I’ve been watching the first season of Glee on Netflix, and while I think that the story is over the top and there’s too much suspension of disbelief, I can’t stop watching it, mainly because it’s just so much fun – Which is precisely how I feel about most Bollywood movies too.

Which kinda makes me wonder why many Americans think Bollywood movies are weird.

Well, here’s the reason why our movies have all that singing and dancing with extravagant choreography – we do it because we can, and it makes the movies so much more fun to watch.

In other words, it’s just like Glee.

Why Twilio wasn’t affected by the outage

Lessons learned, and why it wasn’t so bad after all

On cascading failures and EBS

What can we learn from this failure?

How a small startup survived the outage

How SimpleGeo stayed up during the downtime

Postmortem by Heroku

I had to verify this with the GPS on my iPhone. The number shown on the iPhone isn’t exactly 0.001475 because it’s not a survey-grade GPS receiver. It’s close enough though.

There’s a good description of the two prime meridians on the Flamsteed Astronomy Society website. (As a side note, John Flamsteed was the first Astronomer Royal in England and was the first resident of the Royal Observatory where the Greenwich Prime meridian is located)

O.cn has these incredibly detailed maps of Guangzhou

Baidu has similarly detailed maps – they look very similar to what o.cn has, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they were the same. Here’s Shanghai

Edushi goes all out and plasters realistic looking advertising all over the 3D cities.

Google seems to prefer the more scalable method of scanning 3D buildings and overlaying satellite imagery on top to generate somewhat realistic looking imagery. Here’s Shanghai in Google Maps (with the Google Earth plugin to show the 3D imagery)

Of course, with the Google Earth plugin, you can change your viewing perspective and see it from any angle you choose. The sim-city maps seem to be rendered from a single perspective only. It’ll be interesting to see if they can scale it to the entire country and keep it well updated considering how fast cities are changing over there.

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”

- Evelyn Beatrice Hall (on Voltaire’s beliefs)

This ruling (and the fact that it was an 8-1 ruling) illustrates something that makes the United States very unique. Even in European nations, not all speech is tolerated, especially when it’s related to religion or the holocaust. India, for all its tolerant values, is quite sensitive to speech that may be offensive to religion. It’s remarkable and quite commendable that freedom of expression is taken so seriously in the United States.

Of course, the one big caveat to the protection of free speech in the US is obscenity. Moral outrage over what’s deemed obscene has often trumped freedom of expression with the Miller Test being the test to determine whether something is protected under the First Amendment or not. The test uses three criteria to identify obscenity:

(a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

There’s no reason why such a test cannot be created to judge the permissibility of any speech, but my guess is that some of the objection to obscenity is grounded in religious beliefs, and therefore harder to get rid of. Obscenity is an important enough caveat to warrant a line in the US Customs form that says that warns that obscene articles will be denied entry. Thankfully, various cases over the years have ensured that books and movies are not banned simply on grounds of obscenity. (Not that banning a book or a movie did anything but whet the appetites of people to find and consume such content. I should know – as a high school student, I bought a copy of the highly unreadable Lady Chatterley’s lover simply because I’d heard that it was once controversial.)

So, while there may still be kinks to work out, it’s worth remembering that the United States is quite ahead of the rest of the world when it comes to protecting freedom of speech. Cheers to that!

Someone captured Discovery’s final flight from an airplane using his iPhone.

I wish I could’ve seen this historic flight, but these flights get delayed so often due to weather and other complications that it’s not easy to take time off to watch it unless you live in Florida. *Sigh* Maybe one of the private spacecraft programs will catch up soon enough so that we don’t have to talk about the space shuttles as wistfully as we do about the moon missions. By the way, I’ve noticed that most people don’t realize that we had more than one moon mission. Everyone knows about Aldrin and Armstrong, but did you know that there were five more successful missions to the moon with a total of 12 humans walking on that surface?

1. Avoid free public Wi-Fi. Seriously, if you can avoid using a public Wi-Fi network, do it.
   1. If you have to use the public Wi-Fi, then use it on one condition – you should have to enter a password to be able to connect to the network. Some coffee-shops will give you a password to be able to use their Wi-Fi, but if you have to enter the password after you have connected to the network (say, on a page that you are redirected to after you connect) then your connection is not secure. Simple rule – if you have to enter a password simply to connect to Wi-Fi, then your connection is secure. (Just to clarify though, the kind of security used by the wireless network also matters. If they use WEP, then your connection isn’t really secure since everyone’s data packets are encrypted with the same key, but if it’s WPA, then it’s secure for all practical purposes.)
   2. If you have to use an insecure wireless network, connect using a VPN. If you have a company laptop, you probably have access to your company VPN. If not, you can easily setup a VPN server at home. Some of the better routers like the Buffalo Nfinity will let you do it pretty easily from their control panel. If you have a router that allows the firmware to be hacked, you could install Tomato or DD-WRT which support OpenVPN. I’m guessing that none of these options are really things that most people want to deal with.
2. There’s a very simple thing you can do to ensure that your browsing is done securely without having to resort to all the methods I talked about earlier. All you need to do is to browse to the https:// version of websites. When you use https:// instead of http://, your browser automatically encrypts all communication with the server. However, you can’t just use https:// on just about any website since it has to be supported by the website in question. Fortunately most of the popular websites such as Google, Facebook and Twitter have https:// versions of their services.

How can you enable https:// on most websites? If you are a Firefox user, all you need to do is install an add-on to your browser which will automatically take care of everything. It’s called HTTPS Everywhere and it works quite well. Unfortunately there’s no good option for Google Chrome though.

If you use Chrome, you can tweak your settings on the websites you use to ensure that https:// is turned on for you by default. Usually I have links in my browser toolbar that use the https:// version so that I don’t have to remember to type it in, but it helps if the website forces it on its end. Instructions for most websites are quite easy to find. Here’s how you can do it on Facebook. Thankfully Gmail already uses https by default, but in practice it’s a bit more complicated since your credentials are passed around when you visit any Google property, including their home page (So it can customize the home page and search results for you). Just for that reason, I’ve been using Firefox as my default browser on my Mac instead of Chrome since I use it to browse in places where I don’t entirely trust the network.

So, that’s it. If you use Firefox, install the HTTPS Everywhere add-on. If you use Chrome, just ensure that you visit the https:// versions of your favorite websites.