u won't want to make a mess of your bookmarks feature for just single articles, when you are not even sure whether there will be any replies to your comment at all). Being a bloglnes/news aggregator user I mostly visit article permalinks rather than the entire blog (exception: blogs of my most favorite bloggers are always tracked in entirety). LiveJournal allows me to track replies to any comment/entry i post on any journal on LiveJournal in my email inbox...allowing me to reply to the comment from within my mail client itself. This is a perfect solution, if LJ was the only one blogging solution but that is not to be with bigshots like Google, Yahoo, MSN around :) I have seen some blogs allowing 'watching' the article's comments section for new comments and sending notifications via email...but not all of us are comfortable with giving away our address. another alternative is providing a separate feed for your comments but that is presently supported by open source blogging software like wordpress et al. in the case of feed subscriptions also, you'll face the problem of your news aggregator client being inundated with several hundreds of comment feeds. As long as there be no unique and uniform identity of the user that be authenticated using open standards, it'll be quite some time before i have to work harder on storing as many blog links that i can in my mental buffer.

Wondering if OpenID or something like that could be used to have an anytime anywhere access to notification of replies to any comments that the user has posted anywhere in the blogosphere.
Blogger notification basically sucks. unless the author checks back...you're not gonna get any replies and you won't be able to tell if anyone would continue the thread.

Google does understand that a huge proportion of email users are migrating to the invite-only GMail service and the target audience is slowly filling up with the general herd who'd expect all bloat n bones to exist in one place. So here's an update on how far the most crude XMPP chat client has incorporated more and more of user experience enhancing features

The sequence of developments is roughly as follows: -

1. Google Talk was released for the windows 2000/xp platform. What was really cool about it was that you need not have windows 2000/xp OS because Google didn't want the consumer to suffer vendor lock-in and allowed users to connect with any Jabber compatible client. My choice was Gaim, since I could set it up to connect to yahoo n msn as well. As i later got to use the default google talk client (much later than i had used the embedded client inside gmail), I believe it's the notification of mails and the window controls for entering username and password that required use of windows 2000/xp (esp. if u see the password character of google talk and yahoo messenger, you'd note the difference).One other special feature of google talk client that came right from the start and was not part of either of Jabber/XMPP standard was the VoIP service built into it. Ajay'd want to talk with me but i was still in love (basically stuck with some kind of unexplainable stubbornness) with ME. As per Ajay, the VoIP client gave amazing voice clarity even at low connection speeds. Sidenote: VoIP is more optimized for voice chat/call than basic voice chat that was incorporated in yahoo right in its early days, since the protocol is dedicated to transferring voice.


2. One requirement for using the google talk service was that the user should have a GMail account which gives him/her access to the google talk service. Even if you were a GMail user it was required of you to invite your GMail addresswala contacts explicitly to join you in the chat (invite is one-time process...but some friends make the reminding process multiple times buggin). Google used this requirement to the benefit of those users who were not on windows xp/2000, for people who'd like to chat from a public computer where installation of extra applications may not be permitted and for people who might be having a problem with installing/using 3rd party Jabber client software. They built the Google Talk client right into the Gmail interface, one of the coolest insta-responsive interface. Not forgetting their slow connection/incompatible browser users, they had still kept the existing 2 interfaces to GMail. so now there are standard, standard without chat and html interfaces. So this way users could choose to use the official client from right inside the browser and there is no need for any plugin of any sort, except that your browser should support java (if chat is to be enabled). The chat feature got implemented in phases.


3. Soon after they made sure that the enormous mailbox disk quota per user was used to the user's advantage by using this space to store chat transcripts/logs (with the user's permission) and thus enabling the user to have anytime anywhere access to his/her past conversations. This is waayyyy better than the yahoo messenger message archiving option which stores chat logs in the Pc itself and thus doesn't provide the anytime anywhere access. also if you don't realise, the archiving option is turned off by default, so if you close the window, there is (by murphy's law) a very high chance of you losing exactly that part of the conversation that could help you continue the conversation.


4. I can't tell for sure if this feature was added later on or was introduced with the embedding of the chat interface in the gmail site interface is that the conversations in chat got saved into your mailbox (if you allowed gmail to save your chats) no matter what client software/service you used. this gave more freedom to the user, less reason to be stuck with the chat client in gmail and a greater challenge to google for adding more user-appealing features :) . an example would be when u disabled chat in gmail due to slow connection and are using a browser-based chat client like meebo which does not save you chats if you don't have a meebo login. Saving chat logs in gmail has another advantage and that is if a gmail user has sent you an email and while checkin mail you see that he/she is online, you may reply in chat and that conversation gets tacked onto the conversation thread started by the original email.


5. Lately Google Talk has released a beta (testing version) of GTalk which showcases some of the features that have been incorporated by popular demand (or is it public demand?). This version has 3 new features that are immediately apparent are
   
   
   • File Sharing. P2P protocol is used to achieve maximum speed. This was a long awaited feature for most.
   
   
   • Voicemail. Now even if the recipient is not online and you feel talking is a better option than writing an offliner (which by any means is not supported by google talk) you could send a recorded message in their voicemail.
   
   
   • Ability to display the name of the current playing audio track on your PC, regardless of what media player you are using. This shows that google listens to frivolous feature requests as well. one thing special about this music detection module is that it detects songs played in windows media player while most others require a plugin to be downloaded for windows which requires you to prove you got a genuine copy n yada yada yada....endless hassles ending into no positive result. However I noticed that there was a length limit on the string which displayed the song title and most of the times if you use long descriptive tags (including album artist et al) for your songs more than half of it will be simply truncated.


6. As of the time of writing this entry, Google has turned the aforementioned testing release into a public release version (pessimistically claimed as beta, just in case some users want to blame them for the bugs served out of nowhere :)


7. Had enough of new features? Thinkin' that's all a chat service should be doing or could possibly do? Google is constantly aiming to make the user rethink the possibilities of his simple html viewing web browser. Guess what? google has enabled a flash player into gmail itself so u could listen to your voicemails recorded by your google talk friends right inside your browser. For some more details look at here and here.
   Gmail audio player can play voicemails and mp3's sent as email attachments. basically its the google video player that is used to play the audio file. if you know the location of an mp3 player on a remote server you could construct an URL as http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=MP3_URL where MP3_URL is the url of the mp3 file hosted online. Playing files on remote servers using this method doesn't even require you to login to gmail and hence doesn't require you to even have a gmail account.

Never expect the list to be definite. Never expect Google to have stopped amazing you. Before finishing the post let me show you a few ways, you could connect to your friends on google talk: -

• Google Talk


• GAIM


• GMail


• Meebo


• Any Jabber/XMPP client software

You'd need the official client to get access to any of the extra good features like new mail notifications, voip, voicemails, file sharing and current track detection :D

Had heard of Simpy from FN and even had happened to visit a simpy site but it just looked like extra work to move from my existing collection of links on del.icio.us...till I happened to arrive at it via de.lirio.us, while checking all the social bookmark sites that line up blog articles of news sites...just so ppl can quickly bookmark the article...permalink is not enough any more.

I saw a lot of change on the homepage and it had got better by this revisit. :) As i was looking at all the social bookmarking sites, I was looking for a site that allows private bookmarks, primarily since i need a bookmarking site not just to share socially but also to have a centrally located copy of the same such that i could have access to my bookmarks whether i'm at home or at university without cluttering all browsers on all pc's with my enormous set of bookmarks (well not as enormous as FN's :) Among all, I noticed that simpy had that feature and upon checking out the site i felt it was just the right choice (scroll below for reasons i simpy love it) but what about my existing 250 links on del.icio.us? As soon as I signed up and got logged in, the page to import existing bookmarks came up (clever idea). As I didn't realise that simpy is already del.icio.us friendly, I went to del.icio.us to export bookmarks with tags and descriptions only to find that my tags will be replaced by a single tag that i'll be entering in the import bookmarks form. Importing from del.icio.us is real easy and perfect. you need not navigate away from simpy while you enter your login details of del.icio.us and choose whether the imported links should be marked as private (for your eyes and login only :D ) or as public. Since my bookmarks had so far been public i kept them so. Del.icio.us bookmarks imported this way have their tags and notes preserved as well which is very important coz tags are one of the appealing main reasons for using such a service rather than just dumping the bookmarks.html file in any of the myriad free web spaces available or even worse on a portable storage device.

Ok, so by now My Simpy is ready to serve fresh links from DP's twisted tours of cyberspace. Only one thing that remains and has been kept for the ultimate effect are the reasons why moving to simpy wasn't just pure attraction (or maybe it was ;): -

1. Simpy allows private bookmarks


2. Simpy allows multi-word tags


3. Simpy allows smooth migration from del.icio.us


4. Simpy allows searching a user's bookmarks without actually logging in. del.icio.us by default if not logged in searches the entire site.


5. Simpy shows a select few of the tags that the user has used among top tags (most used tags) and recent tags, so a visitor can directly go to a subset of the bookmarks which have a tag relevant to his/her need as well as search directly thru the provided search box. For the un-tagged links, you might do a (full-text) search...just type in your query in the search box on the user's bookmarks homepage.


6. Simpy not only provides RSS/Atom feeds for your bookmarks but allows you to keep track of your favorite people's bookmarks via watchlists. Better than watchlists is the watchlists filter option, which lets you not just subscribe to people saving links of your interest but to keep track of only those links which are of your interest. after all we all have myriad interests...don't we? del.icio.us came up recently with the network feature, but to me it looks like a bookmarks of bookmark lists with some bare inter-networking and socializing going on between the members of the network.


7. Detect broken, forgotten and even redirected bookmarks. Simpy constantly crawls, checks, and re-indexes your bookmarks, allowing you to quickly see all your broken bookmarks and fix them.


8. Simpy Notes. This is something that i looked up right now. An extra service just to keep the user interested. These are not exactly the notes that you attach to del.icio.us bookmarks but kind of random bits of textual info that u might want to save for later reference while browsing the www. google also has it's google notebook product but a google account is not as accessible as a simpy account. so now you could even have say the links to download all your favorite software in a notepage typed at home and go to the university and squeeze the bandwidth limits and get all the MB's and GB's of software :) There are examples of shopping lists and to-do's but those are not exactly what i have in mind for stuff that i want to get access to anytime and anywhere.


9. Besides providing syndicated feeds for both user's bookmarks (all) and user's bookmarks (by a tag), simpy allows to generate a feed from a search query...like a saved search query, like google blogsearch's auto-generated feed for it's search results


10. Simpy allows storing, accessing and retrieving bookmarks et al using the REST API and provides client libraries in java, python, php, ruby and perl

I suppose that's a whole lotta love for simpy....still loads more reasons to explore and appreciate this service.

Meebo is one of the finest examples of the powers of AJAX (often confused and generalized as web 2.0 by the general public). Meebo has been continuously adding a lot of new usability features...still without charging a single penny!

For those who have a meebo username, you can visit MeeboMe and get a chat widget for your website.

Having a username, allows u to set your account details for aol/yahoo/gtalk/msn on meebo so you could have a SSO (single sign-on) into all of them when u log into your meebo account. the other feature i prefer of meebo is the chat history. in case of gtalk all conversations are archived in your gmail account (if u choose) so they are accessible on any pc where u can access gmail, but the others like yahoo store the archive on the pc itself. Finally you do need a username for having a meebo widget :) but you need not worry if you already don't have one...in step 2 (after you select the size and the name of the chat widget) you'll be asked to join meebo or log in with your existing id.

what's this widget that i'm talkin about? In layman's terms (it's hard to explain except by giving examples [:(] ) they are interactive gadgets or small pieces of GUI (Graphical User Interface), that enables the author implementing the widget add a totally new functionality to the entire interface. widgets are mainly used for content that changes rapidly. think of weather alerts, new email alerts, interactive chat with the site's tech support/owner. Meebo widget is one example and you can check out the example on my Plog (1 more reason to hate blogspot. the gmail attachments that i copied over to blogger didn't get stored on photos.blogger.com and now i got a blog full of large broken image placeholders and even uploading the animated gif's from my computer just converts them to dumb static png's). MacOS 10.4 implements widgets using the Dashboard software. For more details on widgets read this.

The meebo widget doesn't allow your site or blog to become a public chatroom (real-time or passive). you'd rather look for a java solution for that or a simple php script that stores the messages in a file and refreshes your site with the latest messages displaying in the chat box. Meebo allows the site owner to interact with the site visitors on a one-to-one basis and this is the point that differentiates meebo from the other flash-based chat-on-any-site widget by Gabbly, which enables visitors to a site to communicate with all those who are on the same page...y'know bad mouth the site together if possible :P If the owner of the widget is not logged in, then it appears so on the top section of the chat widget, users sending messages thru the widget will fall on deaf ears...just remain in the widget....as good as echoing the characters on screen just to test whether your keyboard is working fine. :) Once the widget owner logs in, the visitors can chat with him/her and the owner will get IM windows in his browser window/tab where meebo site is opened and logged in. This is an excellent way of interacting with multiple site visitors at the same time, without confusing the conversations between multiple IM sessions/visitors happening in a single place. However it is still at an experimental phase and there is no stopping a set of nuisance makers flooding the owner's meebo window with unnecessary spim (spam thru IM -- Instant Messaging).

Do visit my Plog and hope to get a chance to chat with you...if i'm online at the same time on meebo.

On my search for information on widgets i came across Yahoo! Widgets (previously called Konfabulator). It gives the same experience as the Dashboard system in MacOS X. Really cool, real-time interactive goodness. Google Desktop also has a lot of these desktop gadgets but not as glossy as these...hehe too much temptation to work on windows 2000/xp eh? don't worry it's possible in linux too...with the gloss if u will...it's just that big names like yahoo aren't really putting their name/money into it.

I'd been really trying to get this stuff on my journal for a long long time, about my encounters with absolute newbies in gnu/linux who are surprisingly more quick to adapt than those who are meant to learn and use it as part of their studies/work.

During the short phase of all the usually frequented websites being blocked in DCST, the popularity of the internet centre (a computer lab primarily meant and almost exclusively used for internet access) in the university campus had increased manifold...should it have been pay per hour, the scene might have differed. So during the last days of the phase (we weren't aware they were the last days, but i can say so, now as its an event that has passed), I observed Ubuntu 'breezy badger' installed on an experimental basis on a few PC's and running pretty smooth with the net access configured. Encountering the new linux boxes was a pleasant surprise, as I usually start my session with inserting the pen drive, installing firefox from the pen drive and then starting my session, but at first glance (the browser was open and i didn't notice the OS gui, etc.), I saw and thought "Hey! these guys put firefox on all PC's!!..now how cool is that?" "...well it's not as cool as the entire internet centre lab being 60% (at that time) ubuntized and the rest on their way to being so...knowing that majority visitors will be from any department but the expected linux-knowing mca dept." Even though most users require some windows-specific internet related tools like IM messengers or some such tools, they are really not making a noise for being made to use linux...they still have a choice of using windows but still, they are using the firefox browser on linux happily...why 'happily'? coz they're downloading wallpapers especially to decorate tux background. now that is real neat. you might say insignificant, but what's important here is that students are using firefox on ubuntu as normally as they would with other browsers, looking for alternate options to their windows specific tools thru web applications

Mr. Sadashiv, the one-man-army who did the entire lab conversion to ubuntu had his first learning experience in life with linux only durign the installation in the 'internet centre'. While having a chat with the guy, he told me that besides the fact that multiple copies of Ubuntu being easily available, the network configuration and other system wide configs were easy...easy for him working first time on linux. hey aren't first timers supposed to get stuck with fedora/redhat like crappy distros, work n save files, lament coz more than half of the features from the other distros don't work, format, lose results of hard work and reinstall a sensible distro? anyways this guy was lucky and i am lucky to gather this reaction as a recommendation for future reference that ubuntu is good for someone doing admin work or linux box management with no earlier linux experiences. I asked him why did he want to install gnu/linux in a place where the maximost of the users'll be from non-IT background (and I already see most of the DCST students, wincing at the thought of working on linux...oh leaving aside the mandatory assignments. :) )? He said (as i observed and confirmed) that installing linux is worth it in the internet centre as the people using it are primarily interested in getting access to web-based content and a browser suffices on almost all occassions for that purpose and ubuntu has the best browser in the free software world which is better than IE at any given time! so there you go...perfect solution to keep users happy and the system happy. The best part of the chat with Mr. Sadashiv was that at no point did he complain about any feature in ubuntu that may have probably been relatively difficult to configure than on a windows machine.

kept the best part for the last...nah didn't put the headlines below the bottomline...just that this was the coolest part of the gnu/linux experience at the internet centre.
The most interesting user of the new ubuntu installation was the security guard (Rohit) from Nepal who'd been kept in charge of the internet centre and taught a few basic things on windows and currently on gnu/linux. what's more interesting is how much he had picked up on his own and how he went about it. I observed initially during the windows days that he was pretty much familiar with the concept of searching for content on the web and surfing by navigating thru links. He had also (as told by him) been taught a couple of games like spider solitaire and others on windows. Windows is easy to use, anyone can learn it fast, the usual blah blah...not really that cool eh? well this guy after the installation of gnu/linux on all the desktops in the lab, not only memorized the login to let visitors log into ubuntu and start surfin the net, but also figured out the rules of one of the few gnome games available on the ubuntu distro and played effectively. He was not taught a single step to start/play the game. Probably windows users can't see their supporters goin' away :D Rohit explained that he groped around the menus, looking for similarity between windows start menu and ubuntu applications menu. now windows taskbar is usually at the bottom of the screen whereas gnome in ubuntu has it at the top of the page with a different terminology. Under Applications, he located Games (yeahh! Games! wontcha hav said it like a decade ago...when games were playable on affordable hardware?), and clicked through a couple of titles of which he plays just one now (can't recollect the name of the game). The rules of the game isn't clear at first glance (or on few crazy clicks), so it was amazing to know that he knew to dig out relevant stuff from the help menu of the game and RTFM like a true gnu/linux user. Near the end of the chat, that I had with Rohit, I taught him two more games (gnibbles and same-gnome)that were easier than the one he played. the first being the snake game clone and the second one being similar to clickomania where u remove bunch of same-colored spheres by clicking on the set of them. I mean these are really easy, but the main point is to give the guy more choices for entertainment. He also wanted some news sites that would give news about India. Just to simplify stuff, i did the googling and gave him 2 or 3 links, the limitation being that i bookmarked it for him on only one pc but i dunno if it might have been a good idea to overload his brain with 'searching the net, optimizing the queries and choosing the right results from among the billion results coughed up in fractions of seconds'. It was really a great day and a great chat.

On a related note, I'd installed mandriva 2006 on one of my junior's desktop in the hostel (while he was busy playing football and ignoring the chance to watch a different distro's installing procedure). Mandriva has neat interface, has been set to use (by me) IceWM which supports most of the windows keyboard shortcuts and is really really handy when the mouse just hangs. There's a pending issue with the monitor, It's a LG monitor, but the junior isn't aware of the exact model and no clue to the model numbers is available, so maximised windows are shooting out of the boundaries of the monitor and most of the times the "Ok" button gets hidden below the monitor, till we locate the model number.
The junior was happy that he could work from his room and not have to associate the word bored with 'linux: study time' as i showed him how to browse thru his windows partition and also play his mp3 collection using xmms on his excellent 2.1 speakers with deep-bass woofer.
programming without music is just so 'uninspired'...

As Brajesh told me on chatting with him about these encounters, that one need not be computer literate or in a broader sense gadget/machine literate to be able to accomplish tasks on the computer. There needs to be the thirst for knowledge, interest in learning the new environment, urge to seek help that's ready for serving and patience to RTFM. Last words on this article is, "breezy badger is good, dapper drake is reported to expect really high system requirements and mandriva downright sucks...or maybe i cud blame my sick desktop or the iso of the dvd from which i got a copy. KDE's causing big time problems...thinkin' of trying SLES 10...if the CD's work :)

A brief update on some podcasts that I occasionally track n listen to

LinuxQuestions (LQ) Podcasts runs for like 15 to 18 mins. uses heavy compression so file size is around 4 to 5.5 mb now that's dial-downloadable ain't it...but this is like the most crudimentary
podcast of jeremy (root of LQ) with just a single monotonous voice droning about news of the week in world of linux and also a bit about the IT world. u need to be really paying attention coz the voice is low (quality)...sometimes this feels like a text to speech program being run...but to get so much news without any commercial or free break in that filesize is good.

Whats New Now has a more broader scope including all kinds of IT stuff. hardware software, open source, hidden source, expos, exhibitions, etc. Check out John C. Dvorak's articles? He reminds the reader...the intended reader that "Truth hurts" :)

Latest is The Linux Action Show podcast of which episodes 3 to 8 are being available in both ogg and mp3 format...as of the time of writing this article. Anyone got the first two episodes? dataone is as flaky as the noisy phone line in the rainy season...so it's not all yippee yay for me :) (right now am getting the rest of the episodes from dcst lab...pretty good speed after a long time...yippee yay!!) episode 3 is 17 mb and is of 38 mins (64kbps VBR) ogg file. what's different in this podcast is that this one goes on more like a naturally flowing discussion (packed with 'Action' ;) like we would have when we meet and we learn as we discuss. there's a bit of the jingles added here and there and a segment end kinda music after 11 mins or so. it's more interesting to listen to this podcast...practical examples are narrated and that really makes the show more interesting. Even though I feel like divulging contents of the podcasts...it'd be more fun if u listened to them yourself and/or followed the summary on the permalink page for each episode.

One thing i noticed about Open Source based podcasts is that though i previously felt that pre-recorded shows would contain information that might be stale by now..it's not always so. there are just so many applications and web sites that we are yet to discover and gathering info thru reading wud take much longer than all the news summarized and delivered in a format that you can literally sit back relax and absorb most comfortably...it does sound a bit geeky to be relaxing to technical stuff rather than some music...but then Linux Action Show is real fun to hear...even for a technical subject.

this is a copy paste from a mail that i sent to a friend in reply to his helping me find the wonderful podcast at The Linux Action Show. Incidentally it was kind of sidekick mention in one of his mails to ILUG-Goa, but I see no one discussing it...Broadband hasn't spread long and broad yet. :D

My idea of abstraction was nothing more than an abstract notion of it till I spent some time staring at the definitions and explanations on wikipedia and answers.com. Hopefully I know a bit more about abstraction now..though it still remains hard to explain it without resorting to abstracting the view of the concept. Now why would I bother about abstraction so much? See the title. Write one page (in your word processor...no margins or font sizes defined) on the meaning of abstraction and an example of how abstraction is used in daily life...apart from computer science. Now that's not only tricky but unfair too. I use computers in my daily life. :P Well I am cross-posting the contents for review below.

Abstraction: It is the process of taking the essential details out of all the information related to an idea or concept, so as to reduce the effective volume of the information retained to a manageable size without any significant loss or tampering of information required to vaguely describe the idea or concept.

Abstraction of a concept is what we listen to in the theory classes. Although it’s enough for us to get an idea of whatever the lecturer is broadcasting, it just gives us only as much an idea about the idea as our brains process the provided information (spoken word) based on the environment we are and have experienced. Having lab sessions is one way of having a more concrete understanding of the concept of which we have abstracted the essential details in our mind during the theory class. Similarly, abstracting an emotional state to happiness reduces the amount of information conveyed about the emotional state. Well that was just an example of what abstraction means in relation to concepts, but it ended a bit too soon. Let me see if I can come up with another abstract notion and let your mind project the ‘real’ picture.

Think of chess. You probably had intense practical sessions and more often than not without really going through any texts of the theory or the abstraction of the concept of the game. You might have learnt it on-the-fly as you followed other people playing. When you think of chess, you probably visualize the pieces the checked board (more often than not made of white and black). The rules of chess are an abstract definition of how the game is to be played between two individuals (not necessarily human beings) that is it defines and labels the various characters in the game, it never details the appearance or shapes of the chess pieces, the material used to build them (or the graphical library used to generate a visual image of them in a computer game). For e.g. the chess piece called ‘king’ is not defined as a tall piece with a small cross on top because it can also be depicted by the letter K, a particular sound frequency or a computer icon, etc. It is distinguished by it’s characteristic position on the chessboard, it’s moves and the effect of it’s defeat/capture in the game…where the term capture is an abstract notion implying the movement of an enemy piece into it’s cell (possibly) blocking all other exits. Abstraction of rules and the token characters in this game and most other board games is one of the key reasons why these games with innumerable outcomes are still practical to implement as games on computer. Also abstraction in case of definition of rules in the context of board games is a bit more complete and exhaustive, hence allowing the possibility of 2 persons to play these moves in their own minds. Neatorama.com has an article of a man paralyzed totally from below his neck being able to control the pointer on a computer screen using just signals from his brain, which get transferred via a sensor to the computer which deciphers the signals into his intention to move the cursor. So it’s not going to be all that difficult to play a nice quiet game unless you are playing in a country like ours and the lights go out….UPS goes peeeeeee!!!

Last of all I don’t know if I am able to convince the reader that I have got the abstract of the meaning of abstraction or the abstraction of everything else but it. I mean the usual example that I come across has become so overused despite the change of characters, places and seasons. :)

yeah i guess that's the reason why this blog hasn't seen much of me for several days now. writer's block...isn't that the graceful excuse? makes you a writer and gives you the freedom to skip the hardwork...well let's see what i can crap about in this issue

Well my new theme sucks...plainly coz i now realize it's hard on the eyes...especially the page containing the list of tags that i have used...pain in the balls...eyeballs. Of course I'd liked a repulsive layout but not a blinding layout. All I can say is laptop TFT screens are worst screens to judge your layouts on. worse still is i have to go thru the exercise again. wonderin... which color scheme to use.. ;) So much trouble and again all redoing....i'm bored....will think of doing it later....will have to do on that stupid TFT screen as of now.

Classes have started from unearthly 0930. Heard that juniors have from 0915. Reason for justification...MBA's start from 0830. MCA waale ullu jaise raat jaag jaag ke insane deadlines waale project pe project kiye jaate hain...uska kuchh nahin and yes coming to the issue of lab...i'll give an overall view of status of net access in goa university...

Ever since we finished one year we've been asked to move to the new lab...like we had told our seniors. :D However new lab's firewall (or whatfuckinever stupid network software be there) is simply dropping all data packets from certain sites the names or pattern of which none of DCSTians have been able to ascertain. strangely even whitelisting some of those sites didn't help. Funny thing is...E-V-E-R-Ywhere else....even in our dear old lab...sites work without a problem and yes none of the sites whose packets are getting rejected are blacklisted.
So right now, the latest hangout after classes is internet centre of goa university which seem to have oodles of bandwidth allowance and ability to open most of the sites. MCA dept. doesn't have control over the university network...has the narrowest possible bandwidth allowance. open 5 tabs in firefox and if gubevol comes online...u're screwed by squid's ERROR page...forever...kya isspeed se aati hai... And to top it all...there are absurd site restrictions.

By yesterday all juniors from outside category have arrived in hostel...hope the girls have got their accomodations too. warden's made life miserable of hosteliers. zimmedari toh kuchh aati nahin...khaali bhaunkne ki authority misuse karna jaante hain. am not much worried coz i believe.. "jaisi karni...waisi bharni" nah toh theek se baat karta hai aur nahi hostel ke liye kuchh kar pata hai...khaali "i have ordered this and i have ordered that..." doesn't have the guts to see through the execution of the orders. wing B hostel which everyone given a chance wants to avoid is simply so un-livable. hostel ke andar hi jangal. and to think that it was girl's hostel (few years back)!! yeesshhh chhhee chhhee chheee :P
One more thing is that the girls' hostel get much better food compared to our mess...hum log kya insaan nahin hai...ya fir humare liye budget mein kuchh bachta nahin...only leftovers. Everyone's swallowing quietly... :( It always becomes a problem during the exams to get proper food nearby and that bastard guest house canteen wallah told us hosteliers not to eat there coz it seems we have sworn at him...abused him. as if there was no reason behind it. fucktasting food is already the pits...now if the food causes health problems then all I gotta say is "FUCK YOU!"

New batch of juniors have all come from different states and are in different incompatible states. Some have differences with my classmates toh some have differences among themselves. I am just amazed and thankful to how friendship bond between BAA and me got formed. Now in the time of juniors and seniors (outsiders) having serious differences, I am in a difficult position as trying not to lose my friends and yet at the same time not agreeing to all that they ask of the juniors. i won't state any of that here...nor discuss it. Although I don't mind dropping friends at any point of time...BAA is as good as part of my family and I'd reconsider my policies infinite^infinite times before even having the faintest idea of having to sever relations with either or all of them...simply unimaginable. yet at the same time...well let's see how things go.

Juniors (boys2men) have given their formal introductions quite a number of times..so let's see how many i can remember. I swear I didn't look up orkut profiles... ;P

• Ravi Kant Kotwal: B.Sc. student from Jammu...not Kashmir.


• Sumit Kumar: B.Sc. Maths (Honors) from Dhanbad


• Uday Anand: B.Sc. Comp. Sc. from Delhi (Harinagar)..Ashu's junior.


• Abhishek Kumar: Had been trying to hunt down his seniors on orkut much before he joined GUMCA. :) He's a BCA student from BIT (...place sounded like Mesra...BAA'll know better). He's from Bihar...koi ek jagah ka naam bataya tha (well u know i'm bound by my word that i won't check on orkut...don't feel like doing the hard work)


• Guddu Kumar: As sweet as his name. Typical Bihari style bolne ka. Unfortunately fell sick seriously. As a matter of fact, quite a few of the juniors haven't adjust to the changed weather. Let's see aage aage guddu jee kya rang dikhate hain.. ;)


• Vivek Anand: Nah! not Swamiji (Swami Vivekanand) not at all mischievous like him. A bit too much of a yesman...probably sycophantic. He had a birthday day before yesterday which he tried to conceal, but unfortunately revealed in orkut and got spotted by brajesh who added him on the same night. we celebrated his birthday yesterday night...it was a mess...a yummy mess. lotsa fun...still don't like the kicking part. univers(ity)al thing though.


• Anand Kumar: So many Anands!! Anandmay batch hai.. :P He has done BCA and is from Patna. A bit overbold in communicating...not that it's bad but just a bit intimidating for the listener. Better atleast than the rest...but needs to improve on a few points...which will hopefully happen if he's receptive with a positive mind.

I did remember all of them...but not all their details...will learn in due course of time. :D

Writer's Block?? WTF is that? It's just hard to break the habit. ;)

Podcasting is an extension of RSS feeds, allowing a RSS subscriber to use special software called a podcatcher to download the new updated content on a daily or weekly basis. This is part 2 of my earlier post on podcasting. This highlights the practical aspect of podcasting with an example of subscribing to LQ through iTunes.

Although iTunes can be installed for free on a windows desktop without need for buying an iPod which incidentally we have recently, for sister (for her academic excellence + birthday). The main thing was to look for a podcast feed which is free and at the same time is somewhat useful. So luckily the last newsletter of LQ that i received had the usual mentions of various features of LQ (it's just one of the most comprehensive linux related websites that just has-it-all, thanks to jeremy), wherein i read thru the LQ podcast section and saw some special link (which didn't appear as a clickable hyperlink) starting with "itms://" and remembered that now i do have itunes and a good (unlimited) connection, so why not try it out. As you will oberve the previous post on podcasting had been written on 22nd jun 2005...more than a YEAR ago!! at that time, i once downloaded one episode and the size was pretty huge...maybe it was a special episode or something. So this time when the iTunes was loading the episode audio file real fast i was amazed at bsnl...till i knew of the size. :D

Before getting to the enjoying podcast part let's go thru how I figured out adding the LQ podcast to my iTunes subscription list. Steps after i noted down the itms link. : -
Please note that on the website you'll find the generic syndication link that works with all podcatchers and not just restricted to iTunes. My intention of trying out the itms link was to see how the entire thing works on an existing software that i already had installed and which is tested to work with the hardware (iPod) that we have at hand.

1. I opened up iTunes and located a menu option "Podcasts" on the left pane.


2. It gave an existing list of feeds categorized into interests/genres...but no way to add new feed...not prominent as such.


3. Tried out Winamp/RealPlayer's method of "Open Location" but no such option under File menu.


4. Firefox comes to the rescue...umm actually my brilliant idea does! :P Every protocol has an associated application that handles it. So one can launch the associated application via the browser by entering the url preceded by the appropriate protocol... itms:// in this case. Note that in the general case adding feeds to a podcatcher is similar to the way u'd do it in a news aggregator, except for the fact that the software should 'catch' the podcasts as audio files and not unpronunciable garbage.


5. Once the iTunes app got launched via firefox. It shows some meta information about the feed like the title and author and other details that the podcast author might have added and a link to subscribe to the feed. Now since LQ podcast is free, you need not worry about payment methods and all. In iTunes however, there are two ways of paying for the music/audio content that you subscribe to from the ITMS (ITunes Music Store). one is having a pre-configured account that u can pay from using the 1-click method or by choosing the payment method each time.


6. Once i clicked on subscribe, it started fetching the latest episode. By default it's set to subscribe to content from latest file onwards and is supposed to delete old content once new episodes are released. As a precaution I saved an extra copy of the downloaded episode to another folder. One can also download older entries that are available through the feed link. However since LQ podcast is really a valuable source of info, it's worthwhile to store the episodes for future reference...besides jeremy isn't such a bad show host ;)


7. At this point as the episode started loading in iTunes, i remembered last year's experience of patiently waiting for the ~29mb episode to trickle down the non-reliable dial-up connection and went back to reading a few more pages of catch-22.


8. Occasionally turning towards the comp. to check hopefully for a few drops more of download success. Surprisingly the progress bar (which is actually the seek bar for audio files) was zooming ahead pretty rapidly and before long the episode was done...really really fast.


9. Before checking for reasons n all, I played the podcast entirely to see if the entire thing got downloaded properly or not. It played perfectly...all of 14.49 mins!


10. Things became clear (as to how the episode loaded fast) once i checked through the file's (mp3 format) metadata. it was a 32 kbps mp3 sampled at 22khz resulting in the filesize being only 3.2 mb... oh yeah! just 3.2 mb for a 14 min. episode! one thing to note here is since it's just one person's voice and no background jingles and also that this content is made for portable devices with limited memory capacity, this audio quality file is not only acceptable but desirable too.

One cool thing about listening to informative podcasts especially LQ radio is that, you tend to absorb more of the news, just because your ears don't skim/skip thru the information fed to it as much as the eyes does (overlooking v/s overhearing). Also if you're listening to podcasts on your pc itself, you could quickly open up sites mentioned in the episode and check for related info. This assumption is made on the basis of the fact that a podcast feed and a podcatcher is freely available but not the portable media player. The only step remaining now is to sync the episodes between the iPod and iTunes and for that i need sister' permission and knowinng her...i don't think grooving to such a monotonous technical talk show is anything remotely close to what my sister might enjoy. imagine her iPod in shuffle mode and a LQ podcast immediately follows a shakira number ("hips don't lie"...ain't that the new track? :)

I hate fuckin' DCST lab. Now even the physics' dept. assholes look smart in comparison. None of the bloody email accounts are opening. I wonder if physics dept. has blocked our labs out due to some idiots downloading viral mails thru gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, etc. it's so inconvenient to be out of touch. Hope things improve soon.

It's been a long time since I blogged last and much longer time since I blogged about "my world". lost touch with myself, lost in these reviews and stuff...well more of them will come, but time for a self-realization post. :D

Nowadays most of my time has been wasted online...ah well! why wasted you ask? well utilization for some is wastage for others. In one way there's lots of information and cool stuff that I've been inundated with and hardly being able to keep track of. best that I did was mark a lot of these stuff as bookmarks in my del.icio.us page.

I have incorporated a javascript feed from the site on one of my blogspot blogs, which shows the latest 10 links added under the Links section. no need to manually create a list of favorite links...coz favorites change :) Most people i see don't tag their entries...and in course of time will realise that their collection is just too humongous and tags are a quick way to narrow down the scope of the search/browse. Initially it might have been difficult, esp. for sites which are not saved by anyone else. But in majority of cases, they are saved and appropriately tagged, so all ya gotta do is just click n select any of the popular/recommended tags. I'd prefer to go with the popular ones...so a search on those tags are more likely to return relevant results from other users atleast, if not yours.
A related thing is blogrolling, which confused me, till I tried it out finally on my blogspot blog. It's just the same as the del.icio.us feed but specifically for blogs (or sites with syndicated feeds). Blogrolling.com, a tucows company which is most popular for serving blogrolls has a limited free version and my experience with it wasn't very satisfactory. it allows you to import an OPML file, which is basically list of RSS/ATOM feeds which is interchangeable between news aggregators. Now the service is so dumb that when you place a blogroll out of these feeds into your blog, it puts a list of links to the xml feeds which most browsers don't handle well today. M$ is supposedly working on a way to handle feed links, the URL's would be feed:feedurl...can't track down the URL but read it loong back on the IE blog, when there were discussions on what new features are being planned for IE 7 and further versions...Atleast they have incorporated tabs and RSS. I feel even though firefox is more popular among the alternatives, it'll do well for IE to see Opera as the ideal coz it is an alternative that is spun off a centralized production process with lotsa controls and a focus on studying usage patterns to bundle appropriate helper applications, which the open source browser forget to, in the name of freedom.

Surprisingly I had been using a service (Bloglines), but never discovered that the site itself itself provided the blogroll feature. Here I could choose to show n number of all the feeds or feeds from a particular folder (created in my account). My public profile of bloglines is here. The blogroll is not site specific and if anyone requires, just browse the public feeds page and let me know which folder you'd like to sync....the full feed won't be available, there are a few loose ones, but i'll pack them under misc. folder soon.

While I'm on the topic of web feeds, the feeds (from my bloglines collection) that have kinda become my favorites out of my collection are : -

1. All feeds under friends' blogs folder...for obvious reasons


2. Dilbert comic strip...practically funny


3. Boing Boing...my source of all those "where do u get such cool (not to forget...weird) sites from?"


4. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot..."Context is for the weak" , humor in real life, a la bengali style :)


5. Rediff...so far seems to be the only indian news site that syndicates it's content


6. TheInquirer...for it's tongue-in-cheek reviews and news bits. what's more captivating is their amazing ability to convey the news in least number of words

. Check out my bloglines profile to get the links to these sites and read some of their latest content.

Another exciting thing that I tried out was setting up a drupal powered website. What was most exciting was at almost 10% of the time I needed to code from scratch my project website for NIO, drupal helped me put up a community site in so much less time, and with more cool factors and oomph! i haven't seen anything more beginner-friendly than this. One can come up with large scale sites easily using the drupal engine. It's easy coz almost all configurations of how the site appears and behaves can be done graphically. Your web browser becomes the administration/control panel. The only thing that needs to be done manually is setting up the database consisting of over 50 tables (don't worry they give the sql file which u can import into your database.) Again in most cases, this can be done from the web browser using PHPMyAdmin. In very rare cases, where you can afford a dedicated host, you'd get shell access and access mysql's command line utility and follow the drupal installation instructions which are for such an installation. Once you create the first account (admin) you are presented a huge switchboard of options...click, flip, blip....your time starts now! As time passes, you may need to tinker with more and more options, fine tune existing options and customize it more to the tastes of your audience or to the focus of the organization for which the site is being developed. Thanks to Kavita Ma'am for taking time to show me through NIO's drupal powered site's configuration. The ease is simply unbelievable, but is really helpful, especially for all those non-IT organizations which understand the importance of having a prominent presence on the web.

Guess I'll talk about drupal this saturday...hopefully it might help some people, but before that there's a slight technical difficulty that I have with it. Somehow the link to the "Access Controls" settings page has got hidden and I just can't find out how to re-enable it. Possibly going thru the code would help, but it's not a toy project of 100 lines. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also let me mention that I'm using Drupal 4.5.2 which runs on PHP 4.2 with MySQL as backend database and Apache server to host the site. I tried an installation on IIS server using Ensim pro control panel, it's just so archaic and the phpmyadmin installation didn't have an upload feature for importing the sql file. not to forget it was 2.5.0 ...version way too older than what we used in 2004-2005 for our BCA project.

got a book called catch-22 from "The Reading Habit" shop in miramar. trying to improve my reading skills. :D

maybe i should thank the (lolly)pop-suckin' indian music retail shops, that due to the inavailability of this awesome classic album....i'd spared myself atleast approx. 31 mins. of unheard thrash metal music that'll give me an ounce of extra life from the same stuff and the deteriorating stuff that's got onto my nerves. This is a biased article...as are all other DP's Journal entries...so if u think different do comment positively about your view an don't bother cursing mine.

Artist:	Megadeth
Album:	Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good
Year:	1985
Recording Company:	Combat Records

This is one album that I've been trying to procure since like eons past and all albums except this one were always available. Forget the old (original) version...I never even came across the "Deluxe Reissue" which seems to contain Dave's original artwork and 3 bonus demo tracks that the band presented to Combat Records to get a deal to release their albums. Anyways, what's strange is the album Kill 'Em All by Metallica which released earlier than KIMB is still available at most retail stores but not this one...was there only limited prints of this? I mean given that it had been poorly produced (with most money draining into drugs), maybe perhaps the poor sound quality was being seen as a deterrent to good amount of sales. So it's more of value to a collector or one who trusts megadeth music and has really sharp ears/good set of speakers to make the songs audible enough. The most common experience that I relate with this album is the hesitation i have when i ask the innocent candy pop salesman in the retail stores. The scene's as follows:
Sales Rep: Sir, May I help you?
Me: (From past experiences...I've learnt to keep the album name for last so...) I'm searchin' for a Megadeth album.
Sales Rep: What is the album's name?
Me: (poochh liya na?...ab le yeh sun!) Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good. I actually speak this out real fast...coz they used to check me out at half part of the album name... ;)
Sales Rep: No Sir, we don't have that album.
Me: (Woh! toh main bhi dekh raha hoon!) Ok...Then I'm done with my window-shopping.. :D

Let's check out the tracklist and then onto songs of interest...I ain't a musician, so can't stress on the technical aspects much...you could ask this guy though. :)

1. Last Rites/Loved to Death


2. Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good


3. Skull Beneath The Skin


4. These Boots


5. Rattlehead


6. Chosen Ones


7. Looking Down The Cross


8. Mechanix

the first song among these that i heard was Mechanix. It was the Metallica demo from a site nolifetillleather (the site is defunct now). It had all the demo versions of Kill 'Em All and most of the demos of other versions. Mechanix is the alternate version of "Four Horsemen" that features on Kill 'Em All. My first reaction was "it's not the producer's mistake...dave just plays sooo fast, how's he s'posed to catch all those sounds". I mean Mechanix finishes much earlier than Four Horsemen yet both are based on the same rhythm/riff. Themes of both the songs are almost diametrically opposite to the extent that it makes you realise the fact...that 2 sets of lyrics...completely different can be set on one music piece...instead of just adding a dhikchak dhikchak and calling it disco mix '85. Later on, when I downloaded the KIMB version...one thing i noticed was even the final album version sounded as poor as the demo version...barely audible. I thought...damn! the P2P users...cheaters. Till I learnt of Dave's priorities. To this day, I'd choose Four Horsemen over this song...simply because compared to it's lyrics, mechanix sounds so crappy...unless you're in a crappy mood and u wanna have a laugh at a sick joke. Besides Four Horsemen is Bigger, Longer, Uncut :p

I came acoss the title song (every song has a title...but am talkin bout the one that shares it's title with the album) "Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good" (Live version...more crowd noise than Dave's voice). This was first exclusive song from the album that I heard (Mechanix was a 'Tallica demo). This song is about a hitman who talk about his ...umm business and it's good coz his next job is his employer. Just the kind of verses, I'd prefer to pen down. :) But ek baat saaf nahin hui and that's kinda the obvious reason why asking for KIMB album looks a bit odd...the thing is, why is the album named that when the rest of the songs are from different themes. One reasoning is the extreme anger that Dave anna had inside him for being thrown out of Metallica for the habits that all the other members had too....but dave was worse. Through all the years Dave has emerged out of his drug-induced stupor in which he wrote (and performed) some of the fastest riffs (guess what it must be lookin' like --- ♪...vroom vroom vroom!) Dave has come out of drug abuse quite well but the Metallica members are I guess still not happy that they couldn't make him lose his share of fortune that he deserves...and possesses. Back to the song...the lyrics aren't too lengthy, but the general rhythm is pretty much hummable (for those who love metal music i.e).

Got the rest of the songs after we got broadband at home. My most favorite and coincidentally the longest track in the album is "Looking Down The Cross". The duration of the longest track is characteristic of Megadeth's tracks .... quickly done in less duration....(deth is less painful that way.. :P). It's about Jesus Christ looking down at the sinners for whose sins he gives up his life....what if he chose to watch them be at the mercy of Father's wrath? What if he wished to bring harm upon all those who caused him to make this sacrifice? my kinda lyrics again...and awesome music....i'd say a lot of varieties here....surely must've been their best effort in those days.
Rest of the songs ,ordered according to my preferences, are as follows: -

1. Last Rites: instrumental piece...forgot which symphony this is...this is one part of the last rites/loved to deth song


2. Skull Beneath The Skin: cool starting...cool for me coz i'm a guitar dance or a music dunce...so it all sounds cool n amazing but fact is dave mustaine (and consequently megadeth) is amazing....and were more so in those days.


3. Chosen Ones: like the general vocals in this song. Both chosen and skull songs that i have seem to be unclear in sound quality...like a bad mix of sound levels of the various instruments and dave's voice.


4. Rattlehead: Megadeth's version of "Whiplash"...no no not a re-rendition...but a song about one's experience at a concert (megadeth and metallica respectively). i prefer whiplash a lot more....but only the original version which is so damn fast. Rattlehead (Vic Rattlehead) is the name of Megadeth's official mascot (unlike the scary guy logo of metallica...which james came up with...their logo if i'm not mistaken is the M-star logo), but the mascot is described in "Skull Beneath The Skin" while the song Rattlehead describes the experience of seeing him in a megadeth concert.


5. Loved To Deth: This is the second part of the Last Rites/Loved to Deth song and has lyrics as well. It really isn't a separate track or there isn't a break in between the two parts like a fade out/fade in kinda thing....so it's difficult to decide where Loved To Deth starts from... I assume it to be the part when the fast riff (by fast...i mean almost godspeed) starts into the song. vocals and music are typical (love thre irksome high-pitched 'WoooW') of both metallica and megadeth in their first albums...somehow that insane drive seemed to have vanished or lessened.

These Boots (Nancy Sinatra) need to be given a special mention and so am discussing it separately. It's the only track that Dave and his band didn't originally compose, but decomposed into the most vile and offensive lyrical assault....so says poor nancy. ;) Besides being the only 'cover' song it was a feature of first 3 albums of Megadeth to cover songs in their own flavor. And if you believe deth delivered quickly is less painful....dave's version of "These Boots" are crazily faster than the original version...And there weren't any software or machines to artificially increase the tempo of the music to those levels....That was MEGADETH!
Why this song is special because given that Nancy cried and made Dave remove the original version from the reissued version (one version of the story is that the track's been removed and the other is that the swear words have been beeped out, but the track remains). Now I wonder why not many people were having the version that I could luckily get....with all the original goodness.. :D

I can't really discuss about the album on the whole (perhaps like artwork or any stuff printed inside or anything...coz Dave stopped printing these and our retail shops will never have this album....AFAIK. However I hope this huge 'look' at the album proves to be informative to some extent and is my first attempt to write an unstructured review of a music album. Feedback....additional details....welcome. :)

this is one of the most tricky posts where i try to capture my experience as a poem writer...tricky since the flow hasn't really been a one-track thing nor can art (the interpretation of one's mind's state) be defined in a permanent way.

It's been probably since 8th or 9th grade that I've discovered my ability to express my thoughts in rhyming lines. some think this stubbornness of mandatorily rhyming lines is not so favorable, but me feels those non-rhyming blurbs are just thought lines...personally i used to hate them when they used to be part of our literature papers in high school...they're just so difficult to mug up for the oral exams... :D well back on track...during those years...before "Diabolic Preacher", the poems used to be just like any of those usual dose of childish poems about all the values and virtues...in simple language...coz my vocab sucks...but that hasn't stopped me from blabbering so far...eh? Believe me, at that age during the morning assembly sessions whenever i got the chance to present my stuff in front of almost entire of senior section of AHS, it was a thrill ride for my mind. what made the more experience more cooler (than the chilling morning breeze and the cold stares of the students waiting to get to classes and warm the benches) was being introduced by the assembly program compere with the words "...going to recite (dunno...they might have used the word 'read out' for all i care) a poem, composed by himself". the last 3 words were one of the rarest compliments that i enjoyed during the assembly programs (perhaps alongwith a handful of others...i mean there are lots more talents out there).

One of my unique habits as regards to my poem composition is that i end up writing scribbling each poem at a different notebook/diary...whatever is close to me...lest i forget the lines that's in my buffer. finally during housecleaning, it was a frantic search for all the scribbles...which have finally ended up here. Now I find myself sometimes composing directly on a text editor on my computer (u can guess how long am stuck with the comp. throughout the day.. :) )

"Diabolic Preacher" the name originated initially as my yahoo chat nickname...slightly before i realised my fondness for "dark poetry" as one of my friend (drunken loki) calls it or "metal music influenced lyrics" as I put it. My earlier compositions made during high school are under my real name and DP doesn't associate with them directly...though he does acknowledges those as the stepping stones and the building blocks for what shape the compositions have taken on today. It's not like DP won't be suggesting virtues, once in a way...but it got to be presented a la DP style.

DP style poems came around 11th grade when I met Binoy Kartha (may his soul 'jam' in heaven) and was totally impressed watching him being so intensely passionate about metal and 'metallica' in particular...one of my 'adopted' favorites. Starting off my metallica collection with S&M, as I listened more and more to their songs and read through their lyrics (which i was not so good at remembering...nor at catching....misheard lyrics are all the more fun), it often used to be that i just ended up humming the tune when they screamed the indecipherable blabberings...and that used to get so boring, so I used to come up with words from my own mind. sounds crazy? poem toh ban jaata tha na...aur kya chahiye! but as i told before i can rhyme lines often with ease and the song's rhythm/beat helped give structure to the poems. Surprisingly the music kind of inspires DP to write ...umm well DP style poems...lines that are critically ironic. One of my first creations among those at my poem site is the poem "Doing Evil, Thinking Good". What kind of title is that!! Well that's how things started...and to this day if all my composition looks stupid, that's coz I rarely let suggestions tamper directly with my 'expressed' feelings...though they are most appreciated and has certainly brought certain changes in each new poem that i come up with. There was just one more schoolmate (senior) during +2 who used to compose poems and is way better at the language aspect (english) than me and was certainly one of the core motivations...inspite of not really being comfortable with the 'diabolic' and often 'grotesque' nature of my poems.

5 years have passed and am evolving my entire persona around the character i.e. Diabolic Preacher...someone I follow and someone I lead my life as...that's the irony I'm stuck with. Poems are done DP style with much more ease than 5 years back. What has changed is that the frequency of the poems have decreased. that's a good sign isn't it? Diabolic Preacher isn't finding it necessary to code poems...yeah! it's good for me...but me got this blog to screw people, so why bother with poems?... :D
11 years have passed since I've come in contact with some o' my calcutta school friends who apparently have turned into some real talent-filled musicians. Latest influence on my poems is to write them in two versions....one with longer lines and the other one with shorter lines to fit with certain melodies that i come up with or to the tune that i am hearing at the moment...just so that the composition is more catchy (this sounds so cheap...) but i prefer preserving the original version too...sometimes the 2nd version is the only version of the composition. It feels good to be improving my skills of expressing myself...thanks to all the motivations and inspirations. Each new insight opens up a wide variety of possibilities or levels that i can take my compositions to.

Next journal entry will most probably be a review of "Killing Is My Business...And Business Is Good" the one album of the megadeth collection, that is not part of the reissues collection and the deluxe reprint of which, doesn't have the vulgar goodness of the originality of the original version. This album is just not found anywhere in any of the retail shops in the major cities of India. This album is so old and unlike "Kill 'Em All" isn't that much heard of...though it's got some real thrash metal stuff.

Prashob's got a new blog.

"In our times, there were no career choices besides Engineering and Medical". "Your generation is getting the benefit of choosing so many career options"."How much marks have you got in your PCM?" "How have you scored in Maths?" "If you don't study Engineering you'll not get a good job?" "One must excel in whatever path one chooses...."

Basically that means...one must pass in Maths and other streams or professions which aren't Maths dependent are supposed to be idiot's choices.
Welcome to the modern day, where resistance to change still exists, where people still find everything besides engg. and doc. to be a compromise....not a brand new way to lead one's life.

Of course the post is heavily influenced by reality that I myself experience...but this is somewhat like what goes on inside a student's mind who's told there are many career options and that he'll have to prove his worth when compared to an engineer....all in the same breath.

Ever since the formative years of schooling and colleging, it's been the same drill of doing well in subjects that are not at all relevant to the course one intends to pursue...and it's not just the parents, it's the weird education system that expects people scoring high in all subjects regardless of relevancy are more suited to some of the 'unfairly' elitised career choices/course choices that just are easy for some just coz they have the knack for it.... and some aptitude to grasp the newer things. Given that the plethora of choices kinda complicates the maze of career paths that one needs to choose from, but at one point or the other, the older generation isn't much comfortable with the new choices and are back to commenting on the student's performance in history (as in the past...not the subject)..."what if the student had taken this option?" arre baba...was it any bit easier when the student had actually made those decisions in the first place against the storm of parents' comments who always supported their child in his studies, so that he'd choose some career path that they've envisoned their child to be excelling in. The career choices as far as I try to see from their perspective is sort of arranged in a hierarchical fashion...but what determines the levels....salaries?

Anyways, most of the readers who know me might associate this post with my poor performance in the current semester...but that is only a part of this and yes i do intend to take things seriously now. However this post was influenced by sister's choice of goin for arts being overshadowed by parents' choice of goin for science. Although it sounds unfair it is unfortunately practical...as you can switch to Arts even after u do +2 science but not vice versa. that is the hierarchy model....where u stay on a level or fall thru to change tracks. Hoping she enjoys the subjects....her scores won't reflect anything she scores waaaay above 95 or 96 %age in the 'science' subject....hope she hasn't burned out yet. This post is also associated with all those not being academically sound....'back'ed by a paper but yet are excelling in the industry....even that also the parents can't bare....ARRE JHAK MAAR! who the fuck cares!
One thing to note is that even if some parents might be cool by allowing their sons and daughters to take career choice decisions in their own hands, the education system must do away with this hierarchical arrangement of career paths and give equal respect to all professions. One suggestion is to have counselling right from an early age. The internet is bringing a lot of information to the child and his brain is developing much faster with lots of complex ideas and firm decisions being etched on these young minds.

One of my classmates in BCA on our first meet, told me that though he scored enough in PCM to get into Engg. His scores weren't enough to get into Comp. Sci. and even if he did get a seat, it would have been much difficult to score well and if he didn't score there was no question of looking forward to placements n stuff. And I think this is so true. There are only a handful of exceptionally good students who by luck are interested in the default career choice and have the ability to excel. For the rest who've struggled hard and did descently in Xth and XIIth...if they burned out by the time, they reached engg. (which is often the case) then....it's upto you to decide what u feel about the desperate need to be labelled an engineer.
A related observation is "ya got backs? must be from engineering... :D

Ah...wait! what about the doctors and doctornis?? Very less interaction with them to gain any clear idea....but they are the ones who are waging the war against reservation. So cheers to all the medical college students, trying to heal the system. Kudos to them!!

If you've got any feedback regarding the medical science students in this scenario...do comment. One thing that comes to my mind is that all the students in this profession that I've seen or known have either of their parents' or some relative (bit rare) in the profession. Whaddya say?? Exceptions do exist but is what i say an exception?

copying of any form will be punished...you got that!! even if you're copying from the question paper or the instructions on the answer sheet.

Welcome to another stupid site that makes claim of a very noble nature but executes it's promise in the worst way. I am talking about Copyscape a website that does full text searching of your site's page and locates copies of it....so u know who to sue....It's termed as the "Website Plagiarism Search" tool....but that's where the loophole starts as below :-

1. It doesn't verify whether you're the original creator of the content.
2. It does not care to notice that you're attributing the author and providing a link back to the main story.
3. It literally searches the entire site....even the links like Login, Search, Update Journal, Reply to Comments.
4. It doesn't avoid insulting the Creative Commons license by allowng some jerks to have a CC license on their page...plagiarized content on their own page and the bowels to put up a "don't copy...this site is being watched by copyscape" banner.
5. The basic version shows just 3 results....i know one who can't afford such a stupid service won't have much moolah to sue more than 3 webmasters. However what is worse is that out of the 3...atleast 1 is often likely to have your content already removed but copyscape will still complain coz it sees the 'plagiarised' content in it's cache.
6. So you see even if you're a valid original author n stuff...Copyscape doesn't help much....it's a lame excuse of a full-text search engine.
   

If you have used Copyscape on your website....do tell if it has helped you in any substantial way other than amazing you at how it finds all the sites that have the exact same words as you do...and tell only if you've got original stuff.... Me for one copy a whole lot of content....maximum from my own mind....but a little from other sites just to blabber about what they're about n all...so it's a useless exercise. People are most welcome to link to my articles and quote them....if they don't...well i'll still be happy that people are trying to get a larger audience to read my stuff. :)

If someone has a Copysentry account (Premium version of Copyscape), please cite your experiences....Maybe some perfect hits that you had or something. I feel pity for the website and I feel sorry for misuse of the Creative Commons License... Apply with caution.

On a related note I found some good firing from a teacher at her students for plagiarizing content off the internet on the Blabberwocky. Check out the article Big Bad Rant posted on May 29, 2006... zabardast jhaar!! court cases are passé erokom dose tao abar blog e....tooo good!! :)

UPDATE: Check out the article "Is Copyscape Relevant to Bloggers?" We need some candidates from the other side...for a nice debate. i'm clear about my side. :)

crossposted to ilug-ponda.

You must be aware of the fact (atleast by now) that there exists many LUG (Linux User Groups) and FSUG (Free Software User Groups) which have publicly available feeds of their message archive. However the number of user groups/communities are not only very large...it's hard to find out which ones have online mailing lists...which among these have opened their message archive for public preview (i.e. a visitor can read the messages without joining the group)...and finally, what might be the URL's of those mailng lists?

One simple answer is Goa-India RSS Aggregator.

It's a simple website with the message subjectlines from members of various LUG's, FSUG's etc. of India (and some more countries of Asia) appearing in reverse chronological order (in simple words you get the latest news first and stale old news buried deep within.
You can expand a subject line to read the summary (the default abstract that a website exposes through it's RSS/Atom channel) and also read the full article by clicking on the appropriate link.

Although, this site itself doestn't archive feeds for more than a week...it serves as the perfect LUG newspaper. You get to see all the news, links, software from such a wide variety of sources and yet at the same time, they are guaranteed fresh..thanks to the RSS technology...umm format actually. :)

Last but not the least...joining more than one LUG is sometimes not only necessary (to get in touch with a community of people better geared towards answering queries in certain fields of open source/linux) but also encouraged (to volunteer your help to more people than just those in your own user group / community.

Hope you find the resource timely and useful.....or atleast a constructive way of enjoying leisure time.. :)

all you ever get to discuss on blogger communities on orkut is your blog url and a redundant discussion about why people want to blog.

the second one "why do you want to blog seems to have a time-tasted answer that just probably is asked to read the same enlightening, delightful answers, like requesting for your favorite music to play at a jukebox where no other song exists. so well, i kinda visited one such bloggers community, where someone had posted that clichéd question. and i thought, let's try answering in a different style. Through all the blog posts, I have had some experience, that clears one thing, that reasons to blog vary not only for person to person, but also phase to phase. i envision growth of a blogger into 4 phases (5th is optional i'd say for someone who doesn't earn through writing on a blog. i'll quote the phase definition part of my reply in the community...over here.

phase 1: "hello world". we blog for the first time literally just to see how easy it is to have a web presence. there are some who leave blogging after one post...reason 1: got a better site. 2: all content is made out of the author's contribution, which not all bloggers are eager to spend time on. for those who continue onto the transition into phase 2 are likely to show spurts of extra courage under the veil of anonymity. in phase 1, most of the comments'd come from spam or you're near and dear ones...unless you're vincent cerf or some important person who's opinions are eagerly awaited...then u won't remain anonymous anyways.
phase 2: this phase has the blogger having his own blog friends' network, basically starting with getting his friends into signing up, so they can leave comments and consequently quote each other on the articles...y'know trackbacks. for articles to be worthy of linking to they should have some relevance greater than the articles relevant to just the author. in this way, given that there is no shortage of like-minded people, the blog does receive comments from unknown sources (new visitors...not necessarily spammers) and this leads to phase 3.
phase 3: this phase is about u (da blogger) to connect with new people interested in blogging bout the same stuff as you. depending on how much time you could spare, you could simply be writing review (e.g. kinda) articles, following up comments left by users...some might give corrective info...do incorporate that...after verifying :P i'll say if u've come this far, you're pretty much interested in taking up bloggin seriously as a core platform for expressing your point of view. what's wise is to start with sharing your opinions on topics that you are most fond of...it'll help create an outline sketch of the blogger by his interests. this way even people around you, in the real world know more about you...learn more about you...and perhaps so do you, about them...the word of mouth advertising happens again.
phase 4: the phase where it's too difficult to remain anonymous...reasons..1) you letting people know about you (the famous addicted blogger) just so they can trust, whose blog they are reading and just so that your articles are getting more hits and counter-opinions...mine i'll say is an exception coz everyone in the real world accepts this online handle of mine... ;)
at this point u'd have surprise visitors (in your real life) telling how diligently they've been following your blog, and what they'd liked in that...don't worry they won't point out posts (maximostly) coz your blog content would have become humongous by then.. :) they'll also be defamatory comments by jealous people...u cud ignore them, delete them, backanswer them, or give them a dose of their own medicine.
phase 5: community journals, team blogs, collaborative efforts...this kinda might start in phase 2 or 3 but here it's about joining bigger collaborations...e.g. "cool software tips". some sites built along the blogging model but which actually serve content for public consumption...e.g. boinboing.net, gizmodo, engadget...don't have much non-technical examples to site, just because i don't surf them...

so i hope that gives a faint outline of the roadmap of my blogging experience and tries answering the evergreen question. now over to the next question....do you call yourself a blogger, if all you have is a blank blogger account with just one entry "hello world" and no info in your profile??

the ever-slow bsnl dial-up had even slowed down the speed of my hopes and the speed at which i would have accepted that broadband's knockin' the doors of this rural locality.

this article is a shortcut thru the journey from the 4.8 kbps dial-up connection to 48000 kbps wi-fi broadband; transportation courtesy: BSNL. :)

You might be thinkin' I am joking abt connecting at (just connecting...not downloading...downloading was sort of beyond limits) 4800 bps!! (ya like i care what you think bout all day), but this is somewhere circa 1997-1998. The prices of dial-up connection were so exorbitant at that time (given the shoddy service the drastically lowered prices still don't justify the ill fate of the dial-up population). When connecting to dial-up nowadays people do a lot of registry tweaks (i hadn't got into gnu/linux at that time yet...and bsnl helps setup windows pc's by default) to somehow satisfy themselves that their dial-up could go upto 480 kbps....but during those times pushing the throttle upto even just 19.2 kbps will result in the connection not even surviving one web page download. and as per my experience unnecessarily increasing the connection speed (actually between your machine and the modem), usually leads to modem burnouts (modem goes off and no matter how much you screw in the plug and hit the switch hard, it stays cold) as well as frequent line drops.

So it's really been a long...rather mundane journey thru a lot of dial-up ISP's satyam/sify, netkracker, vsnl, bsnl, (probably dishnetdial too), each one having some 'good speed' days by luck in the initial stages...just like some newly built bye-pass that's a bliss to ride on till everyone discovers it and you're back to shifting gears...in dial-up terms...back to dialing. first jerk of speed came with the reliance wireless card for ma's laptop. not only was the speed better (it wasn't phenomenal, but it was like a good connection, staying quite steady) but it connected in seconds which i haven't been able to do with a dial-up account yet. then soon later as i joined DCST i experienced leased line broadband connection that's at the mercy of all the sense-deprived blocking rules (they keep coming and going in and out of the network) and the rains and the feathered friends who control the destiny of the satellite dish antenna.

so finally after being laughed at for asking "when is broadband coming to ponda?" for a long long time, i am finally getting to see it, experience it and to add to the fantastic turn of events surf the net and update this dial-up friendly journal from pa's lappy wirelessly through the wi-fi connection.

mantu dada has done a fantastic job at getting the comp.donkeys to work instantly, when pa on the other hand was just cursing the person who had promised him instant installation, since the payment was done. mantu dada rocks!!

one thing that sucks about the adsl router is that the configuration can be done only through IE, and my winME's IE installation seems to have just got corrupted (conveniently??) and even my tyrepox loving sis has no idea what happened to IE. wondering if i can do the setup in suse prof 9.3!! IE ka jhanjhat sar pe kaun lega!!

exams toh nikal chuke hain...ab unhein yaad bhi kaun karna chahta hai....par yaad aati hai ek khaas viva-voce is blog ko jab bhi visit/edit karta hoon...

This is one of those nicest memorable surprising events that happen at the most desperate times. This is about my viva-voce exam conducted by the external examiner (a cool prof ;)  ) for the pl-28 subject (unix and windows programming lab....windows programming?? waat eej dhat? the course was basically *nix oriented).

All the students were divided into 3 batches consisting of 2 or 3 project groups each. fortunately all of us 4 (ashu, abhi, birju n me) were in batch III albeit in different project groups except me n brajesh, who formed the smallest project group and as per the group strength came up with some real original work...albeit not so noticeable...but we were satisfied that we did our own homework and understood clearly what the project was all about. one more thing that i'd got the advantage was of the understanding and closeness i have with brajesh (...and the absence of internet that made me work :P ) and also being the smallest group helped each of us show our individuality in the code, coding style, etc.....it was a command-line interpretor and it came up quite well...we spent barely 4 hours on 2 existing CLI codes off the net and the LAN and came up with a stripped-down (well.....naked sounds pretty well-dressed in comparison ;) CLI of our own...that doesn't trap errors....yeah that's tR@$h for you!

Batch III had their viva-voce (oral exam) on the 17th May 2nd half of the day (1430 onwards) and we were being called in pairs so our group was effectively present in it's entirety. Before the practz had started, i'd dashed to the server room to check if the net was working again...and it was but vyrarri vyarri s-l-l-l-l-o-o-o-o-w....such that the external popped in and wanted to access the net....i was like "kyun nahin kyun nahin!!" but he let me stay on till i'd logged out properly, but then luckily i was using motilal tyrepox (mozilla firefox for the n00b) which lets u clean all traces with the Clear Private Data tool (Ctrl+Shift+Del) and so i didn't have to make him wait too long and have the wrong impression about my attitude....duh!!

....So anyways as our turn came, we entered the same server room which was now also the oral exam spot as well...with the external examiner downloading something off that painfully frustratingly slow internet line...using motilal tyrepox that i had purposely left on for him to continue and get a feel of....(he's surely having more than a good hold over it for all i can say). i dunno how the actual viva went like...i don't even realise which questions were from the PL-28, coz all of a sudden...as my viva partner puts it, "external, DP ke blog mein hi aise ulajh gaye ki mujhe bhool hi gaye" and believe me that was it too be precise in the least number of words. "You have a blog, right?" "what is the blog site name?" (sir pata hai toh aap hi bata do.... ;) well u guys know what the URL and the name is...so you might as well spread the word for me.. :D well then he continued on to some more questions and then again....(to me) "what stuff do you have on your blog?" (to brajesh) "you write the shell script i have given you?" :) however throughout the interview (it felt more like it than an oral exam), he encouraged me a lot about concentrating on my skills and the software tools i was interested in and seemed to have a lot of faith in me..."arre si woh toh dekha jayega, par is exam ka kya hoga...kashti paar hoga ke nahin?"

All in all it was my blog's day not beause an external examiner visited it and asked me stuff about it, but i guess it conveyed my interests so well, that perhaps the external himself or through someone had got the right idea about what i'm looking forward to be....he said "just two more years..." he had hopes for me doing well in the real world....these hopes are the strongest alcohol/spirit drops on the back of this scorpion...the one who stings...talking of sting, i just remembered, when the external examiner pointed out my blog...i was like..."do i know this guy?? did i screw his name on the blog? did i screw up his bosom buddy's name??...aww c'mon not now!!" however writing those stinging entries and improving on them through time made me confident in answering his questions about how i felt about the course and lots of chain questions related to my experience with various programming tools. don't worry the answer to all opinion searching questions were effectively (as rulesmm puts it) apne DP style mein. :) Disturbingly Precise....

I'd like to thank that cool professor for wishing me luck..and having hopes for my future. I guess my open sores are getting a cool breeze blowing over them... ;)

QOTD: which other university other than goa university cooks their students for more than 3 years for the MCA course?