December 2007 Archives

HNY and HAGY

Being a programmer sucks much.. while all the world is dreaming of ways to usher in a new year outside .. I sat down spoiling myself (and you readers) writing this new year counter program.

Happy New Year ..and.. Have A Great Year



If you don't see any counter image above, its probably already past Jan 1 2008 0:0:0 hrs, or your are reading this post through a feedreader.

If you are more lazier than me this new year's eve, you can happily copy the below line to your blog or website and have that counter setup there.

<SCRIPT language="JavaScript" SRC="http://www.floresense.com/timer/newyearCountdown.js"></SCRIPT>

The program works on user's systems taking the system clock's time, and so you can be assured it is really new year in the viewers timezone when the counter goes to zero. And wait till new year's strike to see a simple cool image wishing you the new year.



Courage and Politics - the mistakes

Pakistan People's Party leader Benazir Bhutto is assasinated at the prime of her attempts to bring back democracy in Pakistan. Some fingers point to the Pakistan president, some point to other villains, and as usual one or more terrorist organizations make claims.

At the end of the day, there are a million questions in everyone's mind... that which news channels immediately take over and try to poll their viewers with.. has all the political attempts made so far, to be gone in pieces now, should all people's hopes be re-lifted back again, and what's left of Pakistan.. is it democracy or terrorism, etc.,

benazir_assasinated.jpg

Like they say, destruction is easy.. while construction is difficult. Stopping a democracy from happening is easy, but constructing it from blood and sacrifice.. with normal people.. trying to make them courageous .. and all is a lot of work.

It takes a lot of courage to be in Politics.. a little more courage to be a good politician... and much much more to be a politician who is trying to usher in change for the sake of the people.

But, like in cocktails, like in cooking, like in scientific decisions like "optimal" temperature .. and things like that... there should be a proper mix of courage and politics. Too little of either is unpleasant, too much of either is disastrous.

Like film stars get carried away at the prime of their success sometimes, and start doing/saying stupid things... politicians also start discounting important stuff like security, trusting the proper aides, etc., at the prime of their political campaigns.

Nothing big can happen fast if there are no risks taken or sacrifices made.. but some sacrifices can be avoided if people can share their responsibilities with the highest importance, when they are working together.

Terrorists or hard-core assassins don't fear death.
Some politicians too don't..

Politicians have a commitment.. their courage is tied to, and holds up the people's strength and the democracy's courage in their acts, speeches and decisions. So, When a politician goes over-board in being courageous without the neccessary security wrap around him/her, the assassins who see a target, take down the courageous politician.

For the bombs and bullets, its just flesh to push through, not the courage.
For the assassins, its a soft target without proper security wrapper to push through, not the huge collective strength of people around.

And so the politician however strong and courageous, goes down, just as flesh and blood vessels give up.. and just as some blasts cut through their muscles dis-membering them.

For the people around, its all their courage coming down, its a majority of their democracy's hopes going down, and not just another politician or their flesh and blood giving away.

It is disturbing to regroup all people and their courage after such killings. Some people run for life not ever to return, some shift loyalties to safer but lesser commitments for the fear of death, and the rest who are left.. just feel like they are back in square one.

"Benazir Bhutto has become a victim of her own courage", aptly says one of her family members. Now that she has passed away leaving many open questions and a million new questions for the others to answer.. and for the TV channels to poll viewers with... Pakistan has to move on.

And, may in the future, people who take such important committments, who are trusted for their decisions by a large number of people, take more precautions about their existence to move things forward, and remember that even great warriors of the past, wore armours or had a security wrap around them however good they were in fighting enemies and making decisions.

Related Links:
Daily mail: Benazir bhutto assasinated
Wikipedia: Benazir Bhutto


You don't have to be a programmer / techy person to watch this.. but only understand that with a few thousand rupees spent on some hardware, and with installing a software demo available, you could easily test 3D on your TV display which shows stuff streamed from a computer. Just like this guy shows here.

I have not tried, or neither am I conversant with the technology that this guy Johnny shows in the video. But this guy seems to have successfully made 3D TV look possible even with cheap home-made technology.. while many big corporations out there are still experimenting with different technologies to make the next big thing in TV viewing.

If you have a nintendo hardware packed system with wii remote (wireless interface remote) and also probably related stuff to play computer images/video on TV, then, probably you can try his programs and experiments that are listed here.


A pipesCamp

What happens when you decide to meetup with fellow web identities, so far total strangers, for an informal technical seminar.. so aptly called a camp. That's what I think I gave myself time to findout today at the pipescamp.

pipescamp.gif

I got interested after reading an invite email from GaneshAPP for the camp. While I don't understand why even when the sender himself said too many times in the email message that it is 'SPAM', Thunderbird or gmail didn't think it was spam...sometimes these google guys don't believe users ..at all. ha ha.

pipesCamp was about Yahoo Pipes! There was both formal and informal discussions on the Yahoo Pipes' technology, the features, what is possible, what is not, why it is not great business sense to do mash-ups like yahoo pipes, and, some more brainstorming like that.

The camp was well organized and attended at Hotel Shaan Royal near koyambedu, chennai.. and it was all planned and pulled off with blogger support with just 3 days notice.

The take-homes from the camp were:

1. All it takes to make a camp and have people brainstorm around is.. just a few humble modest friends who have the contacts, and one guy atleast with the money to sponsor it, and regular blog post readers.

2. 'Geeks' is an utterly butterly over-used, abused, word. Everybody is not a geek in my opinion.. and not definitely just because we attend such camps. Don't brand us geeks please.

3. Remember to have MONEY as an output when you do something.

4. I didn't get convinced that Yahoo Pipes is great, neither got bored that it was just about feed processing... but one thing that was obvious is.. Yahoo Pipes is giving people new ideas to use and present content differently... even on their blogs...so imagine what they will think of doing for their commercial web projects.




Strong feeling for Indian languages

Indian languages have always given way to English, the business language of the world.

But still in Indian companies, and institutions, informal communications in indian languages are a considerable percentage, compared to formal english commmunications, and sooner or later a huge amount of business on the web, in india, is going to go the indic way.

Already, indian language based blogs are rising in numbers, against the huge english blog following in the country. Thanks to unicode based tools like www.quillpad.com, http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic, which have made the platform for developing content for indian language websites look so easy.. which was a major problem area earlier.

Reading indian language webblogs feels very different and in a way like a soothing feeling for a crave... and its not just me, some of my friends also have expressed similar interests in reading or writing the local tamil language blogs. And remember these are people just like me who havent written anything more than a sentence in tamil in their lives. but know the letters and can read or understand them.

Soon, I think we will see all major indian businesses have one or more indian language versions of their websites, and slowly this seems to open up big opportunities.

To dream about, If web content were in indian languages, may be it can add to bridging the technology divide between the villages and cities in india which indians have long been yearning for, to take advantage of technology, to boost growth in the lower strata of india and also to breath more power into marketplace.. why marketplace, because many big industries are still only in villages / towns rather than major cities, like the agriculture industry, like diary products, like farm manure and supplies, even a major portion of the textile industry, and many others.

Typing in Tamil, Hindi or other indian languages.. is easy through below links.
All you do is type the equivalent of the language word in english.. and the applications below translate that into the language text in unicode. You can then copy the language text and paste in your web blog or email or any unicode supported software (like in any latest browsers).

www.quillpad.com
http://www.google.com/transliterate/indic

Read detailed about Unicode in my earlier post:
Can your computer process your language


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This page is an archive of entries from December 2007 listed from newest to oldest.

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