I’ve been using Wikipedia, WikiBooks and WikiQuote since quite a while and I am just amazed at the breadth and depth of their content. That too, this is a community effort done voluntarily in free time. Awesome.

Simon Willison listed his favorite features recently. Take a look. You’ll be surprised that there is even a directory of all the biological species known to man.

When you have cousins flying over from Canada and Australia and everybody catches up, you tend to do stuff together. We went bowling and watched Musafir on Sunday. The movie is worth watching just for Sanjay Dutt! He’s amazing. My favorite dialogue of the movie is (in Hindi) "Taqdeer teri chutti pe. Maut teri sar pe. Lekin baatein aisi karta hai jaise zindagi teri bistar pe." … the songs are straight beats and dance stuff but well made. No pretenses are made. The movie is fast and the songs are fast. A bit of warning though, its definitely not a family movie

I watched Swades today. Very well made and inspiring movie. There are no special scenes or jhatka matka songs. Just pure patriotism. Not the in-your-face over-the-top kind but a simple and meaningful way that you and I can relate to. If that’s not your cup of tea, then don’t watch it. Otherwise, the movie just totally appeals to you. It did to me. No matter what you do, no matter how comfortable you are, there’s nothing like home. One of the reasons I don’t really look forward to going to ‘amreeka’ as most people I see around fancy about. If the opportunity came, I might go. If not, I don’t really care. I like it here. Am I crazy to say that?

On a related note, the movie just reminds me of Abdul Kalam’s vision of using technology to improve life in my country India. I hope one day I would be able to contribute to such a vision.

If this post seems like a bolt from the blue to you, don’t be surprised. I’ve had these things in my mind since a long time. It’s just that I didn’t blog about it till now. I can’t help it, I’m a very idealistic person and this movie just brought out that side in me

Update It seems that Swades is a rip-off of the Kannada film ‘Chigurida Kanasu’ based on the novel of the same name by Shivaram Karanth. I am trying to look for details on this.

It was a good day for work. I worked non-stop in refactoring my project and cleaning up the code.

So, I ended up the day by seeing "Ocean’s 12" at PVR Cinemas at Forum with my friend Azmi. The movie’s great. I liked the plot. There’s only word to really describe it – slick. Really slick. And the star cast is brilliant – George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Andy Garcia, Julia Roberts, and many more.

IMHO, Ocean’s 11 was better, but the sequel is still a great movie too.

Plus, the fact that the seats at PVR is so damn comfy helped a lot too.

My 12-year old sister wanted to learn more about musical instruments for some homework that she wanted to write and asked me if I knew something to write about. I told her she could use the internet to read all about that.

So, she logged into Fedora. I showed her how to open Firefox and then told her to type ‘wikipedia.org’ and press enter. Go to ‘Search’ and type ‘musical instruments’ and press enter. Voila! All the information is there. She got fascinated by the amount of info as well as the nice images on the pages about the guitar, violin, veena, sarod and many more.

It was remarkable how easily she took to Firefox. She was opening the site, searching for something, right clicking and opening in new tabs, all after just 5 min of showing her how to do it.

She even uses the computer to draw. She used to use KPaint but has now graduated to GIMP.

And they say Linux is not easy.

Good to hear that Sun is finally serious about dynamic languages on Java. It’s no secret that I don’t like Java. I don’t want to start a holy war here – it’s just simply my personal preference, I don’t like the ‘smell’ and ‘feel’ of it. But it would be great to write stuff in Python and get it running on top of the Java platform. That would surely be good for everybody. It would make more sense if all the big corporates also tried using Jython or Groovy – it would lead to much happier and saner programmers and better products as well. Oh, and it’ll run on the Java platform.

Then again, I agree with Dumbill that the lack of activity on IronPython is discomforting.

Btw, don’t forget to read that first link – It must’ve been awesome to have Larry Wall (creator of Perl), Guido van Rossum (creator of Python), Dan Sugalski (Parrot) and Samuele Pedroni (Jython), James Strachan (Groovy) all in the same room and discussing dynamic languages!

I’ve been down with fever since the past two days

I watched a part of the ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’ movie and one sentence really stood out for me:

Men are the head but women are the neck. We can make the head turn any way we want.

Food for thought!

Another interesting one was in the ‘Koffee with Karan’ talk show hosted by Karan Johar, the maker of ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ and other big movies and he was interviewing Shah Rukh Khan, the superstar. Karan asks ‘Who is the most beautiful woman in the world?’. Shah Rukh says ‘Aishwarya Rai.’ Karan asks ‘What would you say to the other beautiful women?’. Shah Rukh says ‘There are many more galaxies.’

That was surely a good presence of mind displayed by Shah Rukh.

Yahoo! Bangalore is looking for good people to get involved in some cool projects from UI to the OS!

If you are interested, send me a resume and I’ll forward to them to the right guys.

Extra bonus points if you have attended my talk at LB Heh heh.

If you need some reasons to consider Yahoo, check out what Jeremy Zawodny has to say about life in Yahoo!

What are you waiting for?

I was using MEPIS Linux for the past 4 days after a high recommendation by Pradeep and I was remarkably surprised by the ease of install.

First of all, it acts as a LiveCD so you can test out everything before you do any install and then you then click on the Install section in the menu and it’ll install on the hard disk. Uber-cool!

However, I hit a roadblock on two things – sound wasn’t working and the Sify dialer wasn’t working. Regarding sound, I tried everything but couldn’t get it working at all…

Disappointed, I just had to switch back to Fedora since I needed a working system fast… so I installed FC3 again and now I’m back in business.. The Fedora Installation Guide was of immense help – especially the part about removing unused services at startup and using the KDE Display Manager instead of gdm. Everything looks so much better now!

Also, I have started to rewrite chapters of my book, so that I can get back in the writing groove and also improve the wordings of many parts of the book. I’m taking into consideration the huge list of corrections sent by readers that I haven’t been able to incorporate till now. You can look forward to some good improvements in the book

Here you go, the 2004 Weblog Awards!

Very cool! Has almost any kind of category you can imagine. It’ll take quite a while to go through the list of sites here, but I think there’s a lot of good stuff in there just waiting to be read

de Bono has always fascinated me… to write 56 books on ‘thinking’ is certainly no easy feat!!

I wanted to read this book for quite some time and had got it yesterday from the Eloor library.. have started to read it…. I especially like the part which says:

Being a thinker does not involve being right all the time. Indeed, anyone who is right all the time is likely to be a poor thinker (arrogant, uninterested in exploration, unable to see alternatives, etc.). Being a thinker does not involve being clever. Nor does it involve solving all those cunning problems that people always expect me to solve. Being a thinker involves consciously wanting to be a thinker.

and this:

You choose which of the six hats to put on at any one moment. You put on that hat and then play the role defined by that hat. You watch yourself playing that role. You play the role as well as you can. Your ego is protected by the role. your ego is involved in playing the role well. When you change thinking hats you have to change roles. Each role should be distinct. As distinct as the witch and the prince in a pantomime. You become a bunch of different thinkers – all using the same head. All this is part of the mapmaking type of thinking. As I have said, each colored hat represents a different color that might be used in the printing of a map. At the end the colors come together to give the completed map. …. Thinking now begins to flow fro the acted parts and not from your ego. That is how maps are made. Then, in the end, the ego can choose a preferred route.