Monsoon in Arizona

Believe it or not, it's monsoon time in Arizona. For a place that receives about 3 inches of rain a year, even if it rains once a year it's called the monsoon. It rained like hell on tuesday night. The smell of damp earth along with the fine spray of water that hit me every time I opened the door was so much like Kerala where it rains for six months.(Okay I'm exaggerating a bit, but that's how it feels). No one can live in Kerala and not be nostalgic about the rains. The whole place becomes unbelievably beautiful. Oh yes, there was one more thing to remind of home - most areas had power outages within minutes of the thunderstorm. Now that's something I know quite a bit about!

I've spent five years and as many monsoons in Kerala and never have I owned an umbrella of my own. In college there was always some nice girl to share her umbrella. (Don't blame me, I know for sure that with my absent mindedness I cannot own an umbrella for more than a few days). Couple of weeks back I bought The Life of Pi from Borders. Ever since someone borrowed my bike permanently, I've been using the bus and that involves quite a bit of walking down Mill Avenue. Every time I come near the Borders bookstore I cannot resist the temptation to walk in and buy something. I invariably end up buying something from the store to justify my hanging around for two hours. (Sanaja just sits down and reads entire books without buying, so I'm sufficiently inspired to try it out the next time I visit. Now where are those Asterix comics?)

The glorious book about Pi left me without as much as a bye in a Jack in the Box (or maybe it was the bus.. I really can't remember). So I'm reading the second copy of Pi which I purchased the same day. (I wasn't so interested in the book, but I saw the same lady at the checkout who had sold me the earlier book and I seriously wanted to spook her out by giving her a feeling of deja vu.. by buying the same book and saying the same things).

[On the net: Great rotational illusions | Greater Illusions | Robert Blackwill gets an emotional sendoff | A bathroom odyssey in glorious technicolor | A Job for John]

No Nonsense this!

Nonsense is one of the more interesting projects on Sourceforge. This one produces, yes, nonsense.. lots of it.. it can produce nonsense versions of popular websites among other stuff. Looking for a great sounding, meaningless mission statement for your organization? No sweat, Nonsense can help you out! Reload the page for more gibberish.

"How dare the government intervene to stifle innovation in the computer industry! That's Microsoft's job, dammit!"

Microsoft has been portrayed as the evil big corporation so many times that it has become part of common knowledge. As per Goebbel's philosophy, a lie repeated from multiple sources will eventually become known as the truth. True, Mircosoft is a monopolistic corporation, but that's true of any big company. You do not build up such a big organization and then let anyone take a bite out of you. At the same time, Open Source does a good job of keeping Microsoft and other big companies on their toes. That said, it is wrong to hope for Microsoft's demise for they are solely responsible for many of the computing benefits we enjoy today. It is all right to bitch about how MS stole Apple's GUI concept to create Win 95, but that very act has been the reason why many people took to computers. If we were still in the age of command line DOS and Unix, computers would still be relegated to companies and universities. MS might create huge bloated software, but they also make things simple for most people. Ever tried installing a program on Linux? Ever tried to configure a printer on Linux? or even tried to install a flash plugin for Mozilla on Linux? You'll know what I am talking about. Even after decades of OSS, Linux has not achieved the ease of use that Windows 95 had (and neither has the ease of use of Mac OS X which was achieved in a much shorter period than either Windows or the Linux GUIs). While we still need Open Source to help innovate without the burden of patents and market constraints, we need corporations like MS and Apple(yes, really Apple is no different from MS, it's just smaller) to provide us with products that we can actually use without having to go to geek school.

[For humorous takes on MS and Open Source, visit Humorix ]

Guys who have to cope with late nights and loads of unfinished work might find this discussion on slashdot interesting.

It was a dark and stormy night...

The San Jose State University's 22nd Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest celebrates bad writing. The 2003 winner Mariann Sims wrote the following opening line for a fictional novel to bag the $250 prize.
"They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . . Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently"

The children's literature section winner:
"The Prince looked down at the motionless form of Sleeping Beauty, wondering how her supple lips would feel against his own and contemplating whether or not an Altoid was strong enough to stand up against the kind of morning breath only a hundred year's nap could create."

Read all the hilarirous entries here!

This is hilarious!

Someone at Microsoft Research has come out with a really great system for generating and remembering complicated passwords using inkblots! The idea is that as with the Rorschach tests, each person interprets a random inkblot in a different way. So this program generates a series of random inkblots and all you have to do is take the first and last letters of your mental description of each image and then combine them to form your password. To enter your password, all you have to do is look at this sequence of inkblots and you can mentally generate your letter sequence. It involves keyboard typing, so that someone looking over your shoulder need not be able to see what you are typing (unlike other image based methods where you click on specific parts of the image).
The hilarious bit is the discussion about this technology at slashdot! Just look at the 20 inkblots given on Microsoft's page and then read the interpretations given by /. readers! Boy, I killed myself laughing!

Of all the dumb uses of good technology I can think of, this one takes the cake. Guys at Monash University in down under have created technology that makes it possible for people to log on to their computers by simply laughing. One of the uses mentioned is "the system could be used to follow an executive as they walked through an office, ensuring that their email was always available on the nearest computer". Boy, I surely wouldn't want my email to appear on every computer I pass. Imagine people in cubicles tearing out their hair everytime someone cracked a joke and got logged on to every computer, hehe..And what if I am feeling grumpy?

Outsourcing to create savings of US$ 390 billion by 2009!

Nasscom has released a report which says that contrary to popular perception, outsourcing actually saves jobs and helps the US economy. According to their statistics, US firms have saved from $6-8 billion in the last four years due to outsourcing to India. This isn't as weird as it sounds - outsourcing helps companies reduce their business process costs which leads to greater profits to the company. While specific jobs related to the business process may be lost, the economy grows as a whole, and this creates more jobs within the economy.
The point missed by many people is that it is possible to provide software related services in countries such as India at a fraction of what it would cost in the US. If American companies were not to take advantage of it, they would simply lose business to Asian firms, which would lead to erosion of share value, job cuts and a possible downturn in the American economy. Outsourcing helps these firms stay competitive, and the resulting increase in profits lead to growth of the economy. To put it simply, increase in profits have to be invested by these firms at some point of time(not every company hoards cash like Microsoft, and even MS is trying to reduce it's $43 billion cash hoard), and these investments help create new jobs. In net terms, outsourcing has actually increased jobs by more than 125,000 according to the Nasscom study.

Just out of curiosity, I'm gonna put up my webcam online for a while. I think it takes snapshots every 30 seconds or so and I'm really curious to see what kind of embarassing pics make it to this site. Here's the pic, if you are curious. (Make sure your browser doesn't cache it).

[I've switched off the cam - having a live camera in the room gets on my nerves!]

This GMU grad student thought his work was boring till he began to 'advice government officials and company CEOs'. His PhD dissertation work consists of a map of the American business and industrial world. Seems harmless till you realize that his work actually maps every communication network across America! So , he can 'click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where.He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge.clipper.'!
There are those who feel that stuff with so much potential should not be published at all. The irony is that Sean Gorman got his entire data from publicly available material on the Internet!

[On the Net: $7.5 million for Britney | Making an Invisibility Cloak]

Salon on the white collar 'sweatshops' that are draining tech jobs from America.

If you thought that Apple had indeed come out with the fastest desktop on the planet, here's an article to dampen your enthusiasm. This guy, who calls himself a mac user, has given a detailed description of how Apple tweaked the benchmarking tests to give their PowerMacs an advantage over the other computers. The article seems to take issue with almost every feature in the test to the point of appearing acutely prejudiced, but within all the technical verbiage, there are some valid points. Many of the accusations are, however pointless. For example, he is outraged that Apple used an option on the gcc compiler to use features in the 64-bit G5 processor. This seems to me as a very natural thing to do since it would be pointless to try to assess the speed of the 64-bit processor using programs that do not use the features of the processor. After all, the improved speed is precisely because of the fact that programs can take advantage fo the 64-bit arithmetic and new instructions.

Having said that, I can see (thanks to a long discussion we had in the office) why the new PowerMac might not be the greatest idea since CBF. For one, they have chosen IBM as their chip provider. IBM does not have a stake in the desktop market, and Apple products form 5% of this market which translates to longer product cycles. Compare this with Intel which comes out with faster processors every few months. What this means is that by the time we've stopped gloating over how the PowerMac is faster than any other computer, Intel would have come out with a chip that is twice as fast. Of course, it is understandable that Apple does not want to be dependant on Intel which already has a Microsoft-like monopoly over the desktop market, but then it should have come out with a computer that is much, much faster than anything available today, not one that is twice as fast as a chip that was available months ago!

Also, having a 64-bit desktop with a 1GHz frontside bus is definitely great, but is it really great for the average user? It does not make sense to use a 64-bit computer for normal desktop operations, and gaming performance can be achieved with graphics cards which boast more powerful chips than the desktops of a few years ago. If it is the graphics professional that the computer is aimed at, they could do the same with SUN machines which were 64-bit machines for a very long time. After all, movie rendering is done on render farms which do not need desktops. (Pixar, headed by Jobs uses such render farms instead of Apple machines).

The 1GHz frontside bus is definitely a great idea since the frontside bus has always been the main bottleneck in a computer's performance. It doesn't really matter if you have a 3GHz processor if your bus (which is the channel for data to flow in your computer) runs at a few hundred MHz. To be fair, Apple does have an advantage here since they have the privilege of designing the entire computer and not just the processor, so their entire hardware is (in theory) well optimized and suited for each other. Also, Apple is helping push desktop design in a new direction, so it will be interesting to see how the PCs deal with the PowerMac. Also, check out Apple's very convincing reply on slashdot.

[7/4/03 update : Nasa Benchmarks the G5 (slashdot)]