"A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic."
- George Bernard Shaw
This delectable jungle safari theme cake caught my attention in a baking specialty store the other day, and I quickly snapped a picture. It just looks too adorable to eat. I especially liked the use of pretzel sticks as tree trunks.
The euphoria surrounding the Indian cricket team’s breathtaking victory at the 20/20 World Cup series shows no signs of settling down, and the shower of gifts and accolades does not seem likely to cease any time soon. While the tournament final witnessed an ecstatic performance by the team against Pakistan on Sep 24th, the spoils of victory certainly eliminate even the slightest shadow of doubt that in India, cricket is not just a popular sport, but a prurient religion.
Each player gets a share of about Rs. 1,18,06,700 ($295,000) based on their apportionment of the team’s winnings - the prize money of Rs. 13,06,700 ($32,660), a BCCI prize of Rs. 80,00,000 ($200,000), and a flat worth Rs. 25,00,000 ($62,500) courtesy of Sahara. Most players will also be getting steep raises from their respective ‘employers’, as well as free flights for the next five years thanks to the Delhi government.
In addition, prizes that have been announced for individual players by state governments and corporations add up to tidy sums -
Yuvraj Singh: Rs. 1,00,00,000 ($250,000) and a Porsche
R P Singh : Rs. 10,00,000 ($25,000) and a Mercedes
Joginder Singh: Rs. 21,00,000 ($52,500)
Ajit Agarkar & Rohit Sharma: Rs. 10,00,000 ($25,000)
Irfan & Yusuf Pathan: Rs. 16,00,000 ($40,000)
Virendra Sehwag, Gautam Gambhir, S Sreesanth & Robin Uthappa: Rs. 5,00,000 ($12,500)
Bowling Coach Venkatesh Prasad: Rs. 20,00,000 ($50,000)
Things are looking bright in the near future as well, as corporations have probably already begun their own contest for sponsorships and endorsements.
Boy, it must feel really good to be Yuvraj Singh right now!
(Update) Hockey (or field hockey to the Americans), despite being anointed India’s national sport, lags far behind in terms of the recognition that it should receive. In a big contrast to cricketers, hockey players are actually penalized for poor performance (Rs. 1,000 for each goal scored and Rs. 2,000 deducted for every goal conceded) and barely rewarded, if at all, for their achievements. As Murali aptly puts it, compared to cricket in India, other sports are given the proverbial step-motherly treatment.
Is there something such as perfection in user interface design? I believe one that can be used functionally by a one-year old, comes pretty darn close.
I snapped this picture at a local grocery store, where a kiosk’s sole function of displaying catchy ads for coupons and new products was marred by a familiar Windows error, although not quite as attention-grabbing this time as the other one I had blogged about.
(click for larger image)
Interestingly, the command line reveals that the kiosk runs Laplink Everywhere, commercial software that allows remote access to a PC from anywhere. I guess all the kiosks from the store (and across the country) connect to a central machine that selects the advertisements to be run by the store, and thus rely on 24/7 internet connectivity for their operation. Given that the kiosk is using a capable machine with a complete Windows XP installation, I would have guessed that a better design would be to run local custom software and just provide daily (or even hourly) updates via the internet connection - which is also the way most Windows spyware work.
Of course, capital costs could have been cut significantly if the kiosk ran cheaper x86 hardware with a basic Linux installation - although I wonder if that was even an option considered by the company that designed the kiosk.
The Government of India has recently set up an online grievance forum with the intention of opening up a more direct line of communication with citizens, who can use this tool to highlight problems faced when dealing with Government officials and/or departments. Avenues that immediately come to mind include (but are certainly not limited to) the Passport Office, Electricity Board, BSNL/MTNL, and the Railways.
Submissions to the forum may not be falling on blind eyes after all, if unconfirmed anecdotal evidence making the rounds on many online message boards and by email, is to be believed. It talks about a certain CSC employee in Faridabad who used the forum to log a complaint about the local municipal corporation digging up newly paved roads to install cables - an annoyance most of us in India have had to deal with. Apparently, this was successful, as the BSNL and the Faridabad Municipal Corporation were served a show-cause notice soon after. While it is not clear if the online forum played a vital role in bringing the two departments in sync with each other, it is definitely a tool that more of us can make use of.
Unfortunately, the website (as with most other government-controlled websites in India) suffers a great deal in the aesthetics department (I doubt that any sense of design even exists for the persons in charge of getting websites implemented). With a heterogenous mix of poorly selected html design elements and colors, spending too much time browsing the site can drive one to poke their eyeballs with a fork, in disgust. Alright, dramatic effects aside, I guess a complete redesign of the site (with a hint to derive some inspiration from other functional and spartanly designed administrative websites around the world) would be my choice for a grievance to be filed on the forum. Let’s see how that goes.
The USB Implementers Forum is planning to announce the next generation of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology by mid 2008. USB 3.0 will allow a ten-fold increase in data transfer rates, by adding fiber-optic links alongside traditional copper wires in the bus - which would boost the specification to a theoretical 4.8 Gigabits per second (the current USB 2.0 version has a top data-transfer rate of 480 megabits per second).
Although not too many external peripherals would be able to make use of such bandwidth, the technology implies a completely different meaning for devices such as external hard drives and next-generation optical drives like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The data transfer rate of internal SATA hard drives today caps out at 3 Gbps, with most desktops and laptops using a lesser SATA version that allows only up to 300 Mbps. The prospect of an external hard drive having the ability to exceed transfer rates of today’s internal drives, is very promising - as transfer speeds are the only strong differential that separates the two categories of consumer hard drives today.
There is probably no need to hold off on that impending hard drive purchase just yet, as USB 3.0 products won’t be arriving in the marketplace before 2009 or 2010.
(via slashdot)
The US Government has been planning a redesign of their currency bills, and in doing so, looks to move away from the monochrome format that has been the inspiration for the colloquial synonymity between the color green and money (the world over). Changes were first implemented in 2003, with pastel colors appearing on the $10, $20 and $50 bills. However, the $5 bill is going to see a much more significant makeover - with splashes of purple and gray to liven it up.
US currency notes have had a long standing dubious distinction of using the same size and color schemes regardless of value, and I’m sure many a tourist has been confused between a ‘smackeroo‘ and a ‘Benjamin‘.
The confusion has not been relegated to tourists alone, for confusion is the primary factor that the redesign is looking to eliminate.
“We wanted this redesigned bill to scream, ‘I am a five. I am a five,”‘ Larry Felix, director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We wanted to eliminate any similarity or confusion on the part of the public between the $5 bill and the $100 bill.”
Of course, the design will also be incorporating additional state-of-the-art security features, giving counterfeiters a run for their money (sorry, couldn’t resist).
The next bill to get a makeover will be the $100. It will feature the most advanced safeguard yet, a new security thread composed of 650,000 tiny lenses that will magnify micro-printing on the bills to give the effect of having the images move in the opposite direction than the bill is being moved.
Ooh, that would be similar to the wheel caps on those newer Mercedes coupes, which appear to turn clockwise while the car is in motion.
When I first arrived in the US, I was quite overwhelmed by the broadband access available at my University on the Internet-2 network, and also the connection my roommates and I shared at our apartment. This was already light years ahead of the dial-up connection my brother and I sparingly used back home in Mumbai. That said, the United States is nowhere in the league of nations with screaming-fast broadband speeds. Here’s a chart of the average (downstream) speeds available for consumers by country, in megabits per second. Japan and Korea are an order of magnitude ahead, with the US trailing off at 14th place with around 5.0-6.0 Mbps average speeds.
It’s amazing, how a geek’s lifestyle can seamlessly expand or contract according to the resources presented. While dial-up seemed quite adequate at the time, even in its most frustrating hour (like those last-minute submissions for the IEEE-VESIT online contests), to the point where even a mobile phone today that’s ‘turned off‘, needs 24/7 broadband connectivity to stay fully functional (no, I don’t have nor plan to get an iPhone). When it comes to bandwidth, can one ever have enough?
According to a US Geological Survey study, as this Reuters report mentions, over two thirds of the world’s polar bear population (which is around 16,000) could be lost due to melting sea ice by 2050. That is less than 43 years from now. I hope we all remember this while turning on the air conditioners in our cars and homes.
I happened to notice that the category links in the sidebar alongside have not been working. Thanks to Google Analytics, I know at least a few people have tried clicking on those links recently, and therefore fixing it quickly was obligatory.
The problem exists at some level within Wordpress’ handling of URIs with custom themes. The permalinks structure, when set to the Date/Time format (where the addresses of posts use the ../MM/DD/.. format), has not been working with my current theme. Reverting to the ‘Default’ permalinks structure (under Wordpress Options > Permalink) seems to resolve the problem. I’d really like to use the date/time format, however, so if I find a better fix for this I’ll be reverting to the previous format (although highly unlikely given this blog’s viewership, that should correct any links that people might have linked to).
