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Ten ways Kaminey could have been an even better movie
- Increase the number of cuts per second, because you know, viewers arent satisfied with dizziness, we need to vomit.
- Not enough characters with lisps. Think of how many ways letters can be said as other letters for example. Shahid needed to be a set of quadruplets, at least.
- Have more characters laugh about the lisps, because it's funny.
- While changing timelines within changing timelines, have the characters refer to things that have not already happened – in the pluperfect tense. That would increase the coolness of the movie.
- Copy the abe o Kalia scene, it hasnt been copied enough already. Wait, you did that? Twice? Sorry. I must have been keeping track of the tenses.
- There werent enough regional stereotypes. No Bhils or Nagas, for example. Mumbai is a melting pot, you know.
- Paresh Rawal was missing from the movie. He could have acted as a Bhil and a Naga. In fact, those are the only two ethnicities he hasnt done yet.
- Starve Priyanka Chopra a bit more. This has the added advantage of making Shahid's muscles appear bigger.
- Wait a minute, you say you saw Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels entirely to plagiarize it properly? That kind of hard work can kill the final product man. You should have just seen the trailer.
- Even with the blinkers, I could totally tell it was Shahid and not a horse. Should have made him run on all fours, or something.
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Not even a week and one more amnesia story. I swear, the number of books and movies about amnesia so much exceeds actual real life cases. The difference must be the highest such for a real phenomenon, after maybe English country house murders. Just this blog has talked about two such "units" already, and now we have a third.
Oh God Oh God Oh God what an awful movie Ghajini was. A better review has already been typed (with one hand), and mentions the crucial fallacy – the villain is known, so what is the movie on about? It's mindboggling. Seriously, the mind is boggled, one cant write logically about such complete absence of logic, it would violate Gödel's incompleteness theorem or something. So I'll stick to the mundane details.
For one, porn movies show less male skin. A CEO with sleeves rolled up to his armpits? Come on. I remember the olden days when Salman used to take his shirt off, and people in the theater whistled. Now one whistles when Amir puts clothes on. I felt my arms relax when he put his arms against his torso rather than three inches off it. He must have trained really hard too, how else can a man suck in his stomach when unconscious?
Has there been a BEST bus in history that has stopped so long for one person to say her tatas, climb down the staircase, and get off? A train not going to the depot that has run this empty? A world so bizarro that police inform civilians when people are missing? Villains so stupid that they tell someone for no reason that they just committed a few murders, then dont kill her right there, but send goons to her apartment instead? A person who reads two yearlong diaries (in a hospital bed), then jumps up and travels all the way to the villains' lair, and beats like fifty of them up, all of this in fifteen minutes?
Dont even get me started about the camera tricks. When people are running, the film has been sped up, so instead of being thrilled, you're laughing coz it looks like Charlie Chaplin on steroids. The fights are ludicrous: the funniest was when Amir jumps on the cop's shoulders like an agitated monkey. The cop, by the way, apart from being the worst actor, was such an idiot. When told that Amir takes a bus at the same time every day, this guy, instead of going to the busstop with a few men and making a routine arrest, waits by himself in a rickshaw at a random point along the bus route! By the way, what's the conductor doing with the cop instead of being on the bus conducting?
Any angle you look at it, this movie makes no sense. I feel a little something die inside of me whenever I see movies like Ghajini (and Dhoom 2) among a list of highest grossing Bollywood movies. I cant recall when blockbusters were ever this bad in India, and this includes Dharmendra and Jeetendra in miniskirts in Dharam Veer.
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"Lost" is a well received detective novel that did nothing for me – in fact it actively annoyed me. It's not incompetent, just... annoying. It is written like a lot of fiction these days: gimmickry for the sole purpose of approaching the story from different ends (in this case, the hero has a temporary memory loss, so the "ends" are temporal). This seems to be THE writing school mantra these days and I cant take it any more!
"London is a melting pot" is another mantra for this author. There's a titled guy, a Russian; hero himself is half German half Gypsy and what not. The female interest is a cop of Indian origin. These are all gimmicks – for one he so doesnt know/care about getting it right that he even mangles the girl's surname.
The back story is another fabled crutch of the run-of-the-mill writer. This one is particularly bad. Hero's mother is a Gypsy who was held by the Nazis in a concentration camp as a prostitute, many Germans raped her, one of them was our hero's father. That's not all, she comes to England, marries a farmer (our hero was apparently raised on a farm). That's not all, our hero was responsible for the death of his little halfbrother. That's not all, this makes his mom a mad alcoholic, and now he keeps her in a retirement home which he can barely afford. Of course, childhood crisis and guilt are a must to have a book written about you in these modern times. I yearn for the day when angst disappears from the emotional condition of the literary protagonist.
By the way, none of this back story is shown, all is told. Does it ever come up that the guy uses something he learned as a farmer for example? Are his mannerisms agricultural? Is his outlook? No. No. No. If you dont know shit about farming, your protagonist is not going to, and if he's not going to, DONT MAKE HIM A FARMER. It's not so hard.
Another thing that annoyed me was that if you're gonna give your main guy amnesia, he cant just remember things when it suits you. This was my pet peeve with the Belgian movie, Memory of a Killer, and Robotham does that same thing here. If you give someone amnesia, stick with it, else dont give him it, and just tell the damn story!
Yet another annoying habit of the author was to indicate that the hero just used sarcasm every time he uses sarcasm. The sarcasm was not lost on us, okay, and none of it was very clever to begin with, so spare us.
The dialogue is also a semi-weak point. It's the kind where conversations go, "Do you know what a Heffalump is?", followed by a long explanation of what it is and what the context is and how the metaphor is appropriate to the context, while the other party, a major criminal, patiently listens.
That leaves the story. It is a child kidnapping, another writer manual guideline followed to the letter (young white girl, guilty cop agonizes over unsolved case, and so on). Next time, I'd like a cop agonizing over an 85 year old male kidnappee please. This novel covers familiar ground of say Gone Baby Gone, a much better book. Dennis Lehane, the author of that one, is often inadequate on plot (no one notices a new resident living openly in GBG?), but he more than makes up for it by a lot of creepiness, and talking about what he knows about, and well. This is much more than you can say about Robotham. At best he is like a runny porridge, that is to say, weak but edible.
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On a recent direct flight from Newark to Shanghai, determined not to sleep for the entire 15 hrs to avoid jet lag, I watched 6 movies pretty much back to back on Continental's excellent behind-the-seat entertainment system.
Singh is Kinng was okay. One thing I got from it is that Katrina may not be able to act well or even speak Hindi, but she is just so likeable that you want to forgive her anything. Very unfair isnt it? And does Om Puri look like he's got one foot in the grave! Javed Jaffrey was extremely annoying; Akshay and Ranvir Sheorey were competent as usual.
QoS was a disgrace. It was unrecognizable as a Bond movie, starting from the new-age hip-hop title song and continuing to fast-cut CGI-based action, angst-ridden back-storied characters, and a general lack of Britishness in anything. It was your run of the mill Hollywood blow em up masquerading as a Bond movie. Even the terrible Tomorrow Never Dies had some Bondliness. The action scenes here were especially horrible. Casino Royale had an excellent opening parkour scene, and at least one other really memorable scene (heart attack). QoS had nothing. The opening scene was a poor CGI-enhanced car chase. A later footchase was so quick-cut it might as well have been stock footage. The story was also quite lame. One of the worst Bond movies.
After this, I wanted to see if my favourite action movie was really as good as I remembered. I neednt have doubted myself, it was better. The fourth time I saw French Connection, and it gets better every time. It is well known for one of the best chase scenes of all time, and that scene is absolutely mindblowing. If you count from the time the hitman fires, it is about fifteen minutes of dialogueless edge-of-the-seat action that defines thriller and has a mini-storyline of its own. Even aside from the scene, the movie is a gem. It is the canonical police procedural and Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle is the canonical old school cop – not too bright but tough and relentless.
Notice also the pacing. It starts slow with the cops on the losing side, gets faster and faster until the chase scene, after which the cops have the upper hand and things start falling in place for the conclusion. It's like a cardio run! The procedural scenes are also extremely memorable: the Santa Claus costume footchase, the rounding up in the black bar, the ripping apart of the car, the car auction, the pizza slice and crap coffee while stamping your feet in the cold watching the bad guys eat a grand French lunch indoors. What a remarkable movie.
Then I saw Guru. Another okay Bollywood movie, but possibly the first Abhishek Bachchan one where I didnt like him. He was trying too hard to act like Amitabh, and the later, bad Amitabh, pushing out his lower lip and all that. It was a very disjointed, badly edited movie that felt like a recounted flashbacks episode of a long running series. And my God does Aishwarya overact in every scene! When she cries, her forehead gets creases, her eyebrows arch, her eyes move, her cheek muscles expand and contract, her nose sniffles, her chin quivers and then the tears come. She even overdances: all muscles in her body move at all times. Look at me, I can act, I can dance, she seems to be saying.
Then it was Dr. Strangelove, a 60s satire about nuclear war. I hate the director Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" (one of the worst movies I have ever seen and possibly the most overrated), and therefore was dreading seeing this one, but it surprisingly turned out to be quite good. It was droll and farfetched, but rooted in fact. The writer seemed to have genuine knowledge of game theory, political relations and general government/military workings, so it didnt feel quacky like most sci-fi/fantasy does to me. It must have also been really scary at the time. I highly recommend it.
The last one I saw was Curse of the Golden Flower, a Chinese movie. Visually stunning, but nothing else to it. The dialogues and events happened because the writer/director wanted them to happen rather than following each other naturally, very much reminding me of the Lion in Winter and other work of that ilk that Mark Twain warned against. It also seemed like the entire budget was wasted on garish drapes and royal headgear and CGI and there was nothing left over for reality, like real people and real surroundings, eg. the festival didnt have any normal people, just a lot of flowers and the entire soldier population of China, both in CGI. On the whole, just a boring movie.
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What's with the IPL team names? There is one good name in the eight. The rest range from archaic to juvenile to plain silly. Here's what's wrong with them:
- Mumbai Indians: Hello? Someone missed a memo that they were in the Indian Premier League already. And what about the players in the team that arent Indian?
- Delhi Daredevils: What is this a carnival? Apt name for a maut ka kua troupe.
- Kolkata Knight Riders: Yes, we named ourselves after a corny old TV show with a talking vehicle. Fire those rear rockets, car-moshay!
- Kings XI Punjab, Bangalore Royal Challengers, Rajasthan Royals, Chennai Super Kings: Hand out those privy purses, I mean come on, we are in a democracy for 60 years now! Why would 8 teams have so much trouble choosing names that there have to be two sets of duplicates anyway? And why is the name before the location for Punjab?
- Deccan Chargers: Finally! A good name, simple and effective. I should root for them now.
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Just needed to backpedal (and brag) a bit after a tough day. Wrote this pipe in about fifteen minutes. Not bad eh?
From the description: Tehelka feeds (are crap coz for one they) dont have pubDate. However, the article link has the date encoded. This pipe outputs a tehelka feed sorted on the date encapsulated in the links.
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Wow, two blogs in one day! Must be a record. You may think I have nothing to do at work, but you may wrong. It just so happens that I triaged everything and made the Obamaic decision that education of the masses should not wait, will not wait, must not wait.
The purpose of this blog post is to once and for all end the debate between "could care less" and "couldnt care less" in favour of the former. What will really be proven is that the two usages are equivalent. This result is in favour of the former, sorta by analogy to traditional vs guerrilla warfare (it is said that in the former, you lose if you dont win; in the latter, you win if you dont lose).
To self-appointed language purists, such as the one with the niche, "could care less" is an abomination. "I couldnt care less" means the amount I care (ε) is so little that a smaller amount cannot be measured. On the other hand, when someone says "I could care less", it means that ε is big enough that one could care less. Indeed, this makes ε really a δ, ie. one cares some, which defeats the purpose of what one is trying to say.
This is a perfectly logical argument. What, I'm agreeing? Yes, indeed, logically this is a flawless argument. But then... what's the catch?
No sooner than. Yes, "no sooner than" is the catch. So also is inflammable, but we will stick to no sooner than. No sooner A happened than B did means B happened immediately after A. Literally however, it means B happened as soon as A did OR any time after A did. "No sooner the coals were lit than I walked on them" is a literally correct thing to say, even if the walking was done a few weeks after the coals burned out. What you really want to say, by analogy with "couldnt care less", is something like "no later A happened than B did". In other words, "no sooner than" and "no later than" mean exactly the same thing. And no language purist to my knowledge has ever gone after no sooner than.
Which brings me to my point. English is not a logically perfect language. Opposites mean the same (above examples), the same word means its opposite (dust a chair vs dust a cake), opposites are made from words that dont exist (nobody's seen a gruntled old man). In fact, no non-fake human language is perfect, because humans arent perfect. So there's no reason to argue. Let us "could care less". I "could care less" coz it's got one less syllable so it's more efficient. Whatever your reason, "could care less" with pride.
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Of all the...! This must be a classic beginner error in the world of "time/date" programming. I have been using this feed aggregator called Rawdog in which I have put some hacks to display the output prettyprinted by date. One of the hacks was to put "day" headers in, for which I loop back from a time A to an older time B, one day at a time:
s = A in seconds since epoch
while (year, month, day) of s do not match those of B:
do something
s -= 86400
Except to convert the seconds to (year, month, day), I was using localtime. The bug hit because s was just after midnight on Monday, 9 March 09, in localtime. 86400 seconds ie. 24 hours ago, it was Saturday because of stupid Daylight Saving Time! Moreover, B was on Sunday. So the code went into an infinite loop! I fixed it by using gmtime for comparison. This does mean, since I want the output in localtime, that the "Sunday" header is replaced by "Saturday", but since this is going to happen once a year in this very particular scenario, I am not too bothered – the real fix would be very cumbersome. (Actually, when DST ends, I could get two "Sundays" and no "Saturday", so statistically it evens out!).
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I just finished reading Brian Moynahan's The Russian Century: A Photographic History of Russia's 100 Years (for more information, see the paperback page here). The fact that it is misleadingly titled (it was written in 1994 and covers 1894-1993) is the biggest criticism I can direct at it. It is an absolutely fascinating piece of work, and the best coffee table book I own (or will, once my used copy arrives – sadly the hardcover is out of print, and this is a book for which hardcover is a must).
The photographs in this book alone make it worthwhile. It has for example, the great Soviet flag over Reichstag photo by Red Army photographer Yevgeny Khaldei. In my humble opinion, this blows the most famous war photo ever out of the water. It has some other photos I'd seen elsewhere, like the Stalin-Beria-Svetlana one or the Lenin in wheelchair one. It has many others I hadnt – a pissed-off Khruschev, hat in hand, ready to storm out of a modern art exhibition (he had it closed soon after), Brezhnev entertaining guests on a boat, a Tatar reindeer-herder in bad-ass furs beside an Aeroflot supplies plane, workers with only a hanky over their mouths getting ready for the Chernobyl cleanup (they would soon get radiation sickness), cannibals during the collectivization-induced famine (found with cuts of human flesh), and just people: drunk, happy, sad, hungry, weary, awaiting execution or deportation... the list goes on.
The text is not far behind. Information exudes through what feels like every sentence. There are chilling details about the failed collectivization, the purges, the war, but also about the nuclear race, for example how the life expectancy in some of USSR's uranium mines was one month. There are anecdotes about the lopsidedness of the planned economy, where you could buy chandeliers with no fittings to hang them from, but not lightbulbs which were in short supply. Or about the ridiculous pricing system, which allowed one to make a profit selling a bag of southern oranges in Moscow, taking a flight both ways. It gives a good idea of the Russian mindset, often through Soviet humour. For example, after the austere days of Stalin and Khruschev, who had no time or desire for money themselves, the Brezhnev era meant "the good living" for Party people. The story goes that Brezhnev's mother visits his dacha, and is amazed by the luxury. "It is all well Leonid", she says nervously, "but what if the Reds come back?". About Gorbachev's endless toying with the system: a farmer finds ten of his chickens dead and goes to Gorby for help. "Give them aspirin" is the reply. The farmer does as told, but ten more chickens die. "Give them castor oil" suggests Gorbachev. More chickens die. "Give them penicillin". All chickens are dead. "It's sad", says Gorbachev, "I had so many remedies left to try".
One minor criticism is that it glosses over the later part of the Soviet era. I also expected more about Soviet foreign affairs: the Afghan war is briefly mentioned, the Korean to my recollection not at all; the meddling in other countries gets a cursory mention at most. I suppose it is more tilted towards Life in Russia. There are also minor typos. The editorial effort falls a bit short in general – the aforementioned orange story is mentioned thrice, people are referred to before being introduced, or arent introduced at all. In any case it is really not meant to be thorough, and it does give a good starting point for someone interested in more (and there's always Google). Overall, it is just absolutely fantastic and a must have for anybody interested in Russia.
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The Namesake is a very well acted and directed movie, but the story itself leaves a lot to be desired. The writer is Jhumpa Lahiri, so what did I expect? Indian wives being either naive culture-shocked arrange-married homemakers, or sluts? Check. Said naive culture-shocked arrange-married homemaker wife looking for a fish market or eating something mirchi-fied that isnt normally eaten mirchi-fied? Check, check. Lack of knowledge about India, like how it's mentioned twice that the US has 24 hours cooking gas, implying that India doesnt, whereas in reality Indian cities would have had LPG delivered by cylinder then, which means one would have had 24 hours gas if one had a cylinder, which one would unless one were poor or a bad household manager, neither of which was suggested as cause by anything here? Check. Confusing the Indian mentality with the American one, whether out of ignorance or to improve marketability we dont know, like suggesting that a desire to see the world drives Indians to emigrate? Check.
But I had not expected there to be an actual plot. My hopes rose – what could possibly be the story behind naming your kid after a Russian author? The book/movie is named after this plot point, so it must be awfully important, I thought. But no, Lahiri never misses. This whole plot point, the namesake of the movie if you will, is so arbitrary and orthogonal to anything else that happens in the movie, that its pointlessness beggars belief. It is something most writers, even rank beginners, would think of introducing as a minor plot point and then reject because it too much doesnt belong. It is like a MacGuffin that gets explained, except (a) a MacGuffin never get explained because writers know that any explanation would fare worse than leaving it to the reader's imagination, and (b) the existence of the MacGuffin is important to the story. This is more like if in Pulp Fiction, the suitcase with the orange light wasnt something Jules and Vincent were meant to pick up, but was just lying around in their backseat for no reason, and then the last fifteen minutes of the movie were devoted to explain to you that the orange light in the bag was indeed an orange light. And the movie was named "Suitcase with Orange Light".
In fact, whenever she tries to introduce a plot point, it fails on her. Like when she has Tabu say that her husband wanted her to practise living alone, which means he knew "what was going to happen", which couldnt be the case because he, in so many words, asked her to come with him, and she was the one who said no, just minutes before in story time.
So much for the bad. The pleasing thing about this movie were the performances. Tabu was good as always; Irfan (or Irrrrfaaaan as he wants to be called now) was very good too. Kal Penn and the rest of the cast did a commendable job as well. The direction was also quite good -- in less competent hands the movie would have been as unwatchable as the book must be unreadable.
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A while back, perhaps while reading about the eponymous movie, I had read this Ghalib couplet:
Hazaaron khwaishein aisi ki har khwaish pe dam nikle
Bahot nikle mere armaan lekin phir bhi kam nikle
I loved it and immediately "got" it. Just happened to go back to it today and was trying to find a good translation, but none of the ones I found do it justice. I even went to Scribd looking for one. Here are some of the decent ones:
Thousands of desires, each worth dying for
Many of them I have realized, yet I yearn for more
Thousands of desires, tantalizing one and all
Many a wish have I realised; yet I yearn for more
Many a thousand wish is willed, each itself is great
Many a longing is fulfilled, though not enough to satiate
Thousand of desires, each worth dying for
So many of them were fulfilled, yet so few
Some others had takes a lifetime or choke one etc on the first line. And so on.
Translation is hard. That is why we have "lost in translation" (the phrase, not the movie, dont know why the movie exists). The output has to have the right amount of literal translation so as to retain the original's flavour, yet the meaning should be sufficiently readily discernible. If you start reading an unabridged Three Musketeers translation, for example, that has "Protestants" and "village" instead of "Huguenots" and "Bourg" on the first line, kindly chuck it. A good rule of thumb I've found is to chuck a translation that translates swear words. A good translator should count on an interested, intelligent reader, who can figure out for herself what Huguenots and Bourg mean and that morbleu is a gaali akin to damn.
But that's prose. Translating poetry's harder still, because of course poetry is harder than prose in the first place. You cant lose the poetry! Here, perhaps, you are allowed to make changes, in order to convey the mood more clearly, that would be unsuitable in prose.
I spent a good twenty minutes trying to translate the above couplet after I found the googled translations lacking. I honestly think mine is better than all those I've quoted above, yet it's a totally amateurish effort that has lost the poetry of the original.
Thousands of such desires that each could outlive one
A number of mine have come true, yet the number is small
Here's some explanin':
- aisi = such is before desires because Thousands of desires such that... seems too formal and mathematical. Also, the original breaks after aisi. In English we must break after desires, so if we put such after that, we break differently. I also tried Thousands of desires, each... but it seems a bit constricted.
- About outlive one: I'd anyday take one over you to retain the sense of the original and not make it an informal speech sort of thing. To me, take a lifetime is too shallow, as it implies the desire was fulfilled before you died. Also kill seems too strong.
- In the original, Ghalib uses nikle in two different senses on the second line. I've tried to do the same with number, which is the only reason I'm using that word.
- I have not translated armaan. For one, it lengthens the line too much (cannot possibly drop true as in the original). Also, the original uses armaan (apart from poetry reasons) to change the gender from khwaish, which is unnecessary in English where abstract nouns dont have gender. The two do have slightly different meanings (perhaps this is irrelevant, but even so)... Tough Call.
- In my opinion, yearn for more etc totally lose the charm of the original, so I've kept the translation literal there.
One thing I really dont like is that the translation tapers off anticlimactically unlike the original, maybe because I lost the repetition of nikle from the top line. I cant think of even how to begin trying to fix that. Lost in translation? You bet.
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I dont get it. Really. I tried. I dont get the point. Correct me if I'm wrong but Facebook in its current incarnation is basically Twitter with Apps.
I get the "apps" part. To me, it's barely social networking though coz I dont use them like that, but I grant that one could.
I dont get Twitter, ie. live updates ("microblog" only if you use the historic meaning of blog: @diary). I find it somewhat fallacious: were you actually doing something awesome, would you be live-updating it? Maybe the same gotcha could be applied to photographs, but photos take one measly click and serve as memory. Live updates are more time-intrusive and I doubt anyone re-reads them even a week later.
A live update is social networking in that there's the ability to comment etc, but in it's basic form it's a "push". Like a vanity plate: interesting but usually not interactive. At best, it's what the hostess of a party is supposed to do, except here the hostess is talking about herself and the guests dont have to respond. Does it qualify as social networking? I would have to say not quite.
I dont get the UI. It used to be too customizable. I would try to do a mouse gesture and it'd move boxes. Stay, box, stay. Now it's a nightmare mix of too customizable and not customizable at all. Where to start?
- Each app comes with too many options. These options used to be complete gibberish. They have been since reworded to be barely understandable. There should be one default set of options for all apps (each app to be individually customizable atop that) but there isnt.
- Why is it even an option to let the app pull my info when I'm not using it?
- The word Bookmark has been unnecessarily arrogated to mean "Put on Fugly Bar at Bottom" (@Windows Quick Launch). Took me a while to figure out what it meant.
- Again, there is no global option for this, nor is there a way to remove the Fugly Bar at Bottom [let me (TM) this].
- Note to webdevs: Tabs being the in-thing doesnt give you the right to sprout them like weeds. Especially if yours are as slow as molasses. Wait... slow weeds?... mixed metaphor alert!... Also poor joke alert.
- WTH is the difference between News Feed and Status Updates and Live Feed? These designers seem not to know that "folders" are history. Implement a tag/search or nothing at all.
- Why are my feeds on a different page altogether? Oh forgive me... "What I'm doing" is obviously completely unrelated to "What my Friend is doing", which in turn is obviously twins with "Someone I Dont Know Says My Friend Is In A Photo (Hoot)".
- There is no way to combine everything I want onto one page that I then visit and read with no clicks.
- There is no "More..." button at the bottom of the feeds. If you missed a day of your Friend's life, tough luck.
- Wrt the crappy "More|Less about Friend" design: Where's the current setting? Where's the "Set to Default" button? If I click More twice, does it increase twice?
- The Wall is one of Facebook's most social elements, but it's hidden on Profile and difficult to get at. What gives?
- In general I dont get where they're going with their silly Home=Friends and Profile=You distinction. It must make their life easier, but it sure as hell does nothing for me.
In short, I... dont... gettit. Now if only someone redesigned Reddit to suck (quick, you still have ~11 hours), my new year resolution to ease up on the internet addiction may actually stand a chance. Btw, Happy New Year folks!
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Why is it that the same people who cry foul when the government violates privacy or otherwise restricts personal freedom want to remove one of the freedoms Americans constitutionally possess – the right to bear arms? For the longest time, I couldnt understand why these otherwise sane people (OSP) make a special exception for gun ownership. I thought maybe it's because gun owners are usually white rednecks and OSPs simply dont want to be associated with white rednecks.
But now I think it's the kids: Americans have an unhealthy obsession with how children's lives should be perfectly free from any harm, even the make-believe kind. On my previous commute, there was a school bus that made 3 stops along 6-7 houses on a street (not more than 20-25 meters between stops). Stuck behind it, I always used to (silently) shout, "THE KIDS CAN WALK THAT FAR". Who in the world begets these dolts anyway, who dont understand that cars can cause death so everybody has to stop for them to get on the damn bus? Absolutely ridiculous.
No guns is just an extension to this: the chief worry people have is some curious kid will get hold of the gun at home to play with and shoot himself or his pal, or some troubled kid will grab his father's gun and go on a killspree at his school. Neither of this happens so often that everyone's freedom needs to be restricted for it. As Ben Franklin said, "Those who would give up liberty for a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety".
My view on this is simple. It is a personal freedom. Dont take it away. I am a total liberatarian on the individual front. Dont tell me how to run my life. Legalize drugs. It's not a crime if there is only the intention of it: "Catch a Predator" should never hold water. Deterrent to crime should be a strict sentence if you commit it, eg. drink-driving should be legal -- causing damage to life/property or committing a traffic infraction while drink-driving should have a prison sentence or fine that's much heftier than if you did it sober.
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Took an art test today. Pretty good results and analysis. This is what I got.
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Slowly but surely, everything that was once good about Yahoo is disappearing. My wife once got a very important email from our lawyers marked spam on her Gmail account – this ended up costing us an overnight Fedex and not insignificant stress. Yahoo Mail might suck otherwise, but its spam filter was excellent (a few spam a day in the Inbox but very very few false positives) and I had one up on her with that. Not any more.
Like everything else Yahoo, the spam filter started sucking overnight. Emails from every non-Yahoogroup mailing list and subscription I am part of now more likely than not get marked spam. I'm talking at least 5-6 different emailers that I know of. Emails from my cousin go the same way (admittedly these could arguably constitute spam). Today takes the cake however. Nothing beats finding Yahoo's own emails in my Spam folder. I had a good wry laugh out of that one.
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I have been getting interested in fonts and typography recently (computer, not print). Since I'm thoroughly leftbrained, the design aspects of this are totally alien to me: my interest is more from the user-interaction point of view. This promises to be a meandering rambling post – I just want to lay my thoughts down in some form.
First, browsers. Most browsers nowadays have a minimum font size setting (IE might be missing this). What does "minimum font size" say to you as a user? Pedantically, this has many meanings, but from the UI pov, there's only one: if any fonts on this page are smaller than x, show me them at x. The amazing thing is, only Safari gets this right. Firefox and Opera take any font size on the page, scale that to x if it's smaller, and then scale all other fonts on the page with that factor (this article has details). So if the web designer is an idiot who doesnt test with minimum font size (I'm looking at you, Wordpress and BBC), you get humongous fonts everywhere. Really this is not the designer's fault – it is a mindnumbingly idiotic thing what Firefox and Opera do.
Another thing that's missing in browsers is adequate font control. As users, we can select a default serif font, a default sans-serif font, a default fixed font. The only other thing we can do is override all page font settings with these defaults. The big thing wrong with this from a UI pov is that most people who care about the former arent Nazis enough to select the latter.
One thing they would care about is the ability to not see certain fonts. This might be for aesthetic/readability reasons (Times is much smaller than other fonts at the same size, Tahoma just generally sucks) or for when the fonts arent even supposed to work (Vista has new ClearType-only fonts which render horribly on a CRT where ClearType is supposed to be off, yet designers you think would know better – like the codinghorror guy – choose a ClearType font as their first choice). You could go a bit further and say things like you want to see Verdana but only up to 12pt, but this is not essential. Even font substitution is not essential. Really, the only thing missing is a configurable blacklist of fonts that are then replaced by the corresponding defaults. Was that too hard?
A bit of opinionation now about fonts in general. I pretty much think there's only one awesome web font – it reads really well, it scales really well, it's unique and universal, and no wonder it's already almost the defacto standard of web serif fonts – Georgia. Kudos to Microsoft's designers on this one.
The corresponding sans-serif one, Verdana, has also become somewhat universal but it doesnt scale (too fat IMO at small pt, and I dont think anyone would disagree it sucks at large – some of those Wordpress pages affected by the minimum font size fiasco look like someone raided Gutenberg's foundry and stamped my screen with cast metal ingots). Trebuchet is good, but it's too decorative for my taste – I like it once in a while but dont want it to be universal. Tahoma sucks. Arial, Microsoft's Helvetica ripoff, can be unreadable. I have Unix at work so use Adobe's Helvetica which is better (most of us may not be able to tell them apart at individual letter level, but believe me Helvetica reads and scales much better than Arial). However I find Helvetica simpler than as-simple-as-possible (eg. notice how the big I looks like the small l), and think it could have done with a bit more character. One recent sans-serif for Windows that scales decently well is Redhat's new Liberation Sans. However, it has problems (the u sometimes looks blurred), and it feels too "green", like the writing of a kid who's just learnt his ABCs.
Among fixed width fonts, Courier is too old, time to move on, but there's not much to choose among the rest, they're all pretty okay. At work, I use Sun's screen font, which is surprisingly readable (it is not very good at bold and doesnt have italic, but you rarely see b/em and tt at the same time). Other than that, no real preference for me (Courier New, Liberation Mono, Lucida Typewriter are all pretty good).
One last thing. If you're on Unix/Linux and not using fontconfig, you're missing something. Given the royal PITA that fonts have historically been to manage on Unix, fontconfig is a well-designed tool and a pleasure to use. All Unix-ish apps that depend on fonts should build upon it.
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I am no fan of the Olympics especially here in the US where the commentary is horribly unprofessional when the country is participating in world sports – it's the unsolicited a-priori "we are better" American tourist mentality all over again. By the way, I think most Olympic events dont even qualify as sports but let's leave that aside.
Fact is, I am seriously thinking of boycotting the Olympics, and no, it's not because of human rights abuses by the Chinese government. I could care less about that in this context. What appals me is this: I can predict right now, before the games have started, that the US and China are going to finish at the top, and not only that, they're going to get the lion's share of the medals. And the reason is probably not because they are faster, higher or stronger.
In 2004, the US gymnast Paul Hamm fell on his butt while doing the vault. Bear this in mind. He fell. On his butt. After this "unfortunate event", the judges began to give him very high marks for the rest of his routines, while at the same time penalizing the other competitors for no reason whatsoever, and then there was a scoring error, and he won GOLD... not a medal mind you, but fricking gold. Dont you dare tell me after this that there is no US conspiracy in the Olympics.
And before I forget, there was another controversy in the men's horizontal bar when Alexei Nemov, the best in the business, was given a score so low that everybody in the stands booed seemingly forever. And then Nemov comes out and calms everyone down. Contrast this with Hamm who upon told of the scoring error promptly hides behind the USOC's apron. Now, guess who won silver at the horizontal bar? Yes, Paul Hamm. Nemov was fifth.
Shit like this makes me mad. And it gets me thinking like why is baseball (US, Japan, a few Caribbean countries) an Olympic sport but cricket (England, India, Pakistan, SriLanka, Bangladesh, Australia, NewZealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and a few Caribbean countries) isnt. How come the Chinese are never caught in a doping scandal? How come US athletes are caught doping themselves everywhere except the Olympics? Could it be because they are not really checked, or use drugs that are not on the list? Shouldnt the list be secret? If it isnt, why are the Bulgarian weightlifters so stupid? Is it because they do drugs and drugs make you stupid?... This thinking gets you off the topic quick I tell you.
Now if I boycott only gymnastics type events where judges have the hand, that leaves only boring people (insert participle here)-ing in a straight line or (wow) circle. So half the stuff makes me mad and the rest puts me to sleep, it's a no-win. I'm just gonna do myself a favour and maybe sit out of this one.
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There are a few reasons why Latex is popular:
- It is free and a defacto standard almost free of competition.
- It suits the command line mentality, which makes it a fit for Unix lovers.
- Markup is pretty much O(1). With WYSIWYG programs, text is easy but formulas and special symbols can be a bitch, whereas with Latex, they are at about the same level of difficulty.
- The result looks better than anything else out there. The fonts and typography are beautiful and well suited for computer and print.
My biggest gripe is that Latex is prescriptive. It does things one way and it is at best insanely complicated and at worst impossible to make it do exactly what you want. And I am not talking simple stuff like the fact that figures and tables "float" – which is at least documented. I am talking about the lower level stuff. About the large gaps and margins for enumerate and itemize. Want to change this? You must \usepackage{enumitem} and read its manual. And that was an easy one.
Why does the first paragraph have no indent but the rest do? Oh, it's the standard? What standard? How do I change this? ... All right. Now \raggedright means a ragged right margin doesnt it? Ok, then why doesnt it work here? Oh, you say it has a weird definition for arcane historical reasons and it may not always work. So, what should I do? Oh, I should \usepackage{ragged2e} and use \RaggedRight. Ok. Now tell me, how can I make this table not indent. Yeah, I tried \noindent, it didnt help. Oh, you say forcing indentation is a bitch. Well, is there a way? Even you dont know? Ok, tell me why if I set \parindent to 0, the tables indent to the right but if I set it to 1 mm, they indent to the left. Oh, ok, dont get mad now, yeah I can live with the indent. Yeah, Knuth is a genius, isnt he?
Ok how do I put this word in Garamond font? Oh, why do I need any other font than Computer Modern? I dont know, it's a typesetting system? You say first find the Tex name of the font. How do I that? ... Aah that was an eye-opening hour. Now how do I use it? Uhh what font guide? Of course, google it, how silly of me. ... Ok why does this tell me some arcane crap instead of showing an example of how to use a fucking font? Serenity now. Ok, found a whitepaper on Font Selection in Latex. Hmm it talks about how to change the font for the whole document. What about one word? No? Serenity now. Serenity now. Ah, here's Latex2e's font selection reference. What? \fontfamily{something} \fontseries{somethingelse} \selectfont? What should I use for something and somethingelse? ... It's 2 am already? Ok, does the left brace go before or after? Find out the hard way? Hmm now it says it didnt find the font? Oh you need \fontencoding too? Now what? Oh I dont have the font? ... Yup, downloaded it. Ok now do I install it in texmf or texmf-dist? Ok, why does it still not work? Why does it say I dont have ugmr8a at 9 pt even though I am using it at 15 pt? What, I should use ugmr8t at 15 pt? ... Finally! Whew, all this because I wanted a different font?
Now I respect Don Knuth for TAOCP, and even the typography and all that in Tex, but I wouldnt hire him as a software engineer. Tex is a prime example of how common sense can elude the genius mind. How can Knuth not realize that people who appreciate beauty and the command line hate being dictated – in other words, that aestheticism/freedom and prescriptiveness are mutually exclusive design goals? Perhaps because he is a genius. Anyway I dont even know whether to blame Tex or Latex or both for this, this whole thing is so complicated and FUBAR that good luck trying to figure out where the line between them lies. But, hell, it does look beautiful you know?
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Yesterday, Yahoo switched over to the New My Yahoo after a long beta. I expected the worst but was pleasantly surprised that the worst issues were in UI design. These included too much vertical whitespace everywhere, an invisible tab title (light green over white), and a gratuitous increase in width of what used to be the narrow column so I have to embiggen the window to see things right. There were other sucky aspects like slow as molasses (TBYTM) feed previews but thankfully they can be disabled.
That was yesterday. Today, the Yahoo Mail Preview, the Yahoo Fare Tracker, and the TV Listings have stopped working (that's 3 out of exactly 8 modules I have on that page). You can bet this wont be the end of it. Yahoo's would be a sad saga if it werent so amusing how consistently and predictably the company has failed in recent memory to deliver the goods.
PS: I just noticed that the Currency Converter has lost my preferences and only displays the default Dollar, Yen, Euro, Pound now.
PPS: Going to Yahoo Mail from its module on My Yahoo forces latest-on-top order even if your preference is latest-on-bottom. It took me a while to figure out why hitting Next was bringing up older emails...
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