Truth, Computing and Fail

1. Politicians. Thanks for showing the whole world how incapable are we of governing ourselves. Just a couple of months since one of the worst terrorist attacks on India and you have truly ‘moved on’.

2. I’m looking at you, fucking wimp.

There are not many words to be wasted here. I’ll keep it short. Politicians are not the problem. YOU are the problem. The so-called civilized Indian society is the problem. With all its inherent glorification of subservience, mediocrity and total disrespect for individual freedom, it has been feeding the monster of intolerance and keeping it hale and hearty. Do you know why the politicians are so interested in muffling your dick rather than worrying about the non-existent water supply in your district? It is simply because it appeals to a major section of our oh-so-puritan society. You’d know the people in this demographic. You see them everyday. Those unassuming, pushed to the corner men and women from the 60s who have already fucked up their lives and are now out to fuck yours too. Nothing appeals to them more than some morality talk on the lines of “Ah! Those were the days”. Yeah, those days, when incompetent bastards like them could actually think of eking out a living without worrying about their intellectual capabilities, or rather the lack of it. This thing is like comfort food for them. Nothing else would give them a sound sleep like going to bed being rest assured that there are righteous men out there ready to pull you down, break your spirits and see to it that you don’t dare be yourself again.

Don’t waste your time cussing politicians. They’re the true mirror of what a society really is. If they wouldn’t have had any sympathizers, they wouldn’t have been doing this.

Yes, you heard it right. We Indians don’t deserve it. Certainly not. When you don’t recognize the value of something you already have, you would rather not have it.

Let’s see what democracy would mean in layman terms. Fuck legal jargon.

1. As a citizen of the country, you have every right to mind your own business, however warped it might be as long as you are not flipping out and killing someone.

2. As a direct consequence, you are not expected to be dicking around dictating terms to others.

There we go. We can spot the problems already. Very obviously, you are not supposed to mind your own business. The State is watching over you. There are countless such obstacles you are facing in your day-to-day life. But the flavor of today’s post is night life, as I think I am in a better position to comment on things that I witness firsthand. What does common sense dictate? You are in a free country. You are free to move anywhere as long it is not some private territory and it does not matter whatever time of the day(or night) it is. Having said that, our benevolent authorities have made it sure you don’t have such peace of mind. How else would they remind you that they too exist, even though their sole purpose is to fuck you up. “Whoa! Hold on,”, you say, “I’m not cutting down anyone’s limbs. I’m just having a jolly good time”. Sure you are innocent. But some people just won’t have it.

“Student nuisance in Manipal will not be tolerated,” said the SP when contacted

…and what kind of nuisance would that be? That’s a bummer, you dork. You were enjoying yourself. That’s sure to be classified as nuisance. We have zeroed in on the problem, finally. Hope you are still with me.

This is a deep seated problem in the general Indian psyche and no wonder it propagates all the way up to the bureaucracy and administration. We have self proclaimed religious Godfathers, outfits that are somehow holding off the immoral apocalypse and above all of them, The Executive who are here to dictate terms on how you are to lead your life. This is the hallmark of Indian society. Even though there might be something that doesn’t affect them, people will always have their own judgment ready and more often that not, will see to it that you conform to it. Be different and be ready to be ridiculed and jeered at in this nation. Coming back to Manipal, this is a town full of students and the dynamics are quite different from, say, a colony of pensioners. Also, what could be the justification behind closing shops at 11:30 PM, regardless of what place it is in? None, as we would have it. I don’t think I need to further bring the achievements of our elite Police Force into the picture. They have been a complete failure at protecting the citizens of this country and are quite shamelessly open about this fact. There are fucking huge intelligence failures at the State level. What we have as a result are bomb blasts almost every other day. So what were the police doing? Oh, they were busy curbing the “student nuisance” and also seeing to it that our morality isn’t destroyed at the same time.

The whole of the police force in India is a shameful bloat on the nation, unlike the motivated soldiers in our Army, Navy and Air Force. The reason is not too hard to find out. It still carries the Victorian legacy on its shoulders. It still functions on the same principles from that era when it was used to intimidate the common person rather than protecting and helping them out. That mindset has surely carried over even into the 21st Century. When was the last time that you were to a police station and experienced cordial behavior, unless you pulled some strings, that is. I lost my Airtel SIM card once and went to the one and only police station in Manipal to lodge an FIR since it was a serious matter and I had no intention of getting involved with the SIM card falling in wrong hands. The officer who was supposed to help me out with it rather displayed an attitude as if I had already committed a crime by losing the SIM card and lectured me half an hour straight on some rules I was not in the mood to listen to. Needless to say the FIR wasn’t lodged even though I had the necessary documents with me. Thankfully, the Airtel guys had a really hassle free way of issuing a duplicate SIM card that would block the original one. I wonder where this display of zealous enthusiasm to maintain “an iron hand” over law and order was at that time . I’m not sure if the founding fathers of this country would have had this kind of a situation in mind, where people are harassed and prosecuted just for being outdoors at night. We know we don’t have much hope when the CM of Delhi herself thinks venturing out at 3 AM is a bad idea and too “adventurous” for a lady, even thought it may well be a part of her job.

Fuck whatever TATA Tea has to say. Democracy isn’t all about casting your vote. Rather it’s about knowing one’s rights and having a strong sense of self-worth. Anyway, if there is something whose worth you don’t realize, it won’t be with you for too long.

Read this

A detailed post about the problematic mindset plaguing our society in general. Now don’t go about calling it a rant, you dunce.

Some recent developments in my college that is gonna reinforce the points outlined in that post:

1. We are being literally threatened to stop carrying mobiles (and for that matter, any kind of gadgets) otherwise some badass ‘Discipline Enforcement Team’ is gonna conduct ‘raids’ and snatch those from us. No logic, no explanation needed. Shoot shoot, bang bang modern day cowboy. I don’t yet understand what is it with that ‘raid’ terminology. Are we some kinda terrorists or anti-socials?

2. I saw a TGMC poster on the department notice board. Till now there hasn’t been no announcement of it, leave alone which faculty member to contact to register for the event. Looks like the authorities are busier trying to enforce ‘discipline’. I also wonder if they tried telling the IBM people that those in charge of the labs and the so called R&D centre(which now is just another magnificent building converted into a bunch of labs) are too eager to head home after 5 pm and that the college thinks students don’t need internet access from midnight to 5 AM. Oh, did I forget to mention that you won’t get a single fuckin day of attendance even if you managed to get to work on some project under that initiative? If someone with a Microsoft internship and another one with a fractured kneecap didn’t manage to get that, what chance do you stand?

All of these just point to a single fact. They abso-fucking-lutely have nothing better to do.

The only positive development: we are being taught syscalls and my friends are taking interest in writing standardized codes and reading the man pages . Only if they made us write the text editor in the Systems Programming lab with ncurses for designing the interface and C instead of just that wretched Turbo C. Yeah, gotoxy() is for losers. Getty?

As for me, I am all tangled up with signals. Classes have been keeping me busy and tired but I hope to get my head around that in a couple of days from now.

Perfection is achieved only at the point of collapse – C.N. Parkinson

A storm of discussions and opinions has been kicked up in the online community regarding the decision of some ISPs to introduce metered access. The argument put forward by the ISPs is that while majority of the people use their internet connection for casual e-mails and browsing stuff, the smartass motherfuckers in this minority get away with downloading tons of movies, music, software etc etc even though both of them shell out the same amount for access. Don’t be fooled, all their trash talk about inadequate infrastructure to handle the burgeoning demand of bandwidth is crap. They have been finding a way to deal with since the last 15 years. They would do quite well to repeat the same in the future too. If they are actually concerned about the customer who pays more yet uses less, why don’t they introduce some special plan for these kind of users where they would be charged for something like per 500 MB of data transfer? That would be enough to handle your ‘casual surfers’. Face it assholes, the internet is no more about just e-mail and HTML 3.1 . We have come a long way since that.

How does the rant against the big music corps figure in this discussion? Well, you would soon see how they are related. Yesterday I was listening to songs on the last.fm recommendations radio with the ’80s tag. I came across a band named Kix, which was one of those countless glam metal/sleaze rock bands from L.A. who had a meteoric rise only to fade away that soon. I don’t remember the track name but it was terrible shit and someone in the shoutbox said that the band sounds like a ‘poor man’s version of Ratt’. To put it in a word, batshit. Now, if the big music corps were to have their way, I would have been forced to buy a copy of the whole album only to be stomping over the CD after a single session of listening to it. Don’t mention iTunes. I find paying 99 cents for each track equally retarded. If my internet connection was supposedly metered and I was just inching towards the 40 GB limit they imposed on my connection, I would have thought twice before streaming the song, thereby having no other choice but to buy the CD.

The point here is that both these businesses are working on concepts and models that are totally outdated and irrelevant in today’s highly advanced technological society. The bands and artists have always made shitloads of money even if their albums have been a modest success at best. ‘There can never be adequate compensation for an artist’s efforts’ is just BS. People have families to look after, kids to raise, ailing parents to tend to. They don’t earn just to splurge on some airheaded diva. If RandomBigMusicCorp still plays the same stuck record, tell them to shoot the artists so that they could go to heaven and play with dollar bills and dive in pools of gold coins like Uncle Scrooge.

So here is to both of you,

P.S. Haven’t posted anything technical for a while. Surely will make up for it within the next 3-4 days

Most of my smarter fellow ‘tech bloggers’ might have already informed you of the Firefox 3 release, the clamor for a world record and their subsequent reviews with lots of eye-candy screenshots and inconsequential shit like how the new smooth, rounded buttons and neater icons make them want to crap in their pants.

This is coming from a user who made the jump straight from v2.0.0.14 to v3 with only a couple of times of using the beta versions that were released over the past 2 months. As you type in the address bar, as I had already noted in the beta versions, FF takes a dictionary based indexing approach to the page titles in addition to the standard indexing on URL. This is much better when you remember the context of a page you visited but not the URL. The memory load is significantly lower than the previous version as a quick qualitative analysis of the processes currently running shows. The drop down choices in the input boxes have a quick, jumpy fade out effect which, well, could be improved. It looks cheesy. The bookmarks toolbar has a ‘most visited’ folder. I haven’t yet uninstalled v2 as I’d like to make a better comparison between the two.

I enjoyed the live stream the Mozilla team put up at air.mozilla.com

Oh, btw, if you still don’t know the link, here it is (only for linux distros). Hopefully changing os=windows in the URL would be good for you dowze boys.

P.S.: It has been raining here for 32 hours non-stop and it is sickening. I haven’t been able to step out of the house. Hence the trollish behavior.

Just imagine the apocalyptic response from the faculty if someone tries to do this in a college here

Do check out his presentation too.

Generally mass digged technology articles are not worth commenting upon except a few, like this one. To be more precise its more about the comments posted than the article itself.

It is quite funny,hilarious,dangerous and shocking at the same time that there are a vast majority of people who still don’t believe in global warming and rather prefer to demonstrate their douchebaggery to the world by irresponsible comments such as “Global warming is a fucking scam. There ain’t no warming happening.” At first sight, we may dismiss this as deviant behavior but come to think of the fact that these kind of persons may very well form their own congregations, associations, trusts or whatever that brings them together. Since mania and mass hysteria can reach epidemic proportions in the modern world thanks to instant communication and dissipation of information, you can very well imagine what would happen when such lunatics would coax the world into believing their crap. Then there are the apocalypse and judgment day believers.

Retards, get your fucking fatasses off the couch, visit a rural area, enjoy the cool weather and go back to the city cauldron. You’d know whats heating up the earth. The only reason you shitbags are still alive is due to the forest cover remaining in the remotest parts of the world. Though I can’t wait to see your carefully stored cellulite melting to a stinking pile of shit inside a greenhouse.

Looks like Orkut has followed suit in the steps of Facebook. Just logged in and I can see a ton of them. Currently trying out Music iLike. Time to show my allegiance to the ’80s!

Two back to back posts, but couldn’t resist it…

Movie Reviews

You decide for yourself :p