Every Saint has a past and every Sinner a future

I read the above off the cover of a book - it sounded interesting. I've been walking around in Landmark book store for two nights now. You can't just walk around for 5 odd hours in a book store without accidentally buying a book. In fact, I bought a couple.

I bought the Seven Deadly Colours (ISBN0743259394) and started reading it on Sunday night. The essential magic number of 7 seems to appear out of nowhere a lot of times. 7 Days in a week, 7 Deadly sins, 7 visible colours and 7 distinct musical notes. Anyway the book is about the way colour works in an evolutionary system - about how the eye is just dazzled and cheated by colors. An evolutionary arms race between the eye and colours in nature - from the camflouage of the tiger, to the mimicry of warning colors of the mayfly moth,. the blue tree frogs illusions versus the development of the kestrel's UV vision or the movement detecting eyes of a bush baby. The essential fact being that colour is as much of an evolutionary weapon as the eye is - it is not always sexual selection (selecting the flamboyant male for the reason that he survived inspite of the flamboyance) that guides colors in nature.

I also bought another scientific book - Lucifer's Legacy. This book deals with the essential assymmetry of nature. Why are people left-handed or right-handed. It is interesting to note that the angel of death is always at the left of God - and the word sinister actually means left handed.

Anyway more interesting are the books I didn't buy (for obvious lack of need and cash). Tom Holt's Paint The Dragon . It reminded me of a simpsons episode All Singing, All Dancing when Homer brings home a Clint Eastwood movie - Paint your Dragon with Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin in a musical comedy !. Anyway, the second book was Snow White and the Seven Samurai - a reference to the classical film Seven Samurai (seven again !) . Anyway it was about human hackers messing with the wicked queen's mirror network (Mirrors 3.1).

Thus on the seventh day, he rested. And read a good book.

I visited home (Kerala) last week for about 4 days . I got there by a night bus which takes me into the heart of cochin , cutting via the beautiful nilgiris (in the early hours of morning). After waking up as it neared Cochin,I was surprised to see no buses or road blocks these road hogs cause. The private buses in Cochin were on strike.

'T was a dark and gloomy rainy day in cochin. All my cousins were either falling ill, already sick or recovering from viral fever (otherwise known as asian flu). I tried to use the two wheeler for transport around cochin - an idiot with a cycle made me brake hard. I skid nearly four feet and did a tire burning 180 on the main road.

To get away from all this, I started for Trivandrum - my hometown of sorts. Trivandrum central was a mess - full of slushy mud and dark. But at least it was dark at nine in the night. I did sleep really well that night, what with all the travel. Woke up and realized that my college is barricaded by police with water canons and tear gas shells. There's a student riot about the fees charged by colleges owned by private proprietors. There are good things about kerala model socialism - it just concentrated on food and education. Violent and semi-violent protest is just one of the side effects of a strong college union with connections to those in power. The engineering education costs something around 10,000 INR per year - while 6 years back it had cost just over 2000. Anyway, so I come home and watch TV.

Anyway, all in all that visit was about watching TV , away from my cousins so as to not catch the flu. Sadly rain in kerala is nice when you don't have to go out. It's almost like a kodak moment, watching the drops flow down the roof tiles onto the courtyard in the centre of the house .. with nearly 8 cousins sitting around eating dried mango peel and talking about random stuff , playing board games , just being a kid.

I still hope and dream for that nostalgic utopia of childhood.

Ever since the Bush regime started it's war on terror , especially since he has hoodwinked an entire nation (well, at least a majority) into believing that Iraq was about terrorism - america has drawn criticism from it's allies and enemies both. Let me call your attention to the most insightful novel I've ever read - Dune.

Let me repeat - that is a work of pure fiction. But it is very scary to imagine the forces in play there. The Lansraad in Dune is a conclave of the great houses - sort of like our UN assemblies. The essential purpose of the Lansraad is to ensure that the emperor cannot cut out a single great house from that herd and hunt them down with his sardaukar. Essentially a bi-polar world of a single mighty emperor versus a bunch of loosely confederated countries.

Now reflect on the current world. Bush is the emperor - with his army. Every world leader must live in fear that any day they can come knocking on his door - to dispose of a dictator, implement democracy or just to free the people. The noble intentions rarely pan out and often come with a hidden agenda (Iraq was about oil and especially it being traded with Euros ). The benifits seem almost incidental , even accidental.

As a world citizen, it saddens me to see a country which has always carried the stick for the world use it so mercilessly. Removing a dictator is not always in the best interests of democracy, especially if the army stays back to protect. This ranks of neo-colonialism - after all the British did us Indians a favour by uniting us, but did that mainly by pillaging and ruling justly.

The double standards that current America shows in terms of the rest of the world is amazingly stupid and short sighted. For a country living pretty much completely on a credit economy - it is either planning to go bankrupt or do what all those liberated russian sattelites did (devalue currency, pay back debts and get out). Desperate measures are called for, which seems to be what the leaders are doing. Just like the worksman who has pawned his tools on friday, america is going through the rich for the weekend period of it's life. Come monday, he's starving and worse for the weekend. Like all those wierdos on the street, let me say this - The end is coming. After all you can't bully everyone all the time, they'll just wait till you are down and kick you hard.

The standard reply I get from an american when I express this opinion is :- if everyone hates america so much, why do they queue up for a visa before you could say Apu Nahasapeemapetilon ?. My rhetoric question is - Would you rather be the guy getting beat or the one the one with the big stick ? . Most people I know wouldn't take a chance with the former. The I'm with the winning side attitude is so common with the spineless worker of this world. Add another layer to the foren-returnee wedding cake and you have an answer.

Lastly, let me quote a very notorious person's opinion about mass manipulation.

"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

Please look around and tell me I'm wrong about all this. I don't want it to be this way - but I'm not good at these self delusions.

C'est la vie *sigh*.

If my dear reader would go through apc notice - you'll notice that the following lines are of interest.

PHP5 support and major features by:
Arun C. Murthy
Gopal Vijayaraghavan
Rasmus Lerdorf

It's a pleasure to be mentioned in the same list as Rasmus. More interestingly it was part of my day job (eventhough I slack off during the day). So in effect I was paid to write open source !.

All in all, a very productive two week's of hard work !.

Ever since saturday night, I've been watching Simpsons - mainly seasons 9 and 10. It is really funny how those guys manage to twist seemingly normal behavior. For example take the following conversation.

Homer: Hey, that's super. See you later.
Lisa: Dad, don't you remember? It's our special Saturday.
Marge: You agreed to spend one Saturday a month doing something
with the kids.
Homer: Ohhh. [slaps forehead]
.....
Homer: Okay, Bart, it's your turn to pick, where are we headed?
Bowling? Demolition derby? P. J. O'Harrigan's?
Bart: Hysterical, but I traded my turn to Lisa for her dessert.
Homer: D'oh! But we did a Lisa thing last month -- [notices
Marge glaring at him, and changes to a happier tone of
voice] -- and I'm glad we did. But now I think we should
do something that normal people would like.
Lisa: Why do you assume that I won't pick something fun? Let's
see ... [leafs through newspaper] Oh, this looks very
educational.
Homer: [groans]
.....
Homer: [to Bart] This is all your fault for trading away your
turn. Just for that, no dessert tonight.
Bart: [to Lisa] Trade you my next turn for your dessert.
Lisa: Deal.
Homer: D'oh!

These guys are just amazing. Also they get all kinds of people to do voices for them. For example , in the episode with the superbowl - they had Rupert Murdoch and Dolly Parton give voice as themselves.

Truly amazing stuff. Stuff like in the episode with the Bi-Mon Sci-Fi Con , you can find kids wearing Futurama tshirts, the police box from Doctor Who - even Tom Baker (the ever loved doctor). Not to mention the favourite - Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) actually endorsing Sprint over AT & T on stage with light saber instead of a laser pointer (oh, how the mighty have fallen, that..). To top it off we see Mark Hammil sing Luke, be a jedi tonight in a top hat (with a light saber instead of the typical vaudeville walking stick).

Simpsons used to air at 5:30 pm every day - which meant that I only got a sparing dose of the cynical satire and that too only on days when I got home on 5. But seeing two or three a day has really kicked it up into high gear. The part that is very interesting about the stories is that half the humor is referential - same things we see in real life , but only from a different perspective.

If Douglas Adams had lived, I think he'd have enjoyed Simpsons. Call it wishful thinking, but I think he himself would have worked on a H2G2 spoof episode with Matt Groening. Even I can imagine how that would go - but I like to be surprised.

Simpsons is the best cartoon series for adults that I've EVER seen.

Unless you are a Nato radio operator or someone who reads slashdot a lot, you won't realize what Whiskey, Tango and Fox have in common. But it is an acronym gone bad - WTF.

Now that WTF is common parlance, everyone uses them - though they'd still write $#!@%& for some other profanity. This is the bad thing about Euphemisms.

In this politically correct world , euphemisms take up around half of my entire vocabulary. Anybody who has seen an Austin Powers movie must have heard the term Shag or those who watched Friends (ever so carefully) must have heard Tush at least once.

Euphemisms don't really make offensive words less offensive - they also try to make fun of the other guy's ignorance in another way (In-duh-vidual ?). They remind me of these old people talking stuff spelled out - let's give the B-A-B-Y a bath (ha, back to our acrony expansion thingy). Anyway, they're not better or worse than the original words.

Whatever !

PS: I was seeing Friends (re-re-re run) last night and there was Chandler getting a new bracelet from Joey.
Joey: "You just watch what this does to your sex life"
Chandler: "It'll slow me down for the first couple of days, then I'll get used to the extra weight"

Ok, let's take a look at what's happened recently .

• Microsoft brings out Win2K for PPC
• Apple brings out OS X for x86

What's the deal people ?.. What are you guys doing ?. Now if only the third most improbable thing would happen - pigs with six feet wings.

I was home this weekend and was watching a re-re-re-re-run of a dated episode of Full House. What really interested me was the realism of the entire series - how they could make jokes without anything a kid of twelve couldn't watch. I just love this one more than Friends (maybe not more than I love Simpsons) - having more than enough free time (power outage) , I began discussing with my sister about a big Why ?

The stars :-

• Jesse - John Stamos , Singer, married Becky
• Joey - Dave Coulier , Standup Comedian
• Danny Tanner - Bob Saget , TV Show Host
• Rebecca - Lori Loughlin , TV Show Host

Well, what do you know - this could read the other way too. John Stamos is a singer, played with the Beach Boys. Dave Coulier is the member of a Comedy troupe called Ducksbreath Mystery Theater (*yech*). Unfortunately, Lori Loughlin was an Elite Model (1982), but carries out the wife role really nicely. And the three kids are really real kids - with the flashy older one, clever youngster and cute baby cliche in place. Not to mention the fact that Bob Saget has 3 daughters in real life. And John Stamos did really date Lori Loughlin for some time before he married a real Becky.

That folks is all what Reality TV is all about. And I love it !!.

If everyone in this world has a special skill then mine should be an unerring ability to screw up. I've managed to make mistakes which are impossible to fix and impossible to duplicate. Truthfully I don't know how I do it, but it does. Something like : You can't make anything foolproof, because fools are so ingenious. Let me give you an example.

When you enter 'DDDD' into my old ericsson phone's addressbook it completely freezes. The really strange part is that to press 'D' it takes 4 keystrokes, it's not the easiest or the simplest to type. But somehow I managed to screw up there.

Literally anything I touch fails , misbehaves or breaks. I used to be the nightmare for my managers when I was in Q&A. I combine a naive curiousity and a wanton destructive attitude to proactively screw up. My old webpage had an article on how engineers just love solving problems that if there are none available handy, they will go out of their way to create a few - just for kicks. I think I was very close to reality there.

The only good part is that these days I know it before I screw up. I might have a tinge of prescience or it might just be my allergy acting up. After all the good thing about being a pessimist is that you are never disappointed.

That was supposed to be the PREVIEW button .. aah !

Another birthday, Another year - and Time flys, doesn't it. I am now chronologically 23 , but I am still that sixteen year old short, weak kneed boy inside. Having completed an extraordinarily average 23 years of my life, I feel I've done fairly well in Chapter Zero of my life.

If I could have my way, I wouldn't have any more birthdays. The sickening sensation of having wasted YET another year doing nothing important is too much to bear. And back in your head someone is saying "this might be your last year on earth, use it wisely"... all the resolutions I haven't kept and the ones I've kept come back to haunt my sense of person.

I have no illusions of immortality, but the Eternal Now of the present has me in it's grasp.

With Revenge Of the Sith coming out soon, I was looking back at Star Wars. I saw Star Wars sometime during a weekend sometime in 1999 and I was very strongly affected by the story - and I'll tell you why in a while. The newest episodes have lost the basic something that the original had (Terminator is the only sequel I have liked as much as the original - Matrix was the biggest disappointment)

The Force : It was pure magic - nobody really explained it. That was what was so cool about the force. Midichlorians was a stupid mistake by Lucas. For me the most memorable quote about the force is this -

Luke: I don't... I don't believe it.
Yoda: That is why you fail.

The story essentially deals with the Greyness of the world - the two sides of Anniken Skywalker - The Jedi and Darth Vader. All good movies deal with a bad guy going good - but this one deals with the opposite and still manages to make it click. Memorable quote #2 -

Luke: He told me enough. He told me you killed him.
Darth Vader: No. I am your father.
Luke: No. That's not true. That's impossible.
Darth Vader: Search your feelings you know it to be true.
Luke: Nooooo. Nooooo.

The inevitability of the Good vs Evil battle breaks down here - Paradoxes are what makes us think, everything else is in pretty much black and white. (think about an anti-slavery terrorist). The entire movie was about the struggle of Good against Evil - an inner turmoil that is fought out without light sabers or cool sound effects.

Penny Arcade was right when it put this down - Not Your Father's Trilogy. The later versions don't have the sarcasm, humor or conflict that the first one had.

The first thing a young Java programmer learns while reading through his first java book is the get/set convention. But when you look at C# you will notice that it has a properties construct (purely syntactic sugar) which enforces a few more good design rules and in general makes code cleaner. Properties in Javascript is pretty much undocumented and I've not found much documentation on this - and it is a Mozilla only hack.

function MyClass() { }

MyClass.prototype.__defineGetter__("foo", function() {
return "I am the foo";
});

MyClass.prototype.__defineSetter__("foo", function(value) {
print(value + " is no good");
});

var a = new MyClass();
print(a.foo);
a.foo = "slashdot";

Would happily give the following output

I am the foo
slashdot is no good

The code is pretty much self-explanatory. If you don't think this is of much use, continue reading.

if(!document.all)
{

Event.prototype.__defineGetter__("offsetX", function () {
return this.layerX;
});

Event.prototype.__defineGetter__("offsetY", function () {
return this.layerY;
});

}

Javascript is a truly powerful language. But all graduate students try is to dig into assembly and kernel programming - leaving javascript and webdev to the lesser mortals. It's time all that changed.

The major problem most people have with Javascript is that there is no easy way to test your code outside the browser. Often it so happens that you might want to test out a string split or array splice quickly. Here's a quick tip on getting a python'ish javascript shell.

/usr/lib/firefox-1.0/run-mozilla.sh /usr/lib/firefox-1.0/xpcshell

This should give you something like

js> a = [42, "is" , "the" , "answer"]
42,is,the,answer
js> a.sort()
42,answer,is,the

You can run your javascript code like this and pretty much everything outside the DOM and Window stuff can be well tested. And lastly the ultimate javascript hack of all time - Object orientation.

function base() { }

base.prototype.myname = function () { return "I am base"; }

function derieved()
{
this.base = base;
this.base();
}

derieved.prototype = new base;

derieved.prototype.__myname = derieved.prototype.myname;

derieved.prototype.myname = function () { return "I am derieved"; }

print(new derieved().myname());
print(new derieved().__myname());

When look into the murky pools of the business world, you might wonder how cynical Mark Twain had to be to say "Honesty is the Best Policy - when there's money in it", because that's exactly how honesty works in the so-called modern world. It is as if the world fears that an overdose of truth can hurt and kill - which might not be far from the truth (aah !!).

What is a lie ?. Lies are not just black or white , actually they are black and white sometimes. White lies have been the real true invention in language - to communicate by not saying sometime. That's the sort of lie a lawyer says when he says "There are no reliable witnesses". And some tell the truth, but "Reality is often inaccurate" .

Why do we lie: If you have seen Liar, Liar you might have realized the normal places where people lie. Society as an instituion relies on the ability of people to curb their natural instincts and say things which go against their better (or worse) nature. It is an institution built on the basis that nobody can see into your mind and the skeletons it might hold. In short, if you can't lie, decieve or pretend, you cannot survive in society. It started with the first sychopant caveman who said "Nobody makes such a warm fire like you, Ogg. And your club is huge" and it's been downhill all the way from there.

Whom do we lie to the most ?. I truthfully (ha ha !) think that we lie to ourselves the most. Self delusions of importance and ability which feeds the ego are necessary for survival. Truly depressed are those who are free from these precious illusions . Of course this attitude towards truth is mutual. When you buy a car, you don't want to hear that this model blows up once in a while - you want to hear about it's invisible anti-rust coating and push-to-start features. Truth can be brutal and offending - you don't want to be called a loser, you'd want to be called undeveloped potential. When you ask your girfriend "Do you love me ?" , you want to hear an emphatic Yes, not an "of course" or "not really". Most of us live our lives happy and content walled off by the facade of lies erected by society for our protection.

The really interesting thing about lies is that society takes a really interesting stand on it. It is as if it's ok to lie but not to get caught, which makes a lot of sense from an darwinian point of view. The differentiating factor seems to be the aspect of getting caught. But a society with a majority of absolute liars would collapse, so it maintains an equilibrium of truth and lies - or more correctly induviduals do. The threat of getting caught is the fine line that all of us walk when we lie.

In this politically correct world, the truthfully challenged seem to prosper. And an image seems to fade out in my mind - telling , no asking me - "The truth is out there". But I dare not . Do you ?.

With two economic reformers - Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram - at the helm and stern, we expected this budget from our FM to be music to our ears. But the jarring note was struck on February 28th , when the dream budget hit a few icebergs.

First shocker: Fringe Benifits tax covering the benifits enjoyed by employees in all but not traceable to a single employee. I wonder if internet connections for each employee belongs in this tax (whether I'm being pessimistic or just cynical, I don't know yet). The irony of the situation is that you can expect most companies to withdraw the benifits and blame it on the government (it's a win-win, you see), rather than pay the tax.

The One Two punch: Withdrawal Tax of 0.1 % on cash withdrawals from banks above the sum of 10,000 INR (convert). The ostensible purpose of this is to reduce the cash based transactions in the country. The account payable checks and electronic money won't be affected. The black money and the black market won't be really be affected by this tax - they operate by Hawala channels where they pay ~0.25 % commision to the hawala operators. Truthfully this tax seems to be thrown in for the general effect - sort of to distract the public from the rest of the budget's power plays.

Final K.O with Value Added Tax. The intentions behind these are good in an economic ense - if the grain was taxed, the tax on the bread would be only for the value added. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions or so the saying goes. I have this faint cynical suspicion that this will end up being an excuse to drive up the price of commodities being traded across state borders. All the states accustomed to getting their full cut of taxes, will either institute an entry tax or maybe an exit tax as well. The concept may provide the rationalizations for the state to push their own Reforms into the mix. I might be pessimistic, but it doesn't look quite that bright for the consumer.

Onto Caesar what is Caesar's: The budget is not without any redeeming qualities for the salaried class. The direct taxes have been cleaned up with a clear slab system without involving any imaginary numbers in the tax calculation. No more shuffling with tax rebates and investments which reduce both your income and income tax (surprise !!). The key concept here is that, the more forms you have to fill in, the probablility of you filling in all properly goes down and vice versa. QED (as any self respecting under graduate would have put it).

The gender inequality in the budget would have been controversial - but it is not , because it discriminates against men only (what do these people have AGAINST men ?). Well, if that sounded wierd, just add "wo" to the men and read it again. Coming from a matriarchal society, I find the idea of "We have to give women an unfair advantage to level the playing ground" repulsive to the core. If that becomes the accepted norm, then the feminists have lost (even though they won) - because it translates into "You didn't beat us, we let you win" from the male counterpart. It degrades the victories justly earned. Pardon my rants on this topic but - Nobody is more equal than others !.

Except for the few bits (or controversy-bait for the cynical), the budget is pretty much split between gender sensitivies, good intentions subverted and plain old power politics. Nothing for you to see here, move along.