Published by the Washington Post

Published by the Washington Post


When we were the Sick Man of Asia, We were called The Yellow Peril.
When we are billed to be the next Superpower, we are called The Threat.
When we closed our doors, you smuggled drugs to open markets.
When we embrace Free Trade, You blame us for taking away your jobs.
When we were falling apart, You marched in your troops and wanted your fair
share.
When we tried to put the broken pieces back together again, Free Tibet you
screamed, It Was an Invasion!
When tried Communism, you hated us for being Communist.
When we embrace Capitalism, you hate us for being Capitalist.
When we have a billion people, you said we were destroying the planet.
When we tried limiting our numbers, you said we abused human rights.
When we were poor, you thought we were dogs.
When we loan you cash, you blame us for your national debts.
When we build our industries, you call us Polluters.
When we sell you goods, you blame us for global warming.
When we buy oil, you call it exploitation and genocide.
When you go to war for oil, you call it liberation.
When we were lost in chaos and rampage, you demanded rules of law.
When we uphold law and order against violence, you call it violating human
rights.
When we were silent, you said you wanted us to have free speech.
When we are silent no more, you say we are brainwashed xenophobics.
Why do you hate us so much, we asked. No, you answered, we don’t hate you.
We don’t hate you either, But, do you understand us? Of course we do, you
said, We have AFP, CNN and BBC’s…
What do you really want from us? Think hard first, then answer…
Because you only get so many chances.
Enough is Enough, Enough Hypocrisy for This One World.
We want One World, One Dream, and Peace on Earth.
This Big Blue Earth is Big Enough for all of Us

Duo-Liang Lin, Ph. D.
Professor Emeritus of Physics
University at Buffalo
State University of New York

Copyright: www.workers.org

Anti-China protests made in USA, not Tibet

By Gary Wilson

Published Apr 20, 2008 11:39 PM

Most noteworthy about the protests in London, Paris and San Francisco that targeted the Olympic Torch on its way to the Beijing Olympics was their character.

Take the events in San Francisco on April 9. The biggest numbers to turn out were not protesters. They were from the Chinese community—thousands according to an NPR report—and came to show their support for China. There may have been nearly as many police—more than 3,000 according to city officials.

The anti-China protests were small in numbers. The Guardian (British) reported about 300 in San Francisco; other wire reports said simply hundreds.

The small numbers might be a surprise if you’d followed the big news coverage leading up to the event. No protest in recent memory has received such major media coverage in the week or two before it happened. Such media coverage gives the impression that a big event is to take place.

The small numbers of anti-China protesters might be attributed to the fact that the protesters claimed to be representing the interests of the people of Tibet, but they were not themselves Tibetan. There were at most a handful of Tibetans.

Actually, there are few Tibetans outside Tibet. The exile community is small—estimates put it at 100,000 to 200,000 at most—and almost all are in Nepal or India. So it is not Tibetans who are in London, Paris or San Francisco, but non-Tibetans—mainly North Americans or Western Europeans—who are protesting against China, claiming that they speak for the Tibetans.

When size doesn’t matter

Maybe it wasn’t the size of the event that mattered to the big-business-controlled media in the U.S., but rather the message.

FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) has documented the censorship that dominates the U.S. media. It is a censorship imposed not by the government but by the owners of the media. The political message of an event determines whether it is covered in the news media or censored out.

Most glaring has been the lack of coverage of anti-war protests in all the U.S. media, from newspapers to television and radio.

Several FAIR reports showed the systematic way that the media have ignored or distorted all protests against the Iraq war, for example. Demonstrations that drew hundreds of thousands not only got no attention in the days or weeks leading up to them, but sometimes were never covered at all or were only barely mentioned.

The April 2003 FAIR magazine reported: “In its news coverage in the period before the invasion [of Iraq] began on March 19, the New York Times played down opposition to war and exaggerated support for George W. Bush’s Iraq policy—in ways that ranged from questionable to dishonest. ...

“After the invasion began, when more than 100,000 people in New York City demonstrated on March 22, it was front-page news the next day in the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. But the New York Times, whose offices are two blocks away from where the anti-war march started, placed the story on page B11,” FAIR concluded.

The contrast with the coverage of the anti-China protests today shows the political agenda being pursued by the U.S. media. It has nothing to do with the size of the protests.

Washington’s hidden role

The anti-China protests were planned in Washington, London and Paris, not in Tibet or the Tibetan exile communities.

In fact, Washington’s heavy role in the protests, using Tibet and Tibetans as a cover for an anti-China agenda, has spurred public criticism from no less than the former leader of the Free Tibet Campaign.

Patrick French, once the director of that group in London, wrote an opinion piece that the New York Times published on March 22. He said the exile community led by the Dalai Lama in India is making outlandish demands and claims.

For example, part of what he calls the Dalai Lama’s “Hollywood strategy” is to lay claim to a so-called Greater Tibet, demanding territory never considered part of Tibet.

Another example French gives is the claim made by the “Free Tibet” groups in London and Washington that 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese since the Dalai Lama regime was overturned in 1959. His own exhaustive research, he says, has turned up no evidence to back this claim.

Such distortions and misinformation are put forward not by Tibetans in Tibet, French says. They are put forward by those with a hidden agenda who are behind the “Free Tibet” campaign.

“The International Campaign for Tibet, based in Washington, is now a more powerful and effective force on global opinion than the Dalai Lama’s outfit in northern India. The European and American pro-Tibet organizations are the tail that wags the dog of the Tibetan government-in-exile,” French wrote.

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Articles copyright 1995-2008 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

white hair in my beard

April-20th, 2008.

Ok. Its OK. Its all fine. Its all good.

ebay financials

People who get into sub-prime loss, don't shop at ebay?

Hard to believe, but this home crisis induced recession still need to take its toll on ebay or other related sites.

Everlasting

Everlasting

Let's have the wine
From the heart I am bleeding
Let's dance crazy
This pain is too unbelieving
Let's take a breath
With your kiss still lingering
Let's play with kids
The silver laughter once never ending
Why don't we run away
The beauty of the stranger that breathtaking
Oh, No! Let's not to cry
The tears for the lover too much bitter
Let's not to remember
the words echoed so unforgiving
Let's try to forget
this body felt so much perishing
Yes, let's do it all, Darling
Like seasons change without noticing
Like river runs with no returning
For you, My Love is Everlasting.

Jasmine Lili

Majorities coerce; minorities convert

Nothing else...

Not Invented Here (www.joelonsoftware.com)

PS> I post things here, for my own collection. Mr Joel, please let me know if you want me to remove this for some copyright violation (but, wait a minute, Why would you do that?)

In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome

By Joel Spolsky
Sunday, October 14, 2001

Time for a pop quiz.

1. Code Reuse is:

a) Good
b) Bad

2. Reinventing the Wheel is:

a) Good
b) Bad

3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is:

a) Good
b) Bad

Of course, everybody knows that you should always leverage other people's work. The correct answers are, of course, 1(a) 2(b) 3(b).

Right?

Not so fast, there!

The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is considered a classic management pathology, in which a team refuses to use a technology that they didn't create themselves. People with NIH syndrome are obviously just being petty, refusing to do what's in the best interest of the overall organization because they can't find a way to take credit. (Right?) The Boring Business History Section at your local megabookstore is rife with stories about stupid teams that spend millions of dollars and twelve years building something they could have bought at Egghead for $9.99. And everybody who has paid any attention whatsoever to three decades of progress in computer programming knows that Reuse is the Holy Grail of all modern programming systems.

Right. Well, that's what I thought, too. So when I was the program manager in charge of the first implementation of Visual Basic for Applications, I put together a careful coalition of four, count them, four different teams at Microsoft to get custom dialog boxes in Excel VBA. The idea was complicated and fraught with interdependencies. There was a team called AFX that was working on some kind of dialog editor. Then we would use this brand new code from the OLE group which let you embed one app inside another. And the Visual Basic team would provide the programming language behind it. After a week of negotiation I got the AFX, OLE, and VB teams to agree to this in principle.

I stopped by Andrew Kwatinetz's office. He was my manager at the time and taught me everything I know. "The Excel development team will never accept it," he said. "You know their motto? 'Find the dependencies -- and eliminate them.' They'll never go for something with so many dependencies."

In-ter-est-ing. I hadn't known that. I guess that explained why Excel had its own C compiler.

By now I'm sure many of my readers are rolling on the floor laughing. "Isn't Microsoft stupid," you're thinking, "they refused to use other people's code and they even had their own compiler just for one product."

Not so fast, big boy! The Excel team's ruggedly independent mentality also meant that they always shipped on time, their code was of uniformly high quality, and they had a compiler which, back in the 1980s, generated pcode and could therefore run unmodified on Macintosh's 68000 chip as well as Intel PCs. The pcode also made the executable file about half the size that Intel binaries would have been, which loaded faster from floppy disks and required less RAM.

"Find the dependencies -- and eliminate them." When you're working on a really, really good team with great programmers, everybody else's code, frankly, is bug-infested garbage, and nobody else knows how to ship on time. When you're a cordon bleu chef and you need fresh lavender, you grow it yourself instead of buying it in the farmers' market, because sometimes they don't have fresh lavender or they have old lavender which they pass off as fresh.

Indeed during the recent dotcom mania a bunch of quack business writers suggested that the company of the future would be totally virtual -- just a trendy couple sipping Chardonnay in their living room outsourcing everything. What these hyperventilating "visionaries" overlooked is that the market pays for value added. Two yuppies in a living room buying an e-commerce engine from company A and selling merchandise made by company B and warehoused and shipped by company C, with customer service from company D, isn't honestly adding much value. In fact, if you've ever had to outsource a critical business function, you realize that outsourcing is hell. Without direct control over customer service, you're going to get nightmarishly bad customer service -- the kind people write about in their weblogs when they tried to get someone, anyone, from some phone company to do even the most basic thing. If you outsource fulfillment, and your fulfillment partner has a different idea about what constitutes prompt delivery, your customers are not going to be happy, and there's nothing you can do about it, because it took 3 months to find a fulfillment partner in the first place, and in fact, you won't even know that your customers are unhappy, because they can't talk to you, because you've set up an outsourced customer service center with the explicit aim of not listening to your own customers. That e-commerce engine you bought? There's no way it's going to be as flexible as what Amazon does with obidos, which they wrote themselves. (And if it is, then Amazon has no advantage over their competitors who bought the same thing). And no off-the-shelf web server is going to be as blazingly fast as what Google does with their hand-coded, hand-optimized server.

This principle, unfortunately, seems to be directly in conflict with the ideal of "code reuse good -- reinventing wheel bad."

The best advice I can offer:

If it's a core business function -- do it yourself, no matter what.

Pick your core business competencies and goals, and do those in house. If you're a software company, writing excellent code is how you're going to succeed. Go ahead and outsource the company cafeteria and the CD-ROM duplication. If you're a pharmaceutical company, write software for drug research, but don't write your own accounting package. If you're a web accounting service, write your own accounting package, but don't try to create your own magazine ads. If you have customers, never outsource customer service.

If you're developing a computer game where the plot is your competitive advantage, it's OK to use a third party 3D library. But if cool 3D effects are going to be your distinguishing feature, you had better roll your own.

The only exception to this rule, I suspect, is if your own people are more incompetent than everyone else, so whenever you try to do anything in house, it's botched up. Yes, there are plenty of places like this. If you're in one of them, I can't help you.

Used to be my fav hangout....but i never played chess

(two weeks) installing IDLE on FC

[root@linux ~]# yum install tkinter
[root@linux ~]# yum install python-imaging
[root@linux ~]# yum install python-tools

its been 1 week now

These wonder gums are excellent. I can probably spend the rest of my life on this!!

increasing swap space on system

Yes--It helps...even these days...

By Urbana Der Ga'had

Sometimes in the course of a system's existence you find that the swap partition you set up at install-time just isn't enough anymore. Maybe you're upgrading your system to RedHat 7.1 from a version of RedHat that used less swap in relation to physical RAM. Perhaps you're running Oracle. Or maybe you're adding more memory and would like to increase swap space accordingly.

Our machine srv-2 is swapping like mad and we just can't take it down right now to add more RAM. So to keep the machine from running out of memory entirely and freezing, we'll add 128 MB more swap space by creating a swap file.

First we check out the memory usage:

[root@srv-2 /root]# free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 251 242 8 22 11 32 -/+ buffers/cache: 198 52 Swap: 133 133 0

Make sure we have 128 MB laying around somewhere:

[root@srv-2 /root]# df Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on /dev/hda9 132207 33429 91952 27% / /dev/hda1 15522 2537 12184 17% /boot /dev/hda6 6143236 739000 5092176 13% /opt /dev/hda7 1035660 836204 146848 85% /usr /dev/hda5 2071384 344048 1622112 17% /usr/local /dev/hda8 303344 14439 273244 5% /var

OK, we're going to make a swap file in /opt by using dd to create a file 128 MB in size.

[root@srv-2 /opt]# dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=132207 132207+0 records in 132207+0 records out [root@srv-2 /opt]# ls -l total 132364 drwxr-xr-x 20 usr-3 users 4096 May 22 10:46 usr-3 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Feb 21 07:04 lost+found -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 135379968 May 29 11:52 swapfile

Hey, I know, let's not make it world-readable...

[root@srv-2 /opt]# chmod 600 swapfile [root@srv-2 /opt]# ls -l total 132364 drwxr-xr-x 20 usr-3 users 4096 May 22 10:46 usr-3 drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 16384 Feb 21 07:04 lost+found -rw------- 1 root root 135379968 May 29 11:52 swapfile

Now we set up the swap area and enable it.

[root@srv-2 /opt]# mkswap swapfile Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 135372800 bytes [root@srv-2 /opt]# swapon swapfile

And viola! Twice as much swap as before.

[root@srv-2 /opt]# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 257632 254632 3000 2512 36172 15096 -/+ buffers/cache: 203364 54268 Swap: 268708 136512 132196

You can edit /etc/fstab to enable your swap file automatically at boot time.
By adding an entry like this:

/opt/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

Sure, swapping's ugly, slow and will grind your hard drives to dust. But even modern systems which have been tuned for performance require a generous oodle of swap space.

Best Online Book Ever

Dive Into Python: www.diveintopython.org


Best Chapter: Performance Tuning

However, this chapter is not really about how to improve performance. It does tell few things related to a simple program, but if someone is really worried about performance, this chapter is a misnomer.

I liked this chapter, because it pervasivly depicts the idea of avoiding performance tuning while development. While it is a known advise, "first working code, then performance"; this chapter can teach the software development in a very interactive way, the same lesson.

On a footnote, this is very well written online book. The layout of book ideally matches an online experience. I read this book back to back in 10 days. I wish there were more chapters I could read (a feeling I used to get, when I used to finish reading comics book as a kid and wished the comic was longer).

Anyway, if you want to explore a different language and python is your choice, Please, do start with this book.

Operator Parsing: Nice Hack

#include 
#include 
int main(int argc, char *argv[]){
 int i;

 printf("((((");
 for(i=1;i!=argc;i++){
   if(     strcmp(argv[i], "^")==0) printf(")^(");
   else if(strcmp(argv[i], "*")==0) printf("))*((");
   else if(strcmp(argv[i], "/")==0) printf("))/((");
   else if(strcmp(argv[i], "+")==0) printf(")))+(((");
   else if(strcmp(argv[i], "-")==0) printf(")))-(((");
   else                             printf("%s", argv[i]);
 }
 printf("))))\n");
 return 0;
} 

Steve Jobs

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

• Printable Version

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Live like this is your last day, This is the second time I came across this line.

Copyright and everything owned by Tribune-India (www.tribuneindia.com)

If you want me to remove this article, let me know. I am just logging it here for my records.

Chandigarh, July 2
The horrors of undignified living come alive in each of the 86 faces one encounters in the women’s cell of Jalandhar Central Jail. Piled up like refuse in two small, dingy rooms, these prisoners scramble for space. But there’s none.

“The mice are better off than us,” says Dhyan Kaur, 60, pointing towards four door-less structures. These are the toilets and baths inmates share, 40 awaiting their turn at a time. In all the jails where women live, the situation is bad. There’s no privacy; no one demands it either.

So long as they are inside, they must make do with what they have - two cells in the name of living space, 50 hard beds to share and open baths. The floor under their feet is rutted; the ceiling is giving way; the walls are dangerously perched and devoid of plaster.

This is the women’s barrack at Punjab’s oldest central jail, which has stood for 150 years. Now unsafe, it was originally meant for 25 women. Today there are 86, 71 of them undertrials. Together, the women undertrials at the central jails in Jalandhar, Patiala, Ferozepur, Gurdaspur (each is 100 years old), Bathinda, Amritsar and district jails at Sangrur and Hoshiarpur account for maximum overcrowding. Of the 800 prisoners, only 231 are convicts; the rest are facing trial, some in heartrending cases, like Surinder Kaur, 45, lodged at Jalandhar.

She has been here since the past 11 months for attempting to kill her minor daughter. Strangely, her daughter comes to see her in jail during visits (mulakats), allowed from 9 a.m. to 12 noon and 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., daily. She also brings her raw vegetables, allowed to all inmates, though few can afford the luxury. More often, they sustain with the diet prescribed by the jail manual, written in 1896 and partially revised by the Punjab government in 1996 — after 100 years!

The manual requires lunch to be served at 8 a.m., and dinner at 6 p.m., each comprising six huge unbaked chapattis and dal. “Only 3 gm dry tea leaves are allowed to each inmate, a day. The quantity earlier was 2.5 gm. The diet needs to be balanced to prevent gross deficiencies, which go unreported in the absence of in-house lady doctors. Not a single jail has a permanent lady doctor. Inmates have high uric acid levels, caused by huge pulse intake,” observes Jyoti Seth, who studied Punjab jails for the National Commission for Women.

Back in their cells, women wear pale looks, deprived even of a glass of milk, reserved only for lactating and pregnant mothers. All they can have between the two main meals is a few grams of “chhole” and tea. Superintendents agree the provisions need urgent revision. This is further compounded by lack of proper sanitary facilities. Shockingly, there’s no provision of sanitary napkins and underclothes for women.

All they get is a soap per month and two pairs of clothing if they are convicts. Undertrials wear their own clothes. They need not engage in work programmes either, says Dilraj Singh, superintendent at Jalandhar jail. And why should they? The jail manual prescribes dismal wages - Rs 8, 10 and 12, respectively, for normal, skilled, and highly-skilled workers.

Work programmes, naturally, are a rarity expect at the Ludhiana all-women’s jail, Amritsar’s high-security jail and Bathinda. Elsewhere, women lead lonely lives, counting days to the next court hearing. Darsho, 50, an undertrial since two years in a narcotics case, shows her diary in which she keeps account of dates. “There’s nothing else to do. There’s no regular teacher, no good programme, no motivation. Above all, there’s no sunshine.” The verandahs in women’s enclosures are so small; inmates can’t have enough of sunshine. They fight for their share nevertheless.

But some can’t even do that. At the Patiala jail, the only jail with provisions to segregate women on death row, Sonia Walia, sentenced to death for the murder of Abhi Verma, is in solitary confinement. Unlike those on life sentences, who can move around enclosures expect during “bandi” (lock up), Sonia leaves her cell only twice a day - for half-an-hour each.

In the central and district jails, women prisoners are not allowed to leave the enclosures even to visit on-campus gurdwaras. Within the enclosure, too, they are locked from 12 noon to 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. onwards. These are times for lock-up (bandi), says Roop Kumar, superintendent, Amritsar jail, where women are slightly better off due to the involvement of Kiran Bedi’s India Vision Foundation.

At most other places, they remain marooned in thoughts, unable to engage in unconstructive programmes or uninventive adult literacy sessions. Expect in Ludhiana and Amritsar, there’s no permanent teacher anywhere. Also, Ludhiana is the only jail where inmates can cook their own food. Elsewhere, they must eat what the men give them. They can’t enter the kitchen located close to men’s barracks.

And they better not. In a 100-year-old manually run kitchen, it takes 35 men 10 hours to prepare one meal. For the morning meal, they are awake all night. In Punjab jails, gases replaced firewood only one year ago. No wonder the authorities are lenient to men who cook, for no one wants to.

subscript and postscript in MS Word

Creating Subscript and Superscript in Microsoft Word

by Grif Thomas - 7/29/04 6:22 PM
In reply to: A Few 'Tips' For Computer Newbies by Grif Thomas

This should work in most versions of Word, although I don't have the newest 2003 version to test it on. Although you can use the Character Map to perform some Superscript and Subscript chores, the procedures below will help when you need something extra.

Superscript (Letters/numbers typed above the line of text):

After typing CO (or whatever text you want), immediately press the Ctrl key, the Shift key, and the equals (=) key at the same time. Release the keys then type your number 2. It will become a superscript and look something like this: CO². To get back to the main text line, press the Ctrl key, the Shift key, and the = key at the same time, then release.

Subscript (Letters/numbers typed below the line of text):

After typing CO (or whatever text you want), immediately press the Ctrl key and the equals (=) key at the same time, release the keys then type your number 2. It will become subscript with the number two lower than the preceeding letters. To get back to the main text line, press the Ctrl key plus the = key again.


Hope this helps.

Grif

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Adode Flash plugin on AMD64

It's annoying that there is no 64bit flash plugin for 64 bit linux (in my case, FC6).

Here is what you can do (essentially use a wrapper, to enable 32bit plugins) to make it work.

Download the rpm mentioned below, install it and chill!!!

Download nspluginwrapper 0.9.91.3 (04.Mar.2007)

Why IOs in Haskell are so complex?

A simple solution is not complete!!! try this code below and at stdin, enter "X".

-------------------------------------------
using namespace std;
#include
main()
{
int idx = 0;
while(idx != -1) {
cin >> idx;
cout << idx << "\n";
}
}

---------------------------------------------------------

IRAN: and everything else

Iran is buiding real WMD (if you don't follow the news, WMD stands for Weapons of Mass Destruction). And a real WMD, a Nuclear Bomb.
Wrong: They are not building Nukes, they are building nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes

Then what is the problem!! The problem is, the whole world does not trust IRAN. IRAN is a reckless, irresponsible country, who should not be allowed to get nukes.

That sounds harsh. Maybe that is not the real problem. The problem is, countries who already have WMD, want to control the oil resources of IRAN. They just need a reason to attack IRAN and gain control of the black gold.

So did IRAN give them a politically sound reason by working on nukes (I just like the term nukes, thanks George!!)? Perhaps not..the evil powers of democratic messahiah would have found some other reasons to attack IRAN anyway. Now perhaps they are concerned that if IRAN does have Nukes, it would be slightly difficult to attack the country.

OK.. Now it all makes sense.

One Day Cricket and Software Project

I will start with one inning of ODI, as I saw the score on the website:

1. 5 Overs: 47/0 (47 Runs, 0 Wicket)
2. 12 Overs: 61/4
3. 43 Overs: 244/7

Pretty good score at the end and the fielding team is a real loser. They had no idea what happened for the first 5 overs. They eventually put their best guys in front for next 5 overs, and got to a winning position. Once they realized they are having a lead in the game, they slacked off and the batting team got it all the way to 244 in 43 overs.

Looking at final score, I almost forget the score at 12 overs.

Many software projects end up failing like this. First few months, not much progress. Put best people on the job, some reshuffling and next few months are the most productive. Once the productivity is at its peak, the best performer are overloaded with new project, multiple meetings, astronaut's architecture (Joel on Software) and finally the software is a failure.