Wednesday, December 16, 2015
Saturday, December 12, 2015
Climate change is Real
Chennai is recovering now. For two weeks, the city had been hit by the heaviest rainfall it had seen in a hundred years. And this was enough to bring it down. Not only was the city flooded, but it was also totally cut off from the rest of the nation. And while the state government itself failed miserably to handle the crisis, it was the common people, the citizens, who handled the crisis and saw the city through. The deluge was proof enough that climate is changing.
India is witnessing multiple migrations that are unprecedented in its history. Millions are moving into literacy, similarly staggering numbers are migrating out of poverty and malnourishment, thousands are migrating to the IT world, and several millions are moving to urban centres.Blaming excessive rain or unauthorised construction for the latest misery is a very lazy analysis, ignoring the significant contribution of government institutions and political masters to the mismanagement of Chennai, and other cities. The adverse role played by them in creating havoc has grave security implications for the country at various levels.
Further North, another city, the capital New Delhi is putting together a plan to control its own ridiculous pollution levels. From 2016, Delhi will implement a new rule to make sure private cars with odd and even number registration numbers get to drive in the city on alternate days. On one hand this decision is now being ridiculed on social media , logic dictates that right now any plan is a good plan. The time to think up and come up with a grand plan is long gone, and even the courts are getting in line to support the government move, dismissing PILs against the new law.
I chanced upon this website which tracks air pollution levels in cities around the world: plumelabs. They measure air pollution from agencies of countries and collate them all.
Check out Chennai's pollution levels in real time.
And my own city of Bangalore is far better than Delhi.
But what surprised me was that most cities in developed countries were much better off than us. Check out New York.
Friday, December 11, 2015
Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer into Open Live
Wednesday, December 9, 2015
Scream Queens
On hindsight, the big reveal at the end of Scream Queens revealing Hester to be the brains of the operation, was a obvious. The identities of the killers in “Scream Queens” haven’t really mattered since about the third episode, when it became clear that the show was mostly interested in milking caricatures and seeing how many pop-culture references it could cram into every hour. Fans of the TV show have long had Hester as prime suspect, because that character was completely crazy. But now it should have been more obvious. Because of her casting. Lea Michaels was the star of Ryan Murphy's previous TV show Glee, so casting her in a less important role on Scream Queens was the biggest clue that her role was more than just a bystander.
While the Bathtub Babies and Pete had a clear motive — destroying Kappa and Greek life because of what happened to their mother — the crimes don't make any sense now. Why kill Shondell, the Pizza Guy, and Coney the new mascot? How does that exact revenge? Why kill the Kappa pledges? As outcasts, wouldn't they be the ones to make Kappa a better place? And why kill Chanel No. 2, but none of the other Chanels?
If vengeance were really the motive, why didn't they go after Dean Munsch? She was the one person still alive and on-campus the night their mother died in the bathtub. Why let her live? That doesn't make any sense either. How could they feel any real satisfaction when the one person literally responsible for the cover-up is still alive? Dean Munsch can still be a scourge to feminism everywhere, especially now that she still knows Hester is the killer. Also, wouldn't Hester be mad that Pete killed Boone? Wouldn't she have gone after him?
For me, the real surprise was that Pete was in on the killings. He seemed so honest and committed to finding the truth behind the devils. That was awesome writing.
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer into Open Live Writer
Yeaah !!! This is probably the best news I have head from Microsoft this year.Microsoft Open Sources and Forks Windows Live Writer into Open Live Writer. The latest binary installable can be downloaded now and the project is now on GitHub.
The product that became Live Writer was originally created by a small, super-talented team of engineers including JJ Allaire, Joe Cheng, Charles Teague, and Spike Washburn. The team was acquired by Microsoft in 2006 and organized with the Spaces team. Becky Pezely joined the team and over time, the team grew and shipped many popular releases of Windows Live Writer.
As Microsoft was planning for the version of Windows Live that would coincide with Windows 8 operating system release, the teams that built the Windows Live client apps for Windows were encouraged to focus on building a smaller set of Windows 8 apps designed to work well with both traditional PC input mechanisms and touch. With the rise of micro-blogging platforms and other forms of sharing, eventually this team decided to conclude their work on Windows Live Writer with Windows Live Writer 2012.
Even though there was no active development, Windows Live Writer continued to be a favorite tool of a passionate community of Windows PC users for authoring, editing, and publishing blog posts. Data from WordPress.com at the time suggested that Open Live Writer (even two years after active development ended) was the #1 app for authoring a blog post to WordPress.com from a Windows PC.
A few employees at Microsoft took an interest in reviving Live Writer as an open source project in their spare time. By January 2015, a group of about a half-dozen engineers interested in spending some of their volunteer time to help release an updated version of Live Writer had found each other and began work on getting this open source fork of Live Writer formed and ready to ship. In December 2015 Microsoft donated the code to the .NET Foundation and this passionate group of volunteer engineers rapidly assembled the first open source version.