The Indian Space Research Organi­za­tion has been doing a number of cool things lately, the most recent achieve­ment being the successful launch of India’s Chandrayaan-1. As a frequent reader of Slashdot, there are primarily three kinds of comments that I’ve come to expect each time a major announce­ment is made regarding India’s space program.

The first category contains jokes, often related to call-centers. These can be safely ignored. The second category includes comments congrat­u­lating human-kind for its achieve­ment. While overly repet­i­tive and probably unnec­es­sary, such comments can be easily tolerated.

Finally, there is always a bunch of people whose argument goes like this:

Why is India wasting money on space research when there are millions afflicted by poverty?

This line of reasoning is flawed for a variety of reasons. Here’s why:

1. The argument assumes that there is no (or very little) benefit accrued by spending money on the space program. Further, it assumes that money not spent on the space program would be used to fight poverty, whatever that means.
2. Poverty is not caused by a shortage of resources. There are individ­uals who are very rich, and yet there are commu­ni­ties that are facing starva­tion. If the solution were as simple as taking wealth from the rich and giving it to the poor, all the socialist countries would be models of good governance.
3. Wealth is not something that moves from one individual to another; it is created. As a silly metaphor, think of it as a flame that keeps you warm: you need to keep adding fuel if you want it to last.
4. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime. Charity as a way of life is detri­mental to the progress of society.
5. We can’t wait to solve the problem of poverty before moving on to the Next Big Thing. That way lies madness.

According to this press release by ISRO, India’s Chandrayaan-1 space­craft success­fully hit the Moon as planned on November 14^th 2008. An excerpt:

In a historic event, the Indian space programme achieved a unique feat today (November 14, 2008) with the placing of Indian tricolour on the Moon’s surface on Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s birthday. The Indian flag was painted on the sides of Moon Impact Probe (MIP), one of the 11 payloads of Chandrayaan-1 space­craft, that success­fully hit the lunar surface today at 20:31 hrs (8:31 pm) IST. This is the first Indian built object to reach the surface of the moon. The point of MIP’s impact was near the Moon’s South Polar Region. It may be recalled that the modern Indian space programme was initi­ated in 1962 when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister of India.

Newspa­pers and blogs have been saturated with articles about the United States Presi­den­tial election this year. I have always wondered why the country is so obsessed with who is to become Presi­dent two years hence, rather than worry about what the current Presi­dent is up to in his big white mansion. Imagine all the employees of a company lazing around towards the end of the week — except that the end of the week starts on Tuesday.

I am glad this drama is over for now. Lawmakers can go back to worrying about that wiggly line describing the stock market, without having to pretend that they’re actually doing something about it.

Oh, and in case you haven’t kept up with the news, Barack Obama is the guy who finally got elected.

With a little luck, I managed to get hold of tickets for a prelim­i­nary screening of Bolt, the movie about a dog who sincerely believes that his make-believe Holly­wood life is real. It takes a while for him to learn that he doesn’t really have super-powers, but don’t worry, life’s not too dull even after he catches on.

Inter­est­ingly, the movie is completely in 3D, which means the audience needs to wear those special goggles that make things stand out (notice the pun?) The effects are pretty impres­sive, I must say.

Bolt rates high on the cute-o-meter, just as you would expect of a movie with a dog, a cat and a hamster in it. Add to that a little girl (voiced by Miley Cyrus) who loves her dog very much indeed, and you have the perfect recipe for a lovable Thursday-night-movie.

I have discov­ered that my gray hooded sweat­shirt is, in fact, an invis­i­bility cloak. Oh alright, an invis­i­bility sweat­shirt. Big diff.

Now, I’ve always been able to sneak around silently when I’m wearing that. If no one said anything to me, I just assumed it was because I didn’t say anything to them. I didn’t realize they couldn’t see me; I just thought they didn’t care.

The discovery was an accident, as you may have expected. It happened like this: I had gone to the restroom in my office the other day, and I noticed that when I used the urinal — the kind that uses a sensor to decide if you were done — it would start flushing even as I was standing there! At first, I was merely shocked and unhappy, but when it happened several times in the following days, I began to wonder about the reasons behind it. Was it some kind of misguided anger against me? Did I do something wrong? I searched my soul for answers, and when that didn’t work, I even tried Google.

And then it hit me — it was my sweat­shirt! Sometimes the truth hits you in the face in a moment of perfect clarity, and your thoughts come together like a giant jigsaw puzzle so magnif­i­cently that it leaves you speech­less. It was truly a revelation.

Sometimes I wonder why I was chosen. What did I do to deserve such a wonderful gift, this invis­i­bility cloak? Did I do something right in one of my past lives? I don’t know for sure, but sometimes things just happen and all we can do is accept it.

If you install Linux for the first time and are greeted with an ugly set of fonts -

1. Make sure you install all the popular TrueType fonts (Microsoft’s common fonts are gener­ally avail­able via your distribution’s repositories).
2. Remember to enable anti-aliasing of fonts. Anti-aliasing can be turned on through the desktop-environment’s config­u­ra­tion, for example, KDE’s Control Center.
3. Set the hinting to ‘medium’ while enabling anti-aliasing of fonts.
4. Change the user-interface fonts to something that looks good, like Verdana, DejaVu or Calibri. Firefox also comes with an ugly set of default fonts, so you may also want to change those defaults too.

Once again, I have a hard-copy of J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

After I switched from KDE to XFCE as my desktop environ­ment, I had to abandon KMail as my email client (since I would rather not run KDE-based appli­ca­tions in a non-KDE environ­ment). The replace­ment I settled on was mutt, something I had already tried and liked a lot.

So what’s the big deal about console appli­ca­tions, you ask? I don’t know, but they’re just much nicer than GUI clients. It must be genetic or something.

So here’s how I’ve set up mutt:

• I can read my Gmail messages (actually, Google Mail for my domain).
• I can send email using Postfix, which routes messages through Gmail’s server
• The recipient’s address is automat­i­cally added to my address­book when I send email
• I can look up or autocom­plete addresses while composing email
• Messages are signed using GnuPG before they are actually sent

I don’t like to manually check my email. Instead, I’ve set up a mail-notification applet (a ‘biff’) to check my email every couple of minutes and play a sound when there are new messages. Reading, deleting and composing mail are all just a few keystrokes away. Addition­ally, there is no need to open any heavy appli­ca­tion — the terminal window pops up within seconds.