I got it on yahoo. Couldn't miss this one. You know why he is here :D
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Wandering thoughts
Foolishness, unlike intelligence is difficult to conceal. The more you try to suppress , the more it tries to surface.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
1992
George Orwell would have still safely chosen to write 1984 since what came 8 years hence was far from predictable. I remember myself as a hardly 6 year old sitting in front of newly subscribed "Cable Tv" with glitter in my eyes anticipating another batsman to get bowled on the first ball he faces so that I could watch the animated duck mocking the already embarrassed looser. It was the 1992 World Cup and no matter who was loosing or winning I was lovin it...
Some information for those who are least aware of the metamorphism 1992 WC was. It was the first WC that had players in fluorescent colors ( notice the word fluorescent. The colors were indeed pleasing... ). The first white ball, flashy screens, the invisible third umpire, the sparkling floodlights and the packed stadias gave a feeling of being at the center of a high profile tournament, a realization that every ball counted and so did every player and every single spectator. They would walk in their glamorous outfit with suncream all over their face, a handkerchief nevertheless adroitly tucked inside their trousers. Far from "clowns" as what described by Harold Larwoods , they were the vicious bowlers and the entertaining pinch hitters who were rendering a glossy touch to a game that was essentially labeled as a gentleman's monopoly.
1992 changed perceptions. Australians, I reckon, for long were the only people in cricketing fraternity concerned about actually "marketing" cricket. They introduced the concept of ODIs followed by successful ventures like Triangular series and World Championship Tournament .1992 WC was fresh breath of air. Even the most unnoticeable entities drew attention.The seats were visibly attractive and the umpire appeared more than just the dumb Christmas snowman he use to be in previous editions of the game.Alan Donald with his trademark suncream apparently became my favorite cartoon character before I realized my mom was just playing prank on me telling that it was he who inspired Walt Disney to sketch out the legendary sailer duck. Sachin was still young and Inzamam clean shave. Kiran More was loudest wicketkeeper in the world and I had incidentally started batting left handed, overwhelmed by comments from some "aunty" who told my mom that your son is as cute as Andy Flower! As a 6 year old, I could in fact educate my father "Papa, Don't watch cricket if players are wearing white. They play very slowly..."
"Change is unavoidable",one of the forgetful commercial during the recent IPL matches claims. But that is neither the statement of century nor the complete truth. Change, whether avoidable or unavoidable, is "fruitful" only if it is Change for better. And there is a defining difference between merely Change and Change for better. People expect something naive, you give them that something, people accept it happily, you are rich, This is merely a Change. People never thought about something, you give them this unforeseen "something", people accept it happily, you are rich. This is Change for better. IPL by merging Bollywoodish and Cheerleadish pomp and show with cricket did the former. 1992 coming with an unprecedented, unanticipated fresh face of cricket riding on the back of circumstantial advantage of onslaught of Cable TV ( in India ) did the latter.
Exploiting the lack of demand for innovation and emotional inclination towards Bollywood, IPL might successfully foray into cricket history books as a major milestone. The pseudo-innovative marketing involved in promoting IPL is akin to what Ekta Kapoor did to Indian television. Saas-bahu dramas were in nascent stage about 10 years ago when Ms Kapoor's K-series acid rained on Indian Television, their continuing success nevertheless proving the large appetite of Indian viewers to keep chewing the old gum stolidly. Same, if happens with IPL for next 10 years wont be a surprise hence.
Did IPL bring any culture to cricket?Is it giving new dimensions?Benchmarking with respect to 1992, is IPL a revolution? Did IPL change anything at all? No. The Ceat Ad suggests Change is unavoidable. Ironically, Its IPL that proves it is not :P
Packed MCG during the final. Pic lifted from Wiki :-)
P.S I wish I could credit the forgetful aunty. Andy Flower is still among my favorite players and I still bat left handed because of him :D
Some information for those who are least aware of the metamorphism 1992 WC was. It was the first WC that had players in fluorescent colors ( notice the word fluorescent. The colors were indeed pleasing... ). The first white ball, flashy screens, the invisible third umpire, the sparkling floodlights and the packed stadias gave a feeling of being at the center of a high profile tournament, a realization that every ball counted and so did every player and every single spectator. They would walk in their glamorous outfit with suncream all over their face, a handkerchief nevertheless adroitly tucked inside their trousers. Far from "clowns" as what described by Harold Larwoods , they were the vicious bowlers and the entertaining pinch hitters who were rendering a glossy touch to a game that was essentially labeled as a gentleman's monopoly.
1992 changed perceptions. Australians, I reckon, for long were the only people in cricketing fraternity concerned about actually "marketing" cricket. They introduced the concept of ODIs followed by successful ventures like Triangular series and World Championship Tournament .1992 WC was fresh breath of air. Even the most unnoticeable entities drew attention.The seats were visibly attractive and the umpire appeared more than just the dumb Christmas snowman he use to be in previous editions of the game.Alan Donald with his trademark suncream apparently became my favorite cartoon character before I realized my mom was just playing prank on me telling that it was he who inspired Walt Disney to sketch out the legendary sailer duck. Sachin was still young and Inzamam clean shave. Kiran More was loudest wicketkeeper in the world and I had incidentally started batting left handed, overwhelmed by comments from some "aunty" who told my mom that your son is as cute as Andy Flower! As a 6 year old, I could in fact educate my father "Papa, Don't watch cricket if players are wearing white. They play very slowly..."
"Change is unavoidable",one of the forgetful commercial during the recent IPL matches claims. But that is neither the statement of century nor the complete truth. Change, whether avoidable or unavoidable, is "fruitful" only if it is Change for better. And there is a defining difference between merely Change and Change for better. People expect something naive, you give them that something, people accept it happily, you are rich, This is merely a Change. People never thought about something, you give them this unforeseen "something", people accept it happily, you are rich. This is Change for better. IPL by merging Bollywoodish and Cheerleadish pomp and show with cricket did the former. 1992 coming with an unprecedented, unanticipated fresh face of cricket riding on the back of circumstantial advantage of onslaught of Cable TV ( in India ) did the latter.
Exploiting the lack of demand for innovation and emotional inclination towards Bollywood, IPL might successfully foray into cricket history books as a major milestone. The pseudo-innovative marketing involved in promoting IPL is akin to what Ekta Kapoor did to Indian television. Saas-bahu dramas were in nascent stage about 10 years ago when Ms Kapoor's K-series acid rained on Indian Television, their continuing success nevertheless proving the large appetite of Indian viewers to keep chewing the old gum stolidly. Same, if happens with IPL for next 10 years wont be a surprise hence.
Did IPL bring any culture to cricket?Is it giving new dimensions?Benchmarking with respect to 1992, is IPL a revolution? Did IPL change anything at all? No. The Ceat Ad suggests Change is unavoidable. Ironically, Its IPL that proves it is not :P
Packed MCG during the final. Pic lifted from Wiki :-)
P.S I wish I could credit the forgetful aunty. Andy Flower is still among my favorite players and I still bat left handed because of him :D
Saturday, April 26, 2008
10 recommended songs this week
1. Nazron ke milne se - Kavita Krisnamoorthy (Vishvavidhata)
2. Don't look back in Anger - Oasis
3. When I look into your eyes - Firehouse
4. Pyar se fir - Strings
5. Back home - Yellowcard
6. Chupne waale saamne aa - Mohd Rafi (Tumsa Nahi dekha)
7. Ajooba - Jeans
8. Na tum jaano na hum - Lucky Ali
9. Penny and me - Hanson
10. Isn't it a wonder - Boyzone
2. Don't look back in Anger - Oasis
3. When I look into your eyes - Firehouse
4. Pyar se fir - Strings
5. Back home - Yellowcard
6. Chupne waale saamne aa - Mohd Rafi (Tumsa Nahi dekha)
7. Ajooba - Jeans
8. Na tum jaano na hum - Lucky Ali
9. Penny and me - Hanson
10. Isn't it a wonder - Boyzone
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Wandering thoughts
The only ethical way of making money is either selling renewable sources of energy or selling medicine. Period.
Monday, April 21, 2008
PCLinuxOS
This gotta be the one stop destination for all you guys looking forward to switch to Linux. I think Suse will still be second no matter how close it might look to Windows. Its almost an year that I had my first date with PCLinuxOS. I was pretty comfortable with it from day 1. It came well bundled with a host of applications, both Geeky and non-Geeky. But what steals the show is Synaptic, the package manager. For those who had miserable time on Fedora unwrapping RPMs from the command line spending sleepless nights wondering about the missing libraries ( missing dependencies, thats what you call them..right? ) PCLOS comes as a dose of relief. I agree these days all distros come with a package manager but man what I mean here is THE THING REALLY INSTALLS IT!!!. There are ample applications already in the distro and I promise you need not install anything extra for at least the first 4-5 weeks of usage.
OK...Editors First. Well, Since I never went beyond the vi editor before, Kwrite proved to be a blessing. Highlighted keywords and support for various languages meant I never had to look at anything else. It was fun going through some build files when opened up with kwrite ( Well actually I had quite a bad time on DOS/XP...). I was looking around if there was a Latex editor too but guess you need to look into the package manager and download that. There aren't many development environments though, one reason could be the target audience being home users who are mainly concerned with office applications, multimedia and the Internet.
The Internet, I must mention, is the most important or rather most indispensable part of the experience. And make sure you connect to it well. I don't think the Package manager would have made much sense had I not had Internet. I have an ISP that uses a private proxy ( which is also the DNS ....named 172.16.1.1 ) connected to a public proxy. So all I had to do was to install a client for my machine that provides an authenticated connection to 172.16.1.1. I managed to get a client software after long and successfully connected to the Internet. I dont think it was a piece of cake but PCLOS makes it sure that you are just 2 clicks away from all sort of network settings. If you are using PCLOS and unable connect to internet, feel free to share :-)
Office applications, its better I speak least about :-(. Though it has the Open office application pack but dont expect much from it. It wont open your MS Office files properly and add unwanted renderations that would be a pain in neck to correct. Online Office packs arent that great either and despite being a complete non-MS user I still agree docx actually rocks! I would post my discovery in CAPS if I ever come up with office application that can do me good.
Multimedia is the best thing here, especially if you have used other Linux distros. You have Amarok audio player and a host of video players like KMplayer and Kaffiene ( these two might suffice ) that play all sort of file formats on earth. VLC could be added later if that was your favorite player on Windows, but guess you might not need it. The quality of sound though is not as good as what you might find with ITunes or Windows Media Player 11 but the fact that it plays proprietary formats like wma and licensed mp3 gives it a certain edge over rest of the distros. And if you're thinking of putting Amarok on your Fedora and claiming you could do the same from there, man you're certainly inviting those dependency errors you might have already got used to by now :P
System Admin tools are comfortably accessible from the KMenu from the desktop and even the most naive could make out how to configure file servers, web servers and even remote desktop. Archiving and compressing may not be a very comfortable experience. While you may literally need to run scripts to compress/decompress rar archives, you better keep your fingers crossed while writing a DVD with K3B. The result could swing either ways :P. CD burning is something K3B does with poise, DVD exactly the other way.
A host of command line tools ( Now with every distro ) adds a lot of functionality that may not be evident to a home user but thats what Linux distros are best at. The "mkisofs" command could help you take a backup in an .iso format which you might agree is a good utility given that you switch your distro every month. I suggest one should make a habit of opening a shell prompt at bootup and try commands like -help and "man" quite regularly to get used to the command prompt. Trust me, No book can teach you Linux, only manual pages can :-)
Ardent Internet surfers like me always look for a Torrent Client, a P2P transfer application and some LAN connectivity tool. I got the very best of 3 in PCLOS. Ktorrent and Frostwire is something I use very often. There are instant messaging clients unlike many other distros, so you could log on to yahoo and AIM. Jabber support is there but for Gtalk you still need to use your browser. Samba could make sure you can connect to a Windows machine with a cross cable. I may post more on Samba later. I love it from the very depth of my heart. Was very helpful taking backups :-)
Thats all you need to know to go for your own first hand experience with PCLOS. I aint quite a Linux freak but I truly love this particular one. It used to give me "syslog" messages when CPU got overheated and would work from RAM when my Hard disk would accidently get disconnected ( Now you might be wondering how the hell can HDisk get disconnected..Well, trust me, in my case it happens quite regularly :P I'll send you a video of how that happens :D ). PCLOS gave me a Nirvana feel, a constant companion I would never wanna give up for the rest of my life.
P.S - If you have queries regarding PCLinux or any other distro please feel free to share with me at Amey.Khalatkar@gmail.com
OK...Editors First. Well, Since I never went beyond the vi editor before, Kwrite proved to be a blessing. Highlighted keywords and support for various languages meant I never had to look at anything else. It was fun going through some build files when opened up with kwrite ( Well actually I had quite a bad time on DOS/XP...). I was looking around if there was a Latex editor too but guess you need to look into the package manager and download that. There aren't many development environments though, one reason could be the target audience being home users who are mainly concerned with office applications, multimedia and the Internet.
The Internet, I must mention, is the most important or rather most indispensable part of the experience. And make sure you connect to it well. I don't think the Package manager would have made much sense had I not had Internet. I have an ISP that uses a private proxy ( which is also the DNS ....named 172.16.1.1 ) connected to a public proxy. So all I had to do was to install a client for my machine that provides an authenticated connection to 172.16.1.1. I managed to get a client software after long and successfully connected to the Internet. I dont think it was a piece of cake but PCLOS makes it sure that you are just 2 clicks away from all sort of network settings. If you are using PCLOS and unable connect to internet, feel free to share :-)
Office applications, its better I speak least about :-(. Though it has the Open office application pack but dont expect much from it. It wont open your MS Office files properly and add unwanted renderations that would be a pain in neck to correct. Online Office packs arent that great either and despite being a complete non-MS user I still agree docx actually rocks! I would post my discovery in CAPS if I ever come up with office application that can do me good.
Multimedia is the best thing here, especially if you have used other Linux distros. You have Amarok audio player and a host of video players like KMplayer and Kaffiene ( these two might suffice ) that play all sort of file formats on earth. VLC could be added later if that was your favorite player on Windows, but guess you might not need it. The quality of sound though is not as good as what you might find with ITunes or Windows Media Player 11 but the fact that it plays proprietary formats like wma and licensed mp3 gives it a certain edge over rest of the distros. And if you're thinking of putting Amarok on your Fedora and claiming you could do the same from there, man you're certainly inviting those dependency errors you might have already got used to by now :P
System Admin tools are comfortably accessible from the KMenu from the desktop and even the most naive could make out how to configure file servers, web servers and even remote desktop. Archiving and compressing may not be a very comfortable experience. While you may literally need to run scripts to compress/decompress rar archives, you better keep your fingers crossed while writing a DVD with K3B. The result could swing either ways :P. CD burning is something K3B does with poise, DVD exactly the other way.
A host of command line tools ( Now with every distro ) adds a lot of functionality that may not be evident to a home user but thats what Linux distros are best at. The "mkisofs" command could help you take a backup in an .iso format which you might agree is a good utility given that you switch your distro every month. I suggest one should make a habit of opening a shell prompt at bootup and try commands like -help and "man" quite regularly to get used to the command prompt. Trust me, No book can teach you Linux, only manual pages can :-)
Ardent Internet surfers like me always look for a Torrent Client, a P2P transfer application and some LAN connectivity tool. I got the very best of 3 in PCLOS. Ktorrent and Frostwire is something I use very often. There are instant messaging clients unlike many other distros, so you could log on to yahoo and AIM. Jabber support is there but for Gtalk you still need to use your browser. Samba could make sure you can connect to a Windows machine with a cross cable. I may post more on Samba later. I love it from the very depth of my heart. Was very helpful taking backups :-)
Thats all you need to know to go for your own first hand experience with PCLOS. I aint quite a Linux freak but I truly love this particular one. It used to give me "syslog" messages when CPU got overheated and would work from RAM when my Hard disk would accidently get disconnected ( Now you might be wondering how the hell can HDisk get disconnected..Well, trust me, in my case it happens quite regularly :P I'll send you a video of how that happens :D ). PCLOS gave me a Nirvana feel, a constant companion I would never wanna give up for the rest of my life.
P.S - If you have queries regarding PCLinux or any other distro please feel free to share with me at Amey.Khalatkar@gmail.com
The Elegant Kmenu
The Colorful Shell Prompts
What the hell!!!
Grace. yeah thats the word. Grace was missing. I was watching a cricket match after years. I missed even the world cups and the 20-20s to eventually come back one day and watch the Mumbai Indians ( Mumbai Titans could have sounded better, whatever...) clash with The Bangalore RC. Honestly I had great hopes with this experiment called IPL. But the performance of sub-sub-junior players who still aint outta their diapers made me realize what a great experience watching ODIs was. Frankly there aint anything else but the business model to blame.
Complaints now. I thought I was watching high profile players. Spare the under-19 players, I saw no reason why Robin Uthappa was playing the unconventional paddle scoop when least needed. It was as if there was no other damn thing he could think off. The shots paid but eventually ( and quite deservedly :X ) got him stumped. Damn irritating it looked and Jacques Kallis was not the only man who was frustrated with that.
The other thing was the bowing action. I would have never realised how inelegant was Vinay Kumar's bowling action if Shaun Pollack would have not been playing the same match. Not only Kumar, but Dhaval Kulkarni, Akhil and many other diaper-wrapped 19 year olds did the same. And yeah, now you could say they're all U-22, but hey! this is a billion dollar business. We aint paying for nothing.
Coming back to my first statement, I found grace missing. The irritating snicks and clicks and flicks ( those predictable Uthappa scoops included... ), the inexperienced bowling attack, lack of heat of a billion dollar tournament, Absent innovation ( except the staggered scorecard may be...) , visibly ridiculous strategies ( Notice it was the kid Dhaval kulkarni who was bowling the final over against RC...) and the distracting semi-naked cheerleaders, they all poured in to make worst out of what possibly could have been the best.
Now what. Well, I dont hate IPL, neither I call it a failure. But definitely its not the same revolution that perhaps the 1992 world cup was. And what did 1992 WC bring for us? Well, call me up sometime. I am too tired to write about it. May be someday I'll take some GBs of web space to write on that.
In short: Wait for the next post. :-)
Complaints now. I thought I was watching high profile players. Spare the under-19 players, I saw no reason why Robin Uthappa was playing the unconventional paddle scoop when least needed. It was as if there was no other damn thing he could think off. The shots paid but eventually ( and quite deservedly :X ) got him stumped. Damn irritating it looked and Jacques Kallis was not the only man who was frustrated with that.
The other thing was the bowing action. I would have never realised how inelegant was Vinay Kumar's bowling action if Shaun Pollack would have not been playing the same match. Not only Kumar, but Dhaval Kulkarni, Akhil and many other diaper-wrapped 19 year olds did the same. And yeah, now you could say they're all U-22, but hey! this is a billion dollar business. We aint paying for nothing.
Coming back to my first statement, I found grace missing. The irritating snicks and clicks and flicks ( those predictable Uthappa scoops included... ), the inexperienced bowling attack, lack of heat of a billion dollar tournament, Absent innovation ( except the staggered scorecard may be...) , visibly ridiculous strategies ( Notice it was the kid Dhaval kulkarni who was bowling the final over against RC...) and the distracting semi-naked cheerleaders, they all poured in to make worst out of what possibly could have been the best.
Now what. Well, I dont hate IPL, neither I call it a failure. But definitely its not the same revolution that perhaps the 1992 world cup was. And what did 1992 WC bring for us? Well, call me up sometime. I am too tired to write about it. May be someday I'll take some GBs of web space to write on that.
In short: Wait for the next post. :-)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)