Hindi blogzine : The time has come

It seems the Hindi blogdom will soon realize its dream of creating a Hindi blogzine, "Nirantar". The monthly blogzine on the anvil has the mission to chronicle the blogdom in general with an emphasis on the Indian language blogging scenario. However, the magazine, hopefully, would not be confined to topics related to blogging alone.

We are currently soliciting material for the inaugural issue of 'Nirantar', I look forward to contributions from all. Do not bother if your material is not in Hindi; as long as someone among us can comprehend the language, we will handle the translation work. Click here to know the kind of publication material we are looking for. Contributions and suggestions for the blogzine may be sent to patrikaa at gmail dot com. A prototype of the zine is available here.

Phew...

Months of activity, loads of brickbats (ranging from bad template -- despite the excellent work by Chugs, poor management, disagreement with the methodology, rigging at the polls, being partisan to Hindi blogdom right unto being pooh-poohed on my anonymity and bad English) and now a breeze of praises, organizing Indibloggies was arduous compared to the last year's event. Thanks to all those who pitched in and all who visited the blog, I am sure the Indiblog community gained something from all this. On hindsight, I marvel at the spirit of Internet where such an event could be organized solely based on free resources, apart from my time and few bucks on surfing there was nothing that I had to create myself. My salaam to the spirit!

I have always been maintaining that for me the outcome of the award is not the poll result but the list of nominees and this year it has come-up with a good showcase. I am sure it you would added many new blogs to your blogroll (Sepia Mutiny, India Uncut and many others have been pleasant additions to mine). Despite of my own initial apprehensions, I think peer review was fairly successful in uncovering the forerunners in Indiblogdom. This also resulted in the right mix of blogs being nominated. Indian language blogs were no doubt poorly represented due to insufficient representation in the jury.

All in all, I am delighted of the outcome and motivated for the next. I have been receiving suggestions and the quick-poll conducted on the blog last fortnight revealed that most of us feel the current process is quite apt. However, I would surely ponder on improving the same, one of the idea being registering the blogs for the event throughout the year and let the jurors classify and select from amongst those blogs, this would perhaps put an end to the complains of blogs not being considered for nomination. 'Register if you want to participate' would be a good standpoint.

Thanks to all the Jurors and sponsors. Thanks also to all those who nominated the blogs and voted from them. Hearty congrats to all the nominees and the winners. I am sure through this event we will come closer as a community.

Confessions of a copycat ;)

All my sites have been abused by people trying to transfer money to Pakistan, people like scientology publishing posts for gathering funds in the pretext of tsunami relief etc... and not to forget me being 'branded'

all this and more from Rohan Pinto, the copycat in limelight who confesses thanks to an "angelic" call he got.

Adamant on copying

Chandru emailed me about this guy called Rohan Pinto who has his own domain and has been plagiarizing the blog posts, verbatim, without perhaps ever worrying about it. Now I can understand his urge to be a noted blogger when blogging on pretty grave technical topics but what could be the rationale for blatantly copying an innocent post that appears here, notice how the copycat cleverly replaces "husband" with "wife" and voila he has something to publish. That's a cute way to get rid of the blogger's block or is it the case of a pure blockhead?

Update: Wait, wait, wait...in the fury of the moment I got carried away and did not notice the post dates. It seems the lady here stole her post dated Jan 12, 2005 from Rohan's post published Feb 10, 2004. While I take back my utterings, I cannot help wonder on this. There is no dearth of copycats and this seems a case of copying from the copycat?

Hindustan times' ePaper

News paper giant Hindustan times has come up with a new ePaper concept. The catch is, it is a premium, subscription based content where they promise the replica of the print edition would be available online even before it would reach regular reader's doorstep. The concept is one coined by Bodhtree who are apparently servicing other publication groups as well.

Honestly, I find such moves fairly stupid. The only plus it seems to offer (for people accustomed to reading online) is the keyword search. Now, with Google news, that hunts on headlines from news papers all over, even that is an overhead. IMHO, for the rustic feel there is no substitute to the print medium. As I have to leave early for work, I miss my morning skimming but I always compensate it with a cozy evening read, even though I subscribe to various newsfeeds. Also, as far as I know, a similar venture of the India Today group never saw the light of the day.

Hard Where?

Getting tired of my Celeron with 32 MB RAM and 10 GB hard disk (yes I was surviving on that) I have almost made up my mind to go for a new PC under exchange. Pentium P-IV with 512 MB DDR RAM, 80 GB HDD (Hynx).

But I have two problems, being new at Pune I am not aware of the right places to ask quotes and secondly I am not too sure on the exact difference (in terms of performance and upgradeability) between Pentium-IV 2.4 GHz (Prescot) and Pentium-IV 2.8 GHz (HT, L2 Cache: 520) , the price difference is a substantial Rs.6500. Can anybody, who have recently gone for such configuration or read any recent benchmark at Chip or Digit, guide me to the information?

Update: Tight on budget I finally settled for a P-IV 2.4GHz with 845 GV Chipset Motherboard, price difference was quite a lot :) the only consolation being a bigger (17") monitor, Artis 1000W speakers with subwoofer and DVD Combo.

Happy new year

Null Pointer wishes its readers and well wishers and their families a very happy and prosperous new year 2005.