Funny (but true) Quote!

Seen on the tagline of Slashdot user eldavojohn

"Can god code something so unusable even he can't use it? No, but I can and so can you: http://www.microsoft.com/careers"

*lol*

RoR Scalability

I have written about this earlier. Now here we go again. It's about Twitter having problems scaling.

Volume Fade Out Sleep Timer

I usually take a nap Sunday afternoons, and I like to hear some streaming radio during that time. I wanted something that would fade the volume down to 0 after a certain period of time (say half hour). I decided to give it a shot myself. It's Tcl and Snack to the rescue! After twiddling with the Snack API for 5 mins, here is the code:

package require snack

set line [lindex [snack::mixer lines] 0]
snack::mixer volume $line v1 v2

set totalTime 1800; # half hour
set delay [expr $totalTime*10]

for {set v 100} {$v>=0} {incr v -1} {
  set v1 $v
  set v2 $v
  puts "[clock format [clock seconds] -format "%T" ] - $v"
  after $delay
}

It worked out well. And for the record, after I woke up, I googled to check if there is something out there that will do the same thing. There were many utilities, but the one stood out was this, based on something called AutoHotKey. I 've never heard of that before, but sounds very impressive.

Disruptive Technologies

The presentation I gave at SKP Engineering College on 04/18/2008

Disruptive Technologies

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My First Speeding Ticket!

Today I got my first speeding ticket, after 10+ years of driving. I clocked a paltry 68kmph, when according to the traffic police, the limit is 50kmph. This was on the Rajiv Gandhi Salai (near Tidel Park), one of the best roads in Chennai, during a lazy mid-holiday-morning, when there was no other vehicle on the stretch except mine. The police officer was polite though, and I paid the fine of Rs. 300.

I love to drive fast, but I drive responsibly. I honor all traffic lights (it is a rarity in Chennai), be courteous to pedestrians and other drivers, keep the lane etc. There are people who drive rash. Mind you, rash driving is totally different from fast driving. Unfortunately, the police (CCTP) have no means or intentions to take away those rude mongrels off the street.

Drinking is not illegal. However, they urge you to "drink responsibly". I think speed limits should only be guidelines and drivers be let to "drive responsibly".

American Airlines - Bernard Jordan - False Prophets

I was checking out the news article about American canceling 850 flights, when this paragraph struck me: "Bishop Bernard Jordan, a Harlem minister, was in a first-class line trying to catch a flight to Atlanta, where he was scheduled to preach Wednesday night". Contrast this to what Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 9:3 -

And He said to them, "Take nothing for your journey, neither a staff, nor a bag, nor bread, nor money; and do not even have two tunics apiece." (NASB)

I have never heard of this man. Prodding further, I went to his site, the headline of which screams "FREE Prophecies are back!". Huh, when did prophecy come for a cost? It is so awful. Read about many of his antics here.

We should be very careful about such people. There are many youngsters, and particularly women, who are deceived by these people and fall in their trap. Remember what Jesus said in Matthew 7:15 -

"Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves."

Not Practising What You Preach?

I have blogged about YSlow, a very nice tool from Yahoo, that gives performance indicators of your web page. Guess what? I ran it on their own page (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) and found that they got 3 F's, 1 C and 1 B. Overall score was a D (62/100). A case of not practising what you preach?

Performance Grade: D (62)

B	1. Make fewer HTTP requests
F	2. Use a CDN
F	3. Add an Expires header
F	4. Gzip components
A	5. Put CSS at the top
A	6. Put JS at the bottom
A	7. Avoid CSS expressions
n/a	8. Make JS and CSS external
C	9. Reduce DNS lookups
A	10. Minify JS
A	11. Avoid redirects
A	12. Remove duplicate scripts
A	13. Configure ETags