Doublespeak

The HuffPo gets a Pulitzer

anil — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:12:18 +0000

Congrats to them, but I can never take them more seriously than a supermarket checkout rag.

The Mix & Stir Unhackathon for TED City 2.0

anil — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 02:27:07 +0000

Our idea will be one of the three being presented to the TED folks. On the TED Blog.

The early-bird penalty

anil — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:04:08 +0000

Get this.

I got a fixit ticket for a broken tail-light on Feb 1. In California, this means that you have to get it fixed, then go to a designated court, show it to a peace officer, and then pay an administrative fee to close the issue.

So, I got it fixed and 21 days later, went to the court to go through all the formalities. Should be a cinch right? Except, that the clerk tells me that she can’t accept my payment because the ticket is not available in her system yet. Apparently I was too early and it usually takes 4-6 weeks for these tickets to appear in their system.

So, in 2012, I can speak to my phone, chat with anyone across the world in real-time, but can’t pay a ticket because 21 days is too early for their computers.

Really, California?

How Browsers Work: A deep, deep view

anil — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:24:16 +0000

A very fascinating look at how modern browsers (at least the open-source ones) work. Cheers to researcher Tali Garsiel for creating this.

[original link on Tail's website]

The importance of data visualization

anil — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 05:46:42 +0000

Hans Rosling’s talks are data porn for me. He illustrates a very important concept – our perceptions can be very far from the truth, and nothing illustrates the truth like good visualizations of data. Let’s hope that one day, enough data will be freed up, and will be in the hands of people in an accessible way so that any misconception can be cleared with just a few clicks.

Glee is just a serialized Bollywood movie. Seriously.

anil — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 06:30:41 +0000

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.

Amazon nearly takes down the Web… and what we can learn from it

anil — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 22:26:12 +0000

Yesterday, Amazon’s AWS went down for most of the day, and it nearly took down most of the usable Web (at least for me). Websites like Quora and Reddit were unresponsive, but what hurt the most was that my own website was down because it was hosted on Heroku, which in turn uses Amazon’s AWS. Hacker News was immediately flooded with stories relating to AWS and cloud computing. Here’s a selection of stories that I’ve been reading.

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

Interview on The Takeaway

anil — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 03:56:44 +0000

On Monday morning, I ended up talking with the hosts of The Takeaway, a morning news program from WNYC and PRI. You can listen to the segment using the embedded clip below or download it here.

The prime meridian isn’t where it used to be…

anil — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 06:59:19 +0000

One of the interesting things I found out when I visited the Royal Observatory in Greenwich this week is that for practical purposes, the prime meridian isn’t exactly where it’s marked as such. The prime meridian (0 degrees of longitude) is a completely arbitrary line and for historic reasons, it’s located in Greenwich. However, the GPS system uses a coordinate system called WGS84 which puts the meridian of zero longitude around 102.5 meters east of the Greenwich Prime Meridian. So, if you were to put a GPS device on the marker at the Royal Observatory, you would not read 0 degrees. The difference between the two prime meridians is 5.31 arc seconds (=5.31/3600 = 0.001475 degrees). An accurate receiver would therefore read 0.001475 degrees.

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)

Selling the system, not just the hardware

anil — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 07:09:21 +0000

The thing about Apple that I find so impressive is that they understand the importance of selling a complete system. While other companies tout the specs of their hardware, Apple sells the complete experience. Yesterday’s iPad2 launch was a great example – Not only did they improve the hardware specs (A third thinner, faster, yada yada) – they created two great apps (iMovie and Garageband) that show what a measly tablet can do. There’s no waiting for other companies to release apps to show the potential of their device. Motorola and Samsung could learn a thing or two about not assuming that people only care about hardware specs.