The console that burns

In part on a friend’s insistence, I bought the Xbox 360 console a little less than six months ago. I knew before buying it that the Xbox 360 suffers from a scary problem that is notorious by the name of “the red ring of death.” If your Xbox console is unlucky to have the red [...]

Saved on a technicality

If your god is forever forgiving, provided that you bow only before him and consider him unparalleled, unchallenged, and single, would you indulge in petty (and non-trivial but non-cardinal) sins and deeds on the belief that at the end of your day you will be forgiven if you so seek forgiveness for your sins from [...]

Are Google Mail and Chat becoming an annoyance?

Is Google Mail faltering under its load?
Its webmail user experience appears to be degrading with respect to response times. It becomes appallingly slow often. I despise webmail interfaces, and therefore much prefer to use IMAP4 (or POP3). I have been content with Google Mail’s IMPA4 access until recently when I started to face a class [...]

Of logic and conscience!

Inspired by The Value of Logic in Pratical Life, by JayWalker, I decided to rant about logic.
Logic, in practical life, is, more often than not, what we want it to be. As Taleb underlines repeatedly in his book, The Black Swan, people tend to only look for instances that corroborate what they want to believe [...]

Switching over to Wi-Tribe WiMAX Broadband service

Last week, I hastily switched Internet service provider to Wi-Tribe. They are new in town, and provide Wireless Broadband Internet through the WiMAX technology.
Faithful readers may remember that I had already been using Wireless Broadband Internet services from Wateen Telecom. They also offer a similar, which I had been using, WiMAX service.
I switched [...]

Omelette paratha, and cold coffee

Omelette paratha, and cold coffee.
Not a perfect combination of drink to go with the snack, but nonetheless pleasingly savoury.
I was sitting next to a table occupied by three young guys dressed resplendently in haute kameez and kurta. They were conversing in Sindhi. I thought I had heard them talk more about politics than anything else, [...]

Creating click-able hyper-links in CSV files programmatically

If you are programmatically creating CSV files intended for Microsoft Excel users, and cannot figure out how to make URL data in the CSV files behave like click-able hyper-links for your users, this tip is for you.
There is a special format in which URLs should be formatted, that is used by a number of [...]

Resize images with Preview on Mac OS X

Thinking that there’s no way built into Mac OS X to resize images, I have been for a long time hunting down free third-party image resize applications. What I did not know and could not find until today is that the Preview application, which is used to preview images by default on Mac OS X, [...]

Short and useless commit messages

I have been guilty of writing short, pointless, and completely useless commit messages [before]. Stoked by a recent thread on StackOverflow about the worst commit message that one has ever authored, I looked into the commit log for a project I have been working on and subsequently maintaining for the last one year. I had [...]

Debugging Django applications!

When developing Django applications, there can be many times when you would want to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. You may want to know, for example, why the control isn’t falling into a certain block of code, what values are being returned to the view from the browser or test client, [...]