Truth, Computing and Fail

Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seat belts and get ready to be taken through a whirlwind tour through the kingdom of the self proclaimed ‘tech bloggers’ who profess to live, eat and breathe technology. Soon you would come to know they fart too.

Some generalized observations on the sweeping epidemic that is ‘tech blogging’ :

1. Someone starts a damn, fucking blog with a nice theme. Point to be noted. He could later throw around that fact and claim to be a CSS geek.

2. He starts writing vociferously about mobile phones, ‘gadgets’, ‘latest tech news’ (sic), ‘tips and tricks’ (did I forget to add Windows here?), ‘tweaks’ (o yeah, what’s next? tweaking nipples video on youtube?) etc etc

3. Uses the term ‘geek’ atleast once while describing himself.

That is all that is there to it. Uhm..you would say how do I term it as an epidemic? Let me begin with some specific cases in the Indian blogosphere scene. Cases that would make Tim Berners Lee cringe.

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Case I:
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Ashfame tech blog

What is it about: So this guy is a tech blogger. Heck, he knows he is damn popular. He even tom toms his blog stats in a separate post.

What does his blog offer: Let us allow him to describe it himself, “I blog about blogging, tips and tricks, tutorials, hacking, hardware and reviews. A niche is less than what I blog about.”

Fart factor (on a scale of 10): 9.5

Quick analysis: Looking at the first page, I see posts on Opera download, some obscure tool for creating animated gif, ‘tips’ on using IrfanView (aargh) and write protecting USB drives. No need to take the pain to delve dipper into the guano. Mr. Ashfame, you’d have got a 8 but for your zomg-look-i-am-a-hacker posts. Now Mr. Ashfame has ‘tips’ for becoming a hacker too! No wonder the old farts at AntiOnline are going to lose their jobs soon. In his md5sum post, he has a radically different view of the security of hash functions:

It is extremely unlikely for two non-identical files to have same md5sum as calculated by hashing algorithms (however the theory says something else).

Extremely unlikely, no way. The very nature of the 128-bit md5 hashing function opens it up to collisions as some researchers have already demonstrated and which I am not fully qualified to discuss. Mr. Ashfame, I have a task for you. I have a XOR encrypted C source file. Let me see you break it. This hint should be enough for you as I presume you have extensive knowledge of something even more secure than this i.e. one-way hashing functions.

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Case II
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Akshay Gandhi’s tips & tricks and blah blah…

What is it about: A blog that would give you tons of info on freeware and…again…*bangs head on a wall* tips & tricks!

What does his blog offer: Again, nothing better than allowing the person himself to demonstrate it to you.

An ALL INCLUSIVE BLOG – Find trivias, graphology, Vista tips, troubleshooting, mobile secrets, mobile code, reviews, freewares, tips, tricks,legal info, law firms, legal view, jokes, interesting facts, etc…

Fart factor (on a scale of 10): 9

Quick analysis: An all inclusive blog. What more could you ask for, eh? But wait, I thought people satisfied those needs by visiting santabanta.com . Some remarkable gems from the first page: Power Defragmenter 2.0.125, Rapid Typing tutor (they still have openings for typists?) and some shit about System Restore in Vista. Seriously dude, if you need ‘tips & tricks’ for working on Vista you better re-evaluate your current technical knowledge base.

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Case III
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John TP

Do I need to say more?

*SIGH* See, how things get redundant after a short trip to only two blogs? Redundancy, as we have come to know, is frowned upon in the computing world. We have extremely reliable and well edited sources of information for gadgets and cellphone news, new softwares, games and OS releases, major policy upheaval by decision makers in Government and all that on the Wired, Ars Technica, Endgadget, ZDNet blogs (no, I won’t be mentioning TechCrunch here) and a lot many which I don’t visit but have a loyal reader base. The point I’m trying to make here is that don’t fucking post just for the sake of it if you don’t have anything new to add to the already vast source of information available on the same topic. Why? It gets really frustrating for a newbie who would google for something like optimizing his PC and would end up at the countless sites like the ones mentioned above. Total wastage of his bandwidth and time. If an established site has already covered the same thing, DO NOT fucking post the same thing again. (Do I sound like Brad Pitt here?)

BONUS TIP: Stop using Windows and you’d never need to rummage through such shitholes for optimizing applications. There are enough GNU and other open source tools that come bundled with all *nix OSs which would take care of such nifty matters. Case in point: iptables or Zone Alarm?

Get a cue from the blogs of the numerous FOSS developers and also programming stalwarts like Jeff Atwood. Write something that really matters, has some real content. Else, just fucking get off the tube. You are doing no good to us. Just because you have been handed an internet connection, you can’t get away with swinging your fuckin badass boner like it was nobody else’s business (read: posting content with 8+ fart factor).

Signing off, as the lords of code would say:

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

Once again it is the start of a new year. Once again I resolve to be regular with blogging.

Happy new year to all the other worldly readers of my blog!

P.S: 25 years of TCP/IP too! Celebrating 2.5 decades of reliable packet delivery

Well, lets get to the point and admit that everybody wants to rake in some moolah from their AdSense susbscriptions. But the thing that bothers them the most would be the proper positioning of the ads. Imagine a new visitor coming to your blog to see it cluttered with misplaced ads, like one bang on top of the first post. Forget about clicking on the ad, he won’t even read your first post and there you have your potential $1 bidding you goodbye.

I got the idea of this trick from this post at Jake Jarvis’ blog. I had been on the lookout for such a thing for a long time.

In this post I will elaborate it a bit to make it easier for newbies at coding who may have difficulties finding out the start and end of loops.

The file you need to edit is index.php in most themes or like theloop.php in k2. Basically the idea is to put the ad block in the post loop. Remember that: the post loop.

Now open the required file in the Theme Editor from your wordpress admin and find the beginning of the post loop, the line containing if(have_posts()).

For example, in theloop.php you will find it in this manner:

if ( have_posts() ) {

Freshy makes life a bit easier for you, by including descriptions in the index.php file. Find out

<!--blog-->

Now that you have found this line, below this line declare a variable:

<?php $count = 1; ?>

Now go to the end of the post loop, to be understood by codes like

<?php endif; ?>

. After this line of code and just before the closure of the

</div>

tag, add this loop:

<?php if ($count == 1) : ?>

<!-- YOUR ADSENSE CODE HERE -->

<?php endif; $count++; ?>

Now placing the adsense code becomes easier if you are using the AdSense Deluxe plugin. It keeps the coding neat. Just put in the following line of code in the loop:

<?php adsense_deluxe_ads('Ad_Name'); ?>

and you are done!!

The blog has undergone a total makeover. It is now running on the latest Wordpress 2.1.2

I had to change the theme to the one that has witnessed phenomenal popularity in the past one year, Freshy. This was mainly due to problems with the k2 sidebar modules configuration.

And I did not care to restore the previous posts from the database as they were hardly informative.