Karthik's blog

Finally got to read George R. R. Martin's latest book - A Feast Of Crows - Book 4 of the A Song Of Ice And Fire cycle - over the last couple of days. And what a pleasurable read it was!

This book has pretty much taken 5 (looooooooong) years to write, and considering how immensely satisfactory the previous three releases were, I was waiting for this with .. extreme anticipation and a high degree of expectation. And boy, I wasn't let down :)

Noted science fiction author Sir Arthur C. Clarke has contributed an article [Free reg. required] on the rise of "citizen journalism" to Outlook's anniversary edition [released last week]. He basically talks about how blogs, wikis and the like are surely .. revolutionising the media and changing the scope of variables such as censorship, accuracy and responsibility.

This seems to be a good coupla weeks old, but nevertheless I believe that these guys need to get all the exposure that they deserve.. better late than nevah I've been told.. :)

Now, even though I don't really think much of MBAs.. I have never heard of a top B-school named IIPM before today - seems I should get out more lol..

This whole imbroglio seems to have stemmed from this article on a college community site named JamMag [fubar site]. IIPM apparently have an intense marketing campaign to draw in students from all over India. The article basically questions the veracity of pretty much everything that IIPM advertises and also draws attention to the very authenticity of degrees from IIPM.

The previous three books of Robert Jordan's Wheel Of Time saga have been tedious to say the least. But, with the Lan + Moiraine prequel (which was the last book released by Jordan) being so promising, I was looking forward to reading Book 11 - Knife Of Dreams, with some interest. Having finally done so yesterday, here's my take on it..

While things have definitely picked up in KoD (in terms of momentum), Jordan seems to have lost track of all the myriad characters that he's introduced in previous books. There are just way too many loose threads, and the holes in the logic have grown to drive-a-truck-right-through proportions.. Similarly, the threads that have been tied off have been done so rather clumsily (presumably in a rush to set things up for Tarmon Gai'don which has a looming presence throughout this book), and many characters are just plain ignored.

Site Update: Added the google sitemap module yesterday - looks pretty nifty, except I'm not too sure that it's handling node type priorities very well - not sure yet.

I'm also working on my first Drupal module, and intend to perhaps write a walk-through-or-two that outlines the basics of module writing. The online docs are (as is the norm with Drupal) just plain shoddy.

-K

If (like I was today) you're stuck with a Drupal site with Clean URLs enabled but mod_rewrite disabled, here's how you disable it via the database [Afaik there's no way to do this from Drupal itself, as you just can't login and navigate the site as all the URLs are clean URLs.. quite the catch-22 :P]:

Navigate to the variables table your DB, and view its contents sorted by the name field. The three rows that concern us are:
cache s:1:"1";
clean_url s:1:"1";
clean_url_ok i:1;

All three are stored in serialised form [as strings]. Cache will be set to 1 only if you have caching on, the same for clean_url. Edit each row so that the end result is as follows:

I've just been re-reading the Vorkosigan series - for my and everybody elses reference:

Reading (and chronological) order for Lois McMaster-Bujold's addictive Vorkosigan series:

• Falling Free
• Shards of Honor
• Barrayar
• The Warrior's Apprentice
• The Vor Game
• Mountains Of Mourning (short story - see below)
• Ethan Of Athos
• Labyrinth (short story - see below)
• Cetaganda
• Brothers In Arms
• Borders Of Infinity - 3 short stories
  

Firefox seems to be finally getting it's act together with the next version of it's browser - codenamed "Deer Park". I am a content user of the now free (!) Opera browser, and have always look down my proboscis at anyone claiming that FF is a better/more user friendly browser. But now, it appears I will be hard pressed to do so :P

The notable improvements (that have taken care of some of my pet peeves) that I've noticed are:

• Page based error messages : All error messages are displayed in the browser page rather than with a popup dialog.

Symphony X have to be the most unglamourous metal band in the world. They have about the same amount of stage presence as .. er .. Manmohan Singh :P Excellent excellent band though and vastly under rated. But hopefully, Gigantour garnered them a little attention and a host of new fans.

Just wanted to get that off my chest ;)
-K

..if I ever lay my hands on the guys behind the IRCTC website, there is a very highly probably likelihood that I will defenestrate the whole incompetent lot of them preferably from which ever train they put me on..

Morons.

-K
P.S sorry.. just had to vent a little there.. :P