I have been struggling to understand a Concept about something at the work for the last 3 days. Initially, when I started, it was all black.. till a few moments ago it was still black hole (even though I had been filling a few pages drawing boxes and arrows while trying to understand it).. and then suddenly the blackness dissolved as I was hit by enlightenment. The Concept made perfect sense now. It is the moments like this that make the lighthouses of the life - beacons of hope, that I am not dull .

Thought for the day - to reach a particular point of thought, where you have a clear picture of the thing, you have to struggle through hours of working through cobwebs misunderstanding and pitfalls.

Update: Enlightenment followed by nice dinner and icecream is much better

I have added the "internet keywords" feature to the "2-in-1" search. If you now type "news India", it will do a search on both Google and Yahoo news. There are keywords for image and mysql too. Thinking of adding a "meme" keyword, which will search the Technorati and feedster search engines.

The code for this lies here and is in public domain.

One of my colleagues pointed out that my bio page was pointing to "the other search engine" . When I was searching for a method to compare the results of both the search engines, I came across this comparison site. Which in turn prompted me to write something similar to it. Now all the mentions of the other search engine are gone. Instead I now have my own 2 in 1 search engine. The code for this lies here (of course, the code is in public domain). I am thinking of adding a few more hacks into it (like Internet keywords) and making it into my home page. Hack idea one - add a keyword "news" and then instead of going to search.yahoo.com and google.com, go to news.yahoo.com and news.google.com .

While writing the "2 in 1" I also found out that my grasp of frames was very weak . The other thing I found was that you could download the HTML specs as a zipped file, stick it in the documentroot of your webserver and you have the HTML spec at easy reach. Very well written document with nice and clear examples.

A few days back, we (Lig and me) were able to put up the first version of the PHP Community Gazette online. There are quite a few minor things we had overlooked, which we will rectify in the second edition. If you have some feedback, please leave a comment here. We will have a mailing list to get the reader's feedback soon.

I have been thinking about what is meant by "Patriotism". Loosely defined, a patriot is someone who loves his country. However, let me dig a bit deeper into this definition. What does one mean by the "country" ? Does it refer to all the people living in the country ? Or does it refer to the geography of the country ? Most people think of patriotism as loyalty to the government. Most would say, it means loyalty to the constitution ? But how can anyone be loyal to a bunch of people you have hardly met or to a piece of paper ?

The reason for my questioning what patriotism is arose from a flame-war on some mailing list I am on. This particular list has been created for discussing e-governance issues. However, more often than not, people end up calling each other corrupt, money-minded (personally, I do not think there is anything wrong in making money) or accusing each other of trying to advance his own personal agenda. I am sick of it. At the drop of a hat, each one of them will swear that he is a patriot, but I doubt if anyone of them will be able to define patriotism to me.

I think Patriotism is one of those words which have been politically abused for a long time. It has now become a loaded word, anyone who says he does not like something about his country, might very easily be labelled as "unpatriotic". In worst case scenario he might even get hauled off to the jail on charges of treason. Personally, I am quite unpatriotic. I find it hard to show my show my loyalty to the machinery which is good at sucking up money (taxes) but giving back nothing in return. I even find it hard to believe in the constitution of India i.e. the words of our founding fathers. Sometimes I think Gandhi and Bhagat Singh were fighting not out of patriotism, but for their right to free speech and against injustice. Perhaps the title of a "just and thinking man" would be more apt for him. I am still confused whether saying someone a patriot is a compliment or a veiled way of calling him a unthinking follower.

This is superb. Yahoo! has come out with a Yahoo! Employee Blog Guidelines. This goes to reaffirm my belief that I am not working for a company which is run by PHBs. Please contrast the behaviour of Yahoo! with the another well known company we all know of which had fired one of its employees for blogging.