Rich Skrenta elucidates the power of less code. I ask you, grasshopper, which is better: flexible code or tiny code? “Ah,” you exclaim, “Learned master, it is a trick question: code which is tiny yet flexible is best!” WRONG! Tiny code is always best. Now you must carry water up the hill for the rest of the day. For sure, he can’t think up of good stories. Just Kidding! Every time we, developers, make a change or fix a bug, we decide the fate of that particular code flow. We take a call on how the module or component is going to behave for the rest of the life of that application. ...

Over the last couple of years, the onslaught of web 2.0 apps has almost made the desktop irrelevant. With a service offering for almost every kind of application that a normal user would use, the age of installing applications is near its fag-end. Is this good? Is this the direction we want to head towards? More importantly, does it make real sense for end-users? Ok let’s see what you pay for a normal laptop these days. ...

Finally upgraded to wordpress 2.2. Geez!! It was released almost a week back and I hadn’t upgraded!!! I know, I know! I am a little paranoid! I wonder why, that every time I update my wordpress version, I need to go through this very laborious task, of backing up my database, the entire wordpress folder, the last underwear that I wore, etc. Scripts guys! I need a script that does all that. Installing wordpress takes 2 steps, but upgrading 5?! ...

I’ve been on a reading binge lately. With quite a few hours of flying time, and long waits at airport lounges, I got the chance to catch up on my reading. Went through two books this time around, the placid, but mildly interesting “The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri (skip the book and watch the movie.. way better) and the exhilariting final masterpiece, “The Salmon of Doubt”, (wikipedia entry here) by the new age, space comic, Douglas Adams. ...

And the timing is perfect. Mr Dell, as it turns out (a little Douglassy, eh? Don’t get it, read “Salmon of Doubt”, the last book by Douglas Adams, pg 27), runs Ubuntu, Feisty Fawn on his home PC. Well, one of his PCs, he has four mamoths with 4GB RAM and a Quadro FX 3500 et al, costing well over $4000. Aparently, he also runs windows as well. Hmmm… living the high life. ...

Philipp Lenssen, has an interesting (scary) thought about the day that google acquired the world (aka internet :) ). The date that he has chosen, 12 May 2017, sent a shiver up my spine. I, definitely, don’t want to see the world taken over by the most efficient search engine on my birthday!! :) That would be some scary stuff to wake up too. Since we are on the subject of acquisitions, google paid over $3 billion for doubleclick, a company that google didn’t beleive in when it wanted to serve ads in the first place. How ironic! You pay more than what you invested in your company, to acquire something you didn’t believe in! I find that a little absurd, and you? ...

Me and thousands of other people, continue to use wordpress, one of the leading blog management systems (sounds kewl, eh? ;) ), and proof that is it in fact leading is here. Apparently, Wordpress.com, has the least spam, compared to other free blog-hosting services. The honored list of competitors, include the likes of google, myspace and AOL, each one of them goliaths! Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Wordpress, associates the success of wordpress.com spam protection to Akismet. This is something that I use now. I used spam-karma before this, which was pretty good, but with Akismet, it is almost zero-management. ...

I have a dual-boot PC at home, which boots to OpenSUSE and Windows. After a very tiring 7 hour journey, I came home to a GRUB failure. After searching for help all over the web, I found some help here, here, here, here, here and here. :) It turns out, that GRUB stage 2 was not being loaded. So here’s what I did. 1. set the root partition 2. run GRUB setup on the MBR. 3. load the os using chainloader. ...

Yipeee!! Just one word - Fantabulous. The most painless install ever. Well, actually, I haven’t yet completely migrated to Ubuntu, but I just might. Today, I downloaded the latest beta of Ubuntu codenamed"Feisty Fawn". The thing that amazed me was that it had to use a restricted driver to get my Wireless working, but it did detected it and also most other hardware on my laptop. Amazing how far linux has come in the last couple of years. No wonder, Ubuntu has captured significant market-share from other linux distros. Now what is required to push wide-scale adoption, is to make a slicker interface. I know there is Gnome and KDE, but we need to rethink requirements. Greedy as I am, I fail to be satisfied by “better than windows” performance. It would be great if the Ubuntu developer push the envelope further, and develop something that can compete with MAC OSX. ...

I ought to resist the temptation of writing posts full of only links to other blogs .. but this one is good http://www.douglaskarr.com/2007/03/25/selling-news-is-dead/ He talks about how “selling news is dead”. I thinks he hits the nail on the head with this one. When was the last time, that you read/saw, a news items that was worth buying the newspaper for? I can hardly remember the time, I needed to pick a newspaper, let alone buy one. Well, I do read a couple of articles once a week, on the papers that lie around in my office reception. ...