People put more thought into building cars than building houses. With houses, there are always so many incon­ve­niences, annoy­ances and oddities. Often the place­ment of rooms is inappro­priate, there is little consid­er­a­tion for the furni­ture that would occupy the room, windows are too small or too large, and so on.

When it comes to cars, I’ve noticed little things that have been thought out carefully. The seats move back for better leg-space, the back-rest can be kept at any angle; cooling as well as heating is provided; you can listen to radio or CDs; there is a place to keep coffee cups; there is a mobile charging station; the car seat can be heated up individ­u­ally. You may have to pay extra for some of these acces­sories, but the way they all fit together in one small car is truly amazing.

Earlier, I had posted an article about the Gentoo leader­ship crisis. Although I haven’t followed the subse­quent events closely, it appears that every­thing is now back on track. Gentoo is gearing up for a 2008 release, and KDE 4.0 is now avail­able via the genkdesvn overlay.

Phew! I am quite relieved, being a Gentoo user myself. There is nothing more depressing than having your favorite GNU/Linux distri­b­u­tion fade into oblivion.

Once in a decade, something comes along that is so aston­ish­ingly ridicu­lous that you cannot decide whether to laugh or cry. I ended up laughing a lot. Read these comments on a ZDNet article (the article itself is not relevant):

that wont work without THEFT of intel­lec­tual property
Vista is the Future
It wont happen
You are kidding arent you ?

I suspect this may be some sort of practical joke, but you can never tell.…

UPDATE 2008-01-25: As Abhishek rightly noted, all the above comments appear to be from the same guy. Someone sent me a link to his site.

I assume there must be some name for this, static­elec­trici­tio­phobia or something. I am talking about the unnat­ural fear of getting an electric shock due to the build-up of static electricity. People who have this condi­tion are gener­ally hesitant about touching metallic surfaces. For the last few days, I’ve been one of those people.

Come to think of it, there’s nothing unnat­ural about it. In an exper­i­ment with mice, if the mouse goes down one path, it receives a mild shock; if it goes down the other, it is fed cheese. All mice, except the cheese-haters and masochistic ones, will quickly be condi­tioned to take the second path. In a similar fashion, getting a jolt of electricity three times a day is an excel­lent way to condi­tion a person to be wary of metallic items.

Winter may be at the root of it all. It is so dry these days that a stroll on the carpet would be enough to do the trick. I wonder if there is some way to shield oneself from this annoyance.…

If you are an actively enrolled student in any US univer­sity that gives you a .edu email address, you can download a copy of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59.95 (as compared to the original price of $679).

I strongly believe that $679 is way too expen­sive for any kind of software, even if it really kicks ass. I could buy a decent laptop at that price. But $59.95 is a reason­able price, so if you do need to use Microsoft Office, then this is an offer you shouldn’t miss. The offer is valid until April 30^th 2008.

I had the chance to take a look at Microsoft OneNote recently, and, having liked the concept since long before Microsoft came up with it, I looked around for an open-source alter­na­tive for my GNU/Linux system. I had done the same thing several years ago and come up with nothing, but this time I was pleas­antly surprised to find a good replace­ment, BasKet Note Pads, a KDE appli­ca­tion similar to OneNote but with less features.

I had actually tried out BasKet earlier, but it was at a more primi­tive stage of devel­op­ment then. It seems to have advanced to a greater level of sophis­ti­ca­tion since then.

Today, I put this software to practical use: I used it to make lecture-notes for a class. That worked out pretty well, although a Tablet PC with a stylus would certainly have been more convenient.

There are a few features missing in the appli­ca­tion, such as picture editing and annota­tion, handwriting/character recog­ni­tion etc. But it is possible to link an external appli­ca­tion (such as Krita) to edit images, and handwriting recog­ni­tion is not very useful without a stylus, so for personal use, BasKet seems to be an excel­lent option.

I share this furnished apart­ment with two other guys. As expected, much of the furni­ture is quite useless. For instance, there’s this large sofa in the living room that no one cares to use, a dish-washer that we’ve never turned on, storage areas that no normal human can reach…you get the picture.

There are plenty of lights…but again, not in the right places. There are four bright lights in our little bathroom, two in the small kitchen, and one dull lamp in the corner of the living room. It’s as if we’re being told not to waste our time sitting in the living room. That’s where the large sofa is located, the one that no one wants to use.

Today, I decided that it was time to make use of at least some of the furni­ture. No, not the dish-washer; I don’t like to work. I figured it would be a great idea to move this large recliner chair (is that what you call it?) that was gathering dust in the living room into my own bedroom, where I could use it to read comfort­ably. So with a little rearrange­ment of the cupboard and the bed, I dragged it to my bedroom.

I think they make it that way on purpose. Why else would the doorway be an inch smaller than the furni­ture? I had to lift up the chair and pull it in sideways. I was actually surprised to find that it was quite light; I think it’s hollow inside.

So now I have this cushion-ey brown mass next to my bed. Cool.

The convo­ca­tion ceremony for the batch of 2007 of Dhirubhai Ambani Insti­tute of Infor­ma­tion and Commu­ni­ca­tion Technology was held on the 19^th of January, 2008. I was unable to attend, but here are some photos [login required] that Dhruv posted on his Orkut profile.

For those of us who couldn’t attend the ceremony, we’ve been asked to await further instruc­tions for receiving the degree certifi­cates by mail. Alright, I’m waiting.…

Update 2008-01-20: Some more photos put up on Orkut by Rajesh.

Update 2008-01-21: More pictures, from Kishore.

Update 2008-01-23: Prashant’s photos and Navin’s photos

I would have liked to tell you about this recently launched site called Hulu that offers televi­sion series online for free, and is supported by NBC, Fox and other broad­casting compa­nies — but I won’t, because each time I even think about doing so, the site stops working properly for me. There!

“Every super­hero has a secret identity…who wants the pressure of being super all the time?” –Mr. Incredible

Super­heroes may be fun, but I would rather watch a real hero in action — someone who doesn’t hide his identity, and faces the challenges that arise as a conse­quence. Consider Batman, for instance. The whole point of putting on a mask was to hide the truth (that he was Bruce Wayne) from everyone else. But to me, that appears to be the easy way out. Would it not have been more heroic to conquer the bad guys as Bruce Wayne rather than Batman? Wouldn’t that have set an example that could be followed?