doshiamit.net » Internet

Rediff Comments and Poes Law

doshiamit — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:10:54 +0000

Amit Verma posts on the Shiney Ahuja situation, and at the end points readers to some rediff.com comments. Hers is the comment in question:

i thoughted that he is a good persun and his name telling that he is shiney persun. All pepuls are spradening baddy things about him. No oned talkied about shakeete kapeur and guldshand geiver. Why?

I absolutely took the comment at face value but went down a little further and found another one by the same user:

how i killing you with simpule engleesh? are you goned maddy ? to killed you need guned, kniefe, hamur, stoned. howe simpule engleesh killed you?

As soon as I read this it clicked. Poes Law. Its an old internet rule that states:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.

I think we need to have a rediff commenter specific version of this law. On reading rediff comments I think we can simplify the law as well:

It is IMPOSSIBLE to recognize whether or not rediff comments are parody.

I think we should name it the Bala law in honor of Ajit Balakrishnan without whom we would not be blessed.

And for anyone who is willing to try and figure out if the above commenter is for real check out Halakus Comment Page.

Brief review of Vir Sanghvis new site

doshiamit — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 03:42:59 +0000

Ive been a big fan of Vir Sanghvis writing for years, and am glad to see he is one of the first prominent Indian Journos to dip their feet on the web.

However I am also terribly disappointed in the technology of the site, not the content but the technology. I am no open source zealot, most of the work our company does has Microsoft technologies behind it and I’m a big fan of the .NET platform in general. However I do also believe that every job has the right tool, and in this case by using a .NET based CMS Vir Sanghvi has done himself a disservice. Based on the sites content an implementation of WordPress or Joomla would have been much easier(and dare I say much less expensive), and provided the content in a far superior way.

Some specific problems:

1. The RSS feed is just wrong. The data in the feed has nothing to do with the page linked to.

2. The next page link uses an AJAX control that does not take you to the top of the next page.

3. The form for Lets Talk does not work.

Lets hope these are teething issues, but my experience has been that for content focused sites Open Source CMS’s do a better job.

What the ….???

doshiamit — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 02:52:57 +0000

I saw a medianama post about internet penetration in India. Nikhil has some good analysis but I disagreed with one point.

Percentage growth: In percentage terms, Maharashtra grew the least, followed by Delhi and Tamil Nadu, primarily because of the large subscriber base.

I think growth in Maharashtra lags because of pricing. An unlimited 256K connections going to cost you close to a Thousand bucks. I pay VSNL about 1100. My cable guy offers me something for 800 but I promised never to use IN Cable for internet ever again an I intend to follow through on that. MTNL offers one for 2500. I just thought I would compare prices between MTNL Mumbai and MTNL Delhi and was shocked. I knew there was a price difference but this is ridiculous.

Mumbai:

Thats Rs. 2500 for a 256K, 4500 for a 512K

Compared to Delhi:

Thats Rs. 599 for a 256K and 1299 for a 512K. Thats half the price for twice the bandwidth.

Are you fucking kidding me? Can anyone come up with a logical reason for why thi might be the case?

The Importance and Scarcity of Water

doshiamit — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 02:53:49 +0000

THIRST

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: design crisis)

SlideShare does a contest for the best slideshows created. This one won first prize this year. Thought provoking.

Take a look at some of the other winners

Lightning in Slow Motion

doshiamit — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:19:26 +0000

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This just looks so cool.

Is this Schadenfreude?

doshiamit — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:21:41 +0000

I’m a big fan of Scrabulous the facebook application. Probably have 6-7 games going at any given time. Unfortunately for the Agarwala brothers, who developed it, they got sued by Hasbro for violation of their copyright on Scrabble. Real who has the rights in Europe wants to work something out, but not Hasbro who sued to shut them down. This has led to a circumstance where the game is not available in the US and Canada, but is all over the rest of the world.

I think what I feel now can only been described as schadenfreude. I am taking delight in geographical restrictions on content finally being applied to people in the US, instead of the rest of the world like it usually is. This has been something that’s annoyed me for years. The first time I encountered it was when I wanted to find out more about the Penn and Teller show Bullshit. This was years ago back in 2003, when I first heard the show was coming out, and they are a lot more international user friendly now. But while they have gotten better buying digital goods has gotten a lot tougher. I like to buy stuff, pay for stuff online all the time, but as of right now it seems like Audible is the only company selling digital media who wants my money. I miss allofmp3.com. Not Apple. not Amazon, none of the TV networks, if I want something like Heroes, or House my only choice is to Pirate it.

Ive been collecting screenshots of messages where I cant see content that Im looking for. Some are more egregious than others(Im looking at you NBC), but they all annoy me. Here’s a slide show.

Surface is awesome

doshiamit — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:48:49 +0000

Microsoft Surface is a new interface that Microsoft has developed. Its initially going to be sold to large customers like T Mobile and Sheraton Hotels, but it looks like the Minority Report future is not far. Or at least not that far.

This is from CES 2008

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From a Popular Mechanics feature

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Microsoft Promo video

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This is inventive spam

doshiamit — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 09:11:07 +0000

I got a message in my gmail, and I thought it looked like spam. But it was from a name Ive been expecting something from for the last few days. I opened it and realised that it was spam, but saw how it was a different kind of spam. Instead of a link in the email to a dodgy website, this one has a link to Google.

This is the Search Result Page

Iv never seen anything like this before. I hate when spammers get clever.

I couldnt agree more

doshiamit — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 07:08:20 +0000

I hate dancing more than I can possibly explain. I hate doing it myself, which I can’t anyway, but I loathe and resent the necessity to try. I hate watching other people do it. I hate the way it breaks up conversation. I hate the slovenly mixture of sexual exhibitionism, strutting contempt and repellent narcissism that it involves. I hate it when it is formless, meaningless bopping and I hate it (if anything even more) when it is formal and choreographed into genres like ballroom or schooled disco. Those cavortings are so embarrassing and dreadful as to force my hand to my mouth.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry, the funniest man alive, has started podcasting. The first one was ok, but this is an excerpt from the second one, and it is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.

Is friendfeed what twitter should be?

doshiamit — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 03:35:02 +0000

I read about some of the drama about friendfeed over the last couple of days and thought id try it out.

While playing with it I started realising that what friendfeed really would be awesome as a feature for twitter. Right now its the other way around, twitter is a feature on friend feed. If you could create a friendfeed client like snitter, wouldn’t that pretty much eliminate the need for twitter for a lot of people?

I dont think you can send messages to twitter using friendfeed as of right now, but that shouldn’t be too difficult to to do. But once that functionality is in their, twitter becomes superfluous to a lot of people.