I have started using Firefox 3.6 and it does feel a little faster than its predecessor, though it's definitely not as snappy as Chrome. I should note that this is how Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 also felt at the time of their release, only to not feel that fast as time wore on and we received successive security and stability updates. I wonder why.
2010-01-23
2010-01-11
Underwater Blues
The New York Times now encourages you to walk away if you have an "underwater mortgage" on a house, that is, you owe more money on the mortgage for the house than its value in the current housing market. I find such analysis based on the negative equity of a house somewhat puzzling. It might make sense if you have bought a house purely for investment, but not if you call it a home that provides you protection against the elements. If you give up your house, you still have to find an alternative accommodation and very likely pay rent for it.
2009-12-27
Hard Lines
I find myself agreeing with the author of the article "Good Novels Don't Have to Be Hard": a lot of "good" fiction in modern times is just too much work. It should not be too surprising to find many people giving up on it and moving on to simpler and more entertaining stuff. A struggle is not what I usually look forward to when I take up a novel during my precious free time.
2009-11-25
"Terror In Mumbai"
Mumbai was attacked by ten terrorists a year ago in an incident that has since become known in India as "26/11". The attacks were accompanied by hysterical, and at times quite misleading, media coverage here in India. The subsequent media coverage didn't get any better and was more often than not filled with pointless analyses. This was especially noticeable on television where the news channels would feature endless rounds of debates among the usual bunch of bickering "guests", none of whom would ever get to complete a point before being interrupted by another guest or the anchor. Thankfully there is now a documentary film titled "Terror in Mumbai", made by Dan Reed, that rectifies this situation. This film is a must-watch, but we don't know if/when it will be shown here in India.
2009-11-23
Google Chrome on Slackware
Google Chrome has been out for a while now, but only on Windows. There are pre-release Linux builds of Chrome, but they work out-of-the-box only on Ubuntu or Debian. As a Slackware 12.1 user, I couldn't therefore check out this browser and I was too lazy to build it myself. Fortunately for me, it turns out that the available builds can be made to work on Slackware with a little effort. Chrome turns out to be surprisingly usable and fast on Linux. That said, I'm not shifting from Firefox to Chrome yet, at least not right away.
2009-11-02
The Landmark Quiz 2009
I participated in the Landmark Quiz 2009 (Bangalore) yesterday on a lark along with a colleague and a remote acquaintance of his. Our team was appropriately named "Last Minute Line-up". We only managed to get 19 correct answers in the preliminaries for the 40 questions that were asked. We didn't make it to the finals, but it was fun watching the quiz.
2009-09-24
A Good Reader Indeed
I was looking for an application for the iPhone which could display PDF files on this device, especially those containing images, in a way better than that provided by the built-in support for PDF files on the iPhone. I stumbled upon an application imaginatively named "GoodReader" that does this job very well. It is not free, but at the current price of 99 cents (versus the usual USD 4.99), it's a bargain.
2009-09-23
PDF Manipulation Tools
I wanted to manipulate a few PDF files recently and was on the lookout for suitable tools. More specifically, I wanted to convert a few double-page PDF files (containing two pages of text on a single page) into single-page PDF files. I also wanted to drop some of the pages in order to have the files contain just the text that I was interested in. Fortunately for me, there are several freely-available tools that do the job well.
2009-09-01
"Capital Gains"
The latest issue of Granta has an article by Rana Dasgupta titled "Capital Gains". It talks about the huge wealth and power recently accumulated by a few in Delhi, their unabashed flaunting of this new-found wealth and power, their displacement of the previous elite who are now disgusted and the resulting class divisions in the society. It is a long article, but well worth the read.
2009-06-30
ICFPC 2009
I spent this weekend participating in the ICFP contest. This year the task was a series of problems of increasing difficulty in which we had to steer a satellite orbiting the Earth in order to accomplish various objectives. Like the task last year, it depended heavily on physics, mathematics, your knowledge of a particular domain and the stability of your numerical calculations, not to mention the need for the occasional compensating manoeuvre. It was fairly tedious and I didn't quite enjoy it as much as I did the tasks from some of the previous years.
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