Grab bag

Sometimes, when you go hunting for something, (not snipe :p) you find something much more interesting 🙂 For instance, a few days ago, I was talking about King Asoka of India and in the process of browsing through his Wikipedia entry I happened to stumble upon a reference to the Nine Unknown Men.

Now I’m a conspiracy theory nut (OK, maybe nut is too strong a term – I don’t live and breath conspiracy theories but I do enjoy hearing them and coming up with ones of my own :p) and so I immediately pricked up my ears and went over to the new Wikipedia entry. I must say that the entry kept me enthralled (and immersed) for quite a while – much like the reference to snipe hunting that I linked above. (Incidentally, I don’t know if I’ve heard the term snipe hunt before a couple of days ago but since then I’ve come across it a couple of times and wanted to see what it was all about – good stuff :p)

But back to the Nine Unknown Men. Apparently, the story goes that India actually presents a facade of being a technologically backward/developing country whereas it actually is far more advanced than the other countries in the world. The story continues on to say that this is due to the efforts of King Asoka, who realized that there was a certain kind of knowledge that would always be used for evil in the hands of humanity and so set up the group of Nine Unknown Men to guard this knowledge so as to ensure that it didn’t fall into the wrong hands.

From all I can gather, this story/theory was not started by Indians themselves but rather by a few Europeans who visited India and later wrote about this mysterious cabal. Of course, later, the theory seems to have been picked up by Indians as well and it is said that some prominent Indian scientists are believed to be either part of the Nine or in communication with the Nine regarding various subjects such as microbiology, alchemy, communication and gravitation. In fact, there are quite a few corollary stories such as the one about a secret temple under the Ganges River which cleanses the water of the rive using radiation (or microbes according to another account).

It’s an interesting theory and if you want to write a story, there’s enough material for several books. In fact, the whole story for some reason reminds me of a Philip Jose Farmer novel (or rather, an amalgamation of several). Now that I’ve read about them, the Nine Unknown Men are probably going to turn up in my own writing at one point or another – just not in the same way that they’ve been portrayed before :p

Conceptions, inceptions and misconceptions

I’ve been having a rather interesting debate on one of the forums I frequent. And it’s again about that message from Dan Simmons 🙂 Usually, I don’t like cross-posting since it feels a bit like promoting your own point of view or encouraging your cronies to go over and bash somebody up on your behalf :p However, since this particular conversation is so convoluted and drawn out, that I don’t think I could give any idea of all that it encompasses without actually sending somebody over there to read it. If that’s your cup of tea, of course.

Now the central point in the debate that has been running through today is that this particular person seems to think that there is no difference between those individuals who commit all sorts of dastardly deeds in the name of Islam and true Muslims who actually follow the Qur’an and the prophets teachings. Of course, she often mentions that she believes that Islam is not all bad and that it has the potential for good etc. But she keeps coming back to saying that Islam today is militant and that Muslims everywhere have not risen up to cast out the terrorists who commit heinous atrocities in the name of Islam and so that it is the fault of Islam in its entirety – not just a few misguided individuals.

As the discussion progressed, she threw out terms like dhimmi and Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb. To be honest, I had not heard the terms before. However, she was kind enough to provide me with wikipedia links and I noticed something. The wikipedia entry clearly states "Dar al-Islam and its associated terms are not found in the two most basic works of Islam, the Qur’an and the Hadith". Now Muslims are supposed to shape their lives based on the Qur’an and the Hadith. Those define the core rules for Islam. But these words that she tosses out to indicate how virulent and vile Islam is are not part of the core of Islam! I realized at that point that she obviously had not read the wikipedia entry herself or had not understood the implications of what that single line in wikipedia actually means.

Either way, the way I saw it, here was somebody who was talking about radical Islam and how Islam spawns (or at least nurtures) terrorism and so on but she had no real clue as to what Islam was all about. She had not actually bothered to read the core teachings – instead, she relied on what others said about Islam. At least, that was my conclusion. Of course, I might be wrong :p But it still begs the question, how many people are out there who know nothing of Islam beyond what they are told by hate mongers and other ill-informed people? How many people hate (or fear) something without actually knowing what it is that they hate? But then again, we always fear the unknown, don’t we?

Writing, perceptions and consequences

I was actually going to write about something completely different today but I came across this thing yesterday and it has been bothering/nagging me since then. So I decided to blog about this instead :p

I wrote about Dan Simmons’ April message a few days ago. Yesterday I went over to Dan Simmons’ site for some reason and was surprised to discover that the April message was gone. The folder that the message was in is intact but his whole news folder simply shows a directory listing instead of the default page. (You can find a copy of the original message here if you’ve not read it and have no idea what I’m talking about :p) I was curious as to what had happened. Was this enemy action by somebody who did not like the message? Or did Dan take it down himself because of all the negative response to the message? What had been the original intention of the message in the first place? Was it an April Fool’s joke gone wrong or was he serious? Being the kind of cat that curiosity certainly would enjoy killing, I went over to Dan Simmons’ forums.

Now bear in mind that Dan’s site was not defaced in any way. The new folder itself was there as well as some other subfolders under it but the April message (as well as all other messages by Dan it seems) were missing. However, on the forums, the opinion seemed to strongly suggest that this was some nefarious deed by the "jihadists" (as one forum user called them) and not many seem to think that Dan Simmons himself might have pulled it. Granted, I don’t know enough about Dan Simmons to make a guess and these people probably do seem to know him best but given the circumstances, I do wish that people wouldn’t be so prone to jump to conclusions. But that’s people for you :p

I really have no idea what happened and I hate to make sweeping assumptions without knowing all the facts. So I will just file this under interesting and weird :p If anybody learns what did happen, do let me know 🙂 Incidentally, David Brin has a comment about the Dan Simmons message on his own blog and while I haven’t read them yet, I hear that the reader comments are interesting …

Downloads away!

Software tools are such funny things. Sometimes they work fine, sometimes they give the appearance of working fine and sometimes they don’t work at all. Sometimes you put up with a few idiosyncrasies in the app because you believe that the app is overall sound and then you discover that the app is nothing but idiosyncrasies :p

Take the case of DownloadStudio from Conceiva. In my early days on the Internet way back in the nineties, my download manager of choice was Net Vampire. I would rave about Net Vampire to all and sundry and would install it on every machine that I worked on. Somewhere along the way, I switched over to FlashGet which at one time I believe was also known as JetCar (don’t ask me why :p). I used FlashGet till about a year ago when I began looking around for a new download manager – mostly because FlashGet didn’t integrate well with FireFox and the solutions around for making FlashGet work with FireFox didn’t seem to always work that well. That was when DownloadStudio came into the picture.

Now I must start off by saying that I’m a sucker for a nice looking interface :p DownloadStudio had a really spiffy interface and it seemed to do everything under the sun (and I’m a sucker for all-in-one tools too – it’s the little boy in me still hankering after that Swiss Army Knife :p). So I fell in love with DownloadStudio at once. It did integrate with FireFox and it seemed to work fine and so I used it for a few months without any problems. A few weeks ago however, my Internet connection started becoming really flaky. Downloads would fail all the time and would have to be resumed and the download manager became a really important tool. That was when I began to notice the cracks in the pretty facade of DownloadStudio (DS).

For one thing, DS would not retry a failed download even if it was set to retry indefinitely – it would simply give up after the first failure. For another, if I had a half-complete download and I changed some of the download properties (for instance, instead of downloading the file as 5 different segments, I set it to download as one segment), it would start the download all over again. Yesterday was the straw that broke the camel’s back – I had a 60MB download that I was nursing along forever. It would download 500k to 1MB and would fail and I’d have to hit retry again and then after a few minutes, it would fail again. At about the 50% mark, I decided to change the downloading from 5 segments to one segment – my mistake. It started the download all over again, argh! I had had enough, I began looking around for a new download manager.

After some searching, I came across Download Express and its big brother Mass Downloader from MetaProducts. Both the products integrate well with FireFox and what is even better, they can download multiple files at multiple segments and seem to have no issues with restarting after an error like DS does. In fact, I was able to download the 60MB file that I’d been trying to download the whole day in about four hours with no user interaction at all except for one minor change. I had set the job to stop on 10 retries and that’s what the job did after downloading about 20-30MB. I then set the retries to unlimited and the job completed just fine. Guess the pretty apps aren’t always the most reliable ones :p

Chrononaut chronicles

Yesterday while meandering through the web, I came across a message from writer Dan Simmons. Apparently, Dan Writes a message to his fans every once in a while but this one seemed to be slightly darker in tone. I say "seemed" because I know nothing of Dan’s politics nor his intentions. All that was there on the site was a rather bleak message which seemed to hint at total annihilation as the only possible solution to the "Islamic menace".

I was originally going to post a message about writers and their responsibility to their readership here. About how whatever we write and how we ourselves mean it, that it could be taken a completely different way by somebody else. Dan’s message could have been a satire along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s "A Modest Proposal". Or it could have been an April Fool’s joke with the traveller’s final three words being "Happy April Fools!" :p But I cannot know what Dan Simmons intended. All I have are the words on the website and how the words themselves are interpreted.

The words on the page sent me off on another hunt. Or rather, one word – "dhimmi". I am a Muslim but I had not heard this word before. And yet, supposedly this was a word which had great meaning to Muslims. I looked at Wikipedia and found an article that had its neutrality and factual accuracy questioned. I searched Google and came across hundreds of thousands of pages but the interesting thing was that most of the pages seemed to be by non-Muslims on the topic. The only Muslim site on the first two pages that I found was Islamic propaganda rather than an impartial article – I wasn’t interested in propaganda. I wanted the true account of things and the more I searched, less I found in the way of truth. Opinions, sure. Conjecture, yes. But facts were scarce.

I then went on Dan Simmons’ forums to see what the regulars there had to say. I saw a whole bunch of people saying that Islam was a militant religion, that nobody wished Muslims ill but if things came to that, they’d beat the Muslims down "out of need". Truth be told, there were those who opposed this point of view as well but it seemed as if that was the minority. Now I’m a Muslim. I’ve never wished ill upon Christians or Jews or people of any other religion. I believe that God lets us choose our own path and whether we choose good or bad depends on us – not our religion. After all my web browsing, I feel a great weariness, a sadness. Why can’t people see that the issue is not with different religions or ideologies but with people?

I am not angry at the people who will not see the wrongs on their own side as people of a particular nation or people belonging to a particular religion. But I do feel anger at our own stupidity, arrogance and blindness. We always believe that somehow "we" are right and that "they" are wrong. We keep finding a new "us" and a "them". It’s as if all humanity can do is break into ever smaller groups and keep fighting each other till we dwindle away into nothingness. Is that our fate?

The writing on the wall

No, yesterday’s lack of a post was not an April Fool’s joke :p I ended up having to attend a family funeral on Friday and given that it was about eight hours away from home, I was playing catch up most of yesterday. So no post yesterday.

Today, I have something interesting (or not so interesting, depending on your perspective :p) to announce. I was thinking the other day about the ancient art of graffiti :p No, not crude obscenities scrawled on a toilet wall somewhere but artistic (or near artistic) work put up on a wall by some aspiring artist who wanted a different (and larger) canvas. We have an example of that on a wall at the tennis court below our house. It is adorned with the most intricately painted lettering announcing something or other.

But let’s forget the art for a moment. What do people do in this electronic age when they need to just scrawl something on a wall to express themselves? Sure forums and message boards abound, but what do you do to express yourself graphically? Where can you scrawl "Kilroy was here" in the age of the Internet? What about those "secret admirer" columns that the newspapers here are so fond of? Where can you say "To the girl wearing the red t-shirt I saw at the mall – I love you!" on the Web?

I was thinking about this the other day and I began working on something which might fulfil this need – or not :p I call it Shout Out! It’s simply a site where you can put up a message to be read by all the anonymous millions out there on the Net. Yes, you can put up a text message as well but I would prefer it to be graphical – even if it is simply a graphic using a "handwriting" font so that it keeps true to the spirit of graffiti. So come on, if you have a message to send to the rest of the world, a secret to share with strangers or a thought to share with somebody that you’re too shy to say out loud, this is the place to go 🙂 Send me your message and I’ll put it up on Shout Out!

Blogging, traffic and reasons

One of the writing forums I frequent also has a forum on blogging. Somebody mentioned BlogExplosion and BlogMad there recently as a means of increasing your blog traffic. Now I don’t particularly care about traffic to my blogs but I do like technology and so I decided to sign up for both and see how they work 🙂

They both work pretty much about the same. You sign up for free, create a profile, add your blog(s) to your profile and then you start earning credits by browsing the blogs of other members of the service. For each credit you earn, you get a visit sent your way by BlogMad or BlogExplosion. The differences between the two services are minimal. In fact, the only real difference that I see is that BlogExplosion gives you half a credit for visiting a member site but takes away a credit when a member visits your site. BlogMad on the other hand keeps it at a 1:1 ratio.

So how do they ensure that a member actually visits your site and stays long enough to read anything? :p That’s the tricky part. What both services do is to have little navigation bar at the bottom or top of the browser window while you visit member sites. Each time you go to a new member site, the navigation bar starts a little counter. You have to wait till the counter goes down to zero and then select a displayed number from a list of numbers to signify that you are actually doing the browsing instead of having a robot (or a macro) do it for you :p Of course, this still does not mean that the person actually reads the site.

And that’s the problem with both the services. I signed up yesterday and had 80 visitors from BlogMad (they give you some credits to start off with :p) and about 20 visitors from BlogExplosion but I’m not sure that any of them actually read my site. Or maybe I was just too boring for them to comment on :p Either way, I guess the issue is that there a lot of people out there who just want the traffic and aren’t interested in doing any real work to get it. So not sure that BlogMad or BlogExplosion works in the spirit they are intended to be used in …. Of course, that’s just my opinion 🙂

The writer’s tools

They say that a good craftsman does not blame his tools. I would think it would be just as important for a good craftsman to know his/her tools 🙂 The sad thing is, that most writers don’t seem to think this is important. Take for instance your humble Word, the word processor of choice (or necessity) for most writers. Everybody and their grandmother seems to use Word, but how many use it effectively?

There are many resources online (free ones at that) which help you learn more about Word. But people either don’t know about them or think that they don’t need to know how to effectively use the program. Or, they are not aware that they are not effectively using Word. Take for instance this tip – it was displayed on the Word page I linked to above. It gives a lot of valuable information on formatting sections. But how many people take the time to read it? Then there’s the Crabby Office Lady, Office Tips & Tricks and the Microsoft Office Training site all of which have a lot of free information and advice that would be useful to Word users.

It was at one of these sites (I forget which) where I learnt about the top ten tips for working with Word documents. It was a live video training session and I would just like to list the top 10 tips just in case they are of any help to somebody else.

1. Macros are a great time saver. You can easily record a macro to repeat a common task. Simply start the macro recorder and do what you need to do in Word. If you take some time to edit the recorded macro, you can take the power of the macros to a whole new level.
2. Create and edit field codes directly – you can type in a field code and then select it and press CTRL+F9 to create a field and then F9 to update it. You can use ALT+F9 to show field codes.
3. Use Open & Repair. If your Word document becomes corrupted, you can use the Open & Repair option to correct the document. The Word Open dialog has a drop down arrow next to the Open button – this allows you to select other Open options such as Open & Repair.
4. Find & Replace is not just for words. You can use Find & Replace to find (and replace) special characters like a paragraph markers, formatting, styles or for specific text patterns.
5. Sections. Word stores all of the formatting for your current section in the next section break except for the type of the section break – that is saved in the next section break. If you are aware of this, it helps you to understand a lot of the quirks of Word.
6. Use tables to simplify complex documents since they allow you to layout your document just the way you want using tables.
7. The styles and formatting pane – this pane allows you to select all instances using a specific style and to modify them all in one go. It also lets you see which styles are used and which aren’t in the current document.
8. Use the ALT key when dragging anything on the ruler – this allows much better control and shows on-screen guides.
9. Keyboard shortcuts – they make your life so much easier. CTRL+SHIFT+C and CTRL+SHIFT+V are much more powerful format painters than the toolbar button; F4 repeats the last action; CTRL+Q clears paragraph formatting; CTRL+SPACE clears character formatting.
10. Take advantage of what the Word environment offers – use zoom, compare, revision tracking, the different view options, reveal formatting, the object browser etc. to make your life easier. Learn about each of these features.

One-trick ponies and one-horse races

At one time, Microsoft used to be a one-trick pony. So did Google 🙂 For the longest time, even after they had started diversifying, Microsoft used to do mostly software. Sure they had Hotmail, but that seemed to be almost an afterthought more than anything else. Then came the revolution when they started getting into anything and everything – handhelds, mobile devices, pocket PC, smart phones. Of course, it was always mostly in terms of developing the OS for the devices and setting up the specs for each device rather than actually getting into marketing a device under their brand name. That too changed with the X-Box. That is where Microsoft stands today.

Google was slightly different (but then again perhaps not :p) They started off (at least appeared to but perceptions can be deceiving …) much more slowly but have suddenly branched out in so many bewildering directions at once. You had Google Desktop Search being added to the web search and then you had Picasa coming in to the mix. The next thing you know, wham! You had a whole bunch of Google services and downloads – Google Earth, Google Talk, Blogger, GMail, Froogle, Google Base and a host of others. This is in addition to the other stuff which is only hinted at or have not been completely rolled out yet – GDrive, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Writely etc.

If you look at how the two companies have been progressing – MS has been building on their OS market and slowly expanding into new areas while Google has been building on their web presence and search engine superiority and have been moving in ever widening circles. It is inevitable that these two giants both end up in the same arena sooner or later. (And yes, everybody has been talking about this for ages and I’m not saying anything new here :p) Looks as if MS is finally ready to do something about the threat from Google though since they have come up with a whole series of "Live" services and tools which are web based.

There’s Windows Live Search – another attempt by MS to try to horn in on Google’s territory :p They tried it earlier with MSN Search but that didn’t seem to get them anywhere. This is supposed to be faster and better but I have no idea how since it’s just another search engine :p There’s also Live Mail, OneCare Live, Live Safety Center, Office Live and so on. Basically, MS seems to be going "web" full on. Of course, not having tested most of this stuff, I can’t really comment on it. One thing that I have tested though is Windows Live Messenger (WLM) and I must say that I kind of like it 🙂

I signed up for the beta because of the shared folder feature. Laurie and I send a lot of files back and forth – she edits my stories and I edit hers (mostly it’s the first :p) It’s a pain to have to open Explorer, find the file share, go to the right folder and then drop the file in and tell Laurie it’s there. I’d rather have the file automatically synchronized with her machine when I make any changes. This is what I thought the shared folder feature did. Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out to be quite that :p When you add a file to a shared folder, WLM actually makes a copy of the original and places it in your WLM shared folder. So, after the first instance, if you change the original, nothing is synchronized with the other person you’re sharing the document with. I haven’t tried modifying the document in the shared folder itself but I have a feeling that the changes will synchronize then but that defeats the whole purpose of having documents in an ordered folder structure :p So not quite there yet …

The other annoying thing about shared folders is that if you enable shared folders – all your file transfers are done via shared folders. You can’t do an instant send the old way which is never updated again and do a shared folder approach only when you need it. It’s all or nothing. Other than that though, I kind of like WLM and it has performed without any issues on my machine so far. In fact, I’ve actually gone back to WLM and stopped connecting to the Messenger network via Trillian. Given that Trillian development seems to be stagnating, I might actually go back to individual IM apps again :p

Tags, categories and changes

After getting the latest builds of Blog to work, I have decided to remove Ultimate Tag Warrior from the mix here on SM. This is not due to any issues with UTW itself – it’s a great plugin and does the job well – but due to me realizing that UTW was overkill and that for what I was doing, it introduced overhead that wasn’t needed 🙂

Basically, I post all my entries from Blog. I never use the WP admin interface much except to remove spam. I do all my editing, posting and other entry management stuff via Blog itself. The only reason I was looking for a tag cloud mechanism was so that I could show a visual representation of the various topics covered on this site and let somebody interested drill down easily to only the posts that interested them. UTW allows you to do all that but in my case, I was simply converting categories to tags to do this. Since the categories are a built-in feature of WordPress, it occurred to me that I didn’t need the overhead of UTW (which would slow down XMLRPC to an extent) if I had a plugin which displayed a tag cloud based on my categories.

Enter the WordPress Heat Map plugin which does exactly that 🙂 After a brief search of the Net, I actually found a couple of different alternatives. The other one was the Weighted Categories plugin, which apparently inspired the author of the Heat Map Plugin. However, the Heat Map plugin appeared to be better maintained and supported and so, I went with that :p Incidentally, the author of the Weighted Categories plugin is apparently working on a way to make his plugin work with keywords instead of categories. I would be interested in that if it didn’t create too much overhead and worked without any issues with XMLRPC-based posting. But I doubt it … There is another plugin which supports keywords – the Keywords plugin, and the author is apparently working on tag cloud kind of support. Unfortunately, it works basically the same as UTW (just not as well :p) and so, I don’t see the point to pursuing that one either :p

Basically, what I’d like from a keyword tagging plugin for WP, is for the plugin to examine each new post, identify the keywords automatically and then add them as tags. Of course, at the moment, that appears to be too much to ask for :p The biggest problem appears to be identifying the keywords. Yahoo Content Analysis doesn’t do too great a job of it as I’ve mentioned before and while Tagyu does do a much better job, it is abominably slow and tends to end up in my XMLRCP session timing out before the analysis is done :p The best solution would be something that the plugin can do itself instead of contacting an external server but the implementation is the key ….