Been incredibly busy. Would be back online on saturday sunday.

PS: Publishing through blogger seems like a specially painful experience today. Is anyone else having the same experience?

I wanted to take a moment here to thank Anita and Sathish. Anita's creation of the Indian blogger ring is probably the first and only organized work in this area. Before that I did not even know that there are so many Indian bloggers out there. This morning I was pleasantly surprised to discover a list of Indian bloggers that she has put up. It is a great resource. I wish there was some way of categorizing the weblogs by subject. But no one has as yet figured out how to effectively categorize weblogs. (There was an interesting discussion on Blogroots on this subject sometime back). Most of the cool Indian blogs that I know of, I have discovered through Sathish's links. This morning it took me to Kishore Balakrishnan's weblog. It looks quite interesting.

I can't but think that Noah Bruce makes some valid points about the India-Pakistan conflict (via Popculturejunkmail). But I also felt that Alex Perry's story on Vajpayee is not really far out (most people from India apparently hated it). So it is possible I need a reality check. But if Advani really starts running the show, all bets are off. He is a lot more of a hardliner than the babalog of New Delhi would like to believe.

Suman Palit has an absolutely hilarious parody of a test review meeting in his weblog. He is obviously having a rather painful time of it!

This old article in Saitirewire is also very funny. What is really unfunny is that corporate corruption is now so generic.

I hope I am not the only one out here who is sad about the way films are fast going out of fashion. This month's PDN has a story about how an increasing number of stock photographers are opting for digital. Apparently, most still shoot slides on location (mainly because of fear of screwing up) and agencies appear to think that their learning curve still have ways to go before the majority start creating acceptable stock on digital. But digital seems to be the way to go. The consumer market is already transformed by digital cameras. For some reason, it turns me slightly cold. I know still photographs shot on slides would still be touched up on photoshop before publication. It bothers me a little. But digital cameras don't turn me on at all. I like the idea of portability and ease with which I can send images captured on digital cameras to my friends and family. But for personal photography, I still like the feel of a Nikon film camera on my hands. Unless my feelings for digital cameras change, I have a feeling that in five years time I would a member of a dwindling minority who shoots on slides/negatives.

It is tragic that the only choices that the central Asian and middle eastern countries seem to have, lie either with Islamic fundamentalism or benevolent (or not so benevolent) dictatorships. While the eastern European countries managed to (largely) liberate themselves and are making a painful migration to market economy, the Muslim majority central Asian countries couldn?t escape. They are mostly saddled with recycled communists from the USSR era. These guys are as uncomfortable with Islamic fundamentalism as are the democratic entities. The logic of the war on terrorism dictated that US cozy up to those thugs. Now it seems that India is following suit. Central Asia has fond memories of India from the Indira Gandhi days when India was close to USSR and the only romantic fare undiluted by ideological messages that they were allowed to have was of the Indian variety. Hindi movies were a big export. It seems that we are looking to cement those friendships.

India Today (June 17, 2002) mentioned:

?India gifted two Mi-8 helicopters to Tajikistan and sealed a defense pact with Dushanbe. It also signed a defense MOU on 3rd with Kazakhstan, which makes the Illyush heavy lift military aircraft. Uzbekistan and Kyrghystan have agreed to share information on terrorism in the region. India is also ?helping US remove nuclear debris from the region.?

I suppose its a strategic necessity. But the idea of a closer alliance with these countries makes me vaguely uncomfortable. We seem to have forgotten that we had also befriended the Najibullah regime in Afghanistan during the Russian occupation period and paid a huge price for the next so many years after that regime was overturned. All the Afghan Mujahed factions have been hostile to us.

Most of the Central Asian regimes have no legitimacy. USA can get away with an opportunistic policy simply because they are muscular enough to get away with it. It is hard to prosper in the current economic environment with an antagonistic attitude to USA. Unfortunately, the same is not true for India. Also, the human rights abuses would get worse if no one makes any noise about it.

US foreign policy team is pandering to the massive egos of the current crop of Indian politicians to get them to toe the party line. And India is playing up to it. Consider this.

?There is a great responsibility that comes with being in the Superpower Club. India is about to join the world on that Superpower stage, and I hope she can restraint herself and act very responsibly.?

- Richard Armitage (Deputy. Secretary of state)

Can we get any more ridiculous?

Michael Nichols, the National Geographic wildlife photographer, now has a website. It has some incredibly powerful images. This photograph breaks your heart. this also got to me. But most of the photographs in that site are happy photographs. His pungent commentary adds flavour to the site.

I have been browsing through Borneo Rain Forest by Michael Klum. Klum is not as famous as Nichols. His photographs also have a different personality. But the works of both show the same care for nature and wildlife that differentiate great photographers from the rest.

I was shocked to hear that Kuro5hin is broke. If you are one of those who care about k5, have gained from it, you may want to chip in. I rarely go to K5. I get my fix at mefi. But I'll be very sad to see it go, if at all it comes to that.

Never take your dog to the sea. Its totally unfair. We were hanging around in the Capitola wharf yesterday afternoon, soaking in the sun, watching people fish, loitering on the beach. A rented fishing boat came back carrying three would-be fishermen and one really sorry dog. The poor dog looked scared out of its mind. Its ears were hanging completely down, the tail between its legs. You had to look at it to know what a hangdog expression means. It seemed to get a new life once it got back into solid land. I dont think dogs much enjoy being seafarers.

I have started writing this long rant. And it has been getting longer and longer. So, now I have given up on posting it on RandomNotes anytime soon. My mind is bursting with stuff that I want to write and share. But articulating any of those thoughts would need concentrated attention and time. I have been very dispersed for the last few days. My work life is now composed of many small transactions that have been eating up all my time. My computer, which is idiosyncratic even in the best of times, is showing major attitude. At least, I have now gotten all the applications reinstalled (Very important!). I didn't realize how dependent I am on the apps that I use with IE, until I lost them. Here is what I use when surfing:

1. Google tool bar: You probably already have it on your browser. No should have to make do without it.
2. Atomica answer bar: Its a nifty tool to look up the definition of any Anglo Saxon word, term etc.that may cross your path. Since Blogger doesnt have a spell check, it also works as my default spell checker (i.e. when I am doubtful about any spelling)
3. Cuteftp: I am sure there are a lot of ftp applications out there. But over the last few years, I have gotten used to cuteftp. Its really a very neat application
4. Live365: The bestest Internet radio page in the universe.

On a different note, if you are a weblogger, you may want to check out Blogroots (i.e. if you haven't already). Its a forum for weblogging related discussions. It hasn't taken off in a big way yet. But I am sure it will.

Anil says:

"The Common Language Infrastructure component of Microsoft's .NET framework. (which is what runs .NET code that's been written) has been written for, and already compiles on, FreeBSD for x86. ....What it means is, Mac developers should be able to download the framework and port it in relatively short order, given OS X's BSD underpinnings. "

This kind of segues into what I posted on 7th June about Microsoft thinking about making .Net available on Apple.

My permalinks don't appear to be working. I just found out when I tried to link to my own post!. This is rather ironic since I was sniggering after reading about Andrew Sullivan's permalink troubles in Lakefx. Hopefully, I'll fix it tomorrow.

Now that he has gotten a large number of people in the blogworld to adopt auto RSS discovery links on their weblogs, Mark Pilgrim is doing a series of stories on why we should make websites more accessible. This is a worthwhile cause and he is making his point very effectively. I suspect that my weblog is a long way from being accessible.But over the next few weeks, I would like to make changes bit by bit so that this becomes accessible to people with disabilities.

Noticed:

Sajit Gandhi's weblog. It tackles some of the more intractable issues plagueing south Asia. His analysis of mainstream media's coverage of South Asia is incisive, scathing and well written (via Random Thoughts).

The news, uncensored: A commentary of Israelis killed in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Partisan, informative and scary. You feel terrible reading this chronology of death.

xmlhack: I have been looking for an XML resource which will clue me in on all that is happening in that space. With my current level of XML literacy, trying to read it hurts my brain. But I think I am getting up to speed. (The Language of Semantic Web by Uche Ogbuji provides very good reasons for getting to know more about XML)

This absolutely hilarious e-mail exchange that one lady had with one Nigerian scammer.

Craig versus Hollywood.
Newmark versus Turner

My good wishes to Craig and Newmark.

(via A.wholelottanothing)

I would expand on this and my own conflicting opinions on Intellectual property when I get some more time

Heard an unbelievable rumour the other day. Apparently Microsoft is thinking of making .Net available on Apple (on OS X / Free BSD). It seems that the BSD crowd feels vaguely resentful towards the Linux crowd for having better marketed essentially the same value proposition that they have had for much longer. Making .Net available on BSD will apparently undercut both the SunOne initiative (which right now is so much hot air and the iPlanet product line) and the Linux bandwagon. And of course it will give .Net a broader platform. I still think that it is an implausible scenario. But then the guy who shared this little tidbit is very well clued into Microsoft's thinking. Who knows?

This, I have to share.

Last month, one of my colleagues and I went to a tech event in a reasonably cool venue in San Francisco. It was followed by a reception. After giving me a sermon on how very important it is to network with the right people, he decided to lead by example. He attached himself to a foursome of rather old and worn looking people and started talking to a lady who looked like the leader of the group. After a while, it was apparent that he was not making much headway. This is the relevant part of the conversation as described by him.

So, What kind of knowledge management initiatives do you guys have?
Ah all kinds...
Anything interesting that you are doing?
I distribute leaflets for the UCSC (University of California, San Francisco)
Silence while my friend tries to recover.
Your friends too?
No, they just came for the food. Where is the food?
Umm...there is no food today. Only booze.

This week, I was to another expo in San Jose (for those who don?t know; its about 50 miles South from San Francisco). And the same lady was there. Gently sipping white wine and nibbling at some cheese. She had different companions this time.

I am glad that someone has finally gotten the better of the PR companies.

MIT Technology Review has profiled 100 top technology innovators under the age of thirtyfive. Its a fairly eclectic list. Made me wonder, what am I doing!

Why do you keep a weblog? The question keeps popping up in all weblogging forums from time to time. This is probably the closest to my reason for starting to weblog. RandomNotes started off as a placeholder for my links, reflections and thoughts. However, over the last 5 months it has become become a drafting board for various ideas that I am working on, a place to keep my hiking logs, the place where I like to fiddle with markup languages. Nevertheless, Cory has best described the motivation for keeping a weblog for me. When I am looking for a specific link, I often search my weblog rather than my bookmarks.

Incidentally, I noticed that weblogs are increasingly becoming a platform for activism or evangelism. And I don't mean the warblogs. The best and the most recent example of evangelism is that of Mark Pilgrim (and some others) for the adoption of RSS auto discovery by the weblog community. Zeldman's championing of web standards is another example of good evangelism (though that did grate on some people!). He got the ears of even people like me who are outside of the web design community. Googlebombing as activism has been gathering a lot of momentum. I do have reservations about googlebombing. In spite of most googlebomb's essentially good intent, it is vigilante justice of the kind that I can't somehow identify with.

Collectively, the weblogging community seem to have attained the kind of critical mass that makes meaningful change possible.

On a different note, John Hiler listed some of the large media companies that have jumped into the blogging bandwagon. It's an impressive list.

Simson Garfinkel wrote an interesting column on Spamassassin. I have been using it for one of my e-mail accounts and have had good experience with it, though it tags incorrectly all the e-mails that I forward myself from my hotmail accounts. Need to figure that out.

Check out Lomobar's gallery. It presents photographs is a very unusual fashion. But it doesn't jar and the quality of photographs is quite high i.e. if you like the slight distortions that lomo gives. (via Mood-Indigo.net)

I have been taking a lot of pleasure over the last few days in tinkering with the template. I finally got rid of the tables. I stole the basic CSS code from Glish and Bluerobot like many others before me and patched up something which is more to my liking. I also used Phil Ringnalda's script generator to change my archive template. The comment box still looks rather ugly! I hope to get to it sometime soon. I also want to make the site XHTML compliant, but am slightly intimidated by the prospect.

Incidentally,I didn't know that Phil Ringnalda has migrated his site to Movable Type (MT). Phil is almost like a Blogger institution. Jason Kottke has also moved his site to MT yesterday. I have earlier read good things about MT. But getting both Jason and Phil to sign up must be quite a coup for MT! In the blog world, that's publicity money can't buy.

Please let me know in case the style sheet doesnt work for your browser (Almost all of you seem to be using 5x or higher of Netscape, IE or Opera. So it should work!).

I hope I am not being gullible in finding relief in Musharraf's statement. Folks back home are unstressed. Thanks to years of abuse of public trust by the politicians, Indians have gotten inured to the rhetoric. While I am not a fan of BJP, I have more faith on the humanity of Vajpayee's defence team than of Musharraf's. India also has overwhelming superiority in conventional forces. I don't really know whether a structured nuclear command structure exists inside Pakistan. If India escalates beyond a certain point, the temptation to do to lasting damage to India can be very high amongst some sections in Pakistan. So, Musharraf's statement is a huge relief, though I don't know to what extent one should trust the General.

I read depressing news all weekend. I read the incredibly sad story (by Bruce Feldman) of a fifteen year old prodigy whose life was pretty much destroyed by the college football team, apathetic college authorities and clueless parents (via metafilter). It is when I read stuff like this; I feel that in a lot of ways people in India are much, much better off. I read this devastating indictment of Robert Mugabe's reign in Zimbabwe (via Lakefx) by Philip Gourevitch. I urge you to read it even if it churns your stomach. The world needs to know what is going on out there. I have also started reading Robert Kaplan's 'Soldiers of God'. The first chapter is called 'Walking through a minefield' and is depressing as hell.

I need some cheerful news!