Living out of poverty

Today is blog action day and the topic for this year is poverty.

In case people doesn't know Blog Action Day is a global initiative where bloggers from all over the world contribute to a conversation about a particular topic. You can read more about this here, on their official site.

Poverty, despite all the talk about beggars being happier than the rich folks, is dehumanizing. It robs people of their dignity, takes down the quality of life by several notches and prevents them from using their talents for betterment of the individual, family and society. Being poor sucks.

But how do we wipe out something as intrinsic to human society as poverty? After all at no point of time in human history has poverty been totally absent. One basic rule is that whatever the time and the place, there will always be haves and have-nots. But what can be done is reduce the disparity between these two classes to the maximum manageable level.

There has been different ways in which this has been attempted across various places and in different times, with varying levels of success. Communism has attempted it, socialism has attempted it, the capitalists, the globalists, the nationalists: all have their stated aim as preventing poverty. With rare exceptions, most of these experiments have not delivered the results. Now the latest thinking is use of technology to combat poverty.

Take an example. Kiva is a social networking site where people, instead of making friends fund needy entrepreneurs in third world countries. A struggling cosmetic seller in Nicaragua, a chicken farmer in Thailand, a jam maker in India...all have benefitted from this website. Usually their loan requests are small (less than $1000) and they can't borrow from formal channels. Kiva has partners, mostly NGOs in different countries who put up the profile of the entrepreneur on the site and solicit funds. The process is transparent as the repayment record is tracked online. In this way Kiva has disbursed over $46mn in funds. It might seem small but when you consider the fact that most of the donors are individuals and rarely donate above of 2 figures (in USD), that's a monumental effort.

The way ahead to combating poverty is, according to me, using the Internet. Organizations, individuals and governemrnts need to leverage the power and each of the Internet in creative ways. Too often corruption and poverty exists in a vicious circle. The Net can be used for reducing the incidence of corruption too- the Central Vigilance Commision in India used to put up the names of corrupt officials in its site.

The poor does not need empty promises by politicians, they need solid initiatives. In the context of India they need, perhaps, for governments to adopt a hands-off approach.

Chandigarh churnings

What has a city got to do with your state of mind?

My answer would be, pretty much everything. Shift your place of life and work and your outlook towards life changes.

Take my example. I live and work in Bombay, one of India's busiest cities. From the top the whole city looks like a sprawling and a very crowded colony of ants. Entire families spanning across generations live in a single rooms. Suburban trains run across huge distances ferrying millions of people daily. There is no time to rest here, no time to feel the pulse of nature, to time to contemplate life's mysteries, no time to introspect. It's basically a very shitty way to live especially if you come from a small town.

Now for the last week or so I have moved into Chandigarh, I understand how Bombay has been affecting me, in ways that I could never have imagined. Chandigarh is India's first planned city, and was laid out by Le Corbusier. Therefore it has managed to avoid a lot of problems that typical cities in India face: unplanned growth, chronic overcrowding, traffic snarls et al. The roads are ridiculously empty even during so called rush hours and there is plenty of greenery. I can say that almost 90% of the roads here are what can be qualified as leafy boulevards.I have seen another funny thing: even at 10.30 in the night, when the roads are all deserted the traffic lights work and drivers stop at the light. Totally un-Indian like behaviour.

Therefore, what I imagine is driving on these roads is a breeze. You get almost zero pollution, you have disciplined drivers and you get empty streets. In fact it is a shock to some one from a messy place like Bombay and almost creeped me out the first time. Now that I have gotten used to it I wonder how it would feel when I would be plonked into the horrible Bambaiya traffic snarls.

I will leave off now. If I praise Chandigarh enough it might suffer from the Evil Eye syndrome.!!! I still have a lot more, but it is a bit personal and I will probably say it later.

Oh and my office is 5 minutes walk away from my room, compared to a torturous and crowded 45 minutes bus ride (lesser of the two evils. Forget the locals). Take that, Bombay

After a month

The last 40 days I have seen and learned a lot about human nature. About organizational hierarchies. About processes and systems. About laws and procedures. And I have started to understand why large organizations, steeped in bureaucracy will never be able to innovate.

My job is an Information Security Auditor. Sounds pretty fancy, right? This job is part grunt work, part great work. I spend my time either at client sites poring over their documentation, interrogating the various employees about business procedures and policy shortcomings and raising questions like why in tarnation do they store their financial data backup in a safe with the family jewellery.

The last mentioned accident happened at a broker office.This was a small firm, with the office and the residence of the CEO two buildings away. Every night the daily logs were taken on a portable HDD and kept in the CEO's safe. When we questioned the practice he gave a look reserved for imbeciles and started a long, entertaining, rambling lecture. It began with the cribbing about fire safety regulations (what will they do to the data if there is an atomic explosion? tell us to keep the data in lead lined boxes???), went on info about how to save yourself from a thief (kick the low life in the penis!!) and ended with his guns (I have a Mauser and an elephant rifle and practise regularly on the shooting range. There is no bastard born who leaves my place in one piece after a robbery). Phew. Wonder how many rascals he had killed. He also swore that when he gets on the governing body of the exchange he was going to shake things up.

Take it easy, man.

While I may come across a guy who loves to pick faults and mistakes, a well run IT shop would get my highest praise. People just need to get out of their comfort zone and get more educated about their work, especially those who work in sensitive posts. Start ditching IE 5, don't plug in USB drives in production computers, don't use the name of your family dog as the password. Surely that can't be hard, eh?

UPDATE: The lines above this post were written about a month ago....somehow I never got around to posting them. So the title makes change. Right now I am in green and clean and cool Chandigarh, enjoying the life that moves a bit slowly. More on Chandigarh in a later post.

Adios

One phase of my life is over, another is about to begin. Professionally, that is. Personally I have already got into another territory altogether, a state of mind where people get blind and go around the world.

The thing is, I am no longer employed. I quit my job at Digit and now am searching for another job. I will get one eventually but there is going to be a wait. The one question, actually two questions I have been getting are: Why? and Why didn't you wait until you had an offer?

Why indeed? Sometimes it happens that you loose the will to work. Life becomes a routine and feels monotonous. You don't want to wake up in the morning, you don't want to do your daily routines and go for work. You lose that fire inside you when you feel that you are being cheated, that you are wasting your time.

Right now things are normal on the surface. I am serving out my notice period and there has been no change in the daily routine. I still come in, do my research, write out the articles, talk to people and go home late in the night. What has changed is the fact that I will be getting out of my comfort zone and learning some new stuff. Good stuff and exciting stuff, I hope.

On leaving my mobile...

Something bad happened. I left my mobile phone at home today.

I am not one of those gadget freaks who are in love with any device that has an LCD screen and a microprocessor. I also really didn't depend on the mobile for my livelihood, as I was neither a doctor on call or a stockbroker in the middle of a bull run. I am just one of those regular guys that use the mobile phone to keep in touch with friends and family.

When I first came to know I was scared. How would I survive without the cell? A minute or two later I felt an emptiness. And then was the concern about missing all those calls, and missing that one important call which could change your life. Y'know, something like a job interview.


So why I was distressed by the loss? Simply because it has become a part of me. Look around you: apart from wallets and purses the one thing common to all people would be a cell phone. Often, in a city where you are alone in the crowds the cell phone is the only lifeline to the warmth and companionship of a drawing room, or a primeval campfire. I am missing you, my Nokia 3110.

However I am also a bit peeved at how much we have started to rely on something that is so easily misplaced or stolen. Take the ability to remember things, for instance. Our memories are so full of holes that we can't recall even 5 phone numbers if our lives depended on it. Every time we are doing something or the other: playing inane games, reading or sending SMSes, clicking photos or listening to GB worth of music. I am no Luddite but I think that we are in the danger of becoming too dependent on technology, too much for our own good.

So this is what I am gonna do: Remember at least 5 numbers everyday, numbers that I think would be important. I am also going to check my pockets everytime I leave home so that I don't forget my mobile anymore.

These two things should do the trick.

Mozilla says thanks

And I am much obliged.

Today is Firefox Download Day, when Mozilla Foundation attempts to set a world record for the maximum number of downloads of a particular software within a specific time period (24 hours). They even set up a site where people signed up to pledge to download the browser. This was given wide publicity by the Internet and users from all over the world have been waiting with bated breath for the new version of Firefox (it's 3) to be uploaded on the homepage.

With more than one million pledges Mozilla looked like it needed to hire additional servers to handle the strain once Download Day kicked in. They might have made some arrangements but I don't think it was enough. People all over the internet have been complaining about how slow or unresponsive the servers have been once the clock started ticking. And folks have been hitting the servers with gusto. For, at the time of writing this post (7 pm IST) there have been 6,757,833 downloads, with approximately 3 hours for the cut off time. Rounding the figure off to 6 million in 24 hours, this means 70 downloads every second from every corner of the world. And when you consider that it is a free and open source web browser that is not backed by big money, the effort is phenomenal, and once of the best illustrations of why power of the crowds can no longer be ignored.

A big Firefox fan since its 1.5.x.x days I was more than happy to participate in this effort. I duly downloaded the executable from the site though there was nothing new in its features for me. You see, I have been using the betas and release candidates since the last two months and I have been more than pleased with the new shiny version. In recognition of my "efforts" I got this record certificate to flaunt. I don't know if the link would still stay active after D-Day, but this is where you would go if you want your certificate. Try your luck.

For folks who want to know what the brouhaha is all about here is a handy guide to Firefox 3 by the fine folks at Lifehacker, one of the best in the business of tech journalism. Read in your free time.

On a parting note, here is some fun stuff. Open a new tab and type about:mozilla. You might also try this Firefox 3 specific Easter egg - about:robots. Have fun with your new browser and rediscover the web.

UPDATE: The Firefox downloads have crossed the 8 million mark in 24 hours. Which means that after I posted there were more than 1 million downloads in 3 hours. Freakin' awesome.

Digg it, Stumble Upon it........

Are any of you users of Digg, Stumble Upon, Slashdot and such other Web 2.0 content aggregation services? Do you write a blog and feel that readers should have more options in book marking and sharing your content across these Websites ? If you are interested in driving up traffic for your site (who isn't?) bear in mind the fact that these news aggregator sites can provide a very wide exposure to your content

In case the answer is yes, to both or to either of the questions I would recommend the use of bookmark buttons, the kind which you see near the title of this post. Get it from here. You just need to open an account, choose your blogging platform and choose the type of button you want. In Blogger the process is just point and click: the button is installed as a page element. But this looks ugly and is surely going to be missed by readers who has an attention span of not more than 3 seconds. Where you preferably want is near the post headline, or in some other cases near the bottom where it is easily visible and the viewer needs a minimum amount of cursor movement to access it.

For that to happen, as I have done it here you need to dive a bit into the template code. In Blogger go to Layout > Edit HTML and select the Expand Widget Templates checkbox. Copy paste the HTML code in Word or Notepad (Notepad++, even better) and search for

div class='post-footer'

tag (replace header with footer if you want the button at the beginning of your post, which is what I have done). Save the template and you are good to go, your content accessible to billions of viewers.

It's raininggggg

Oh, at last. The rains hit Bombay the other day and I was so inspired that I just had to blog about it. Well, actually I need to keep up a good number of posts per month, which is why I am staying up at 2 in the morning and pounding the keys on a pretty insensitive keyboard!

To be precise, the pre-monsoon showers hit Bombay last Friday in the evening. Shower would be a wrong, and strong word to use. At least where I was, it was more like a light drizzle.
I was walking down from the railway tracks when I saw flashes of lightning on the horizon and the low rumble of thunder. A sound that is sometimes made by your stomach when lunch hour arrives and you are still 50 meters, or 5 minutes away from eating. What was that? Me exaggerating? Fine then, the sound is on a much larger, atmospheric scale. Jeez.

The moment the first drops of rain hit my head I ran. Ran like Julia Roberts in "The Runaway Bride". And boy, did I run? I am frankly surprised at my own stamina. No tiredness, no breathlessness. I dodged matronly ladies hurrying with their vegetable purchases, roadside vendors scurrying to get their wares under cover and legions of preteen kids treating the road like their playground. The kids seemed to go out of their way to trip me or at least make me stop. Blasted brats!!

My sprint through the crowded and dark roads enabled me to reach the apartment just as the rain gods took it in their heads to pour 7 and half bucketfuls on our collective heads. Enough to make a thirsty, grimy ,dusty city hope for succour but noth enough to fill up even a few potholes. I also had a new experience that evening-in that concrete jungle I got to smell ,for the first time in my life the rich smell of the soil when the first rains hit the ground. Funny because most of my life I have spent amongst trees and open houses where there is more earth and less concrete.

These days it rains every evening. My flatmates, bored fro the daily routine of going to their offices are sending fervent prayers for torrential rains to come and flood the roads before their offices. The ideas is to get a rain leave. They may have their wish fulfilled pretty quickly.

I ran like a hare before the first rains. Poets and romantics have very obviously different ideas as to how we should welcome the first showers. What did you guys do when you first saw the rain of the season?

The free lunches on the Internet

The Internet is all about freedom. When we go online we have come to expect everything as free, as opposed to the real world where everything comes with a price tag. Do you crib about paying the postage when you drop your letter in the red box? However I am pretty sure there will be world wide anarchy if Yahoo or Google starts debiting money from your account for every email that you send.

For people who have newly migrated to the Internet this freebie-sm seems incredible, magical or even downright suspicious. An uncle of mine,when introduced to the benefits of free email was like ,"No way this is possible. They must be costly."

"No Uncle. You don't have to pay for sending email. In fact you don't have to pay for anything. Just create an account and start sending mails".

"But what about the costs of maintaining this service? All the wiring, all the electricity, all the pretty colours? I am pretty sure that they ask your bank account or credit card number during that account creation stage"

"Relax Uncle. I have an account and I don't have a bank account By the way I think they recover their cost through advertising. And I am pretty sure they don't pay for the wiring." This was quite some years ago and I was still not very clear about the economics of the Internet. I am a little surer now!

"Hmmm is it completely free then? I don't have to pay anything?" There was this you-are-kidding tone in his voice and he looked very hard for that data field where he would have to key in his account number when creating his email account. I think he was kind of disappointed when he didn't find any!

Since the Internet offers such a wide variety of tools for free (in rare cases they charge, but very little) it's upto us to use all of them for managing our life. One of the pioneers in offering free service is Google with everything ranging from photos, videos, web analysis tools, gadgets, maps, books and whatnot offered for free. Most of us know about or use only a minority of these features: Gmail, Picasa, YouTube, Blogger. Let me elaborate on couple of services that you can use regularly.

Google Reader: This one is a life saver for jobs like mine, where you have to read stuff from plenty of websites of all stripes. You can usually get redirected to this service by clicking on the link titled Reader which will appear on the top left of the page once you log into your google account. You can also get it by googling Google Reader. On the first try you might have to enter your password but that's about it.

"What are we supposed to do with it?". Good thing that you asked. Whenever you visit any Website look out for this orange icon either in the search bar or in the main page.

Click on this icon and you will find that all the contents of that Website added to Reader. Add as many Websites as you want and you will get the daily dose of news,photos, nonsense and fetish at one place.

Google Calendar: Did you ever forget your mum's birthday? Were there times when you got on the bus cab and remembered that you forgot to bring that discount coupon for the eatery near your office? How about forgetting to give your environmentally passionate girlfriend that card for Earth Day? Fear not, with Google Calendar there is no need to dream up last minute excuses.

Google Calendar can be accessed from the same top panel of links, or from here if you are feeling lazy. Log in and you will be presented with a calendar, the kind which is available in business planners.

The USP of GCal is its ability to talk to your phone. Depending on your service provider you can elect to receive alerts of the events in the calendar on your mobile by SMS. These alerts can be set to be received before a user specified time frame. Go to Settings and in the Mobile Setup area and validate your number. Google Calendar has saved my skin a number of times and I am a heavy user. What's cooler is that you can share your Google Calendar with other people and also send invites by Gmail.

Web apps that are free to use are a great way of organizing your life and effectively multitasking and communicating. I fully subscribe to this view but also append a note of caution: never trust your data in a single place, if it's of any importance to you. ALWAYS keep a physical backup. Multiple copies are the safest bet. Utilize the facilities of Internet but be careful not to depend on it.

I am curious as to what free apps do you use, Web based or otherwise to streamline your life and work. Fire away in the comments

Full redesign

For a long time this blog looked like a step son who was passed over by the evil step mother when the contents of her will was disclosed. Just look at the number of months between this and the last post; also look over at the archives. Notice a trend? Well, I was more enthusiastic in the earlier years (comparatively,of course. No way did I average 10 posts per month even in my best days).

Be as it were, there are quite a number of reasons for my lackluster performance. I was a bit jaded after my final semester exams last March, and what with the job hunting and all there was hardly any time or inclination to blog. Even after I got my job (and a pretty decent Net connection) there was hardly any enthusiasm, and I blogged in fits and starts. Now that I come to think of it I was simply bored by my blog design. Inspite of my articles In Digit where I repeatedly used to write how fast and easy it was to give a new look to your blog I was too lazy to do that myself.. Period. The templates in Blogger were my sticking point and I even created a Wordpress blog (it's still there) The content was exported from this blog) because Wordpress offered plenty of plug ins and beautiful templates.

However I was not ready to dump Blogger just yet. I was also not ready to give up on blogging- a big thanks to Partha, Satya, Bhupi and others who opined that I should keep blogging. But no way was I gonna write in a blog that had the default stretched denim as template. Time to move on with a complete redesign.

First was the search for a new template. I did a Google search on blogger templates and was overwhelmed with a problem of plenty. So many designs, so many choices! Sometimes I didn't like the colour, sometimes the font was the villain. I was looking for a design which would provoke a gut reaction and make me say ," This is what I want my blog to look like". After reviewing about a thousand (more or less) templates I saw this one and the reaction was "This is the ONE". Downloaded the XML file, uploaded it and I was brand new, shiny and with a crystal look. So far ,so good.

I wanted my blog to look professional which entailed adding the orange RSS icon (You can subscribe to posts using a default link, but its buried at the bottom and is simply crap). I headed over to Feedburner and created a feed. This is a point and click process and you needn't do any complex Javascript gymnastics to get this button. For a good measure I also added the option to deliver posts to email. Just click on the link on the top right corner, enter your email ID and every time the content is updated your readers get it delivered to their inbox. Sweet!

Adding search functionality is very important for any content rich website. Notice the Google search box on the top right? This can be added either the easy way by using it as page element or the hard way by copy pasting code snippet. However this feature is not available in the standard Blogger but in the Blogger in Draft. For those not in the know, this is actually Blogger's experimental service where features that are planned to be pushed out in the future are present. For all intents and purposes it is exactly the same as the parent service. The only difference that I noted is that the number and type of page elements closely resemble Google Gadgets. I selected what I wanted, viz. the search box and saved my changes.

The trickiest element in my redesign was the tag cloud. I didn't like the way Blogger's default label element displayed my tags. The tag cloud seemed prettier and more intuitive with tags that occur more frequently displayed in larger font sizes. While there are some services like ZoomClouds and TagCloud that will create a tag cloud for you just like Feedburner creates feeds I preferred to get my hands dirty with code. This was because I would have full control over the way my tags behaved and there would not be an empty space smack in the middle of my blog if the service goes offline for some reason (most of the services that I tried were down). Another reason was that if I went by the manual route I will have full control on colours, fonts, size etc of the tag cloud. After some research (actually I spent about an hour) I came upon this page which seemed to get the job done. I followed the instructions and after a fair bit of playing around with colours and font sizes got my tag cloud working. Mission accomplished.

For the moment the redesign is over. I might add some more links and other bits and pieces but the basic look and feel is locked down. I would like to ask my readers what widgets and page elements you think are invaluable for your blog. Fire away in the comments below.

Thoughts on spam

Have you lately looked at your spam folder? I mean not click on the links, but just look at the subject of the mails. Do you notice a trend here? I don't know about others but based on my regular observations I seem to have come to certain conclusions. Here are they:

• The contract for spam has been awarded exclusively to peddlers of meds which increase the length of male reproductive organs, sellers of motivational CDs and lottery vendors who have discovered that I have won 5,000,000 pounds.
• Spammers are sexist. They target only the male organ. Have they never heard of gender equality?
• Spammers are not getting any convincing. All the mails which I have in my inbox that were flagged as spam display unoriginal ideas and shoddy language construction

Now before I proceed this is only on the basis of my experience. There might be spams that promise a woman bigger boobs or a more pleasurable orgasm, or there might be spams which look authentic enough to make you part with your hard earned cash. I don't know. What I do know is that spammers are pumping out more and more mails than ever before, and email services are fighting a losing battle against spam.

However the main danger is, in my opinion not these spam mails, but phished sites. Strange as it may seem, I have never used Netbanking, and I will be damned if I ever do. I am too paranoid these days after seeing how people can lose their money and get their accounts hacked. Why the other day there was this incident where a Nigerian national was arrested by the police. 25 HDFC accounts were hacked and there are no details of what happened to the money in those accounts. My guess is, they were cleaned out. Makes me all the more distrustful of the Internet. I will continue banking the old way, thank you.