Blogs


22
Aug 09

Aspiring Bloggers - Read this

You first need to have a look at what Amit Varma has to say about Blogging. To be frank, he hits the nail on the head. Some of his thoughts are just exactly what I wanted to convey. This guys is probably the most successful widely read author. He is the only blogger who found his way into top 50 most influential people of India.

He has a lot of thing to say. Let me take his post as a base. The title is provided by him and the content by me.

Keep it crisp

Who the F wants to read an essay? Pages and pages long blog posts or articles is nothing more than a turn-off for most people. Even if he subject line is catchy, nobody gives a damn to such articles even though they might be trying to build up the environment. I length of any article/post which fits exactly to my standards are the one at Ars Technica. Go and find out yourself.

Don’t show off

This is spreading like an epidemic! It probably even surpasses Swine or Bird flu in this regard. I have surely seen a lot of aspiring bloggers using highly complicated words enough to freak out normal readers. Some of them consider this as a status symbol or a fashion or whatever (probably they know better). What is the use of writing a blog post when the reader have to keep a dictionary besides when reading your damn article! I would prefer hitting the saviour key-shortcut(Ctrl+W) in such situations.

Use Proper English

Try reading the quote below

If smeotihng can go wonrg, it wlil selruy go wnorg

Found it tough to read? It isn’t as tough as reading a text in SMS lingo. Some experiments have concluded that while reading English text, you just need to have the first and last character of a word intact and rest characters jumbles up. Humans can still read it probably with little or no problems.

Now consider SMS Lingo - The lingua franca for all “kewl dudes” out there. All technical forums, newsgroups etc are perfectly correct in banning it’s use. There is a gap between the writer and the reader or communication which needs to be bridged. Both of them are equally responsible for it. Those who use SMS lingo contribute less to this work since they prefer hitting less keys which eases their work. All the headache now lies on the reader to make sense from that piled up mess.

I don’t mean to direct people, but these points are more of common sense. Nor I am a celebrity Blogger :D


10
Aug 09

Back on seat

I’m back!

I have been in Bangalore for last one and a half months working as a Trainee in Schneider Electric, GTCI as a  Software Developer. Don’t get shocks that what I am doing in this Electric company? They do need software engineers in any sector they move into.

The only thing I can say about this place(Bangalore) is that it’s damn expensive. Travel and food are together responsible for a big portion of my spending. Till now all attempts to put a cap has failed miserably.

I am living a bit near to my office initially, so that I don’t get late for work. Having less idea about the traffic in this city, it’s always preferred to live in a place where bus service is good. The place where I live (Kundalahalli) is out of city but the office is quite nearby.  It’s just 4.5 kms from my place.

I am still left with the job of getting an internet connection and a decent place to eat. These are the two vital thing for my survival. Hope they get sorted out at the earliest.

I have been to an adventure trip along with my office team for trekking, river-crossing and wall-rappling. It was a great fun. I would be regular on my blogging business even without internet, but for twitter I really need a dedicated connection.

More to come up.


14
Apr 09

Get pwned by your girlfriend

Here goes my second attempt at cartoon designing. The third strip would be available on my technical blog. You need to hunt for that blog. This is again inspired by xkcd and fml

Get pwned by your Girlfriend

Get pwned by your Girlfriend

Licensed under Creative Commons Share-Alike India Licence 2.5


6
Apr 09

Facebook a spam haven?

Remember te good old times when we were hooked to Orkut? It was a completely new thing for we Indians and as usual it was a craze. Anyone who didn’t have an account was considered to be un-social.

Days passed, months passed and things change as usual. There was another competitor in town which was gaining ground in such a way that its users had started swearing by the latter. It was no other than Facebook! People who tried out this new networking site found it neat and clean with a nice interface. Facebook users surged exponentially. Orkut needed to give the answer. Instead of innovating, it shot itself in the foot by making applications available using OpenSocial. Now let’s review what’s Opensocial?

OpenSocial is a group of Web 2.0 social networks like Orkut,MySpace, LinkedIn etc which provides an API for making apps for them. Facebook had the concept of apps which took it by storm. Orkut allowed app creators to use Flash which was a big blunder. Not only this, it allowed those apps to be shown in the bottom of the profiles. Flash is always known to cause problems. From that day, I stopped visiting profiles as that sucking flash would freeze my browser, sometimes profiles took ages to load and tons of new innovative problems.

Below is a snapshot of the flash applications that show up at the bottom of profiles.

Makes me go crazy

Enter Facebook….

It was such a nice social networking site with only the shit I wanted and high grades of privacy. Facebook lately uplifted its user-interface which was not well received within the community. I initially supported this move as change is good. People of late had started commenting on the status and news feed. Fan pages and status message comments were the hottest thing out there. The Wall (orkut’s counterpart of scrapbook) was lying unused.

Now after the facelift, Facebook started using bigger fonts and narrower space for showing news feeds. It removed the Live Feed section thinking that no-one uses it. This could be excellent provided only useful data comes in . Initially I liked it and started using FB even more. This excitement was short lived when I found that my timeline has started to show more spam than actual news. People started taking those crappy quizzes like “What category of  fool you are you?”, “Should you have been guy or a gal?”, “What motorcycle are you?” and much more of such crap.

I find the app spam becoming intolerable, below is an example. I don’t blame the users, they are usually ignorant that it shows up in the timeline.

Its actually useless to bang you head for these spams

Its actually useless to bang you head for these spams


4
Apr 09

Neck deep into technical affairs

Being a CS student everyone expects me to have an expertise in Technology and Programming. So what I did for last few days? I have been learning different libraries of *nix system, Linux to be precise. I have written a lot of posts on my Tech Blog which is now getting effin popular. Suddenly I am getting to many hits and referrers, which is a nice development.

So what’s going on lately?

  1. Added an About Page both on this blog and my Technical Blog. Both are same with minor differences.
  2. I have written an article on Working with libnotify. libnotify is a library for Gnome desktop environment to show notifications to the user
  3. Another blog post on “SQLite with C“. This is enough to make half of the people scratching their heads. C is perceive as a dangerous language :P , now when this is combined with SQLite can make noobs insane. You would like to know more about SQLite.
  4. Wishlist for Karmic Koala. Karmic Koala is the name given to Ubuntu 9.10, which would be going to be released after Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope 9.04. I tried out Jaunty Beta and it looks very tempting. Let’s pin lots of hope from the final release.
  5. This blog got a Google Page Rank of 2. It’s around two months back that I started this blog. Google acknowledged it for its unique content and here goes my award. Let’s wait for more improvements. My Tech Blog already got a Page Rank of 3 for quite a long time.
  6. Sankarshan Mukherjee added me to Planet FLOSS India. I am esteemed to share the place with all the geeks/nerds and hackers of India.

24
Mar 09

Language of Orkut Despos

Ask any girl on Orkut about the sheer influx of anonymous friend requests and defacing her (s)crapbook by unknown retards. I have many friends who share their problems with me about these unwanted people. Have you ever noticed what kind of (s)craps they post to get the attention of a gal? Here is quote some examples which you might stumble across sooner or later

1)  He needs your attention :D

hiiiiiii!!!!11

2) If there is no reply

r u their…

3)  Beauty is God’s gift, admire it

u luk vary butiful

4)  Man is a social animal, needs company

i waant 2 mak fraandshpi wid u

5) Friendship knows no bounds :P

u in deli? i am cuming therr

6) Now if the girl gets frustrated and logs off

y u nt replyin? you fadeup with me?


22
Mar 09

Interesting Blog Posts from all over Manipal

Here goes another dose of technical jargon. Being an engineer(almost) you should expect something like these from me. Here goes some great blog posts of late which i have came across.

  • Why is Ubuntu the most Popular distro: It’s said that people disagree just to disagree. Well, there is no harm in discussing anything. This is the democratic feel :) Check out this blog post which has got a lot of hits from all over the globe and enough comments and track-backs.
  • Round-up on the search engines and a troubleshooting linux sessionsVarun writes about his experiences on organizing a workshop on Search Engines and SEO. It was aimed at first timers and general public instead of power users.

16
Feb 09

(Random) Some of the greatest group pics

A piece of Gem

A piece of Gem

This pic doesn’t need a second explanation. I’ll miss Manipal and the awesome company.

(Taken on Rwik’s Birthday)


2
Feb 09

Barkha says: Shut up, just let me say

Looks as if your country is under a phase of transformation. We earlier had two meanings for socialism, marxism, democracy, secularism etc. A new term meaning of “freedom of speech” has been formulated by Barkha Dutt. This “Kargil ki Rani” just made a blogger apologize unconditionally for his blog post where he accused this Iron lady for her shoddy journalism.

I don’t think Chyetanya Kunte said something new. It was repeated again and again all over the blogosphere. Everyone criticized her for being too desperate in reporting the Mumbai attacks. Pushing mics in the mouth of victims is in no way a dare-devil act, showing how commandos are landing on the roof of the buildings did more harm in my humble opinion.

Barkha once had said that bloggers need to be controlled on what they write. Bloggers are actually common people who havnt done any journalism courses and what they said comes directly from their hearts. They constitute a bigger section of the society rather than those qualified journalist who form a small negligible section of this huge society.

How can one forget that she used to accuse politicians each time something wrong happened in our country. Did she have any proof against them? If no, then how can she force Kunte to remove posts in which he accused Barkha?

After Mumbai attacks, government tried to regulate the broadcasts of these news channels including NDTV. It was this Queen who shouted that government has no right to regulate them. Can’t she apply this logic to blogosphere too?

P.S.: Am exercising my freedom of speech and using that explanation which we all know, not the *Barkha’s* explanation of freedom of speech


30
Nov 08

In-Sensitive Media and Politicians

Finally the Mumbai encounter is over, after claiming more than 200 lives in this incident of blasts and shootouts. Terrorists are targeting important locations one after the other. The valour showed by the NSG and maritime commandos is commendable. They deserve their appreciations except that our country lost encounter specialists and one NSG commando while clearing the hotels.

After each such attack, its the politicians who are criticized for their acts. Contrary to the past records, this time the Electronic Media has surpassed the politicians for gathering their share of criticisms.

Maharashtra’s Home Minister RR Patil has dubbed this great incident as small incidents which happen in big cities like Mumbai. Means the life of people is worthless? They get tight Z-cover security, due to which they don’t know the plight of common man! Shameless creatures who don’t deserve to be holding any government servant post.

News channels like IBNLive went as low as no can even dream of. They were in mad rush of Live telecast of such sensitive information. At that situation even those sitting in front of TV screen were busy criticising them. They set up a new standard of Desperate Journalism.

Our own Kargil ki Rani and Padma Shree award winner “Barkha Dutt” was no behind and was seen moving along with those cheap journalist who were there just for covering some sensation. She disappointed a lot of her fans, whom she made for her braveness in Kargil War. Just imagined that you have been rescued by forces and your husband/wife is still stuck up in hostel. Then suddenly Barkha Dutt arrives from nowhere and asks since your better half is still stuck inside, so “How are you feeling?” What would you reply? Speechless? I was once a fan of her long ago, but slowly I have lost confidence even in Media after losing confidence in Politicians. Now its only the judiciary on which I put my faith.

What more stupid questions can the media frame? They can ask Ratan Tata by calling him over. How many terrorists do you think are there inside? What is the damage to the structure? Any estimates? I think a small workaround may be to ban Live Reporting, but that’s impractical seeing how desperate and strong media is in our country.

The media was in forefront to disclose any commando action for cheap publicity. They were showing commandos land on hotel rooftop, what is the positioning of troops around the hotel. How many troops have been dispatched. What ammos they are carrying. They were also desperate to show how people were stuck up and calling for help at windows. They used all operations like focussing and zooming to pile up as much of sensation as they can on the already worse situation. When pushed aside by forces for getting more room, they were even quick to report “So you can see the police doesn’t want us to cover this event, you may miss this sensual and important event due to them”. I am really sick of these cheap activities. The only news channel which I like now is “DD News”, straight and to the point, no sensation, hype and all those crap.

Media is hyping this as India’s 9/11. Sorry! Its not India’s 9/11 since after that event US dared to attack Afganistan to show its might, even though it may be wrong. Our politicians would just condemn this attack and its all over. No one has the guts and most of the ministers in our present government are cowards. The situation of Kashmir is worse than what happened in Mumbai, the North-East is not better. Media - please think before you say. You caused more fear in people that the terrorist can themselves. Why show dead bodies on the first page? Why on newspapers itself? No one wants to start their day after having even a glance on it.

I just hope that Indian Media grows up on time, and we people stop watching their 3rd class reporting methods. If we stop watching, they would stop showing, just a hope. The chances are bleak, but still it is there.