@ infinity, plus 1

Quote from the movie ‘The American President‘:

America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can’t just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the “land of the free”.

If you’re not an American, replace ‘America’ with whatever country you belong to (or live in) and read the above quote again.

Tolerance, then, is a corner stone of a free country. Sadly, we seem to be sorely lacking that quality here in India.

So, You want to work for a startup? is an interesting post by the founders of Taazza targeted at people who want to join a startup. Having worked in a starup for more than two and a half years and having known other people who have done so for even longer, I can easily appreciate the post; it is great advice and I would second it. Most, if not all of the things they say in the post are bang on. This is very unfortunate, in my honest opinion. I’ll try to explain why I think so in this post.

(more…)

Cafe Terra in Koramangala is now my favourite restaurant in Bangalore. If you enjoy European food, you’ll love it too.

They’ve got the full blown English breakfast — Scrambled eggs, Toast, Sausages, Fried Potato and of course, Tea. There’s also a Belgian variety which comes with Waffles and/or Muffins. Just perfect for a laid back weekend breakfast.

Don’t let the name fool you though, it’s a pretty good lunch/dinner place too. They’ve got a nice selection of omelettes (try the Chicken or the Ham & Mushroom varieties) and an omelette here is a meal in itself. The menu is not restricted to European food only: they have got some finger-licking good Thai, Sri Lankan(!), Tibetan, etc. dishes too. Have a look at the (nearly) complete menu at their website.

The food, excellent as it is, is not the only thing going for the place. The ambience is unbeatable. It’s a small room with six to seven simple tables surrounded by a sober decor and you tend to feel relaxed the moment you enter it. And it’s got a reasonably good collection of comic books to keep you company. Whatanidea!

The place is nearly empty most of the time. This has gotten me worried that it might close down . So I’ve decided to patronise it, even at the risk of getting too many people there thus spoiling the very thing I like about it. You can find directions to get there at their website.

An excerpt from Salman Rushdie’s latest, ‘The Enchantress of Florence’:

The emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning ‘the great’, and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory — the Grand Mughal, the dusty, battle-weary, victorious, pensive, incipiently overweight, disenchanted, mustachioed, poetic, over-sexed, and absolute emperor, who seemed altogether too magnificent, too world-encompassing, and, in sum, too much to be a single human personage — this all-engulfing flood of a ruler, this swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster who referred to himself in the first person plural — had begun to meditate, during his long, tedious journey home, on which he was accompanied by the heads of his defeated enemies bobbing in their sealed earthen pickle-jars, about the disturbing possibilities of the first person singular — the ‘I’.

I’m through less than a fifth of the book and I already love it!

Who the eff is?

Needless to say, I’ll avoid shopping at FoodWorld and Health&Glow.

I finally figured out the keyboard shortcut for em dash (and en dash) in Gnome. I don’t have to type the lame — any more, I can be a real man and type the right thing — . If you don’t know what an em dash is, you better read about it on Wikipedia.

Se here is what you do (this worked on my Ubuntu Hardy Heron Linux system):

Go to: System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts > Layout Options > Compose key position

and check ‘Right Alt is Compose’.

Et voila!

Now whenever you need to type an em dash, just hold the Right Alt and type three hyphens.

— = Right Alt + —

Similarly you can get an en dash by holding Right Alt and typing two hyphens and then a period (you can leave the RIght Alt before typing the period).

– = Right Alt + –.

There was a very interesting thread a couple of days ago on StackOverflow (great site, by the way) on “Great Programming Quotes” and it got some great responses. Read it here.

Here is a selection of some of my own favorite geek quotes. Most of them are from the Bugzilla quip list I created at work (hence the flavor). I’m mostly posting these for my own future reference.

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. (Donald Knuth)

Anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen, and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again. Although not necessarily in chronological order. (Douglas Adams)

– Why do we have to hide from the police, daddy?
– Because we use vi, son. They use emacs.
(via Michael Crawford)

One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected. (Norman Augustine)

I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty. (“Sherlock Holmes”)

When trouble is solved before it forms, who calls that clever? (Sun Tzu)

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair. (Douglas Adams)

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. (Thomas Edison)

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. (Richard Feynman)

In his errors a man is true to type. Observe the errors and you will know the man. (Kong Fu Zi aka Confucius)

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (Samuel Beckett)

All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You’d be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men. (Isaac Asimov)

I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones. (“Dr Who”)

Lance: If you’re all right, then say something. Mia: Something.

Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong. (Dire Straits, “Industrial Disease”)

Dont like this bug? Hit the escape button.

If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse. (Henry Ford)

If you aren’t sure if something is a bug, that’s a bug. Please file a bug and mention your uncertainty in the bug report. (Tabriz, Sun Engineer)

Do you print all the emails that you receive? Any of them?

I have never printed an email. Never. Ever. Evar. That’s probably why it infuriates me to no end when I see something like the following at the end of one:

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail. Thank you.

These self-appointed guardians of the environment are the same people who drive the fuel-guzzling Yamaha R15s, who sit in a closed office with the air-conditioner set to 24 C when the temperature outside is exactly the same, who keep the water running when they are wiping that measly beard off their faces, who… you get the point.

This is the exact kind of holier-than-thou attitude I despise. The obvious implication of them adding that line at the end of every email they send me is that they consider me to be a snob who cares shi*t for the environment. Yo! you’re living in a house with glass walls, stop throwing stones at me.

Actually, I might be wrong. Maybe they are not sporting that despicable attitude. Maybe they are just plain stupid.

If you’re wondering “what’s wrong with a single line at the end of an email?”, you’re clearly not seeing the big picture my friend. Think of all the bandwidth these lines waste. If you don’t think it is much, just think of all the sleaze you could’ve downloaded instead of those stupid lines. Ah, now you see! Of course, don’t forget all the time you’ve wasted reading all those stupid lines. Think of how much sleaze you could’ve watched in that time. Do I see enlightenment in those eyes of yours?

More than anything else, those lines are plain insulting. If you are one of the accused, please, for the love of the environment, stop giving gyan in your emails. The world does not need it. Certainly not from you.

“The mass cultural delusion that the sun’s apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality.”

From the sitcom “Big Bang Theory.”

Watch from 1:27 in the following video.

…a place where you can pick up girls on IRC!

Lately I have become quite fond of one line descriptions of anything and everything. Thinking of Bangalore this morning, this struck me.

No, really, it actually happened to me! No, I did not pick up any girl on IRC: I was lurking around on #bangalore on DALNet when this dude PMs me with “ASL?”; he was there to pick up girls and told me as much. I don’t know if he met with any success, but Bangalore is one of the few cities where he actually has a chance.