Monthly Archive for September, 2008

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Browser rant part 2.

Published on September 9, 2008 .0 Comments

I’ve been incredibly busy and pressed for time, and being busy frustrates me beyond measure.

Hence, a rant.

A few words about Google Chrome: It’s a new browser written from scratch, that runs javascript faster. I’m extremely grateful to have used it two months ago, when it still seemed the same, when I worked for the big G. Since I’m on linux, I can only run it on wine(god bless wine), or wait for the linux build to come out. Nevertheless, I’m happy with my custom keybinding two-extension pimped firefox for the moment.

What chrome is: Good. If you haven’t tried it out, and you’re on windows, I strongly advice you to give it a shot. It works a little faster and has a lot of nifty little tricks up it’s sleeve. And there’s a lot lot more to come. I intend to start contributing patches as soon as I can.

What chrome isn’t: A fucking operating system. Micheal Arrington, you’re a douchebag. All you bloggers are douchebags. You do not know the first thing about computers or operating systems, except how to link to other pages. Please trust me when I say the following: 1. Please stop throwing around bullshit like “Cloud computing”, “web operating system”, “Windows killer”, etc, etc. You’re making a fool of yourselves. 2. Web based apps are good, but there’s only a limit to where you can go with them. There are certain apps which, when decentralized, and are server-side do a really good job, like email or file hosting. But I swear to you Google Minesweeper isn’t coming out anytime soon. 3. Internal applications, media players and organizers, file browsers, etc, etc, all need your own computer and hard drive. 4. A browser is a browser. It shows you webpages and pr0n. Get over it.

Btw, I wanted to write more, but one author wrote this article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/08/dziuba_chrome/

At the end of the day, it’s a good browser, and a very useful and essential part of most our lives. Aaaaah, the frustration! it gets worse! Pardon me while I go slaughter some lolcats.

Youtube India seems to be screwing around a little

Published on September 2, 2008 .0 Comments

While youtube does not really work for me, courtesy dial-up network speeds, I had to watch a video regarding some interesting screencast.

Clicking on the youtube logo, it took me to the newly-launched youtube india site. Along with the oh-so-boring featured videos about some people talking into their webcams thinking I’d give a crap, there was the most watched videos tab, I was curious to see what India’s watching.

Rest assured, the videos triggered my gag reflex. Now let me tell you something about my gag reflex. I found out today that there was no water being served in my hall, partially because it’d turned yellowish. Nobody knows why, but I had been drinking away from my near-opaque google-branded water bottle like a depressed celebrity. While normal people would’ve thrown up after finding out, I barely shrugged. Heck, not even the frog in the HJB mess would do the trick. It takes something really really really shocking (nope, not even goatse) to get me disgusted.

Now, back to youtube.

The videos were disgusting. Not “Oh dear kird, my children shouldn’t be watching this” disgusting. (I believe in almost-free media). This was “Jeez, what kind of self respecting person watches this” disgusting.

I am well aware of youtube’s content policy. Outright nudity is disallowed from the videos, and apparently Youtube india hadn’t gotten the message, or that’s what someone who pointed it out to me told me. Either that or that people are too busy doing other things at the time to really flag the videos as inappropriate.

I’d just hoped youtube implements a scoring mechanism, where certain keywords automatically flag the video as adult. Yes there will be false positives, and the digital pussies (a.k.a the blogosphere) will cry out about censorship and bullshit, and google will worry about losing not-evil points.

But this is india that we’re talking about. These people asked Google to take down orkut because there were anti-india communities. I can guarantee, the moment times of india(btw, screw you toi) publishes an article on this, about the kind of content that’ll appear one click from the homepage, we’ll be in for a surprise.

And no, this is not a complaint or rant. It’s a bug report. Unfortunately I’m not in google’s private intranet anymore, so I can’t post it where people will read it, but hopefully someone will over here. This is not a problem with how the program works, but how the people here works. There’s no brigade of overzealous losers going and flagging all the videos like they’re there in other countries.

So please, implement a scoring mechanism, look for specific keywords, and flag preliminarily, and allow to flag false positives from the user-side. And you’ll probably prevent everyone who’s not at your website from coming after your ass.

I couldn’t care less about the content, it won’t affect me in any way, but it can lead to trouble if this market isn’t treated with caution.

Proof is in the PuddiNG: i33 (dot) tinypic (dot) com (slash) k1t8a1.(extension for portable network graphics) Most images are not safe for work. The above image is not safe. Period.

All hail the norse!!!

Published on September 1, 2008 .0 Comments

At last, after a lot of waiting, I finally got hold of “Twilight of the Thunder God”, almost a month before I’d get the actual CD.

Here’s all I can say about it: YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRNNGGH /me starts to headbang manically.

The title song can be heard on the band’s myspace page (Myspace? Why? Odin, Why?). But the remaining songs are just unimaginably amazing. It’s so rare to find something that was produced within the past few months that I actually like.

I’m nowhere near worthy to review the album. I’m barely worthy enough to listen to it. The songs are immensely powerful, yet so melodic and beautiful. While I’ve heard the album only two or three times, I feel it’s great, but “With Oden on our Side”, is the greatest musical masterpiece achievable by man or god, and cannot be topped.

The album features guest appearences by the Children of Bodom guitarist (not Alexi Laiho, the other one we haven’t heard much about), and Apocalyptica.

I wanted to wait till the final release, but the tension got to me. If anyone’s kind enough to suggest an online CD store that’ll ship to India, put me in line for one of these. If anyone is buying the album and can ship one copy to me, please email me.

Overall, it’s amazing how forty three minutes of intestine-tangling viking metal can give so much joy.