"We, The Bloggers"

Chyetanya Kunte dared to criticise Padma Shree Barkha Dutt of NDTV for her coverage of the recent attacks by terrorists on Mumbai. He had to pay for this by having to apologise and withdraw his post. His post (copy in Google Cache - see the post at the bottom titled "Shoddy Journalism") seems to have irked NDTV into gagging him, despite their professed belief in "free speech and expression".

Read More...

Advogato Diary Imported

I have imported all the old entries from my Advogato diary into this blog. These entries are labelled "advogato diary".

It was very simple to do since Advogato used to provide a simple way to import all my entries as an XML file (it does not work any more) and Blogger has a nice and simple API that allows me to post entries automatically, even allowing me to back-date and label them appropriately.

However, I did encounter an unexpected problem during this import. It turns out that if you post too many entries in a single day (in my case the limit seems to be 50), Blogger thinks that you are creating a SPAM blog and turns on "word verification" for posts (a CAPTCHA). While you can still post entries manually, the API provides you no way of retrieving and resolving the CAPTCHA using human input. After 24 hours the word verification is automatically switched off and you can again post using a programme. I had to therefore spread out the import over 5 days since I had 231 entries to import.

By the way, if you worry about search engine rankings for your pages, you might want to note that such mass imports cause Google to downgrade your site for having duplicate content if the old blog is still accessible.

Finally, Advogato is still alive and being maintained.

Blog Tweaks

I tweaked this blog in the last couple of days in the hopes of making it a little better - a little better-looking and a little better-behaved. Read on for the details.

The tweaks include:

• Using a better-looking template. The old template was a bit boring and quite minimal. It made it hard for most people to read all the text I was spewing. The new template looks better (at least to me). It has a narrower column width to display the text, somewhat similar to those in newspapers and magazines, which makes it easier for most people to read the text.


• Showing only the initial paragraph from each post on the main page. You can read the full post using the "Read More..." link at the bottom of each such paragraph. This makes it easier to skip over posts that you are not interested in reading.


• Showing only a preview of the post in the feeds. I used to feel bad about my banal verbiage eating up lots of space on Planet Classpath and other such "planets". This change should let people easily skip over my posts if they don't care for what they see in the preview and navigate to the page containing the full post if they do. It should also benefit people who have subscribed to this blog using a blog aggregator. To do this a bit better than what was possible with Blogger's own feed mechanism (but still not entirely satisfactorily), I have had to redirect the Blogger feed for this blog to the FeedBurner feed for this blog.


• Giving at least something back to Google for providing this great service for free. I used to feel bad about being yet another leech on Google's resources. I signed up for Google AdSense via Blogger. Now each page on this blog shows textual advertisements relevant to the context of the page.

I do realise that there are negative aspects of each of these changes that some folks are not going to appreciate. However, I believe that each of these changes is for the better, all things considered.

Update (2007-08-10): Anusha did not like the fact that you navigate to a different page when you click on "Read More...". It is also not fair to the reader since the entire post is already there on the main page, but hidden from view. So now I have changed the blog template to expand and collapse the rest of the post in place using a combination of techniques shown here, here and here, with a few adjustments of my own.

Update (2007-08-29): The feeds now have the full contents of the posts once again.

Blog Comments

Joel Spolsky links to a post by Dave Winer on blog comments as well as providing his own views on the subject.

Dave opines:

If it was one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think -- then it was a blog, no matter what form it took. If it was the result of group-think, with lots of ass-covering and offense avoiding, then it's not.
[...]
Well actually, my opinion is different from many, but it still is my opinion that it does not follow that a blog must have comments, in fact, to the extent that comments interfere with the natural expression of the unedited voice of an individual, comments may act to make something not a blog.

while Joel adds:

When a blog allows comments right below the writer's post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words.
[...]
Dave is absolutely right. The way to give people freedom of expression is to give them a quiet place to post their ideas. If other people disagree, they're welcome to do so... on their own blogs, where they have to take ownership of their words.

The timing of Joel's post couldn't have been better as I was recently wondering about the same issues myself. I was seriously considering disallowing comments on my blog posts. Some of the main reasons were:

• Impurity - it no longer remains purely my own ramblings (Dave makes the same point). My utterly inane ramblings get combined with the inane ramblings of other, mostly anonymous, folks. It starts to look like a mailing list where I start a thread and others join in.


• Overhead - I have had to review and moderate every comment since the time spammers discovered this blog and started abusing the comments facility to post links to their sites in order to boost their ranks with search engines (CAPTCHAs don't seem to deter them). I would like to avoid this unnecessary overhead.


• Liability - I seem to unnecessarily become liable for the contents of the comments since they are available from my blog. I moderate comments simply to weed out spamming efforts, not to censor or alter them. Reasonable folks would agree that the respective posters of the comments should be liable for their content, but as we all know, reasonable folks are a sad minority in this world.


• Noise - while I try to put some thought and effort into the material posted here, it gets diluted by the utterly trite comments that sometimes follow it, especially when people post under the cover of anonymity (Joel makes the same point). Insightful or interesting comments are a sad rarity on my blog.


• Lock-in - the ability to collect and collate comments is one of the major reasons I am forced to be with Blogger or similar blogging platforms. I would ideally like to be able to merge this blog with my web-site and only upload static pages to my web-site. I would then not depend on anything other than the very basic hosting facilities and this would let me easily switch hosting providers.

However, comments are not all bad, of course. Some of the main reasons I continue to allow comments on this blog include:

• Feedback - at worst, it tells you that at least some people took the trouble of navigating to your blog and reading your blog post. At best, a "Thank you!" warms your day up and a "This sucked!" goads you into writing better. In any case, you get to know that your efforts have not entirely been wasteful.


• Ease - comments allow a reader of your blog to quickly and easily leave feedback for you. Emails are a little burdensome for this purpose, not to mention a bit formal. Making everyone respond to your blog post via their own blog posts (as Joel seems to suggest) looks too awkward to me - you would have a very hard time keeping up with the responses and most readers would just give up trying to leave feedback for you (perhaps that is indeed the effect Joel intends).


• Scale - as Clay notes, if you are a small-time blogger (like yours truly), the signal-to-noise ratio in your comments is very likely to be much better than that on more popular blogs and web-sites that allow comments. For the same reason, the volume of comments is also likely to remain manageable enough for you to be able to moderate them.


• Anonymity - some people are just not comfortable with revealing their identities to you, but would still like to leave a comment for you - perhaps anonymity provides them the security needed to provide frank opinions, perhaps they are shy, perhaps they don't want to sign up with Google just to be able to leave a comment for you, perhaps they just don't want to be seen as a person caught reading blogs in general or your blog in particular, etc.


• Enhancement - some of the best comments are those that expand on the blog post by providing further information, clarifications, alternative ideas, etc. This enhances the value of your blog and makes it more appealing to your readers.

On the whole, blog comments appear quite useful to me despite their obvious warts. I will continue to allow comments on this blog, even those posted anonymously, as long as it remains manageable. I hope I continue to remain small enough to escape the attention of the trolls.

Comments?

Good Bye Advogato!

Advogato is going offline.

I feel a bit sad about it even though I had stopped updating my Advogato diary and have been using Blogger for blogging for the last three months. After all, Advogato is where I started blogging regularly.

mibus provides a nice tip: You can access all your Advogato diary entries in a convenient XML format by appending "diary.xml" to your normal diary URL. For example:

http://www.advogato.org/person/rmathew/diary.xml

There is a "Planet (Former) Advogato" for aggregating the blogs of all those who used to blog on Advogato but have moved elsewhere for one reason or the other.

All Your Blogs Are Belong To Us

We in India are no longer able to directly view blogs hosted on Blogspot, Typepad, Geocities, etc. This is because ISPs in India are blocking access to these popular sites acting on a government diktat to block some blogs "within the provisions of the Fundamental Right to free speech and expression granted in India's constitution" [sic]. Mridula was one of the first ones to notice and write about this blockade and the story has already made it to Slashdot and some of the mainstream media in India.

The government's diktat was to block a specific set of blogs ("to ensure a balanced flow of information") but since all the Blogspot URLs resolve to the same IP address, the blockade ends up blocking all blogs hosted on Blogspot. Ditto for Typepad, Geocities, etc. Since blogger.com is not blocked, I am able to post to my blog. I can also view my blog from my office since the Internet connection there is routed via a corporate proxy server located in the US. Using pkblogs.com, which was set up to allow people in Pakistan to view Blogspot blogs since they have a similar blockade in place, is another workaround, as is using a public proxy server or the Tor network using something like Torpark.

In 2003, a similar government diktat to block a specific Yahoo! Group had caused all Yahoo! Groups to become inaccessible from India. Thankfully that situation was resolved quickly and let's hope this issue is too.

A clueless bureaucracy eagerly assisted by a servile and clueless set of ISPs is not good news. Where is a cluebat when you need one?

Driving In India

This video shows an example of how people drive in Indian cities. This is unfortunately not an exaggeration - for example, the junction of Taverekere Main Road and Hosur Road near my office building has a traffic pattern very similar to the one shown by this video. I come to work every day driving through such traffic. No wonder foreigners find it very difficult to drive in Indian cities and Indians find it very difficult to control their urges in foreign cities.

I Blog in Your General Direction

Yumpee considers blogging an act of vanity and inanity. Of course, he doesn't actually refrain from reading such blogs himself and would sometimes tell you a couple of things based on one of your posts accompanied by his trademark smirk.

Steve Yegge has a very nice writeup on why one should blog and I will not repeat here what he says there - it is a must-read for all people who think blogging is a completely wasteful activity. I would just add that I personally use my blogs and website as a sort of a Pensieve (what Dumbledore uses to store some of his memories in the Harry Potter series of books), except that I like to record my thoughts too instead of just memories. Sometimes I look at what I wrote a few years ago to see what I was intrigued by or interested in back then and occasionally I can't help but be embarrassed or amused by what I see. It still does not stop me from blogging though, mostly for the reasons that Steve points out in his article.

I have found out that blogs tell me a lot more about a person beyond what I can learn from everyday interactions with him or her. For example, Vikgup, Arpana, Anupama and Mridula have blogs that showed me aspects of their personality and areas of their interest that I had absolutely no inkling about from my conversations with them. If you do not blog yet, go forth and blog (and send me the URL for your blog).

By the way, despite my (admittedly mild) pleas to the contrary, Mark has added this blog to Planet Classpath as well. If you see posts in Planet Classpath via this blog about stuff not related to GCJ or GNU Classpath or Free Software or even technology, you now know who to blame for it.

Hello World

I will now be using this weblog instead of my Advogato diary.

Moving

I am now moving to rmathew.blogspot.com for blogging. I find Advogato a bit painful to use for blogging. I also do not want to be restricted to only talking about hacking on Free Software.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Planet GCC

There is now a Planet GCC aggregating the feeds from Planet Classpath and the blogs of a bunch of GCC hackers. If you know of a blog of a GCC hacker that is not directly or indirectly aggregated here, please let Dan know. Thanks to Dan for this initiative.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Miscellaneous

Steve Yegge is now on Blogger for those of you who can't seem to have enough of his rants.


Ranjit Madampath pointed me to a rather hilarious entry on Frameworks in the Joel on Software discussion group.


Planet Scheme used to be available as planet-scheme.yi.org, but it seems to be dead now. I used to like reading the aggregated weblogs of a lot of smart Scheme hackers, the weblog of Jose Antonio Ortega Ruiz in particular.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Stevey Yegge's Blog Articles

reddit.com regulars would have surely noticed several articles from Stevey Yegge's blogs bubbling up with a lot of moderation points. I must admit that I spent more than a couple of hours reading many of his articles. As with Joel Spolsky, I might not agree with everything he says but I have to say that he writes fairly well most of the time (though he is a bit verbose and somewhat incoherent at times).

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Planet GCC

I set up a simple Wiki page listing the weblogs of various GCC hackers as a temporary measure till such a time that we have a "Planet GCC" weblog feed aggregator of our own. Please feel free to update it with links to weblogs of GCC hackers that you find missing.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Bangalore Computer Graphics Group

Anirban Deb, who is a colleague of mine, has started the Bangalore Computer Graphics Group along with like-minded enthusiasts, which aims to bring together people in Bangalore who are interested in computer graphics (not the Photoshop or Maya stuff). If you are interested in such things, or know of someone who is, spread the word. Their initial plan is to meet at least once a month to discuss interesting stuff and to get to know like-minded people and to eventually become the local SIGGRAPH chapter.

In other news, look who's blogging! Now that Andrew and Tom are blogging, Bryce is the only one in the Red Hat GCJ Triumvirate who doesn't. Who wants to persuade him to blog?


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

n Factor

I just found out that my blog (as well as those of many GCJ/Classpath hackers) is also being aggregated by n Factor besides Planet Classpath.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

100 Inane Ramblings

I have put in more than 100 inane entries into my Advogato diary by now.
Here is a nice weblog entry (try to ignore the awfully distracting background image) by James Gosling talking about the problems in "correctly" implementing sin() and other trigonometric functions in Java.

Yumpee had pointed me to some nice papers by some of his fellow Googlers a while ago. They make for some great reading. Try to at least read the papers on Google FS, MapReduce and Sawzall (in that order).


Some day, I hope to be able to decipher what Graydon says about programming languages.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Miscellaneous

RMS has a blog too!

Congratulations to Tom for getting GCJX to generate code!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

No News is Bad GNUs

What's up people? There haven't been regular updates on Planet Classpath from a lot of you for a long time... Get off your Glutius Maximii and tell us what you have been up to recently!


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Tromey

tromey continues to blog albeit elsewhere!

He seems to be working on a new frontend for GCJ.

Now why don't I get to know of such cool things
earlier? :-(
BTW, I finally get to see what he looks like!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)