K World

• Goddamnit
• Google is Evil
• What the heck happened to democracy
• Threat to freedom of expression
• Big brother
• Hypocrisy

These the few comments I’ve seen on a post today at TechCrunch The post is about an Indian software Engineer getting arrested for creating a community in Orkut. Well, its not ‘any’ community but a community which he named “I hate Sonia Gandhi” and he had few vulgar comments about her there.

As Sonia Gandhi is PM of India (Isn’t she the real PM ?), few people might wanted to impress her or may really din’t like what this kid is doing. They asked Google for his account details. Google dint tell no - and gave his email id. And through email id they got his identity. Trust me, this guy is either a dumb-f*** or he never expected his silly-hatred-hobby to become such a big deal. He had that community under his email address rahulvaidindia [at] gmail [dot] com and the cyber crime cell of Pune cought him and now he is arrested.

There are several things to be given a thought after this incident. Major of them are

• Don’t be a dumb-f*** and start hate-communities
• Freedom of expression, democracy etc etc are the terms which others use for you when you are in jail
• When doing stupid things DO make sure that you are not doing anything against law
• Not everyone is as good as Piratebay guys - they are doing nothing against law (in their country atleast) and even they were arrested once
• And finally - Grow Up. You achieve nothing by creating a hate-community other than waste your time

If you see few of my previous posts, you would understand that I hate rediff. But, come on, its my best time pass. Those dumb bugs, annoying ads, silly flame wars on boards make my day almost every day When you hate something (someone), you are doing nothing but giving it (them) more importance in your life which you certainly wouldn’t want to do.

Have fun on internet.

Guess you understood what I’m going to tell. I should have written this a week before, but I thought - readers of this blog would anyway be knowing all the information. But, yesterday an old teammate of mine gave me a very big shock with a mail with subject “Fw: Beware!! Aids can spread like this too - Unbelievable!!!” To add to that shock, it was forwarded to him by another old teammate of mine.

Guess what is the mail about ??? Yeah, our same old pani puri story, but instead of pani puri, it was pineapple. If you don’t know the story, here is the line up

• Kid fell sick (General news)
• Parents take him to hospital (End of the day news)
• Docs diagnosed as AIDS (Shocking news !!!)
• None else in the family has AIDS (Happy news !!!)
• Kid tells that he had pineapple (Exclusive news to Docs !!!)
• Group from Mallya Hospital (Wow, they named hospital name too) finds pineapple guy (Reporter news from crime scene !!!)
• Pineapple guy don’t know that he’s got AIDS (Yet another shocking news)
• So - Don’t eat vada pav and pani puri !!! (WTF ???? News)

I didn’t believe this even when I was in my junior college and its hard to believe that software engineers, who are 25 years old, not only believe this but mail it to a bunch of their friends with in 10minutes and they end up in mailing this again.

I’ve changed little bit and I’m not as assertive as I was couple of years before. So, I didn’t mail him back with technical details of AIDS and tell him that it doesn’t propagate through this way like I did to one of my college friends (regarding Bill Gates giving money to who-ever-forward a mail) and I actually demanded many of my friend to mail everyone in the To-list or CC-list of the mail that whatever he has mailed is “wrong or inaccurate” and to let them know the validity of the content. Some of my friends actually liked that habit and many hated it. Anyway, I’m not going to do that again unless a very close friend end-up in forwarding faltoo information.

You know these, even then as information is wealth [Pun Intended]

• AIDS doesn’t spread through Pani Puri walla as long as you eat just pani puri from him
• As one Telugu movie tells, wear a helmet whenever you fight
• Don’t try Hollywood and don’t fight strangers
• A mint with a hole can be polo but Helmet with a hole can send you to Apollo
• As Balayya[¹] tells, Hand For Hand can be hit in movies but, blood for blood can sometimes shut your life
• HIV-positive need not mean that you are community-negative
• Mosquitoes have more deadly disease to spread, Malaria kills one in every thirty seconds[²]
• HIV is slow[³]. It takes nine to ten years to become AIDS. In those ten years, some bright scientist might find a cure. But, why take risk. Trust helmet.

Gave you enough information that you already know. But, be sure that you spread it to guys who don’t know. I’m going to mail my teamie, atleast for a noble cause. Pani puri is great.

I was talking to a friend couple of days before. Because of my “The Road Not Taken” problem, he was already little pissed off that I’m about to take a decision which would prove that I’m scared of trying something new.

Leaving that aside, yesterday he saw that Safari 3 Beta for Windows was released (It might be released long time before, he don’t know about windows as he is OS X user) and told me to give it a try. I replied him that I’m quite happy with the way Firefox works. He tried telling me that rendering speeds of Safari are better that firefox etc etc. What ever he is telling is true, actually many people consider that Safari is the best browser available (atleast on OS X, and thats debatable) But, I wasn’t ready to give it a try.

Then he told me something which made me think, actually think a lot. He told me that I tend to become comfortable with my Good Old Life and I don’t want to try anything new. After recollecting so many things like in both life as well as technology aspects. I don’t want to about my out-of-comfort actions in life. The following are few things which came into my mind when I thought about Technology and my Out-of-comfort actions.

• I wouldn’t have tried installing Windows 3.2 on a computer with Windows 98, when I hardly knew how to shut down windows just to see how an old version would look like …
• I wouldn’t have tried having multiple operating systems - 98 and 2000, when I hardly knew that there are many filesystem types, and 98 doesn’t support NTFS …
• I wouldn’t have installed Redhat 7.2 on my computer in my B.Tech second year, when none of my friends or my lecturers or me hardly use to use linux or even knew about it …
• I wouldn’t have tried installing Gentoo on my machine, when I hardly knew whats a Gentoo portage was …
• I wouldn’t have tried doing Linux From Scratch or creating a distro of my own-rules and called it KiX after doing my B.Tech even before I knew about those steps involved it doing it …
• I wouldn’t have tried installing DesktopBSD on my computer and mess up my Partition Table and then edit the partition table by calculating sectors of partitions manually using some tool (This itself is a big journey which I don’t remember clearly, but I’ve used some tool given on Hiren’s Boot CD and a calculator and managed to get my partitions back without losing any data .. But, I remember date exactly 19 Aug 2005, 1 day before I gave aptitude test of my current employer)
• I wouldn’t have installed three operating systems(98, XP and Gentoo) on my machine just to make sure that I can run all the applications
• I wouldn’t have done my B.Tech project in Python when I knew that I’ve to start my project review by explaining the guys sitting there that this Python is NOT a snake but a programming language
• I wouldn’t have tried to move my blog from blogger to my own domain when I was pretty much OK with my Google blogging service
• I wouldn’t have changed 15 mobiles in last 18 months

Guess, these are good enough to convince myself that I’m not a person who is scared of trying something new. But, then, to make him happy, I installed Safari on my box. It’s a good browser, but I’m yet to become comfortable with it. I’m just letting it stay in my box along with 3 other browsers - FF, Opera, IE (and Lynx, installed on cygwin, which I use once in a while for fun)

Yes, I tend to be happy with my Good Old Life, but, I’m not scared of trying something new. I would certainly try if its worthy of giving a try.