Anil Gulecha’s Musings

A little truth.. priceless.

Above captured at the FOSS.in conference 08. Coming a little late though.

Amit Verma has posted an *excellent* entry on India in 2007. I highly recommend adding his feed into your reader.

Go read WTF 2007!

He ends with:

Have a great WTF 2008!

I don’t know if thats funny or scary. Notwithstanding, heres wishing this blog’s readers a happy new year! (yeah, both of you :p)

[The below article appeared in the Times Of India, dt 12-12-07 in the extra edition. It was, however, modified and not posted in it's entirety, and few sentences were reworded that made my stance on the subject of Ayurveda and Yoga look a little lenient. In the future, I will note that any modifications to my articles need my review. Below is the article as I actually wrote it]

Open Letter: Challenges of Science

Dear Parents and Teachers,

As recent events have shown, science is under attack by superstition, and seems to be losing. Television has many campaigns that extol the virtues of various methods and objects without any verifiable evidence. Even more disheartening is that there is no active movement against these.

I would thus like to shed a little light into the future we are entering. The world is being fully interconnected and Indian children will interact with people around he world. A group’s intellectual powers are measured based on how rational their view of the world is. That is sadly not the future Indian children will thrive in.

Given the dominance of superstition and dogma in the country, the proponents of science have an uphill battle at hand. The first step would be to eradicate superstitious beliefs from the minds of it’s citizens. A seemingly scientific idea that is not based on any rational and verifiable studies is known as pseudo-science.

Pseudo science in India includes Astrology, Palmistry, Mind-reading, Ayurveda, many types of Yoga, Vaastu Shastra, Homeopathy, Chiropractic treatments, Lucky gemstones and numbers, Rudraksh necklace, etc. At best these ideas will waste time and money of it’s pursuers and at worst can cause bodily harm due to negligence of other truly scientific methods that would’ve worked. When any of the above has worked, it is due to plain chance, placebo effect or by processes that are understood by science.

Minds seemingly grow immune to change of ideas with age. Thus, emphasis has to be given to educating children on science and instill critical thinking into their bloodstream. This is ensure that the upcoming generation will be more open to ideas than the current. With this goal, we need to drive nation wide programs to spread the word of science. I’m not experienced enough to say what these could be, but there are many who could. Those in power need to encourage and those who promote science and take action against fraudulent practitioners of pseudo-science.

I hope we can look into a future where dogmatic beliefs would make way for rationality. Into a future where we would prefer reason over authority. If there’s a challenge we need to overcome, this is one.

In the flashy age of Web 2.0, a browser has evolved to be an entire platform in itself. Makes sense that the extension community of Firefox thrives. I’ve been working on some session persistence stuff on Opensolaris, and the first thing I required a liveCD/USB to support was firefox addons. So without further delay below are a list of extensions you cant live without.

1. DownThemAll : The age of Flashget/got is over. DownThemAll supports suspend/resume, multipart download, and sequence of files using regex like syntax.
2. Noscript : New Javascript and XSS vulnerabilities and are discovered everyday. Get noscript and save on dumb nags and bandwidth. (Note however that this is still for users with a technical bent of mind.. you’d be constantly switching it on/off for dumbly created sites.
3. AdBlockPlus : No more ads! Anywhere..
4. Download Statusbar : This improves upon the default download manager of firefox by making the download dialog non-intrusive. (Firefox developers: this need to be a part of Firefox by default.)
5. Greasemonkey : Play around with the looks of webpages using the hundreds of pre-written scripts. (Again, this is for the techy users.)
6. FireFTP : Nothing like an intuitive, small and cross platform FTP browser. This is a must have.
7. Sameplace : A jabber IM implementation. Chat using your jabber (and gTalk) account right from Firefox.

Are you viewing this from another browser? Why not give Firefox a try?