Back to the top ?

This essay is well worth a read,

“The confidence came from a little boy. In the late 1950s, this boy struggled to have two meals a day while he studied under the streetlights and went barefoot to school. This same boy almost left school in 1960, because his poor widowed mother could not support his education. That this boy, who is myself, could become the president of the Indian Science Congress is what gave me the confidence to say that India could again achieve intellectual and economic greatness. If this miracle could happen to any Indian, then given an opportunity, it can happen to every Indian.”

Mea Culpa

“The two young ladies came from well to do upper income stock and were raised in a modern, integrating India. Vandana's father had served in the armed forces and she was raised all over the country. Vaishnavi's father worked for a transnational company and she was raised in Kolkatta. The first is a Malayali and the second, a Tamil. How often in the world at large do you get such diverse streams coming together to demonstrate such radical humanism? Isn't there enough evidence at hand to conclude this?: between this rising sensitive young generation and a responsive society all our ills have the prospect of becoming manageable in a finite time scale.”

Read more.

Off late, I have been focussing on what is wrong with our country and kerala in particular. Too much of negativity, perhaps.

Frankly, I can't think of a better place or better people to live with.

Easy to point out the faults. Difficult to appreciate the good. Even more difficult is to work for change and make everyone's life a little bit better.

There are a few who actually do that. The above excerpted is one such story. The site itself is like a breath of fresh air. Never fails to fill me with hope of a better tomorrow.

I should be talking less about the bad and more about the good. Better would be to stop talking and go out and do some good.

Living In India : A new community blog

“What is Living In India?

Living in India is a new community 'blogzine' produced by a cooperative of bloggers and writers with a focus on India. It is being developed in conjunction with the team behind Living in China.

A blog (short for weblog) is a web page made up of frequently updated and chronological posts . The content and purposes of blogs varies greatly from links and commentary about other web sites, to news, personal diaries, photography and mini-essays.

Bloggers provide alternative voices to mainstream media. This site aims to showcase the wide variety of opinions and experiences of people living in and writing about this large and important nation.

Content is a combination of original material and syndicated 'RSS Feeds' from our ever-growing network of participating blogs.

We invite all bloggers from India and beyond to participate.
”

Living In India // About Us.

Interesting. Let us see how it evolves.

Linux backdoor ?

“The backdoor was a two-line addition to a development copy of the Linux kernel's source code, carefully crafted to look like a harmless error-checking feature added to the wait4() system call - a function that's available to any program running on the computer, and which, roughly, tells the operating system to pause execution of that program until another program has finished its work.

Under casual inspection, the code appears to check if a program calling wait4() is using a particular invalid combination of two flags, and if the user invoking it is the computer's all-powerful root account. If both conditions are true, it aborts the call.

But up close, the code doesn't actually check if the user is root at all. If it sees the flags, it grants the process root privileges, turning wait4() into an instant doorway to complete control of any machine, if the hacker knows the right combinations of flags.”

The Register.

Interesting.

28th Bharateeya Blog Mela

“Bharateeya Blog Mela is a celebration of the best content in the Indian blogspace. The latest Mela is always available at this URL (bookmark it).

This page is the 28th edition of the Mela. It's archived at this URL.

Any type of feedback is always appreciated. Leave a comment.

This is a spoof of the Indian Express. Please don't bother warning me about it.

The 28th Mela was brought to you by the brewers of...”

28th Bharateeya Blog Mela

Q&A with Krishna Bharat of Google News

“Google News is one of the largest and most up-to-date news services online, gathering content from more than 4,500 online news sources around the world, then determining which stories are related and grouping them based on importance.

While the creation of the original articles and their publication online requires thousands of journalists, editors and other news professionals, the organization and display of stories on Google News is managed entirely by computer programs.

Google News launched in September 2002 on www.google.com. Recently, localized version of Google News were created for international markets, including Germany, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and India. The new beta versions of Google News for these countries are available on their respective Google country domains. Other versions are in the works and should be available in the months ahead.

Krishna Bharat,
Google Principal Scientist

Krishna Bharat, the Google Principal Scientist who conceived the idea for Google News, took a moment recently to answer questions submitted by readers of the Google Friends newsletter.”

Read more.

Google ROCKS !

I guess, It is obvious. Everyone knows it. Any other company would have been content to lay back and rest on their laurels. But they are not that kind. No Sir. They keep coming up with fantastic ideas like Google news and the latest one about which I will be talking about.

I signed up yesterday for their latest product : Adsense.

What is it ?

It delivers targeted advertisements to your website. For years, online advertisers have been talking about targeted ads but nobody has ever really delivered. And google has. In a big way.

Just take a look at the ads on this page about kerala. The ads are about kettuvallam houseboats and the karakathi beach house ! That is how targeted it can get. And I didnt have to do a thing. Google understood the content of the page and delivered the best ad for it. Infact, the ads were so targeted that I felt very tempted to click them myself ! In the end, I did a google search and learned more about them :-)

This page about a US VISA bill affecting indians has ads about green cards and immigration.

When I saw these, I knew Google had a winner on their hands. This will change the online advertising industry in a way nobody could have thought about. And it came from the most unlikely direction.

Ofcourse, there are still a few issues. This site's home page is not getting very targeted ads. I read in a forum that a page listing download mirrors was getting ads about lady's mirrors :) But I am confident that google will solve them sooner than latter.

And finally, we will have ads which are related to and enhance the content of the page. Way to go !

So if you have a website and want to make some money, go ahead and partner with google.

Puthu varshashamsakkal :-)

Elavarkkum ende vishu dinashamsakkal :-)

Silence

The reason behind the lack of updates on this site can be summed up in two words : world cup. When all you do is to track the scorecard during the day and rush home in the evenings to catch whatever little action is left, you dont have much time left to do anything else least of all blog.

It feels great when sachin is in such fine form, isnt it ? I read a while back a stock broker proclaiming that the BSE sensex shoots up whenever sachin scores a century. Just the other day, I was reading an article saying the viewership on setmax goes down by 20 percent when sachin gets out. It is amazing how much power one man holds over the collective psyche of a nation. Is he the most popular man to have walked on the surface of the earth since Jesus ? If you go by just the sheer numbers of his fan following, I would say yes :-)

Masala gets a new url : netlife.tamizhan.com. From my referrer logs, I can see that people tend to make the mistake of thinking that the name masala implies content, the sort of which is found on sites like these ;-).

Last week, something interesting happenned on my site which even I failed to notice till yesterday. For some time now, I have given the option to advertise on my site. Never thought somebody would actually do so. So imagine my surprise when I found out that somebody has done just that. There is indeed an advertisement there now. So if you are not doing anything in particular, do go there and click on the ad. Since it is a CPC ad, I need to get another 25 odd clicks before I get money from my advertiser.

Thanks goes to my sponsor. I hope, you got something out of this and even better, keep doing this again and again :-)

Before I wrap up this entry, there is one surprise news. We had an impromptu indian blogger's meet yesterday at koramangala, bangalore :-). Shyam was in town. So was nilesh. Vignesh is always around. So we decided to meet up and the conversation went on expected lines atleast for me :-)

Shyam was the observer. He is a lot similar to apna vignesh, though to be fair to him, a lot quieter :-) Nilesh was the thinker and he reminds me of sreekanth. Both have a serious air to them though the smile is never far away. Suresh as always kept all of us smiling.

A major portion of the conversation was around my still to be released article titled Thrill Vs Peace. I have been teasing vignesh about this for a while now since he plays the main role of the thrill seeker. I get the author backed role of Peace Lover. This article is going to unleash the flame war to end all wars ;-) The moment I decide how to end this article, I will be publishing it. So stay tuned.

Information Gateway

Well, As expected the google takeover is shaking up the blog world. Enough time and words have been spend on what it means, why it was done and what we will see in the days to come. There is probably nothing more to be said and no angle left to be probed. Still, I will make a couple of points which stuck me as pertinent.

Google's traditional model is to wait for information to be created and then go and look for it. There is a significant time lag in this process which might prove to be critical when an user needs information and needs it now. Once google gets into the business of content generation ( courtesy an army of mostly free volunteers ), they no longer need to go out looking for it. They will be the first to know when new content has been created and will be in the best position to function as an information gateway which I think is what they are aiming for. This perhaps is the single most best thing to come out of the whole thing.

But for all this to succeed, Blogger must regain its once pre-eminent position. Blogger is only a few features ( comments, categories, titles, trackback ) away from doing so. And once you have those google PhDs developing for blogger, who knows what they will conjure up :-)

News for too long has been diluted by the commercial aspirations of the news reporters. It is time to set news free.

Third Annual Weblog Awards.

Third Annual Weblog Awards.

I had a good time there nominating my fav indian blog sites for the awards. Unfortunately, journals are not accepted Most indian blogs are journals rather than a collection of links which is the accepted definition of a blog. Still I did bring sites like kiruba, sathish, mahesh, sachin and nilesh to their notice. All well deserved and I hope one of them wins the best asian weblog award or in one of the other categories I nominated them in.

Update : I saw a category called best non-weblog content in a blog site and so ended up nominated kanchana, shyam and syl.

YAR

Yet Another Redesign :-)

Things look a bit different, dont they ?

Played around with some syndication stuff and a photograph of arjuna's penance from the mahabalipuram site.

itismylife.com will be re-directed to tamizhan.com for a few days to popularise this way of reading all the stuff I write at one place. It will be restored to its previous state in a few days.

Note that the content syndicated at tamizhan.com can be read individually at oru.tamizhan.com, anand.tamizhan.com and masala.tamizhan.com respectively.

As always, I am interested in all of your opinion on the new design.

Punar Janmam.

Lately, I have been reading MY blog. Strange as it sounds that is exactly what I have been doing for the last three days. Before you guys put me in a straightjacket and pack me off to the nearest asylum, let me clarify myself :)

As you all know, I have this terminally ill and close to dying site called Tamizhan.com. After briefly entertaining notions of building a community site built around it, I have dropped the plan for lack of time, energy and motivation. But I cannot sit idly watching that site die :( So I decided to approach the problem seriously and do a complete re-organisation of that site and along with that, this site. So I have been reading my blog to solve the question of how to re-organize my sites.

Here is what I found out ( Nothing earth shattering really :-) )

Three things happen here :

1. Every once in a while, I manage to write something reasonably long and worth reading. This is a rare occurance and happens mostly once or twice in a month :-)

2. I post a lot of links to other sites/stories. This happens frequently.

3. Rarely, Very rarely I write about myself. The archives show me that this has happenned maybe less than 10 times in the last six months.

Now I have two sites and three types of articles.

For the first type of articles, I have re-designed Tamizhan and am re-opening it. ( PS : I am not the kid in the photograph there :) ).

For the second type of posts, I have started a new chota blog at masala.tamizhan.com under the name masala : netLife. This should be the most frequently updated of the three.

And the third type of posts, the ones which talk about my own life, will remain in this site. I hope to write a lot more of what happens in my life in an effort to create an archive of my own life so that at a later point in life, I can look back and laugh at myself :-).

So thats it folks.

Hop over to Tamizhan and Masala to see the newly opened sites. Not much of a design there actually. Something barely enough to hold the content. A more complete design will be put up shortly.

Do tell me your views on all three :-).