As I write this, it's been more than 18 hours since the first of the terror strikes was reported in South Mumbai. The news channels won't report anything else, some of the presenters have been awake all night reporting on events as they emerge, and it seems to me like the whole city must be glued to their television sets waiting for all this to end.

I slept at around 2:00am last night, refusing to continue watching the news, expecting that things would be more or less resolved by the time I woke up. Even the news of top cops losing their lives, only made me believe that everything that needed to be done was being done. I resolved to not let the terror get to me, as that seemed like conceding defeat to the terrorists. And yet, I woke at 7:30am (an event in itself), and without bothering to brush my teeth, walked into the living room and turned the TV on.

If I were to track my mood since then, I'd say that I started the day simply assimilating all the information that all the different news channels beamed at me, still hopeful that things would end 'soon'. Seeing the Taj Mahal Hotel burning, was the first shock. The second shock was when I heard that the college classmate of an acquaintance died in the firing at Cafe Leopold. It always makes more of an impact when you feel you are connected to someone who was affected. It could so easily have been you.

Then there were the photographs of the terrorists themselves. They could easily pass off as visitors of the hotels and restaurants they have terrorized, if not for the weapons they carried.

A doctor from inside the Taj call up a news channel and said she was in a group of around 35 people, and that there was one person whom she was trying to take care of, who had been shot in the abdomen, and had been bleeding all night. She was speaking very calmly and tried to highlight the fact that the man urgently needed medical attention. In a second call from her a while later, she seemed extremely distraught. This while some people seemed to be leaving the Taj and were carried away in ambulances and BEST buses. The news presenters are tired and desperate for good news. Every assault by the army is termed the "final leg of the assault on the terrorists".

My father then told me that his cousin apparently visited Cafe Leopold almost every Wednesday, last night being an exception. She and her mother who lives in a building close to Nariman House are both safe.

Hours went by, and very little seemed to change. The hope I initially had, was replaced with fear, fear turned to sorrow, and sorrow turned to despair. Stop attacking my city, a part of me screams. End this insanity now.

And I'm dozens of kilometers away from where the main action is still on. Even 3-4 kilometers away from the Marriot in Juhu - the closest place to here where firing took place. This is the first time that I'm actually in Mumbai when terror has stuck here. All the other times, I was either in Chennai or in the US. And yet, a terror attack that has lasted for so long, can hardly compare with bomb blasts that are over in a short span of time. There is going to be a difference in the psychological impact of events that last an hour, versus events that last a whole day.

I thank all the soldiers, firemen and police personnel that have been involved in trying to end this stand-off, and hope that it all gets over soon.

I've been using Ubuntu Hardy Heron Desktop Linux (8.04) since April, when I got myself a new desktop PC. There was no way I was going to inflict Vista on my new hardware, and I'd really liked the ease of using Ubuntu Server Edition the one year before that, at work. The configuration of my custom-built PC is -

• Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 (2.66 GHz)
• Intel DG33FB ATX Motherboard
• Corsair 2GB RAM
• Two Seagate SATA 7200rpm 160GB Disk Drives
• Antec ATX Cabinet
• ASUS 20X DVD-RW Drive with Lightscribe
• Sapphire Radeon HD 2600XT 512 MB

My choice of an ATI-based graphics card was based on the fact that ATI seems to be a lot more dedicated to developing open-source drivers than nVidia. They've released their GPU specs, which means anyone can write their own drivers without hacking or reverse-engineering the proprietary binaries, and without worrying that their driver will stop working with the next batch of the chip because some behaviour changed. This means that while currently nVidia has the best support, the future will favour ATI. It was definitely a gamble, but picking a manufacturer that supports Open Source, felt right.

Installing Ubuntu is a breeze. I had downloaded the ISO for the 64-bit version, from the Ubuntu site and burnt it a CD. I booted off this CD, and except for selecting the language, timezone, and partition sizes (which I like to customize), just sat back and watched Ubuntu install itself - in under 20 minutes. And at the end of the installation, I had everything - display, sound, internet, music and video players, cd-burning tools, internet tools, a BitTorrent client, Office software, and even games (including Sudoku). When I tried to install Windows XP on the same machine in dual-boot mode, just getting the OS installed took more than 40 minutes. Then I had to install the motherboard drivers, the display drivers, and the monitor drivers. I only wanted XP to play my copy of Need for Speed Underground 2, but if I had wanted to use XP for normal purposes, I would have spent the next few hours installing Norton 360, MS Office, and some internet tools. Talk about a waste of time!

The only things I changed after installing Ubuntu, were

• Used 'Restricted' (meaning closed-source) drivers from ATI, which work a lot better than the open-source ones at this time
• Installed the msttcorefonts package, which contains some Microsoft developed true-type fonts, including the ubiquitous Verdana
• Turned on Desktop Effects (Compiz Fusion)
• Installed the compizconfig-settings-manager package to customize the Compiz settings to my liking

The fonts and drivers are not installed by default, for legal reasons. Closed-source drivers and fonts must be selected by the user specifically. Compiz Fusion - a compositing window manager that makes Vista's Aero obsolete - is still not as stable on large number of machines, and won't work on many embedded graphics card so for simplicity, it's turned off until you specifically turn it on. See this Compiz Fusion demo and find out why Linux users are so thrilled. And before you ask - No, you can't get this working on Windows.

I'm a complete geek, but one thing I noticed about Ubuntu is the fact that - as advertised - it just works. It'll be a lot easier for you to teach your grandparents to use Ubuntu, than to use Vista. Desktop Linux is definitely here to stay.

The latest version of Ubuntu - Intrepid Ibex (8.10) - will be out in 3 days. So head to the Ubuntu site and try it for yourself.

Note: Here are some good articles if you've never setup a dual-boot system before -
How to dual-boot Vista with Linux (Vista installed first) -- the step-by-step guide with screenshots
How to dual boot Windows XP and Linux (XP installed first) -- the step-by-step guide with screenshots

An 80-year-old political leader and some others are killed in Orissa by a group of suspected Maoist insurgents. Political parties blame the murders on a religious community. Religious violence breaks out, and many people die. Others are forcefully converted and humiliated. The state government looks the other way, for the most part.

In a different state, a young political leader forms his own party. In his greed for votes, he incites violence against people of other communities, in the name of protecting what he calls sons-of-the-soil. Many people (including sons-of-the-soil) are hurt, a few die, and there is fear and tension all around. This government looks the other way too.

Terrorists cross the border from other countries, and find the general public dissatisfied with a lot of things, and easy to divide on religious or other grounds. There are 'terrorist' attacks all over the country.

News channels monger fear and panic, using everything from ghosts under trees, to particle accelerators, to rumors about terrorist attacks, to the ineffectiveness of the government's security measures in preventing said terrorist attacks, to the fall of the stock market. They try to divide people along lines of 'people vs the government', 'people vs foreign investors', and even 'people vs science'.

In the middle of all this, a group of scientists of different castes, from different states, and following different religions, manages to launch a mission to the moon.

We seem to be a country of contrasts. Easily divided, easily provoked, easily offended, easily scared. And yet, when some of us put our minds to it, we can accomplish so much. Even the moon doesn't seem so far.

To think of what we could accomplish if everyone stopped trying to divide us, and worked on unity instead...

At 6:22am Indian Standard Time today, India's first unmanned mission to the moon successfully took off from India's satellite launch centre in Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh, 80km from Chennai.

The success of this mission, which will attain lunar orbit 15 days from now, will bring no little pride to our country. And yet there are people who question the very basis of the mission. "Do we really need it?" they ask. And the reasons they give for why this mission is a waste of time and money?

The money (386 crore) could have been better spent feeding the country's poor.

and

Other countries have already gone to the moon. What new can we learn?

D-uh.

First of all, this is an advancement of the country's technological prowess. As Dr K. Kasturirangan, chairperson of ISRO said when the Chandrayaan-I project was announced

It is not a question of whether we can afford it, it's whether we can afford to ignore it.

In dollar terms, the mission has cost India only US$80 Million. That's pocket-change when compared to NASA's Billion dollar space-probe budgets. And the returns will be great.

Antrix, the Indian Department of Space's commercial arm, earns valuable foreign exchange every year, by launching satellites for other countries, selling data captured by its satellites, and also selling hardware and software. This lunar mission will not only strengthen India's position in the commercial satellite launch sector, but will also give India more experience in the various aspects of space travel.

A mission to the moon - accomplished by only five other countries till date - will put India in the elite group of space-faring countries. So when humans do start visiting or living in space, India will not be waiting in line to be piggy-backed there. We'll be able to get to space on our own. And we'll probably be giving other countries a ride just like we did this time.

And as far as the question "What is there to learn?" goes, there's always something to learn. This particular mission hopes to capture the following information:

• Map a 3-d atlas of the moon with a spatial and altitude resolution of 5-10 metres.
• Get information about the distribution of various minerals on the moon

Apart from this, we also hope to get information on Helium-3 deposits, which will be useful for nuclear fusion research, and may be one of the answers to our energy problems.
Additionally, today's successful launch seems to have already cleared the hurdles towards government funding of our man person on the moon plans. There were earlier reports that the government was rethinking that mission because of the high cost.

All the attention that ISRO get out of all these missions might also help some of the brain-drain of scientists from India. I mean as of today, how many people you know actually want to become scientists working for the government? The idea of possibly working for something as glorious as your country's space program, can pretty motivating.

Of course, today's only been Stage 1, the easiest of all stages. India has been sending satellites into space for a long time now, and is so good at it makes money out of the exercise. The next couple of weeks will be really interesting, and will be the true test of Indian capability.

I'm not much of a believer but I think I'll have a chat with my friend just in case.

Update: DesiCritics.org has two good posts on the benefit of the mission - here and here.

Here I am, breaking my year and half long self-imposed Maun Vrat (Oath of silence?), to do what I love doing more than anything else.

Complain.

Some things never change, eh?

A friend of mine, often pronounces certain words wrongly differently from what I consider the correct pronunciation, and refuses to correct herself when I point this out, because she says

You can pronounce proper nouns however you want.

A-hem. No, no, not that one! I mean like the sound you make when clearing your throat. Of course, that's more like Ghhmhhmghm, but I digress.

So, where was I? Right.

A-hem. No, you cannot pronounce proper nouns however you want!

Take the case of a name, like 'Rajesh' (that's my name, in case you were wondering). My name has a specific pronunciation, and pronouncing it "Rahash" - "j" is pronounced "h" in spanish/latin/mexican - would be wrong.
Similarly, it is not okay to pronounce the Indian name Dhillon, as "Dhee-yo-n", even if Quesadilla is pronounced as "Ke-sa-dee-ya". "Amit" is "A-mih-t", and cannot be pronounced "A-mite" or "Aim-it". "Iraq" if pronounced "Eye-Rack", is being pronounced wrong, even if it's being pronounced by the President of the United States of America!

Names derived from new additions to the English language are all the more problematic, since you often see the words in print long before you actually hear them. The "Wiki" in Wikipedia, is pronounced "Wih-key", not "Why-key". (On a related note, if you do decide to use the term "LOL" in real speech, then it's pronounced "Ell-oh-Ell", not "Lole"! Of course, I would recommend actually laughing instead.)

A proper noun is a name, and mangling someone's or something's name is not polite - to say the least.

So, the next time any of you decide to change the pronunciation of any so-called "Proper Noun", do consider taking the permission of the owner of that name.

He woke up screaming.

He'd had a vision, and somehow he was sure that it would come true. The world was going to end. In less than three hours.

He had to tell someone. They had to try to stop it. He ran out into the street, and tried to grab the arm of someone who was passing by. But his arms refused to react. He tried to shout, but no voice came from his throat. He tried to write on the ground with a piece of chalk, but his arms wouldn't move. It was as if the universe didn't want him to interfere. He walked around the town trying to talk to people, to warn them. They stared at him, but never reacted, never interrupted what they were doing.

Time passed, but he couldn't seem to do anything to prevent the doom that he was certain was coming. Every minute, he grew more desperate.

He came to an open space where a crowd had gathered. A man was holding a gun to another, and shouting something about avenging the death of a loved one.

He wanted to jump in the middle of the crowd and make them listen. The world was going to end! Couldn't they feel it? But he couldn't even move anymore. He could only watch. He watched like everyone else, as the man with the gun shouted. He watched as he pulled the trigger. He watched as the bullet struck, and the victim fell to the ground. He was sure, like he knew everyone else in the crowd was sure, that the man deserved it.

The world started to grow dark. This was it, he knew. And he'd been unable to stop it. It was noon, but the sky had turned gray. Even the sun seemed no brighter than a dim lamp. It wasn't just becoming dark, he realized. The world was turning black. All the colors were fading away into nothingness. And just like in his vision, the message appeared in the sky. Glowing white letters on black. In a language known to no one. Two words that meant the end of the world, the end of life, the end of everything.

"Okay," I said, shaking him by the shoulder. "You can get up now. It's over."

"Hmm?"

I pointed at the screen, which now said The End in large bold letters.

"Oh. Good. Hope you enjoyed it.

"It was nice. You should have watched."

"What's to watch? If the bad guy kills the good guy's girlfriend in the beginning of the movie, then in the end, the good guy must kill the bad guy. In between, you throw in a few songs, some fight scenes, and you have a three hour Hindi movie."

"Okay, so it was predictable. But it was still a nice movie. They made it pretty well. And there was some good acting."

"If you say so."

"You know towards the end, in the crowd surrounding the good guy and the bad guy, there was this man..."

"What about him?"

"I don't know. He didn't seem part of the movie. It was almost as if... as if he was more real than the other characters."

"More real? Like he was about to jump out of the screen?"

I grinned even though that's exactly what I'd thought. Hearing the words said out loud made the idea seem absurd. "Nah," I replied. "He was probably an extra who was trying to get noticed."

On the screen, the The End sign slowly faded away.

As you might have noticed, I've made another update to the template of this blog. This is my fifth Blogger template, the third one for the new Blogger, and the third update on this blog. The image in the background is that of a glacier in Greenland. I got it from Wikimedia Commons. Image manipulation was done using The GIMP as usual.

One of the other templates I created, works on the new Blogger and can be downloaded for free, at City in Paint. It's based on an OSWD design, though I made some minor modifications to the look, and some major modifications to the HTML to get it to work with Blogger.

I'll be offering this one for download too, once I complete a few finishing touches.

Do let me know what you think about the new look. I'm hoping the (mostly) white background and the bigger text makes it easier on your eyes. The blog should look okay on Firefox, Opera, and IE 6 and 7. If you're among the less than 1% of readers who use a version of IE older than 6, then you might see some weird JavaScript errors. But those are from Blogger, and I can't really do much about them. Of course, if you are still using that ancient browser, you should really consider getting Firefox.

It was a big asteroid. "Ten percent chance of hitting Earth," they said. "Expected angle of impact is enough to wipe out a country."

"We'll use Nuclear weapons!"

They aimed. They fired. They miscalculated.

The asteroid deflected in the wrong direction, hit Earth head-on, and wiped out all life. Except the cockroaches, of course.

Is it acceptable to take animal life or cause harm or pain to an animal, in the interests of science?

This isn't a new question, and it's not one that both sides are going to agree on in the near future, if ever. Me, I'm all for science. But I'm not happy with animal rights being violated either. (For the record, I eat meat but don't think I'm a hypocrite for being against fur.)

Still, how can you make a decision?

Take for example this story. Scientists are apparently trying to figure out how some animals grow back body parts, so that the same technique can be used with humans. If they figure this out, there's no end to the benefits for medicine. 50,000 people lose a body part to amputation every year in the US alone. If scientists can make the technology work, all these people could have their fingers, hands, arms, and legs back in a matter of weeks or months.

So that's a good thing, right?

Not for the animals that have the regenerative abilities.

Take for example Salamanders. These animals can apparently grow back an arm if it gets severed. How often must scientists make cuts in a salamander's body to find out what chemicals, enzymes or glands are involved in the regrowth? How often does someone cut off a Salamander's body part to observe what happens?

Scientists have got far enough to grow extra arms on salamanders. Does the salamander feel any pain when it is cut, or when it has an extra arm coming out of where there should only be a simple rib? Unless the researchers are extremely careful with anesthetics, there's probably a lot of pain involved for the poor creature. Does the salamander know about the value of the sacrifice it is making? Surely not.

A hundred years from now, the number of people who will have benefited from regenerative technologies will probably be close to one billion. There will still be those who demand that researchers stop testing revolutionary medicine on animals. They will still be right. But so will the scientists.

He walks like a king through his house. He is master of his domain. He can eat what he wants, drink what he wants, and he can turn on the television and watch whatever he wants. He smiles to himself.

"By the power of Grayskull!" he shouts. "I... Have... The Power!"

He hears the car in the driveway. His wife is back from shopping. He sighs.

It was nice while it lasted.

We may be called the stronger sex, but really, if there is anything a man is scared of, it's his woman. And if he's not, then he's just ignorant. I'm not kidding.

Men don't understand women. Men don't understand what women want. And men can't live without women. It's a recipe for disaster, I tell you.

And to ensure that men continue to fear women till the end of eternity, there is this annual ritual they've come up with. It's the most evil of all rituals, and has its origins in medieval times.

It's called Valentine's day.

You're laughing.

Tell me, irrespective of whether he's single or not, which man has it easy on Valentine's day?

On Valentine's day, a single guy has to tell some girl that he's interested in her. If he doesn't, then he will be pitied. And the male ego doesn't deal very well with pity. If he does decide to make his feelings known, his fear is that she will say "No". Which is what usually happens, of course. However there is sometimes the unfortunate case where the girl says "Yes".

If a guy is not single on Valentine's day, though, then he's in really big trouble, because he has to do something on the special day.

For two weeks before the fourteenth of February every year, the media is full of advertisements for Valentine's Special gifts and experiences. A guy may decide that he's not going to give in to the intense commercialization of the day, and he's not actually going to get her anything. If you know such a man, pray for him.

If he does decide to get something though, he has to figure out what to get her.
If he gets her a bouquet of roses, she's angry because that woman at work whom she hates, got two from her boyfriend.
If he gets her a box of chocolates, he's in trouble, because her friend got chocolates and flowers.
If he gets her chocolates and flowers, he's cheap, because a girl she knows also got a watch. And a stuffed toy.
If he gets her multiple gifts, he doesn't really love her, because he can't take the time to take her out.
If he takes her out to a restaurant, he should have taken her out to a restaurant in a five-star hotel.
If he takes her out to a restaurant in a five-star hotel, he should have taken her to a resort outside city limits.
To actually survive Valentine's day, the guy must pick his woman up from work, fly her to Europe, have dinner on the beach with a live band playing, and give her a diamond ring.

But then the guy is done for. Because next year, he'll have to top even that. And unless flights to the moon are available, he'll hear the words "You've changed."