New Name, New Design

My old blog design was, well, old! Its smaller width reflected the limitations of monitor widths in olden times, color looked like an old fungal infected scroll(which, BTW, was the background image), and it was written before template designer was introduced in blogger(yes, that old).

I actually wanted to change that one with my own design for past 3 years, but that never happened in part due to my perfectionism and in part laziness. Google changed the design system two times in the meanwhile. ;-)

Initially(two years ago I guess) I started converting Andreas Viklund's one of the templates into a Blogger theme. I had a liking for his designs since the days of my very first blog which used one of his themes modified for blogger by Aswin(I basically just copied it off of his blog, Neosagredo, which does not exist any more.)

I never got around doing it and at one point forgot that job altogether due to other commitments and Google also changed their theme system. Then, this January I found that there was a serious grammatical error in the blog's caption itself. :( I decided that I should get rid of the theme itself for good or move the blog to Wordpress. WP has nice editor(in fact I authored this post in WP and then copied it to Blogger;-) that obeyed semantic HTML4/5 standards, had HTML5 themes, math support etc. I didn't go to WP since they didn't allow custom design and domain for basic account.

I started modifying the 'Simple' default theme that came with the new Blogger Designer Template. The reasons for choosing it are twofold. One, I like to have clean themes with no fuss and improved readability. Two, it is easy to modify a plain bare bones wire-frame to your liking rather than a heavy theme. :)

If your browser doesn't support these typography features (older browsers or insane ones like IE), the theme will look bland though still readable. :-) Also it makes use of CSS3 features like box shadows for boxes like this one and image frames.

This theme relies heavily on typography (webfonts, kerning, letter-spacing etc.) rather than on pictures and such, so that it is more readable and takes less time to load. The fonts used are IM Fell English SC for header, Philosopher for all headings and Inconsolata for all other text.

Hope this design is good. Comments and suggestions for improvement are welcome. :-)

The Trek to Tada Falls

On the way to forest office

On Sunday, 9^th Jan, I and 6 more friends from IITM went to Tada falls (aka Ubbalamadugu Falls - 13° 36′ 35″ N, 79° 50′ 34″ E) near Nellore in Andra Pradesh.^[1] We took a bus from CMBT to Tada (busses to Nellore & Sri Kalahasti go via Tada), where we reached by 11.30; had food at a Tamil Mess (irony! We used to eat @ Andhra Mess near IIT when bored of our mess.) Then we rode in an open share auto till the forest office gate.

Base Camp 1.(Yes, we could have come till here in auto; But we walked 4 kms)

Then we walked for about 4 kms to the base of the hillocks.(Base Camp 1) There I saw the clearest rivulet water I have ever seen. It was so clean that it became difficult to find if water was there or not!

The main falls is located in a hill at a height of about 7000 feet. We started walking after a while and split into two groups. Till a Shiva temple(Base camp 2) the path was, though uphill, mostly sandy and kinda ok with small stones. There we got some guava fruit and crossed the brook again and got into more rocky path.

Climbing rocks!

After that I was enjoying the nature so much that I stopped taking photos. :-( The rocky path went somewhat parallel to the brook and sometimes we had to cross small sub-brooks. We reached the small falls and spent some time admiring nature. Then the path(the non-path) became very hilly and we had to climb high rocks to reach the main falls.

I was thoroughly enjoying it so far and the sight there made me sad. There were quite few youngsters who were swimming and drinking; Beer bottles, both new and broken, could be found around the water pool; The place was filled with so much trash of all kinds(polythene, plastic tumblers, soft drink bottles...).
[Rant: If those idiots wanted to drink, why not go to some pub and drink to their heart's content? Why spoil such a place? Indians exhibit worst behavior when it comes to things like this.]

Along the brook.

We spent few minutes there and decided to return.(I could not stand in that place with all those things going around me.:-( ) We three felt a little elated and adventurous after the climb that we decided to take not the path by which we came, but the downstream of brook itself.

Destiny! [Caption by Mandar ;-) ]

It was not only rocky, but slippery too this time, since algae had grown over rocks due to water. It was exhilarating, and sometimes fearful that we might not take correct route when brook sub-divides and end up roaming till death. :p We finally managed to reach Shiva temple where the brook intersected the pathway and we switched to it. Thereafter downhill was simply sandy cum stony path. :-) Overall I felt happy and elated about the whole affair. :-) A nice experience!


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubbalamadugu_Falls

X and Wayland

In the context of Ubuntu waiting to ditch X in favour of Wayland, this fortune I got today is interesting:

I have never seen anything fill up a vacuum so fast and still suck.
-- Rob Pike, on X.

Steve Jobs said two years ago that X is brain-damaged and it will be
gone in two years. He was half right.
-- Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie is twice as bright as Steve Jobs, and only half wrong.
-- Jim Gettys

Hmmm, why do I keep getting good fortune cookies today?

Lotus Symphony

I started using Lotus Symphony today^[1]. Seems better than OpenOffice.org upon which it is based. There are good templates from Lotus website too.^[2] Let me see how well it performs; may turn out that GNU/Linux has a good presentation software after all.(No, sadly OO is not as good as PPT.)

The templates can be installed easily by copying .otp files to ~/.lotus/symphony/.symphony/user/template

---

[1] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/10/ibm-office-suite-lotus-symphony-3-released
[2] http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/gallery.nsf/GalleryPresentations?OpenView&Count=15

Discovery Of The Day

Mess food tastes like real food at 12 o`clock. ;-)

Note to self: Somehow make it mess at 12 every day!

QOTD

..once upon a time there was no time.

-- John D. Barrow

Bias Against Women

A new study demonstrates that how women musicians dress alters the perception of how they play:

...in an attempt to overcome biases in hiring, most orchestras changed their audition policy, and began using screens to conceal the identity of the candidate.
Female musicians in the top five US symphony orchestras rose from 5% in the 1970s to around 25%. This could have been due to wider societal shifts, so Goldin and Rouse conducted a very elegant study, Orchestrating Impartality: they compared the number of women being hired at auditions with and without screens, and found women were several times more likely to be hired when nobody could see that they were a woman

Via Stallman.org

QOTD

Don’t Judge people by what you have seen in them. Remember… What you have seen in them is only what they have chosen to show you.

-- I don't know(came in an email)

A Gadget to Promote SFD

Here is a Google Gadget to promote Software Freedom Day (SFD): http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/108664960353323049895/sfd-ilugc.xml

You can add this gadget in Blogger blogs, iGoogle page, Google sites, Google documents etc. Pretty much on all sites that supports Google Gadget API.

I have not hard-coded location and link, so that you can change them if you want to promote some other SFD event(like in JFC, for example). Defaults are Birla Planetarium, Chennai and http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2010/Asia/India/Chennai/ilugc respectively.

You can change title too. Since every visible portion is made editable, Tamil Blogs can also utilize this. Just change values in textbox to Tamil when blogger asks you to change defaults if necessary.

To Add Gadget:

Go to the page where you can edit page design (in Blogger this is Dashboard-->Design), click on Add Gadget --> Add gadget by URL and give the above URL. Some services like blogger will ask you to change default values and in others you have to change them after adding by selecting Edit Gadget.

Google Buzz Bookmarklet

I noticed that few web pages have this 'share this on buzz' link after few of my friends shared pages using that link. Then I thought, why not make this into bookmarklet like 'Note in Reader' provided by Google Reader.

I searched for it and found that few people have already made such bookmarklet but by using a round-about way of noting in the reader and using the connection between reader and buzz to share it. This will work only if

• one uses Google Reader and
• has added Google Reader in Buzz connected sites.

I wrote one which works natively using same URL that was used in the 'share this on buzz' links:

Buzz This»

Drag it to the Firefox/Chrome bookmarks toolbar. To share a page just click this button in bookmarks toolbar. Try clicking right now, and share this page. ;-)

NOTE TO PEOPLE READING FROM READER: Google Reader strips scripts from page. If you want the script visit my blog.

கட்டற்ற தமிழ்க் கணிமை செயல்திட்டக் கருத்தரங்கம்

யாவர்க்குமான மென்பொருள் அறக்கட்டளை மற்றும் சென்னை தொழில்நுட்பக் கல்லூரியின் கணினிச் சங்கம் இணைந்து நடத்தும் இக்கருத்தரங்கத்திற்கான நோக்கம் யாதெனில் இனங்காணப்பட்ட கட்டற்ற தமிழ்க் கணிமை தொடர்பான தலைப்புகளில் பங்களிக்க விருப்பமுள்ளோரை ஒன்று கூட்டி ஆக்கப்பூர்வமான விவாதத்திற்கு வித்திட்டு, அத்தலைப்புகளில் மென்பொருள் உருவாக்கத்திற்கு / பங்களிப்புகளுக்கு வழிவகை செய்வதாகும்.

இடம்: ராஜம் அரங்கம், சென்னை தொழில்நுட்பக் கல்லூரி, குரோம்பேட்டை
நாள் : 28-08-2010
நேரம்: காலை 9.00 மணி - மாலை 4.30 மணி
பங்களிக்க விருப்பம் இருப்பவர்கள் தங்கள் விருப்பங்களைப் பதிவு செய்யக் கடைசி நாள்: 15 ஆகஸ்டு 2010
கலந்து கொள்வோர் பதிவு செய்யக் கடைசி நாள்: 26 ஆகஸ்டு 2010
உறுதி செய்யப்பட்ட தலைப்புகள் அறிவிக்கப்படும் நாள்: 18 ஆகஸ்டு 2010

மேலும் விவரங்கள் பெறவும் பதிவு செய்யவும்: http://csmit.org/index.php/tamconf/home

Net Neutrality in Danger?

The news item Google and Verizon Near Deal on Pay Tiers for Web seems to indicate so:

Google and Verizon, two leading players in Internet service and content, are nearing an agreement that could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.

The charges could be paid by companies, like YouTube, owned by Google, for example, to Verizon, one of the nation’s leading Internet service providers, to ensure that its content received priority as it made its way to consumers. The agreement could eventually lead to higher charges for Internet users.

Such an agreement could overthrow a once-sacred tenet of Internet policy known as net neutrality, in which no form of content is favored over another.[Emphasis mine]

I think net neutrality is still sacred. Is Google being evil?