The ChaosZone! Blog

2004-10-04T17:12:00.000Z

47 years to the day after Sputnik, SpaceShipOne touches down in Mojave and wins the X-Prize. Though the prize is no longer in contention, others, such as the Da Vinci Project, plan to follow, making the dream of regular, cheap non-government spaceflight many more steps closer to reality.

To place what has happened today in context, the Mercury missions in the early 60s cost $1.5 billion in 1994 dollars. SpaceShipOne's flight, on the other hand, cost just under $25 million.

On the X-Prize webcast, I'm listening to Peter Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation who's talking about how one spaceship is not enough, how real space travel will depend on having a fleet of ships, each with competing designs offer the public increasingly lower costs. Right on. In fact, to keep the spirit of competition in space alive, the Foundation is planning an annual spaceflight grand prix called the X-Prize Cup that should become to space vehicles what the F1 Grand Prix circuit is to automobiles.

2004-09-15T06:09:00.000Z

Indiatimes doesn't quite get blogging yet. While it's great that they've been linking to several of their blogs off their heavily-visited home page, the blogs (quality-of-writing arguments aside) remain anonymous, with most having only a post or two. IMO this is the wrong way to boot a thriving weblog community. Here are some of the things I'd be thinking about if I was running O3.

First: encourage readers to identify -- anonymous weblogs are about as interesting as random Usenet posts. Many users may wish to remain pseudo-anonymous, this is perfectly okay if like Belle de Jour they make clear who they are and what they're writing about. Of course, many of Indiatimes' visitors are net neophytes and unfamiliar with online etiquette, but this problem is likely to go away with time. Second: comment spam is a huge turn-off to would-be bloggers, so help them understand how they can crack down on comment spam. For example, the user who wrote this post hasn't posted again yet -- not surprising given the virulent reaction and comment spam he got. Third: use a "quiet period" to let bloggers "find their voice" and actually fill up those pages with something, instead of linking first-post weblogs from the front page merely because they have catchy titles.

That said, I think it's great that larger numbers of Indian netizens are getting their feet wet with blogs. In a country whose citizens have been talked down to for far too long (by just about anyone with authority, including their elders and rulers) blogs provide an excellent way to reverse the flow.

2004-09-14T15:14:00.000Z

Firefox's support for feeds via Live Bookmarks is great, but it's support for the RSS 2.0 spec is wobbly, to say the least. For example, as of now (version 1.0PR), feeds without a link subelement within item will not load, with a message "Live Bookmark feed failed to load" that's as unhelpful to the user as it is to the feed author who's trying to figure out what's going wrong.

This bug makes it impossible to use Firefox to subscribe to heavily-subscribed feeds like, for example, the Scripting News feed. The Firefox community really needs to expand their testcases for this feature if it's to not look half-assed when 1.0 ships for real.

2004-09-07T15:23:00.000Z

Packetyzer is a Windows-based packet analyzer based on Ethereal that's much easier to use.

2004-09-01T13:02:00.000Z

Speaking of of girlie men...

2004-08-24T09:35:00.000Z

I'm not a huge fan of Indiatimes, however now that they've added weblogs to the roster of services offered, I applaud their using the .Text engine. Dottext and Wordpress have to be the best weblog engines out there, for free or pay. This automatically means Indiatimes bloggers have a far better tool (and far better blogs) than, say, Rediffblogs. I wish Indiatimes would go easy on the advertising, though.

The quality of writing on Indiatimes' weblogs isn't anything worth writing home about, though -- barring a few good ones, most are faux stream-of-consciousness textstreams.

2004-08-24T08:09:00.000Z

It's sad to see Scripting News turn into a soundbite site for the Kerry Campaign. Weblogs are supposed to wear their biases on their sleeves (and Dave has laid his biases bare: this election has one and only one issue for him: Anyone But Bush); however, it is interesting to see which way a weblog turns when there's a conflict of interest.

Regular readers of Scripting News know that the relationship between webloggers and journalists is a fairly regular topic here. Because of that, the silence on Scripting News about the Swiftvets and their (non-)coverage in the media was mystifying. Here was a story where the weblogs were getting all the action, and I for one expected Dave to point to it and rebutt it vociferously. However, the position on Scripting News was radio silence. Now, this could be simply a result of Dave having too much on his plate, however, given the things he is likely to write about I have to wonder if the silence was a result of a battle between his politics and his professional work (as a thought-leader in weblogging), a battle which his politics won.

A great counterpoint is Scoble's point about who you should point to: to be an authority on the operating system industry and to become an authority you must point to ALL stuff, not just that that's friendly. Substitute 'integrity' for 'authority' and 'politics' for 'operating system' and there's a point the guru of weblogging could himself take to heart.

2004-08-24T08:01:00.000Z

Victor David Hanson:

So insular had [Europe's] utopians become under the aegis of NATO's subsidized protection that it was increasingly convinced that the ubiquitous United States was the world's rogue nation, the last impediment to a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave subsidies, and wind power the world over. [...]
But this is no parlor game any more. Islamic fascism, scary former Soviet republics, rogue Middle Eastern nuclear states, an ever more proud and muscular China thirsty for oil ? these and more specters are all out there and waiting, waiting, waiting...
Welcome back to the world, Europe.

2004-08-23T14:14:00.000Z

Gmail Notifier is Google's official Windows-based Gmail biff tool. It's in beta, but works well for me.

2004-08-23T12:26:00.000Z

For this year's US Presidential Election, the graph to watch is the Iowa Electronic Markets Winner-takes-all market prices graph. Interestingly, it's been running close to a dead heat these past two weeks. What does the market know that we don't? (For those interested, the IEM's 2000 Elections markets have some fascinating data as well.)

2004-08-17T13:51:00.000Z

(Via Slashdot) Slate on Macroeconomics and Olympic Destiny:

The model projects such big losses for established Olympic powers -- and such big gains for nobodies -- largely because of the influence of GDP growth. In the past four years, France and Germany have had comparatively little growth compared with, say, India and Mexico. So, France and Germany are projected to lose medals, while India's total is expected to rise from one to 10 (!) and our neighbor to the south could win 11 medals, up from six in 2000.

This is all good, but given the paltry sums budgeted for our athletes ($30,000 per athlete actually budgeted -- and rampant corruption ensures that what actually reaches them is far less), I'll eat my words if India's medals count exceeds five (yes, I know India won its first silver today in double-trap shooting).

2004-08-10T09:47:00.000Z

I'm back to posting after a long hiatus. Lots going on now so posting will be light; however I'll try to keep posting once in a while.

* * *

I was in the beautiful city of Sofia on a business trip. Even after years of Communist rule, it has managed to retain its old world charm. Some photos:

* * *

Windows XP SP2 is out. This is a must-have upgrade; now Windows users have no excuse for letting spyware all over their systems. MSFN notes that even users with pirated copies should have an easy, hassle-free upgrade:

There have been a number of discussions on this newsgroup regarding whether SP2 will install on non-genuine (aka "pirated") versions of Windows. Here is the official Microsoft position on this topic:
We expect that nearly all Windows XP users, running genuine or pirated Windows, will have access to the security technologies in SP2. The same users that were blocked from installing SP1 - those that have used a small set of legacy pirated product keys - will be blocked from installing SP2. We believe that there are very few systems in use today that use these keys -- in other words, the pirates have moved on to other keys which we are not blocking.
So how do we characterize our policy?
We want to make sure that the broadest number of people can install SP2. The nature of malicious attacks on computer users is constantly changing and we will continue to evaluate how we deal with security updates for pirated versions of Windows to best protect our genuine Windows customers.
Thanks,
Gary Schare
Microsoft

Given the number of users running pirated XP and jamming up the net with trojan traffic, this is great news for the net at large.

2004-06-29T14:43:00.000Z

Dave Winer:

That's often been the lie around Apple, that they invent and Microsoft steals. I like to tell the story of how Mac scripting software came to be. I was in the audience at a Bill Gates speech in the early 80s in Palo Alto where he described a system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet, word processor, plotting app. I made a note. That's a good idea. A few years later I started work on such a program. Showed it to Apple. Next thing you know, Apple has this great idea. A system-level scripting language for a personal computer, connecting various apps, a spreadsheet...

2004-06-22T12:01:00.000Z

Spyware injecting ads into Google results?

One of my friends was cribbing about how the quality of Google's search results seemed to have gone down the toilet lately. Some questions later it was obvious this was not the usual griping about Pagerank. He sent me a screenshot which he said "has junk inserted at the top" (I've obscured personal details in this image).

Look at the third result in the screenshot. Unless Pagerank has really been flushed down into the sewer, there's no way qksrv.net would feature as #3 for a search. Some googling later I found this post dated July 14 --

there appears to be a form of adware that is able to hijack google results and insert ads to make them appear as if they were real results.

The poster goes on to provide this screenshot, in which another well known ad server (click.atdmt.com) features at #1.

I'd love to know what particularly ugly piece of spyware is behind this. So would Google's lawyers, I'm sure.

Update June 28: CNET's now got the story. If you think your PC has been troubling you, get a good Spyware remover like Spybot Search and Destroy and see if there are any of these pests on your system. And oh, switching to Mozilla Firefox as your primary browser is strongly recommended.

2004-06-21T16:43:00.000Z

A big Thank-You to Robert Scoble for the link... two hundred hits over the weekend. Wow.

2004-06-21T16:38:00.000Z

Woohoo! SpaceShipOne flew - and landed! They are now preparing for another flight that, if successful, would mean they win the X Prize. Great news for all of us who believe that there's more to our future than quarrelling over dwindling resources on one increasingly overcrowded planet.

2004-06-21T10:57:00.000Z

I have some unused Gmail invitations, write to me if you need one.

2004-06-21T10:56:00.000Z

The (afaik) undocumented Amigos page on Slashdot lists recent journal entries from all your Friends. Great, now all I need is an RSS feed for this.

2004-06-19T15:55:00.000Z

Right or wrong, Joel scored a slam dunk with his ditty on the API Wars. I disagree with a couple of the points there (and the article does take care to note that it is overgeneralizing) but one of his points rings true: Microsoft lost a whole generation of developers. However, it is not clear that soldiering on with the Raymond Chen approach¹, with its 80s era design, would have solved anything. MS web devs were already fleeing to Java and PHP because cranky old ASP (even ASP 3) wasn't cutting it any more. Worse, beginner web devs were moving to PHP and Java in droves because of (a) free dev tools (Weblogic+JBuilder is a free download for individual users, and you now have Eclipse) and (b) much better community support at php.net and the then-Java-only serverside.com. C# and VB.net were huge reductions in barrier to entry for MS development. If anything, the only quibble I'd have is: why isn't VS.Net 2003 a free download for home use yet? The Framework SDK is not good enough when you're competing with a Weblogic Workshop (based IIRC on Borland JBuilder) download from BEA².

Joel spends a lot of time talking about backward compatibility across Win32 and .Net. I'm not sure why, because the gulf between them is huge, and, to my mind, necessary. Win16 was a huge paradigm shift from processor-centric DOS programming to C-based Windows programming. Win16 morphed (reasonably) gracefully into Win32, but it's important to realize that managed code (whether Java or .NET) is yet another paradigm shift. Thinking about managed code as "just another set of libraries" is to miss the point.

From a traditional Comp.Sc. viewpoint, what Microsoft calls "managed code" consists of a set of orthogonal features, mainly

bytecode for a stack-based virtual machine
automatic memory management
a "sandbox" execution environment and a standard security model
importantly, a large, standard set of libraries to program against

It is possible to have each without the other. The language D, for instance, includes garbage collection but not bytecode generation or a sandbox. Pascal has offered bytecode for ages but not automatic memory management and so on. Smalltalk had almost all of it except a standard security model. Java put all these together for the first time, and was incredibly popular with developers. .NET added some new twists, and when the dust settled, the .NET environment was more than a set of Win32-callable DLLs.

On Robert McLaws' LonghornBlogs site, a poster asks:

.NET 1.1 is not completely backwards compatible with .NET 1.0 == true Is it or is it not? It is not.

The correct answer is, it does not matter. If you believe it does, then you do not understand .NET SxS. Of course, Microsoft has made massive screwups with SxS, but that does not take the feature away. Of course, given that Joel depends on a download model to run his business, I can sympathize with his fury over adding 20MB to his runtimes. But look at it this way -- how many FogBugz customers are on dialup? CityDesk is a slightly bigger problem, though. Note to Microsoft: where are the AOL-style disks with the .NET Framework (plus Windows+IE patches)? Longhorn is years away, you guys gotta keep us happy until then!

Finally, there were those who rejected Joel's central Web-uber-alles thesis, notably Olivier Travers:

And is the final frontier of HCI to have keyboard shortcuts that work, or can we expect a little more from those ever more powerful computers? What a startling lack of ambition [...]

I would probably point to Joel's older Five Worlds article and point out that Joel was mainly talking about forms-oriented apps. Nobody's quite ready to cede Photoshop to the web yet :-). Although after watching Joel's follow-up posts, I have this to say: the day Design-By-Committee makes a platform with a better user interface, pigs will fly. Opera and Mozilla can't even iron out their ECMAScript and CSSx differences yet -- and I'm supposed to trust these guys with my forms, too, now?

¹Full Disclosure: I actively read and enjoy Raymond Chen's weblog, and can actually remember a time when we needed hPrevInst arguments. I also happen to think a lot of today's kids are spoilt on PHP and C# and Java (Do I sound like a curmudgeon before I'm even 30?), but that's a topic for another rant.

²MSDNAA has been plastering campuses with free VS.Net CDs, at least in India, but I wonder how many converts from the LUGs they've got.

2004-06-17T15:52:00.000Z

Folk bothered by Firefox's slow (1-line) up/down-arrow scrolling can install Cosmic Cat's SuperScroll extension and set directional scrolling to an IE-like 4 lines.

2004-06-10T00:46:00.000Z

Yahoo Messenger 6 is now bloatware, piggyback-ware (it installs several Yahoo tie-ins, like Yahoo Internet Mail and Yahoo Autocomplete even when these are unchecked in Messenger Installer Options) and vampire-ware (refuses to die: removing Yahoo Internet Mail was an ordeal because it did not respond to UnRegisterServer during uninstallation -- I had to waste 5 minutes driving regedit stakes through its heart). You've been warned, stay away. Until Yahoo cleans up its installer act, version 5.6 should work quite well.

2004-06-08T14:28:00.000Z

Life imitates art: Native American Wireless ISP launches. Coming soon: Liberation Spectrum.

2004-05-31T13:58:00.000Z

I saw The Day after Tomorrow over the weekend, largely because it's been ages since I saw a good ol' fashioned break-things-up disaster movie. This one had great eye candy, lots of great steadycam shots, a few good moments but overall very little impact. This is to be expected since climate change is very hard to boil down into simplistic cause and effect models: for example, while Day after Tomorrow largely deals with the North Atlantic Drift (which we know fluctuates), it fails to take into account other ocean currents, and aperiodic disruptive factors in those currents, such as El Niño.

(Mild spoiler ahead) Day after Tomorrow opens on the Larsen B shelf in Antarctica, where a massive sheet of ice splits away in the opening minutes of the film. Interestingly, in March 2002, about 500 billion tonnes of ice did break away from this shelf in a matter of weeks. While worrisome, the most reassuring result of this collapse is that it merely underlined (again) how little we -- Earth-firsters and SUV drivers alike -- know the complex web that makes up the climate of this planet.

2004-05-27T11:05:00.000Z

Microsoft has Rational's developer toolset firmly in its sights with its updated Whidbey roadmap. Modeling, code analysis, testing and test management -- and even source control.

Yes, good ol' Visual SourceSafe is getting its guts ripped out and will be replaced by something codenamed Hatteras (aka Visual SourceSafe 2005) that I'm sure will finally be a real source control system offering from MS (too bad it'll only work well for Windows developers).

2004-05-22T11:19:00.000Z

Way to go - Mil Millington of Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About fame has published his second novel.

2004-05-21T11:00:00.000Z

I saw this on Boing Boing and it's worth repeating: Hugo-Nominated Short Fiction for 2004 is available online. Especially recommended are

Jeffrey Ford's The Empire of Ice Cream - it's a shame to label this beautiful genre-defying story SF. It could just as easily be labeled romance, or even horror. If I were voting, this would get my vote.
Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald - I read this with no idea about the anthology in which it originally appeared, but the story stands on its own even if you know its premise in advance.
David Levine's beautiful, fable-like Tale of the Golden Eagle.
Vernon Vinge's hard-SF vision of escaping a Groundhog Day-like workplace: Cookie Monster.

2004-05-17T11:24:00.000Z

Tavleen Singh in the Indian Express:

On the day of the election results, I happened to travel on a flight with a leading light of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. When I asked how he reacted to India having an Italian prime minister he spat out the word democracy as if it was poison. "This is what comes when you give illiterate, desperately poor people the vote." ... As for me, for the first time in my life I feel ashamed to be Indian.

Ms Singh's email address handily at the bottom of the page, I wrote to her (edited slightly here ):

--snip--

You wrote that "this is the first time [you] feel ashamed to be Indian." There is also Praveen Togadia's devastatingly revealing quote, "This is what comes when you give illiterate, desperately poor people the vote."

I wonder if your shame/pride in your country is purely a function of how much your countryfolk agree with your (presumably urban, upper-middle class) beliefs. I also wonder if Togadia would have been quite as contemptuous when these very desperately poor people voted him to power riding a Ram wave in the 90s. This attitude of the-unwashed-are-nice-only-when-they-agree-with-us appears hypocritical at best and fascist and venal at worst.

To be very fair, I am one of the those for whom India is probably shining, and, had the Election Commission not managed to keep my name out of the electoral rolls, I would probably have voted for the NDA. But, because I come from one of India's most economically backward states (Jharkhand), by merely visiting my hometown I knew that when faced with bad roads, no water, and little prospects for well-paying jobs, a hoarding that says "India Shining" would provoke anger not appreciation, and to the people there, the BJP spin-doctors who wrote such a slogan may well have come from another planet, as opposed to the Congress President who merely came from another nation.

I do not want to give you the impression that this letter is an unabashed apology for the Congress president. Frankly, I don't care [about her] one way or the other, and I firmly believe that my opinion carries no less weight than yours. But when you invoke the "people" -- as in, already, people have started talking about how embarrassed they are ...; wherever I travelled I asked people if they objected..; even people who voted Congress now say they would not... -- I feel it is worth remembering that there are people who are so far on their backs that for them the shining streets of Mumbai are as far away as the lights of Turin, and laptop-wielding spin-doctors more foreign than Italians in sarees.

--/snip--

I believe the foaming-at-the-mouth the "foreign origin" issue (examples here)invoked has actually help cement the urban/rural disconnect more than anything else. The BJP was People Like Us(tm), and now these barely educated so-and-so's have used their vote to take power away from them - Waaah!

Cry me a river. What a bunch of crybabies and sore losers.

Update: I found this comment from from Shivang on a ToI message board particularly telling:

To be an Indian is my birthright and Congress is doing nothing but trying to challenge my dignity of being an Indian. I will never tolerate any foreigner to sit on my head.

Shivang, Los Angeles, USA

I somehow feel the Indian voter had a slightly more prosaic view of what their 'birthright' entailed (for starters, clean drinking water and decent prices for crops), not some abstract concept of Indian-ness that a (comparitively) spoilt brat in LA has the luxury to think about.

2004-05-13T09:28:00.000Z

Great quote on why the NDA stumbled in the elections: Wired: "What 'India Shining' are we talking about? We are dying hungry here," said Santram, a farmer just 45 miles from the gleaming new malls of the capital."

NDTV's Rajdeep Sardesai hits the nail on the head:

Ironically, its not as if the demanding Indian voter is expecting a dramatic change in life. Glossy ad campaigns can conjure up images of a farmer with a mobile but most Indian voters don?t see the mobile as the ultimate symbol of social mobility.
The Sensex may be projected as the ultimate barometer of economic well being, but not everyone is looking to become a member of the equity cult.
Yes, creating an aspirational society and capturing the excitement of the market economy is important, but ultimately most voters just want to feel that small changes are being made in their life that create hope for the future.
Which is why bijli, sadak, pani matter more even today than BSNL or a BSE for a majority of the Indian voters.

2004-05-11T14:12:00.000Z

The Hindu Business Line had a story about the price of Gmail today. Among other things, they covered Gmail's privacy woes and how Gmail accounts are up for sale on eBay.

The curious thing is that most papers had covered this about a month back for the California Senator story (e.g. El Reg, Apr 13) and about two weeks back for the Gmail addresses on sale story (e.g. CNET, Apr 30.)

Why do The Hindu group newspapers feel compelled to give its readers yesterday's news, today? (This is especially true w.r.t science and tech news.) Which to my mind makes it even more amazing that this newspaper has an extremely passionate audience who will claim (as I have heard time and again) that their morning kaapi does not go down well if not accompanied by The Truth™ as written in the Old Lady of Mount Road.

What Chennai needs is a Telegraph/Asian Age style paper that'll rattle the Old Lady's petticoats, the way The Telegraph rattled The Statesman twenty years ago.

2004-05-11T12:36:00.000Z

Google now has an official weblog.

The Blogger relaunch happened over Sunday night/Monday morning India time. Good new stuff include comments and post-level pages. The default templates are now glitzier. Categories and custom non-html templates would have been good to have, but it's not there yet. No RSS support either, for completely childish reasons (IMO if the Atom API is tied to Atom-the-format, it reeks of poor design.) And oh, the new interface is not as fast (speed and productivity) as the old classic interface, so could we please have the old one back?

2004-05-09T19:42:00.000Z

New Blogger release on Mother's Day. Mm, RSS feeds would be nice to have.

2004-05-09T19:34:00.000Z

Undocumented MSN Messenger (version 6.1.0211) ‘feature’: Shift+Ctrl+" toggles smart quotes in the Conversation Window. Unfortunately, not only does this completely undocumented keystroke not give any feedback to the user (and it's easy to press this by mistake while IMing away) but also breaks some emoticons: :'( produces a weepie , but :‘( and :’( produce nothing.

2004-05-07T10:11:00.000Z

On April 4 I wrote:

What'd really kick ass: a desktop app communicating over HTTP to my Gmail account (like Outlook Express communicates with Hotmail). Dredging through long conversations over a browser will not be fun, I assure you (anyone tried really long threads on Google Groups?).

...to which a couple of people have written over to say that they've been trying out Gmail's conversation view, which in their opinion is the greatest thing since sliced bread and is tons better than Google Groups' threads.

The problem here is one of UI scalability: newsgroups often have very large threads (100+ messages at 7+ levels of nesting are not uncommon) unlike personal email, where 25+ messages at 3 levels would be a big deal. Gmail's "flat" conversation view is ideal for personal messages, but it won't induce folk who subscribe to high volume mailing lists like india-gii or debian-user.

One other thing: Gmail should really consider a SOAP API to their compose interface. It is still far easier to send a message using Hotmail (using Hotmail's Outlook Express integration), complete with a decent editor for HTML email - something that the current Gmail beta just can't do yet. Of course, what'd be really good would be an IMAP/HTTPMail interface to non-archived email in one's Gmail account.

2004-04-30T10:24:00.000Z

So Google finally IPOs -- with an approach as unusual as its approach to webmail. The founder's letter in their S1 filing eloquently argues the case for taking the long view:

Although we may discuss long term trends in our business, we do not plan to give earnings guidance in the traditional sense. We are not able to predict our business within a narrow range for each quarter. We recognize that our duty is to advance our shareholders' interests, and we believe that artificially creating short term target numbers serves our shareholders poorly. We would prefer not to be asked to make such predictions, and if asked we will respectfully decline. A management team distracted by a series of short term targets is as pointless as a dieter stepping on a scale every half hour.

For now, Google is probably not going to change the world, and the IPO is probably a bad idea for many investors; but for those with the pockets to take a risk, there are promises aplenty.

2004-04-28T14:58:00.000Z

I've been using Gmail for about 5 days now (found out via Evhead about the Blogger offer before the Slashdot story broke) and here are my first impressions:

The service's reliability is very good indeed. Even for a beta, this beats Novell's MyRealbox, and is way better than the other 1 gig free email provider, Spymac.
Search - Gmail's strongest pitch - still needs work. "tolkien" fails to match "tolkien's", etc. "Silmarillon" does not result in a "Did you mean... Silmarillion" (both of these work in Google's standard web search). So searching your mailpile isn't quite as easy as searching the web - yet.
Being able to access Gmail fully over HTTPS rocks (Go to https://gmail.google.com/ instead of http://...). Myrealbox is the only other free provider that has this, and they are nowhere as reliable.
Currently you can only store 20 filters. Not quite adequate if you get tons of email.
Gmail has its own operators for searching email. Some of them are quite nifty, although I would love to have a not operator and a has:responses operator. I expect Google to allow these searches to be carried out through their advanced email search form, since the sheer number of operators may be a bit much for CLI-phobic users.
It'll be interesting to see how spamfighters like Suresh treat Gmail when it goes live. Gmail adds no X-Originating-IP, X-Originating-Email or X-Sender header. I wonder if this is Google's commitment to protecting its users' privacy, or just an omission in the beta.
Gmail support informed me that forwarding incoming email to another address is "coming soon", as is a plain-HTML version of Gmail (the current version is very Javascript heavy, as others have noted, but is probably the most usable webmail interface on the planet.)
Currently Gmail offers no way to compose HTML email. Not a big problem, but some people may miss it.
No ads in outgoing email (or in incoming email for that matter). That gets a thumbs up. Many other web email providers, especially Indiatimes (which routinely inserts dating ads into users' outgoing email), should take note.

Overall, great service so far, and lots of promise. An IMAP interface to non-archived mail (so I could use my favorite MUA) and my happiness would be complete.

2004-04-18T14:20:00.000Z

I'm now tucking into Part 2 of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, The Confusion. For a change, Landmark in Madras actually stocked the book in time for its April 13 launch date :-).

2004-04-18T10:29:00.000Z

The Telegraph has an article about a new pre-poll survey that predicts a reduced majority for the NDA, saying that the "feel good" factor seems to be wearing thin, particularly in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Not sure about Andhra Pradesh, but I'd buy that for the BIMARU states, the north-east, and Bengal (Note: Calcutta's baby steps into IT do not count as the number of people they touch are still very limited). Given the the relative lack of opportunities there, "India Shining" is about one of the most alienating lines pols can reel out in those states.

2004-04-16T20:07:00.000Z

For those interested into building location awareness into their apps (and have MSDN sub IDs) this is a sweet deal: MapPoint sub free for MSDN users. You get access to their staging environment for a year and upto 50k commercial webservice transactions. (via the Early Adopter weblog)

2004-04-16T19:36:00.000Z

Why not go to MP3 Lizard for all your indie MP3 needs?

2004-04-14T05:49:00.000Z

Miguel de Icaza on Java, Gtk and Mono.

2004-04-04T06:45:00.000Z

Summer is icummen into Chennai.

Gmail's 1 gig free sounds good, and I hope the service is reliable. What'd really kick ass: a desktop app communicating over HTTP to my Gmail account (like Outlook Express communicates with Hotmail). Dredging through long conversations over a browser will not be fun, I assure you (anyone tried really long threads on Google Groups?).

[Update: I have since joined the Gmail beta program, and the innovative "conversation view" notwithstanding, I stand by my statement.]

Sun and Microsoft kiss and make up. McNealy's barbs will be missed. While I don't expect any letup in the competitive rhetoric, an officially supported RMI to System..Remoting bridge would be very nice to have.

2004-03-29T14:51:00.000Z

New from Google Labs - Google Personalized Search. I tried the classic "asp" search with mixed results (the current prefs directory is skewed towards software), but overall this service shows promise, especially since the UI does not get in the way (and marks personalized results clearly). Wish: Search URLs which included a (read-only) key into my personalization profile so that emailed/IMed URLs would result in consistent results.

2004-03-19T13:07:00.000Z

After Epson got their all-women design team to have a go at a printer, it is now Volvo's turn (via The Old New Thing): an oil change only every 50,000 kilometers and no hood, so you can't poke around the engine. I can already see some of my automobile enthusiast friends foaming at the mouth :-).

2004-03-16T18:51:00.000Z

From the access-ramps dept: Toggle Keys is a killer Windows Accessibility feature that works very well for touch typists who keep hitting cAPS lOCK bY mISTAKE (as when touch-typing on a different keyboard). To switch it on, use Control Panel | Accessibility Options, Alt+T, Alt+A, Enter.

2004-03-16T18:47:00.000Z

The San Francisco Examiner is probably the best designed newspaper I've seen online: with only one little advertisement tucked away in the corner, it's a refreshing change from The Slime of India.

2004-03-16T12:46:00.000Z

SteynOnline (via Instapundit):

For all M de Villepin’s dreams of Napoleonic glory, his generation of French politicians will spend the rest of their lives managing decline. By 2050, there will be 100 million more Americans, 100 million fewer Europeans. The US fertility rate is 2.1 children per couple, in Europe it’s 1.4. Demography is not necessarily destiny, and certainly not inevitable disaster. But it will be for Europe, because the 20th century Continental welfare state was built on a careless model that requires a constantly growing population to sustain it.

2004-02-18T10:40:00.000Z

Policy and Population in Asia (via Volokh). Great essay on population trends and Asian demographics, especially the social impact of the aging populations of China, Japan and Russia. Interesting bit: by 2025, India will be the youngest large-population country in the world -- ahead of an aging China. (Outlook (free reg. reqd.) ran a cover story that mentioned this by-the-by some time ago). The only fly in the ointment? AIDS.

2004-02-18T09:20:00.000Z

(Via Instapundit) On Defensetech: The Darpa project, called "Metabolic Dominance" or "Peak Soldier Performance," is part of a wider, future-facing Pentagon research push to develop grunts who are pretty much immune to normal human demands.

2004-02-16T21:21:00.000Z

Clay Shirky on the last Internet campaign:

Those of us watching Dean thinking "This is it - the campaign we've been waiting for" were, in a way, correct. This is it, or rather that was it, before Dean decided that he could run a populist campaign without the support of the populous. The big surprise, to me and to many of us, is how little it mattered. Though Trippi said "It's all about money", they blew through $40M to surprisingly little effect.

I have a ~~bad~~ terrific case of schadenfreude about this: I am laughing about how paypal-tipping Deaniacs are still scratching their heads about how they're still behind 0-9. The entire Dean campaign, with the "Internet constituency" as one of its most vocal (or is that blogarrific?) drivers, reminded me far too much of the second superpower meme floating around a while ago. That meme, like the energy behind the Deaniacs, fed on a vicious cycle of groupthink and faux bleeding-heart politics. At least the Deaniacs spent $40m of their own money to realize exactly where they stand -- i.e., nowhere; which is more than can be said about the reflexive anti-war brigade.

2004-02-13T04:10:00.000Z

Bye bye, Nanny state: Good opinion piece from The Telegraph on the IIM fee dustup:

A few decades ago, the middle class was regarded as one of the catchment areas of socialist populism. The so-called progressive politicians of yesteryear like Indira Gandhi and Jyoti Basu, used the politics of envy to nurture societies built on inefficiencies, mediocrity and deprivation. That economic model ran out of steam by the mid-Seventies, although it was another three decades before it was formally junked. Today, India’s middle classes are impatient for change. They detect opportunities and want to demolish the numerous roadblocks of the past. The mood is fiercely euphoric. The middle class has broken emotionally with the third world mentality.

Actually, while I agree about the generally upbeat atmosphere (whether based on sound fundamentals or not), the nanny state is far from rolling over. Urban India, remember, is just 30% of India's population, and only a small fraction of that 30% live in cities that get any benefit at all from the new `knowledge economy'. In India's tier 2 cities, and its numerous villages, there is enough teeth in the old license-permit raj (think grain procurement, think fertilizer subsidies, think untaxed electricity for irrigation) to last generations to come.

2004-01-20T15:05:00.000Z

Very insightful post from John Robb

It is true that in the US, we have a meat grinder assembly line approach to life. If you fall behind, the machine chews you up and turns you into a hotdog. If you get far enough ahead, you can leap off the conveyer belt and stand in safety -- and stay there unless you are dumb enough to spend enough to get close to the belt again.
However, the safety net for many of us is our family. They can support you through the most difficult of moments. They can pull you off the conveyer belt for a while -- the moment it takes for you to gain the strength for another run. The price is that family isn't free. It takes an investment of years. It takes an ability to forgive and forget, and more comprimise than you think you think you can stand.
Maybe the ability to build and maintain a strong family is a mindset. It is a mindset people haven't talked much about. It requires that people know how to keep connections alive. How to throw insults and humiliations away as so much transient garbage -- that were generated in the heat of the moment. How to give up what you want to do what is right for your family, even when every fiber of your being demand that you drive it up to the edge.
And finally: to forget. Most importently, the ability to forget the negative is the best way to build a strong family.

2004-01-07T16:26:00.000Z

Outsourcing Consumer Electronics manufacture (via Gizmodo): Just as Infosys changed the rules of the software development game (it is technology agnostic and willing to cater to anyone -- often developing software even for arch-competitors like Lucent/Nortel or Sun/Microsoft), companies like Flextronics are rewriting the rules of manufacturing consumer electronics. Today, Dell can sell a flat-screen TV, Nike an MP3 player, and Apple an even more famous product. Interesting read if you want to see how commoditization changes the rules of the game.

2004-01-04T14:00:00.000Z

NY Times: From Rogue Nuclear Programs, Web of Trails Leads to Pakistan: That network is global, stretching from Germany to Dubai and from China to South Asia, and involves many middlemen and suppliers. But what is striking about a string of recent disclosures, experts say, is how many roads appear ultimately to lead back to the Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta, where Pakistan's own bomb was developed.

2004-01-04T07:52:00.000Z

Joshua Allen: Education is not a passive thing that happens to a student, and the more that students realize that their ultimate competitiveness lies within themselves, the more they will be prepared to push the value curve instead of falling for scarcity thinking -- and ultimately that benefits everyone.

2003-12-18T04:32:00.000Z

Chris Anderson responds to Wesner Moise's concerns about Doc/View in Avalon. Chris is right: it's too early in the Avalon dev cycle for frameworks to be written on top of it (anyone who remembers the genesis of MFC knows this), but this makes it imperative for the architecture group at MSDN to get out and spread the word before v1 ships about architecture patterns that make developing rich Avalon-based document editors easy.

2003-12-16T09:45:00.000Z

Like Luke Hutteman notes, spam into my Hotmail Inbox is now down to about 1 a day, from the pre-update 10-15 a day. Great!

2003-12-15T14:46:00.000Z

Captain's Quarters quotes from the The Voyage of Earendil, which describes the capture of Morgoth, the renegade Valar responsible for much mayhem in the First Age:

... and all of the pits of Morgoth were broken and unroofed, and the might of the Valar descended into the deeps of the earth. There Morgoth stood at last at bay, and yet unvaliant. He fled into the deepest of his mines, and sued for peace and pardon; but his feet were hewn from under him, and he was hurled upon his face. Then he was bound with the chain Angainor which he had worn aforetime, and his iron crown was beaten into a collar for his neck, and his head was bowed upon his knees.

I was reading this not one week ago, and was struck by the anticlimactic similarity of it as well. Captain's Quarters continues:

Unvaliant, indeed ... his sons died fighting, a tactically stupid thing to do but a mistake that only hastened their eventual fate. Saddam, who had vowed never to be taken alive, did not even draw the pistol he carried when he was caught, and instead surrendered meekly. The Valar thrust Morgoth "through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, and into the Timeless Void"; I suspect the Iraqis have something similar in mind, if less literary and more literal.

Indeed.

2003-12-11T17:07:00.000Z

Incidentally, one of the reasons Dave's pages have the visual "mix" that he talks about is that his editing environment is a very capable one. Radio/Frontier IMO has probably the best outliner in the world, and Dave is really able to reap the benefits of its rich UI to show off Scripting News to a level of polish mere Radio/Blogger/MT-wielding mortals can never achieve. Even rich clients like w.bloggar IMO constrain you to a per-post view of your data, while Dave's outliner gives him a page-level view of what he's writing, giving him a unique ability to create flow as nobody else quite can.

2003-12-11T16:59:00.000Z

Dave:

What if you just want to link to something, should that require a whole post with all its attributes? It's a matter of user interface in the end. If MT made it easy to post and update a news item that was link-blog-like, people wouldn't need to invent a way around it. But that would break the relationship between the feed and posts. Oy what a mess. ... they're working around the model of longish posts with lots of visual overhead (a model also implemented by Blogger, Manila and Radio, so this isn't a dig on MT).

As Dave says, it is a matter of interface in the end. Smart templates (hide the title when the post has none, tweak spacing for untitled posts, etc) and a bit of CSS can work magic on sites like the Scobleizer, which contain occasional lengthy posts and masses of links.

In Movable Type, for example, I'd love to see:

<$IfNotBlank$><$MTEntryTitle$><$EndIf$>
<$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>

...but MT can probably not grok IfNotBlank yet.

2003-12-08T21:38:00.000Z

I've updated Chaoszone's RSS feed to use RSS 2. You may see minor breakage, especially if you use a server-side aggregator like Bloglines.

2003-12-01T18:23:00.000Z

From the world's-largest-democracy dept: Whistleblower shot dead. Shame.

2003-12-01T14:19:00.000Z

Photos from the Return of the King premiere in Wellington, NZ:

2003-12-01T10:04:00.000Z

News of the LoTR: Return of the King India release date from theonering.net:

The ROTK release date in India is Feb 2004, as reported by the Times of India. This is earlier than both FoTR and TTT, which is a sign of how popular the trilogy has become... word from one distributor was that ROTK would be released in India even earlier, on January 9th.

2003-11-24T12:01:00.000Z

Topical quote from Ben Franklin, for all the genial folks in Maharashtra and Assam intent on xenophobic mayhem: We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

2003-11-24T11:58:00.000Z

MJ Akbar has a great opinion piece on Bihar: where Migration and Poverty go hand-in-hand.

2003-11-24T10:35:00.000Z

Of course, the Bihari (to use them as a symbol for all the failings of the BIMARU states of the country) also have problems. The "democratic process" there is a joke, high illiteracy, a submissive people and chronic unemployment has meant that it has been subverted into a process of appealing to voters to vote not for development, but for their caste or community. This has changed somewhat in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, but Bihar has shown not the slightest inclination to come out of its rut, and the lack of charismatic, forward-thinking leaders haven't helped either.

So the answer to the lady who threatened poor Shankar is -- no, there are no jobs. The precious little there are taken away by vicious cycles of reservation, corruption and nepotism. Yes, Shankar and his brethren are probably responsible for this state of affairs -- after all, to this day, the people of Bihar haven't risen against the democratically elected tyrants who have denied them entry into the 21st century so far. That is still no reason why Shankar had to get the welcome he did in more prosperous -- but not more enlightened -- Maharashtra.

2003-11-24T10:27:00.000Z

How well does India work as a nation?

A Sena threat to disrupt Sunday’s examinations led the Railway Recruitment Board to put them off, but many like the 22-year-old Shankar, a Bihari from Chhapra, were unaware of this and landed here to appear for the tests.
But as Shankar got off the Lokmanya Tilak-Varanasi Express at Kalyan at 1.30 pm yesterday, he was set upon by a Sena mob lying in wait for him and other Biharis. His small-town-youth excitement on landing in a big city and his bright blue-and-red bag easily marked him out as an `outsider' hoping to find a way out of the poverty of Chhapra.
"[He looks like a Bihari as well]" a woman activist shouted as Sena goons rushed towards Shankar, quickly surrounding him. The youth sensed trouble and abandoning any attempts at bravado, began weeping and tried to fall at the goons’ knees.
But there was no space for Shankar to bend as the activists preferred him on his feet for it made it easier to slap and kick him. Accusing him of "stealing jobs from Maharashtrians", the goons set upon him.
"[Why did you come from Bihar? Are there no jobs there?]" someone taunted as another slapped him across his frightened face.
"Will you go back on your own or should we bundle you into a train to Tamil Nadu?" a woman asked. "I will go back, sir, today itself," a hurt and humiliated Shankar, stripped of his dignity and self-respect, replied his eyes moist with pain and embarrassment.
But Shankar did not scramble into just any train to flee Maharashtra, as countless others have been forced to. Instead, he took shelter in a Rs 100-a-day motel along a dirty yard near the station.
"How can I go back. I thought I will take the exams and see if I get the railways' work," Shankar said. "My father is a tailor running a small shop and my mother cannot work because she has cataract in both eyes. I have two sisters. They have to be married off."

The Constitution of India guarantees equality to all Indians. It guarantees the freedom to move throughout India. What it does not guarantee is rule of law, and more importantly, respect for the law. And stories like Shankar's happen every day across this vast country, gnawing a little more at what our ~~latter days kings~~ democratically elected pols call the `national fabric'.

How much would it take to spiral out of control? Some of the poorest states in the country -- Bihar, Orissa -- with high illiteracy and unemployment rates, are ominous, standing powder-kegs. One of the reasons they have not exploded yet was that there was a safety valve, however slim, of escaping the mire into the relative affluence of places like Gujarat and Maharashtra. But what if those doors were shut in their faces?

Places like Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa also play host to a wealth of natural reserves -- coal, uranium, steel, mica. How long before the cry goes out in the coal and uranium mines -- "no outsiders here!"?

Is it India's destiny to devolve into a set of regional fiefdoms run by chauvinistic hooligans? History would say yes.

2003-11-20T13:44:00.000Z

When it rains, it pours. After a long time of staying off paper, I have a good reading list to work through:

Snow Crash (done)
White Teeth, by Zadie Smith
Guns, Germs and Steel
Quicksilver
The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Machine Crusade

Can't wait to dig in.

2003-11-19T12:56:00.000Z

More on India's premier trashy tabloid. For some time now, The Times Of India has now stopped giving single-page views of articles. Even for small articles, you now have to click through to a second page. Someone at Indiatimes must've been on a page-view doubling jihad. Compare ToI's approach to the NYT's, which for all its faults doesn't split small articles, and has a clearly visible "Single Page View" link.

Add to this the atrocious writing, and the infernal blinking ads (also guilty: The Hindu, which is a far better newspaper than its crappy website would lead you to believe), and who really wants to visit ToI on the web any more? Certainly not me.

2003-11-19T12:47:00.000Z

The Indian Express is the first Indian Newspaper out there with RSS feeds. Updates regularly too. Great! I can now cut down my visits to that trashily written tabloid called The Times of India.

2003-11-18T16:47:00.000Z

SharpReader's the first aggregator I find I like enough to be using continuously for over a week, after playing (over time) with Radio 7, Radio 8, NewzCrawler, Syndirella, Amphetadesk, RSS Bandit and Bloglines. As a result, I finally have a real, honest-to-gosh OPML blogroll for the sites I like to frequently read.

2003-11-18T09:12:00.000Z

Kazaa finds its first legit film: Supari, starring Nandita Das and Rahul Bose.

2003-11-14T16:31:00.000Z

USA Today: Pioneer Craig Venter announced that his research group created an artificial virus based on a real one in just two weeks' time ... The project was funded in part by the Department of Energy, which hopes to create microbes that would capture carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, produce hydrogen or clean the environment.

2003-11-14T04:26:00.000Z

(Via my Referer Log) As you look at it for the first few milliseconds, malixya looks like a perfectly normal, well-designed personal website. Then you realize that this isn't quite your typical weblog. Welcome to the new world of porn spam.

2003-11-06T16:43:00.000Z

Went and saw The Matrix: Revolutions yesterday night (first day, second screening). Reaction: predictable movie, if you've been following all the hints the Brothers W have been dropping in the Animatrix and Enter the Matrix, but fascinating to watch and a visual (and acoustic) treat nevertheless.

Of course, some critics miss the point of the movie entirely, but the creators of the movie have remained very consistent with their intention of creating a SF messiah movie, even down to disappointing a large percentage of their fanbase with an allegedly weak ending.

Animatrix-watchers, on the other hand, would agree that the trilogy ended very well. In The Second Renaissance (which you can see online: parts one, two), leaders from the machine city, 01, go to humanity's doors -- actually, the UN -- and ask for peace and coexistence. Their pleas are denied, the war soon begins.

At the end of Revolutions, humanity's representative -- Neo -- travels to the machines to ask for peace. If, to a machine, that would not be a satisfyingly symmetrical and fitting note to end the war, I do not know what would be.

2003-10-29T18:38:00.000Z

While others are busy hyping Avalon, Indigo, WinFS and XAML, Jason Nadal has the right idea and writes about Monad. This is worth watching since the lack of a good command shell (no, cmd.exe still doesn't qualify) is one of my biggest gripes about Windows, and a programmable shell would be very useful indeed.

2003-10-23T11:33:00.000Z

(Via Slashdot) Gator forces site to remove Spyware label. Interesting. I don't mind if someone installs Gator to hear about shopping bargains. The reason I don't like Gator is that it arrives surreptitously (no, a IE do-you-want-to-install-GMT dialog is not good enough), and eats up RAM and CPU cycles on the user's PC even when no browser is running.

For an example of a tracking application done right, check out the Google Toolbar-- in its advanced mode, it does send data back to Google, but no sane person would call it spyware.

The day Gator stops using drive-by and pop-up downloads to distribute their product, I'll stop calling it that name. Until then, in my opinion, Gator is spyware.

2003-10-20T12:01:00.000Z

CBC.ca: Old purple frog danced with dinosaurs.

2003-10-16T02:03:00.000Z

Did you know that the NASA outspends the rest of the civilian world put together? It had a $15bn budget for 2003, and that's not counting the $12bn forked out to the US military for its space applications. China apparently spent something around $1.5-3bn a year on its civilian+military space programs combined (source: BBC World Service). If I were a betting man, there'd be no doubt which one I'd bet on to accomplish more.

2003-10-16T01:56:00.000Z

Amidst China's successful launch of its first taikonaut, there have been persistent questions -- why space? why now? how can you justify the expense? Patience, grasshopper, there are answers, but they are more apparent to those who take the long view than those who are more worried about their quarterly P&L sheets.

Why Space? If you're a nation of one billion plus, on a land with diminishing resources, you have only one real option: conquest. Thanks to the vice-like grip the US holds over the rest of the planet militarily (outspending Russia and Europe put together if I recall right), that one is a fool's errand. The second option is to think out of the box, or in this case out of the geoid.

Why Now? The plan was actually hatched more than 10 years ago, and it was scheduled to come to fruition around now, and that was a very good idea, because it happened around a local maxima for the Chinese economy. This is not to say that the Chinese economy will tank in the next few years, but the going may not be as good as previous years have been, what with the weak dollar, their dollar-pegged exchange rate, and a hurting US economy.

How can you justify the Cost? Besides the usual blather about minerals and terraforming in space, there is one other clincher. Space Program: $3bn/year. Manned Space Flight: (out of my hat) $400mn. Putting a PLA base where the Americanos find it impossible to touch cleanly: priceless. 'Nuff said.

Of course, I hope that whoever sets up Earth's first extraterrestrial colonies is rather more interested in minerals and terraforming than military bases. Earth looks much too beautiful from space, whatever script you use and whatever language you speak. But if it'll take Star Wars to put man into space, I'll take it over Star Trek anyday.

2003-10-14T14:33:00.000Z

Re China's first manned space flight: Travel agent leaks State secret. The date seems to be 6am local time on October 15.

2003-10-14T00:27:00.000Z

Things I learnt today:

Do not run Windows Update's Service Pack Express over a 802.11b network. Too darn slow and connections can get flaky.
Trust MS' Service Pack QA levels and switch off WinXP System Restore before you apply service packs, or be prepared to spend ages waiting for the Service Pack to install. Ditto for downloading almost anything from Windows Update -- each hotfix causes a System Restore Point to get created.

2003-10-13T09:23:00.000Z

Three Arrive for China's Spaceflight: Three final candidates to be China's first astronaut in space have arrived at the spacecraft's desert launch pad, the government said Monday, and suggested that only one will make the trip.

2003-10-09T15:48:00.000Z

Andrew Duthie has a great tip for privileged file management while running as an ordinary user in Windows. This is important because explorer.exe cannot be launched as another (higher- or lower- privileged) user using its Run As feature. The tip? Use iexplore.exe, which doubles up as a file manager when fed a local path.

On the other hand, what this says about IE's potential to wreak havoc on a system is best left unsaid. If I were an auditor going over IE code, I would not be a happy man :-).

2003-10-09T06:38:00.000Z

CNN: China Eyes Mid-October Space Date.

2003-09-25T17:48:00.000Z

groups.yahoo.com is now once again accessible through my Indian ISP (VSNL). But, visit an arbitary URI and my browser returns:

Forbidden
You were denied access because:
Access denied by access control list.

I smell an application layer proxy.

I hear the gentle sounds of Article 19.1.a being ripped apart in the background.

I see the Internet in India as restricted as Dubai, China or Iran in one year. I pray that I am wrong.

The worst part is, now that access to Yahoo Groups is (mostly) restored, this issue will die. If readers' opinion in the Times of India is anything to go by, no one in this country cares a rat's arse about liberty. And not-so-oddly enough, in this democratic society, their government doesn't either.

2003-09-24T16:40:00.000Z

groups.yahoo.com has been blocked by government diktat for the second day running now. Please write to your nearest Indian embassy (or NRI/PIO ambassador, if you happen to be of Indian origin) to let them know what you think of India turning into the next China or Iran.

If you live in India, I'm not sure what you can do. Unfortunately the time-honoured method of writing to one's MP does not work in India. Ideas appreciated.

2003-09-24T16:06:00.000Z

TechEd India Day One went great. High points: Office 2003/InfoPath sessions from Raj Chaudhari and Deepak Gulati (excellent speakers, both of them). The Longhorn video was great too, hope to see more in October and November!

The demos just confirmed what I felt after playing with the betas: with InfoPath's and Word's writing out data to user-defined schemas, and Word's ability to mark up documents as XML after-the-fact, Microsoft has the strongest and friendliest XML processing toolkit on the market today. (Of course, they weren't the first -- anyone remember SoftQuad's XMetal Pro?)

Biggest boo-boo: A certain *cough* speaker at the keynote, claiming SPOT was based on Wi-Fi :-p.

No I was wrong about the biggest boo-boo: this is the bigger boo-boo. This is what I still get when I try to log into MyTechEd online (as of Sep 24 9.30pm):

http://server1.msn.co.in/sp03/teched/register.asp : Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0126' Include file not found /sp03/teched/register.asp, line 67 The include file '/navigation/header/tech_edtop.asp' was not found.

This is after two Microsoft event management partners and one Microsoft employee assured me all possible wrinkles have been worked out on Sep 23.

2003-09-23T05:56:00.000Z

Indian businesses often tout India's "Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence" as one of its key competitive advantages over China. Re this groups.yahoo.com censorship mess, I wonder how many folk coming to do business in India will notice how ad-hoc India's rulemaking really is. (Of course, anyone who has invested in India in anything but IT can tell you horror stories anyway, and will also tell you that IT or no, leopards don't change their spots.)

2003-09-23T05:36:00.000Z

This story in The Pioneer says

The IT Act 2000 has no explicit provisions to block websites, unless they promte pornography, slander, racism, gambling, terrorism or violence, which cannot be challenged under laws governing freedom of expression.

Can you imagine a government agency trying to block every one of the gambling sites on the web? (This is in a country where various states have their own lotteries!) But of course, like any Indian will tell you, in India, selective enforcement is not the exception: it is the rule. Laws are not made with enforceability in mind, they are made because they "look good on the books".

2003-09-23T05:28:00.000Z

Well, now VSNL has gone and done it too -- groups.yahoo.com is now inaccessible. From what I understand from this informative culling by Fred Noronha, most other ISPs have complied too. Ironically, all this attention caused the group in question ("kynhu") to exceed its download quota and is now effectively inaccessible.

Make no mistake, this is a black day for the Net in India.

2003-09-20T18:30:00.000Z

The IAB nails it wrt DNS wildcards (re Verisign and the SiteFinder fiasco). Long, but a worthwhile read.

2003-09-20T17:35:00.000Z

Here's a clue for career bureaucrats who fail to understand the Internet. The Internet is like a mirror, it reflects the real world. Banning a little nook of the Internet is not only futile, it makes about as much sense as smashing the mirror because you don't like the mole on your face.

If -- if -- the kynhu Yahoo Group was a forum for illegal activities, talk to Yahoo and bust 'em for violating Yahoo's terms of service (which includes illegal activities such as violent crime and terrorism). Or track the member lists (the GoI already eavesdrops on large portions of India's Internet traffic) and arrest list members in India. But for Cthulhu's sake stop showing yourself off as a retard by censoring the Internet. All it does is attract more attention to whatever it is you were trying to suppress.

2003-09-20T17:06:00.000Z

Dear Government of India, if you must censor the Internet, can you please do with a bit more style and technical savvy? Maybe by spending a bit of money asking Cisco to build you a decent firewall? Hamhanded efforts like these to censor Internet access kinda kill India's rep as a "software superpower". Maybe you can get cybersavvy folk like SM Krishna or Chandrababu Naidu to consult before writing dumb memos like these? Yours very sincerely, a scandalized Indian Internet User.

Some background: Essentially, the government of India directs Indian ISP Dishnet to block one group in Yahoogroups. Dishnet, displaying that it can bend over and take it better than anyone else, blocks the whole of Yahoo Groups. It is not known if other ISPs like VSNL were similarly directed -- they seem to be allowing that URL just fine. Posts on india-gii have pointed out that Dishnet could have blocked only that URL, but at the cost of increasing the strain on their own routers, so that was probably why the blanket block approach was chosen, freedom of expression for the rest of their customers be damned.

The blocked group seems to be (according to this post by Suresh Subramaniam on the india-gii list) a mailing list started by an ethnic minority outfit in Meghalaya, and cribs about how corrupt the Indian government is, how public money is swallowed up, etc. All I can say is if issues like these have to be censored by the Indian government, then the Indian press had better watch out, it is headed for the gulag in short order.

Another interesting point is contents of the fax itself -- Mr J Random Bureaucrat is "directed to convey the approval of competent authority" that the group be blocked. Who is this competent authority? What process did they follow while deciding that this group be blocked? Was Due Process™ with respect to Article 19(1)(a) observed? Were constitutional experts consulted? Such questions are Best Not Asked in the world's largest democracy. What also surprised me was the outrage, or rather the lack of it, in groups such as the india-gii. There almost seems to be relief that the mai-baap sarkar has decided to block only one group, and not the whole site. I'm not going to get into slippery-slope arguments here, but will point out that things like these set a precedent, and if it's going to be a little ethnic minority in Meghalaya today, it can be google.com tomorrow.

2003-09-20T11:12:00.000Z

Did you know that Google Syndication also serves ads as XML?

2003-09-20T09:56:00.000Z

Where's a good trademark lawyer when you need one? I got this email (screenshot) that for many users would be a dead ringer for an official MS email (exhortations that Microsoft doesn't distribute software by email notwithstanding). Virus writers do seem to be getting smarter, don't they?

Update: I believe this worm is W.32/Swen. Be careful while downloading attachments!

2003-09-16T10:04:00.000Z

Digital Bugles:

The music sounded fainter and less crisp than a live instrument. But it had a haunting, far-away quality. And as the final, tremulous note faded in an extended diminuendo, a woman dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief before leaning her head on a companion's shoulder.

Of course, The digital bugle has no smarts, but in an age where the ability to play a musical instrument is diminishing fast, I'm a big believer in smarter instruments that create innovative ways for even novices to create music, like the Future Music Blender.

2003-09-16T09:26:00.000Z

The Intarweb (sic) is a small in-joke among the geek set. It's a dig at the web-is-the-internet attittude prevalent among large numbers of newbie net-users. Today, however, the Intarweb is one step closer to reality, thanks to one of the companies charged with one of the crucial pieces of the Net's infrastructure -- and ICANN, the organization responsible for Internet names, is asleep at the wheel as usual.

Starting today, all nonexistent entries in the .com and .net top-level-domains will resolve to a Verisign server called sitefinder. From an viewpoint of an interactive ("Intarweb") user, this may seem harmless enough, but this makes life much more difficult for the anti-spam community, network operators and ISPs, not to mention hapless developers who now have to add && !(isWildcardAddress()) snippets all over their host lookup code.

Technically, if implemented right (which it isn't -- sitefinder's Mail Reject Daemon seems to be a flawed SMTP implementation), Verisign will not "break standards". DNS does allow for top-level wildcards, but this move is bad for users from many practical standpoints, including privacy and flexibility. Verisign's best practices document (PDF) notes that several other TLD operators provide such a service as well, for example the .nu domain takes you to a generic page for sites which don't exist. Which is fine, except that vanity domains like .nu don't get used anywhere as much as the staples of .com and .net, and does not change the fact that wildcards are not a good idea at any gTLD level anyway.

PS. chaoszone is a dot-org, the registry of which is maintained by ISOC, not Verisign. Misspelt dot-orgs are not likely to get you misleading pages anytime soon.

2003-09-15T16:01:00.000Z

Read this a while ago, but forgot to comment: Ray Ozzie's possible prior art for plugins doesn't surprise me. As someone who has worked a bit on Lotus Notes and Domino (and whose workplace has some serious Notes gods), I went through a phase of continual surprise at the richness and sophistication of Notes' workflow model (truth be told, it was combined with disgust at its UI excesses). Microsoft could do worse than make Ray Ozzie their new best friend and centerpiece of their appeals claim.

PS. It's an article of faith with the Notes devs at work that "this new-fangled web thing" is nothing special, Notes Had It First™ anyway. It's also an article of good natured jest among everyone else that Notes may have had it first, but it was so damned hard to use that you had to take Certified Lotus End-User Training just to comprehend the majesty of it, and end up not using it anyway :-).

2003-09-14T15:54:00.000Z

Via Shanti: Major anthropology find reported in India:

Scientists report they have found evidence of the oldest human habitation in India, dating to 2 million years, on the banks of the Subarnarekha River... The 30-mile stretch between Ghatshila in the province of Jharkhand and Mayurbhanj in Orissa has reportedly yielded tools that suggest the site could be unique in the world, with evidence of human habitation without a break from 2 million years ago to 5,000 B.C.