Who roasted George W. this weekend? The journalist with the most balls!

Atleast CC has the guts to celebrate this and not take it out on Stephen.

Technorati Tags: interesting, humor, stephen colbert

I spent today scanning old photos from my school and BITSian life. I have only finished about 65 or so photos and have hundreds more to go. I seem to have taken a lot of photos (or had a lot of photos taken of me) before buying a digital camera.

I put up some of the scanned photos on Flickr, my first use of Flickr also. With just 28 photos, I have completed almost half of my monthly upload quota on flickr. The quality of the scans is not great, but it is sufficient for me.

In all this time, I had gotten used to certain things that Gnus did and did really well:

• Threading: Mail and usenet post threading was very critical to my functionality. I could ignore entire threads and run through messages much faster this way. It really helped me deal with the amount of information that was available in mailing lists and usenet posts.
• Scoring: I used adaptive scoring in Gnus. This was just too perfect for words to describe. Based on this scoring pattern and my reading pattern, Gnus really helped me skip topics I was not interested in and helped me skip authors whose rantings I no longer wanted to read. It also allowed me to change my mind about a topic or an author, all without editing any .killfiles or any other mechanism. I had set it up this way:

          (setq gnus-default-adaptive-score-alist
           '((gnus-unread-mark)
             (gnus-ticked-mark (from 4))
             (gnus-dormant-mark (from 5))
             (gnus-del-mark (subject -4))
             (gnus-read-mark (from 1) (subject 2))
             (gnus-expirable-mark (from 0) (subject -1))
             (gnus-killed-mark (from -1) (subject -3))
             (gnus-kill-file-mark)
             (gnus-ancient-mark)
             (gnus-low-score-mark)
             (gnus-catchup-mark (subject -4) (from -1))
             ))

• Fiters: I used nnmail-split-fancy to move mail messages to different “folders.” It was so much easier to create rules for nnmail-split-fancy and you can do it in really creative ways. You can filter based on anything you wanted, not just some canned To, Cc, To or Cc, Subject and From. You can split on any header you wanted, any body you wanted, whatever suited your fancy. Writing rules were also easy, once you understood the tiniest bit about XEmacs’ regexps.
• Saving body of message or the entire message or the attachment, to different folders, files, etc were really simple. A few keystrokes and you were done. But then anything could be done in a few keystrokes. And if you have already set up a few regexps in the right places, the defaults offered to you when trying to save would be correct.
• Scripting: In recent years, scriptability is what seems to separate various programs. Whether it is using shell scripts, AppleScripts, Python, whatever. But Emacs was the grandfather of all scriptable programs. Write your own whatever! Heck, in what other program can you actually emulate your biggest competitor? (Yes, I am sure there are some other programs which can emulate their competitors, but this is a rhetorical question, so please don’t try to answer it. Thanks). You want to write your own filtering system for Gnus, go ahead! Whatever you want. Have it your way! ™
• Citing and replying with context: Supercite and Gnus together provide the most joyous environment for replying to mails. You can cite any which way you want (including one of your own design! See previous point), pick the right context for your reply and make sure your reader really understands which part of his mail you are presenting as evidence to prove that he is an idiot. Citing the right part of a mail was considered the right thing to do. You never ever top post. And supercite just made it so easy to do that. It would realign your paragraphs correctly and add the right prefixes to the original mail, including different prefixes for different authors, if you have set it up that way.

I have not even touched on features I have not used, such as the various pseudo mail backends (nndir nnslashdot, etc) and a whole load of other things.

In 2002, my then company moved us all to Exchange and Outlook for mail. That was a very fascinating experience for me. The fact that the mailer did not thread mails was such a shock to my system. I had been used to threaded mails since atleast 1998 or so and I didn’t realize that other mailers did not have that capability. How was such a thing even possible? In 2002? Apple made such a big deal of adding threading to Mail.app in 2003. People were going on record saying things like “threading is cool!” and I looked at them like Sylvester Stallone looks at people in the future in Demolition Man: welcome to the past!

The other primary failing of all these other programs is the reply citing: they all suck! If the mail you are replying to has long lines (very close to 80 chars per line), then adding a prefix to them will push the final word into the next line. Now that next line will either NOT have the reply prefix; or it will have a reply prefix but it will not be merged into it’s next line, and thus you will have a cited line that has only one word in it. What supercite would have done is to merge that last word into the next line and made it into a proper paragraph, as it was meant to be. Here is an example of one such bad reply citing:

In the above image, the line beginning with “fixed and” should have been merged with the line that says “that’s a kernel issue.” Or atleast it should have been given a reply prefix. But neither happened in this case. And this is in 2005!

The current crop of graphical mailers, such as Mail.app, Thunderbird, Outlook, etc, etc, have only some of the features that Gnus had in 1998 and they dont even do that job well. Accurate mail threading is still black magic to Outlook. I have a Mac nowadays and I am trying to get used to Mail.app, with the idea that I should start to use a real graphical mailer in 2006. Mail.app has some cool animation when you open and close a mail thread, but it still doesn’t have any sort of adaptive scoring that Gnus had in 1998. Neither do any of the other mailers. I find it painful now to subscribe to high-volume mailing lists because I am not able to deal with all that information in any meaningful way without manually performing multiple tasks per mail to simulate scoring. Of course, scriptability of any application comes nowhere close to what can be accomplished with Emacs, but this is not something I would hold against any application. Emacs is only an editor by chance; at it’s base it is a lisp interpreter that just happens to have some minor specialization for editing. I have never used mailers like Mutt, so I dont know what they are capable of. But Mutt can only be called graphical, if you consider running emacs -nw as running a GUI application.

My next company let us use Thunderbird, so I tried that for some time. It was definitely much better than Outlook, but still nowhere close to Gnus. Now at my current company, I am back to having to use Outlook (it is actually much worse now since I also have to use Windows for development; thank God for Cygwin). I have now switched my personal mail exclusively to Gmail, just for the mobility that it offers me, and I have given up on a decent desktop mailer client. Nowadays, I just top-post in work mail, because it is too much work to be a good netizen. The tools no longer help in being a good netizen.

Is this the future of all software, where as time goes on, more importance is given to graphical whiz-bang but useful features keep dropping out. I struggle to find IDEs that offer the same kind of capabilities that (X)Emacs did long ago. To be fair, IDEs have much improved in certain areas like intellisense, that (X)Emacs still lacks. But in fundamental scriptability (X)Emacs and Vim rule the roost. And these are 30 year old programs! I long for that day in the future when I can get a mailer with Gnus-like functionality with whiz-bang graphics as in Mail.app, that is well integrated into the system (use AddressBook for addresses, etc). Maybe flying cars will be here sooner.

Technorati Tags: emacs, gnus, osx, xemacs, thunderbird

I didnt know anything about the series itself, and only heard of The Office as being a very popular American tv show. Aswini added Series 1 to the netflix queue and I watched it without any sort of idea of what I was going to see. And man, was I amazed at it! I had to get the second series (the BBC calls them series; the American equivalent would be season) and the Christmas special.

The expressions made by David Brent are just really funny, like for instance, the way he points at the toy monkey (in episodes 1 of both series 1 and 2). His “motivational” speeches to his staff, the way he reinterprets events to show himself in a really good light, all just really funny. The music during the final titles is also nice.

I hope the American version is just as good.

Technorati Tags: interesting, tv

Jason Kottke points to an article that describes one of the newest mashup sites that should open business soon, called FlySpy.com. I am really keen to see a website that provides the service that Jason himself describes. It would definitely help plan our vacation travels also.

Friday night was fun. Vatsa was meeting up with a few other MBA bloggers at the Latin American Club in the Mission, and Kripa and I piled on with him. After all, how can one not want to go to a good drinking party, even if one has nothing to do with the theme of the party. It was an interesting experience for me personally. I have always read accounts of bloggers meeting each other after long periods of knowing each other electronically, but I had not had such an experience myself. Until now! The introductions went thusly:

“What is your blog/pen name?”

“You do have a blog, dont you?”

“Boooooooooooo.”

The group consisted of … errr.. well, they all had alter egos, like Bob Parr and the Mr. Incredible. There was taketwobskool, foobarme, marina, sorebrek, i_will_make_it, brownoski, vatsa of course, and other friendly bloggers whose names escape me now, thanks to all the alcohol of that day. There was so much drinking that, in the end, the other patrons of the establishment stopped drinking and encouraged us to make fools of ourselves. As taketwobskool puts it, we were like fraternity boys, thumping tables and chanting “drink, drink.” And birthday-girl Kripa enjoyed her tequila-spiked beer a lot!

Then we went to a nice little taqueria, where the food was awesome. I am told this area has some of the best Mexican restaurants and I agree. At the taqueria, Kripa called one of the bloggers as ..erm.. a character from a “Will Smith Alien Movie”. We stayed there until we were asked to leave and then went to another bar for more refreshing alcohol. By this time though, some of the folks had left, as it was past mid night and the rest of us decided to call it a night too. It was a fun night and I hope I get to attend one more blogger meetup.

Saturday was spent lounging around in The House That Google Provides. Breakfast at Sears Fine Food was really awesome. A breakfast of eggs and mini-pancakes provided enough sugar to walk up and down the hills of the city. Sears was quite a find. We were just wandering around, trying to find a place to eat and we saw this smallish looking place and decided to go there. On the inside, it looks quite different, like a posh hotel lobby. There are framed pictures and news articles describing a 103 year old man who worked as a maitre d’ for this place, and other fascinating bits of information. Some time later, we were approached by a lady who told us that they have tours of the city and if we had any questions about touring the city, we could get their help. I wish other restaurants did things like this.

Another good place to eat was the Chaat Cafe, opposite Kripa’s lodgings, where we had dinner saturday night and lunch on sunday. The place had enough variety to support two straight meals there. Saturday night was spent watching The Sixth Day on cable and drinking Ouzo. Kripa wanted to sleep, while Vatsa and I wanted to go out somewhere but neither of us felt like getting out of the sofa. Then sunday came around, I got my parking ticket and we had to split up.

In all it was a fun weekend.