World's first Hindi blogzine

I feel elated in presenting Nirantar, World's first Hindi blogzine. It has been the result of untiring efforts of so many Hindi bloggers, and prominently that of Pankaj Narula, Jitendra Chaudhary, Anup Shukla, Ravishankar Shrivastava, Atul Arora and Raman Kaul but I must say that the fire kindled in the Hindi blogging community for strengthening it provided the much needed shot in the arm. I must place on records my special appreciation for Pankaj, who very patiently handled the Drupal and Civic Space installations and hacks and hosted the zine on his website.

The motivation behind the zine is manifold: consolidating the creative talent of Hindi blogdom under one hood; perhaps convincing others to take up blogging in Hindi (Isn't it strange that a language spoken by 400 million people and understood by far greater number of people has only 40 odd persons blogging in the language?); showcase the language blogging scenario in general and Hindi blogging in particular and above all providing a wholesome read on a plethora of topics concerning our nation and Indian blogging apart from other for the outside world.

In the inaugural issue of Nirantar, you may read;

• Best Indiblog winner Atanu Dey's Interview with Nitin Pai
• Book Excerpt in Hindi  from Rebecca Blood's book "The Weblog Handbook". I must thank her, not only to allow us publish this excerpt, but also to convince her publishers to donate Nirantar 4 copies of her book which we would award at forthcoming competitions at Nirantar.
• Dina Mehta's analytical take on the Indiblogging scenario, which also happens to be the Cover story.
• A tutorial on using Firefox

Apart from this there is whole lot of other stuff slated to become regular columns in the zine Photo feature, a competition, Jokes, Blogger profiles, Poll, Links to interesting stories, News roundup, Poems and Short stories, Quotable quotes, Best Posts handpicked by the editors. You are just a click away from this, and a lot more stuff.

If you love Hindi, you sure gonna fall in love with Nirantar! I look forward to your suggestions and criticism :)

Update: Another first 'feather' gets added to Hindi blogging's cap, the World's first Hindi Blog Radio "Blognaad" launched by Jitendra.

Blog strolling - 2

• Java's friendly mascot Duke has got a blog too.
• Indic threads has a 3 part skinny on J2SE 5.0
• Bus Service to Pakistan. Oh no not again! I am sick and tired of these gimmicks.
• "some countries"..so sweet Patil saheb! India ki diplomacy da jawab nahin!

Scratching the wounds

Visibly annoyed with its aging dinosaurs and amidst the aspiration scuffles taking its toll in the party, BJP's old turk Govind Govindacharya is scratching the wounds again. The Babri mosque demolition was the "failure of the saffron leadership..to gauge the mood of the karsevaks...a glaring example of contradiction between cadre-based and mass-based politics", says the expat.

An occupying contradiction is entailed in Maloy Krishna Dhar's book. Maloy, a former IB Joint Director, does not agree that the incident was a spontaneous misadventure of the mob. He maintains that it was engineered months in advance by top leaders of RSS, BJP and VHP, a choreographed pralaya nritya with the vandalism handled by the Shiv Sena while Sangh leaders added fuel with their "irresponsible rhetoric". Another occupying observation made by the author is about the late Prime Minister P.V.Narsimha Rao's piteous handling of the issue, who, according to the author, "had regained some jest for life and had started dreaming of short-circuiting the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty."

It's early days!

It is difficult not to raise voice against this seemingly undemocratic move, the recent return of monarchy in Nepal, yet if King Gyanendra's motive of curbing the Maoist showdown holds any truth, I would invest my support for such a move. When the elected representatives are capable to do little, it is futile to justify a weak democratic setup. What scares me is thatsmall nations like Nepal could be completely engulfed with such insurgency in no time. In our own country, we have seen frail political will almost ruin the state of Kashmir.

Interestingly, many analysts interpret this as a clever move of the Himalayan nation to put India and China in a tug of war, for example analystRaja Mohan says,

Gyanendra has also sought to play the China card. After all no one can ignore the reality that Nepal is the geopolitical fulcrum of the Himalayas. Being the bridge between China's Tibet and India's Gangetic plains, Nepal has often sought to play India and China against each other.

Indeed it is difficult to rule outKing Gyanendra doing a MusharaffI still believe that it's early days to predict Nepal's future. As long as the monarch promises basic civic rights and stays on his agenda, I see no problem in the nation retreating to a democratic regime in a year's time, hopefully the Maoist nuisance that was wrecking the country would be gone by then.

So u got a good memory, huh?

Very few organisations would go out of the way to provide additional facilities to their customers. Obviously Paypal is one such organisation. It gives you the facility to, guess what, forget your password. So if you were too proud of having an elephant's memory, accept the challenge ;)

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.

Google Suggest and other things

Joel pointed to Google Suggest, another incrdible offering from the guys who always think different. I agree with Joel when he says that "Google is very publicly raising the bar on the quality of interfaces that people will expect from web pages." What inspires me is the approximate number of search results displayed along side the suggested search term, result of the XML HTTP Request magic.

Among other things, voting is on (and it seems would be on for a long time) for the New 7 wonders. Emails from patriotic Indians all over are already doing the rounds. Do your bit to give the Taj it's due.

Maintenance projects and DPs

Not many developers get the opportunity to be part of a project through the entire SDLC. For many people who are working on maintenance project, where the product is already there, the developer is usually involved only in bug-fixing or minor enhancements. Having been involved in a few, I have always wondered on the question, how can the Design Patterns be applied in such a scenario?

I raised this question to the authors of Head First Design Patterns at Javaranch and the following was Elisabeth's reply:

..even if you are involved only in the maintenance of a project, programs continue to evolve and new requirements come along all the time. A maintenance person might end up being the "expert" on the code after a while, especially after it is gone through a number of fixes and upgrades. Perhaps this maintenance person can see when the bug fixes that are requested are going to cause a problem, or perhaps are caused by a bad design. Having design patterns around to help to see where a program needs to be made more flexible to meet changing requirements is good for anyone. And eventually, this maintenance person might be asked their opinion of whether or not the program needs an entire overhaul to support a new requirement, or if they think a new requirement can be fit into the existing code. Knowing and understanding the design will help them greatly with this challenge.

While I agree with the author, I still am skeptical about the application of Design Patterns for such a project. Many, if not most, of these maintenance projects do not either have any documentation at all or have insufficient documentation on the background or architecture of the application. How do you just get to know the patterns used just by looking at the 2-3000 odd files in the project folder? The Application designers may have followed a pattern to begin with, but when the same code passes through a dozen hands (maintenance projects usually see a lot of resource rotation problem) the pattern thing takes a back seat. You simply comment out old code, tuck-in yours, alter and add few queries, all this forgetting about the performance issues, the focus is simply on restoring and ensuring the expected functionality to meet the deadline. I agree a lot depends on the programmer himself but then it is difficult to meditate sitting in the market-place.

You may read the complete thread here.

BBM on Nuktachini

As the baton is passed by Ek Cup chai!, my Hindi blog, Nuktachini becomes the first indic blog to host the Bharteeya Blog Mela. Nominations are being invited for BBM's 37th edition. Blog posts written by Indians on Indian topics during December 7 - 10 can be nominated for the mela. This blog had the privilege to host mela once, you can read it here.

Blog strolling -1

With most of the bloggers being IT professionals and students (I seem to be too sure on that), it is a refreshing change to see a lady "criminal psychologist" blogging. Thenga, Manga, Pattani, Sundal is the blog I stumbled upon recently (though I didn't quite get the need of having another blog with the same name but different username even if "Ethnic-chiclet" sounds cool..). The author seems to experience the same quandary every blogger goes through at the beginning, says she in her maiden post:

I cannot decide if I want to have an online journal, the kind that mimic the teenage cutesy highly private diaries (with the cheesy key and the corny poem on the first page that warned all intruders of dire consequences) or the more mature blog. Somehow, blog seems like a weighty word, as if it should contain deep, heavy words that speak of profound issues.

A comment on my last post, brought me to Vijay Bhaskar's Ripples with a rear view, nice name for a blog and must say..sporting one of the sexiest blog-banners I have seen. Also check out Parth Pandya's Salilowkey.

Blogger block

Charu refers to an article on how to dela with the blogger burnout, a term I came to terms with when Jivha quit blogging. For me it has been more the case of Blogger block rather than burnout. I have never been a zealous blogger anyway but few months back I at least would right twice/thrice a week, it is still twice or thrice but the weeks have turned into months. A friend, who just would not have Null Pointer on his blogroll ;), tauntingly observed recently, “I like your blog but it would be better if you atleast have one post a week instead of one a month”. Some write to me enquiring if I have quit blogging, and while I am reading all those blogs regularly, I am often ashamed to find a referrer log entry from a reader who visited my blog expecting some new post but (perhaps) went away perturbed. I worry if s/he would ever come back again.

A thing that prevents me from blogging regularly is absence of net connectivity at home. Then the recent happenings at the personal front are to be blamed too. Blogging at work is definitely awkward, your colleagues keep staring at your monitor and are not content to ask “Yeh kya hai?”; preparing a post especially in Hindi (and I am very poor at punching Hindi on Takhti) seems more heinous than looking a porno pop-up that shockingly appeared from an innocent looking site. During the day I must have been thinking at least a dozen times to blog about this and blog about that, but I am too lazy to jot it down immediately. Then it slips from your mind and poof, the slate is blank again. Now, I never have been in the habit of posting a link with a short comment, an advice given in the article that I just can’t follow, most of my posts are lengthy, some are notoriously so.

So I don’t think I (and the readers) have much choice really except that I don’t care a damn about those staring eyeballs and don’t feel ashamed in jotting a short link post instead of waiting to post longer ones and then not posting at all.

Zooming in on India's map

At least there is some initiative for India. Me thinks Map My India, the desi version of Mapquest has still long way to go but it’s good. I tried searching for my locality at my native place Bhopal (only a limited number of cities are covered as of now) and though it just managed to point at a broad outline, no street level data was given as with Google’s Keyhole, but then Keyhole would not ever concentrate in India, will it?

I can understand the limitations, you cannot expect the sarkari mapmakers to get into such nasty details, may be when the business prospects are understood and the moolah beckons the municipal corporations will wake up. As far as the business use of such products is concerned, unlike CNN news channels in India hardly ever use such micro-views with news capsules, we are still accustomed to looking at DD styled political maps of India and the ones send by our good old Insat. [Link through Animesh.]

Cal ho na ho

Are you aware of any date in history when nothing, absolutely nothing happened, literally? Well I was not aware of it and the answer unexpectedly came from Unix. On the Unix prompt if you do a 'cal 9 1752' you get the following calendar.

The missing days owe it to the Gregorian Reformation when the King of England decreed that the days from 3rd to 13th be knocked off the calendar month in order to adjust the days while switching from Julian to Gregorian calendar. A funnier explanation for the eliminated days is given here.

Debar whom?

These are election times in Maharashtra and a reader of TOI wrote in his letter to the editor that he supports a petitioner who demanded that the pavement encroachers be debarred from voting. This, they think, apart from saving the city would prevent politicians from cashing on their vote bank. There are lacs and lacs of encroachers in most of the major cities, especially in Metros who occupy pavements and public dwellings but debarring them from voting would be one of the stupidest way one can think of to tackle a problem of such magnitude.

Indian politics has had a long history of dependency on one kind of vote bank or other. The game remains the same as the theme changes every election. Supporting such petitions, whom do we debar from voting next then, the SC/STs, the Minorities, Women?

Encroachments are the illegitimate bye-products of unplanned development, lack of infrastructure and petty politics. First their goons would enact the encroachments, hand in gloves with the local civic administration. Then they provide them with ration cards, let them feel at home and provide then all kind of amenities they can expect, voila they have a vote-flow ready on their investments. We all know this, yet we allow these buggers to contest elections year after year. If we should debar anyone, they are these gangsters and frauds turned politicians, debar them from contesting any election, if they ever promise anything to such "banks" in their manifesto or speeches. Set some example and you would see the results. But who's going to bell the cat?