Blog Tech...

I was fairly amused by the amount of technology that has gone into my blog...so I thought it would be a good time to discuss them with you... And no, this is not about CSS/HTML.

Lot of my friends have asked me to put my blogroll on my blog, and quite clearly I have not. The answer is simple: I read around 50 feeds regularly (and some notorious feeds like that of digg.com/slashdot/lifehacker churns out 50 entries per day) so putting them on my blog will simply consume a lot of space.
Any serious blogger worth his salt uses some form of feed reader to keep track of blogs, I use bloglines for its web interface goodness. The link on the right hand side labelled Frequent Reads links to my separate blogroll.

The other awsome feature of bloglines is that it allows you to create email subscriptions. It is a really cool concept. It generates unique email IDs for you which are shown as feeds on the bloglines feed reader. Now how is this useful???? You would have subscribed to some emails( or would have given your email ID for registering to some service) and dont want it to hog you inbox space... simply give the bloglines email address and all the emails to that address will appear as feeds. Also its amazing if you use it with ChangeNotes.com. This site generates emails for you everytime some site you are monitoring(which does not expose RSS feeds) changes. Almost none of the University professors have RSS enabled web pages (or your college job employment site)... and since you have to keep an eye on them for any new entry, just generate a new bloglines email address and use it as your default email account in ChangeNotes. Now you have a RSS feed for your feed reader for a site that does not have a RSS feed exposed. How cool is that!!!

Another tech feature that I love is the performancing metrics provided by performancing.com. Notice the performancing label end of the sidebar (under the heading blogmates)... It is on the lines of google analytics, but unlike its google counterpart is completely *free*. It generates feeds too... Here's an example of what I get daily in my feeds (by performancing ofcourse)


And these are just the tip of the iceberg. I get information I never dreamt would be possible for me to get without considerable work. I get the demographics of people visiting the blog, browsers they are using, platforms they are using, screen resolutions, Outbound links etc etc... the list is endless. I was fairly amused when I saw that there were considerable amount of users using Linux and FreeBSD to access my blog. Also I came to know the different screen resolutions people were using and a decline in the number of visitors using higher screen resolutions... Only 65% of the users had 1024x768, 4% had 800x600 and rest had higher resolution (as high as 1536x960). I got hold of a bigger monitor and opened my blog... and man ..those people had a reason not to visit my blog again. The whole template looks weird on higher screen resolutions. Many blogs, with customized templates, had the same problem. Performancing helped me find a problem which I never knew existed... Thanks a lot Performancing... great job.

I was trying to integrate LighBox JS and flickr into my blog but that would have effectively killed my low bandwidth readers.

Do you guys have any other kewl stuff that I can integrate into my blog? and which does not hog any space? (the two stuffs I explained above are just two links... so I would like stuff more in those lines). Also I am searching for an optimized tagging service. Technorati is good but I have'nt seen many blogger sites with visible tags or tag enabled services (i.e you can subscribe to feed labelled as... say "life" and ignore the rest). Google.... are you listening??

PS: I have decided to give technorati a try... hence the search box. Now I will be tagging my enteries too. Lets see how it works.... and yeah my performancing account crashed :(( and I lost all my metrics.


Tag:technology,blog

Why do we live???

"Who? Who is but the form following the function of what. And what I am is a man in a mask."
- Hugo Weaving in V for Vendetta

The question was asked in a community on orkut: Why do we live?

This question is troubling me ever since. I scrambled to find the answer everywhere. Ofcourse there were canned answers like "to explore the horizons of living... loving"..blah but why do we have to do those ? Why do I have to fall in love? Why should I respect elders? Why should I breathe? Why should I stay Alive??? The question reverberated through my mind... after all if you lose all the pretense of being a human and see the humans as a third entity, say in the manner humans see lab rats... these emotions are just neurological signals to the brain.

Quoting Agent Smith from the movie matrix:
"Do you believe you're fighting for something, for more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is, do you even know? Is it freedom, or truth, perhaps peace, could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose! And all of them as artificial as the matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it Mr. Anderson, you must know it by now. You can't win, it's pointless to keep fighting! Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you persist?"

Those emotions of love, hatred are just special neurological pattern in our brains.. what is the bigger picture? How different are we from a single cell amoeba who even though have no emotions, live... They can only move/exixt and reproduce... i.e unlike humans' that is definitely a simple cause (though there are more reasons than the cell it has).. If it is then why does it exist. If there is a reason say A for amoeba to exist.
Now for humans, even though there are many reasons to live, everything boils down to A.
So everything is what it is because of A. I guess we also know A as God (or whoever we believe in).

But then the question redirects itself to A... why does A exist?
Just for argument sake lets say that A exist because of B, B due to C and so on... This results in an infinite series. Since this is an infinite series there is no end to it.
The following proof is involves order theory so you may stop reading:
Now we have the set $={We Humans, A, B, C, .... } which is infinite. This set has no upper bound but it is directed, we being the lower bound of $. Since $ is not an element of $ so we can make a new set $$=$U{$}, which contains {$} as its topmost element but is still infinite.

Now I am not relegious or anything but lets take a closer look at {$}. {$} is the topmost element in $$ and contains everything present in/out of the universe... hence {$} is omnipresent and we all are a part of {$}. Next {$} is the topmost element in the chain of this directed-complete poset so clearly {$} is above all of us. {$} is an infinite elements away from us. Infinty is incomprehensible to humans... something which we cant know. Hence there is no way of knowing what {$} is.

If I say that {$} is God then the whole equation actually makes sense. We are all part of him. He is omnipresent. He is above us. And there is no way of knowing him exactly hence knowing the exact purpose of our living... so live in the moment and plan for the future... you may only predict the future and the nature of {$}.

PS: Tell me if you find any flaws in this proof

V for Vendetta

Nah not the movie... the torrents aren't out yet :P. Am talking about the comic series. There is a popular quote:

Never Judge a novel by its movie.

So I decided to read the novel before the watching the movie. Normally anything related to movie/novel goes on my movie blog but since it was a comic and was kindda special to me, it made it to my regular blog.

Whoever said that comics were for kids cannot be more wrong. It is an adult comic book. If you have seen the movie or read the reviews, you would be knowing the basic story behind the comic. The strip was originally published between 1982-1985. The book was sorta futuristic for its time as it is based in the late 1990's. The movie shifted it to the late 2020's to retain the futuristic effect.

Few weeks back I was told about the movie. I was blissfully ignorant about its release date, so when a V for Vendetta torrent caught my eye, I immediately downloaded it. Much to my dismay, it turned out to be the original classic 10 issue comic book series. Not wanting to waste all the bandwidth, I started to read the comics and believe me its the best comic I have ever read, and I have read about millions of them.

Today I finished the last issue, and the end makes you to rethink your priorities in life. You feel good about yourself in a funny way and bad in other weird ways. Unlike movies like Swades or Rang De Basanti which make you feel patriotic or thereof lack of it, this comic book splits open all your self doubts and makes you feel miserable. The ending, however makes you feel good and surreal.

Update: saw the movie... a class in itself. Hugo Weaving has yet again given a classy performance, as V. Although the mask hides his face, the dialogue delivery makes up for it. The slight deviation from the original comic series has a big difference on the story. They both are parallel stories with different endings and are awesome in their own respect. A MUST WATCH

XGL+Compiz+Ubuntu = Nirvana

I have been trying out desktops for a while now, and just so you know, my idea of a perfect GUI is that of a macintosh. After having my windows transformed into a MAC look pony I was itching to give my ubuntu a mac look too, but there was nothing available. Gdesklets sucked and did not come any closer, so I ended up running an OSX theme on Gnome which was not all that great.
For the zen types, yeah I know simplicity is great, I tried using fluxbox and simple window manager for sometime. The problem is that they are too stable to be interesting :P and I dont like it when the sea gets too calm. Also lemme use my 1 GB ram will you..?? :D

So I got a link to a great article which just gave a few steps to install XGL+compiz on ubuntu. There's a lot of buzz going on about XGL in comp Sci community so I decided to give it a try. And believe me the screenshots dont do justice to it. You gotta see it in action. The best part is that it uses full hardware acceleration and does not run like other graphic intensive pigs.
If you have ubuntu installed, definitely check the article above. Check out this video too. Well I took it on my cam and the quality sucks but hey...who cares!! I have a desktop rivallling mac :)

New York...

Yeah finally went to NYC. Even though I live so close by NYC, this was the first time I visited the place. The place was reminiscent of Bangalore save the architectural spectacle. There were rickshaws, hot dog vendors, people peeing on the streets, the filth on the road... i felt right at home.
Check out these videos...



Nah i did not capture those in my cam. Unfortunately my camera's battery died down abruptly. Some of the pics were taken by Nihir and Sudheer.



The career fair was not all that great, the freebies were great though. I wont talk much in this post...i'll let the pics and video do their work. The topmost pic links to my flickr page and has all the NYC pics.



Hope you guys enjoy these.