lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

RFC 1984 is Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) Statement on Cryptographic Technology and the Internet.

The below is not my writing. I picked it from the comments left at " The Importance of Having Friends Who Disagree".

Somethings I have observed,which are indirectly related to topic (well more to the topic of ideas really) are:

• Now a days, more than ever, even if you implement an idea/prototype which you do not yourself believe in much or consider low-impact; people may find it interesting and find out a new way of using than what you could not even think. Somethings become popular just like that:(. (This is not to suggest that popularity is necessarily a measure of cool ideas)
• It is difficult generally in practice for people to reject an "new" idea which is implemented (tangible) and available to play with; than an idea presented in theory/verbally. I mean both can get rejected, but it relatively takes greater time to reject the former than latter unless someone has implemented very badly(in which case even a good idea can get rejected quickly).
• A good measure of finding a person which you mention, quickly, is how fast and right that person understands the concept of "po". After explaining "po", from the other persons reaction, you can make out how close he is to the perfect guy. I have seen that some guys do not bothered to listen; then there are those who nod their head and say they understood ; but the closest are those who just start building upon an idea from where you left or branch out from it or start another path. Basically, if idea has any inspiration/possibility they seek before giving it up immediately. It means they give due consideration before judging it black or white. Most of the times I have seen that both people involved come out with something slightly or completely different than the original.
• Some people develop "disagreement" as a coolness trait, assuming it to be a characteristic of an "independent thinker". They generally are successful in drawing a lot of attention. It is in my opinion, important to cross-check them, by looking at their cool ideas/reasons/explanations carefully and having your own opinion about it. It is sometimes easy to fall in the trap of pseudo-disagreement friends too:)

Did Shakespeare inspire Douglas Adams for the answer 42?

Take thou this vial, being then in bed,
And this distilled liquor drink thou off;
When presently through all thy veins shall run
A cold and drowsy humour, for no pulse
Shall keep his native progress, but surcease:
No warmth, no breath, shall testify thou livest;
The roses in thy lips and cheeks shall fade
To paly ashes, thy eyes' windows fall,
Like death, when he shuts up the day of life;
Each part, deprived of supple government,
Shall, stiff and stark and cold, appear like death:
And in this borrow'd likeness of shrunk death
Thou shalt continue
two and forty hours,
And then awake as from a pleasant sleep.
— Shakespeare, Act 4, Scene 1.
          FRIAR LAURENCE gives Juliet the vial

The problem with MediaWiki is not the lack of documentation, but the lack of well organized documentation. Here is a useful bit of information I found out. Suppose you want to change the sidebar that appears in the MediaWiki site (the one of the left, which has some navigation links in it). You can do that by going to the MediaWiki:Sidebar page i.e. suppose that your wiki is installed on http://example.org, then your sidebar will be accessiable by going to http://example.org/index.php/MediaWiki:Sidebar . To edit that page, you have to be logged in as a WikiSysop

Last week, I had gone to GNUnify, a conference organized by Symbiosis(SICSR), Pune. I had spoken on webservices together with Gopalv and Premshree.

An interesting event we organized was a Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting on "Why you should be a FOSS programmer" that we had with the students there. My first observation during the BoF was that most of the students had no idea what FOSS is. One of them actually thought that FOSS was a programming language. Most of them had been absolutely brain washed by MS propaganda or maybe they had been brainwashed by their teachers. Not may of them had used any of the P languages (Perl, PHP, Python). I asked them this question - "will you like to work for Yahoo!, Google or Amazon or will you like to work for another IT sweat shop? If you want to work with the big names, then you have to know the P languages". Gopalv, Premshree, Pankaj and Philip spoke about their respective projects, how they had gotten into free software and how it had helped them in getting jobs. Gopalv pointed out how our education system is flawed when it comes to exams and assignments. In a class, you have to beat the others to be called a achiever. In the real world, you have to work with others to come up with something good. Working with FOSS allows you to collaborate with others and have a taste of how things work in the real world.

Our main aim in organizing this BoF was to get even 2 students interested in FOSS. Sadly, I am sure we failed to do that . However, we told the students about the mailing lists and irc channels that they could use to find help. I hope some of them eventually turn up there.

Danese was one of the speakers in this conference and she gave a good presentation on how to get into open source. Answering the audience questions on how to make money with Open Source, she said that Open Source allows you to make money by offering services, and India understands the service model well. This rankled me quite a bit. There aer ways to make money by selling FOSS products too - MySQL and SugarCRM being the prime examples. However, in India, you don't have any companies which make products. Lots of companies outsource their development work here, but except Tally (a closed source accounting software), I don;t know of any Indian companies making products. I am not sure why this is the way things are - one reason might be that product development is inherently a risky business. On the other hand, the payoff from a product is quite high.

I also met a bunch of people whom I knew only in the online world. We went to this amazing restaurant called "Horn OK Please". Even though we had to wait a bit to get the tables, it was really worth it. If you are in Pune, try out that restaurant.

All in all, I will say that this experience was really good. The students did excellent work in organizing the event, though I would have been happier if they participated in the event instead of just being a volunteer in it.

AOL, Yahoo and Goodmail: Taxing Your Email for Fun and Profit

The justification is that if people have to pay to send email, they won't send junk email. Apparently AOL and Yahoo believe that if we "tax" speech then only desirable speech happens. We all know how well that works for postal mail — that's why no one gets any "free" AOL starter disks, right?

That is all I have to say about this.

Update : Yahoo! provides some clarification about their plans about this. They plan to use the Goodmail system for "transactional" email messages such as bank statements and order receipts only