Wadiblog

The Obama campaign continues to be the most tech-savvy ever. Or, to be more accurate, it is very much the first–2nd/3rd, actually, if you count Dean and Ron Paul–Open Source campaign. I still haven\’t been able to acutually use it, but here\’s a sceen dump of the Obama iPhone app.

I am not sure I completely agree with, or endorse the thought, but this bears quoting. It’s something Nowsherwan Yasin said on a mailing list this morning about the whole Zardari hits on Palin brouhaha (in case you’ve not followed it, check out the post and discussion Teeth Maestro’s blog here.):

Although I agree that such statements are inappropriate in foreign relations, I can’t help but see an unintentional advantage (of sorts) of Pakistani chauvinism in dealing with such a character. The politically correct, hidden misogyny of the American politician really has no answer for the snide, smart @ss, belittling demeanor that Palin seems to exhibit. She reminds me of the typical sitcom girlfriend, you know the one that will not let passive guy X go out with his friends and Y humiliating him to a laugh track, constantly nagging and yelping without any real knowledge of anything.

But good old sexism, in societies where it is acceptable, such as Pakistan, provides a trump card.

Technorati tags applicable to this post: Zardari - Pakistan - Palin

SAJA BRIEFING: The South Asian Blogosphere and How Its Changing the Media 8:35pm
Website: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/saja/2008/09/26/desiblogs

The South Asian Journalists Association presents an online panel discussion among some of the best-known names in the South Asian blogosphere. They will discuss the state of the blogosphere (South Asian and otherwise) and how it is affecting how news and information about South Asia and the diaspora is gathered and shared. Sabahat Ashraf of iFaqeer; Anil Dash of AnilDash.com; Karthik of Uberdesi.com; Maria Giovanna of Filmiholic.com; Arun Venugopal of SAJAforum.org

Just installed the 3.0.2 update for Firefox. I really hope it improves the memory management on that browser, because I am also using Chrome and I am loving the way it uses and, particularly, lets go of memory when you’re done with a tab.

The reason I am loath to let go of Firefox, frankly, is not sentimental or one of principle. It can be summed up in one word: Foxmarks. It is just a huge convenience to have my bookmarks synchronized across machines–and platforms!–and I really don’t see why I have to live without that convience. I still can’t believe Chrome still doesn’t synch up with Google Bookmarks! Talk about being dead to user needs, man!!

And I can’t end this post without saying a word about Opera. I rediscovered it because I am currently using a Mac at home and Chrome isn’t out for the Mac yet. And boy, is it superior in speed and memory management!

Comments anyone?

I apologise for the hit-and-run post, and though I have great respect for the man, I am not a Gandhian. But following everything over the weekend, I am left with a thought this morning that channels Gandhi; A War on Terror would be a great idea–if either the West or Muslims choose to take up the idea.

Haven’t started playing around with it yet, but at least one person I know was gushing over the speed with which it runs. Anyone else have comments, first report, etc.?

I am particularly  curious because when Google announced Knol, most of the discussion about it kept mentioning it as a competitior/equivalent to the Wikipedia–which, to me, showed very little undersanding for what the Wikipedia–or a wiki, generally–is. Apples and Oranges, if you ask me. How is a site that carries articles by individual users a replacement for a site where people collaborate to describe and document things? To me, that showed either that folks, as I said, had no understanding of either product/service, or they were way too eager to just parrot the corporate line they were given. And we make fun of the mainstream media!

But getting back to Chrome. The list of functionality we’re promised is:

• One box for everything
• New Tab page
• Application shortcuts
• Dynamic tabs
• Crash control
• Incognito mode
• Safe browsing
• Instant bookmarks
• Importing settings
• Simpler downloads

It would be interesting to hear from folks on what these functions and capablities mean in real life, and what their implications are.  And by implications I mean implications for where the web and how we use it is going.  Will this make blogging–and reading blogs–easier? How much faster is it? Will it still be faster once all the bells and whistles are up and running? Drop a line here–or send me your comments and we can post them separately, if you want.

Hi, folks! Sorry I have been out of touch. Thought I would drop a line and try to start a discussion on Obama and what he said yesterday. Specifically:

• Did I hear him say he’d remove Capital Gains taxes from stock options? What does “eliminat[ing] capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.” mean?
• And what does it mean to “stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.“

Anyone care to comment?

In my last post, I mentioned the then breaking story that the Pakistan Telecomm Authority was in the process of blocking YouTube from the country. The “reason” given a video that was disrespectful to “An Hazrat, Maulana Mohammad, Rasul Allah”, as we are wont to say in Pakistan, or “The Gentleman, Our Lord, Mohammad, Prophet of God”. Of course, amongst our wonderful, patriotic Pakistanis, there were the immediate questions about whether that in itself was a rumour or documented. Well, please do take a look at one of the documents that went out from the Pakistan Telecomm Authority to the ISP’s on Siliconstani’s blog.

The suspicions on the part of the grapevine is that this blocking/censorship happened when it happened because of videos that were ending up on YouTube of vote rigging–both in Karachi and Lahore and elsewhere. Though the brunt of the suspicion is about videos of rigging in Karachi, and pro- the MQM.

But, wait! There’s more!!! Breaking news right now is that the way the regulatory organizations for the Internet in Pakistan went about blocking YouTube has caused an outage/inaccessibility of the site globally!
Continue Reading »

There’s an old (from our youth :p) Bollywood song that goes “Main ro’oon ya hansoon; karoon mai kyaa karoon?!” or “Should I cry or laugh; To do, what do I do?”Users subscribing to the Internet though the PTCL (Pakistan Telecom Corporation Limited, the semi- or formerly-government-owned corporation), in particular, have been getting the following message today if they tried to access YouTube:

————–
Dear Internet Users

Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (www.pta.gov.pk)has directed all ISPs of the country to block access to www.youtube.com web site for containing blasphemous web content/movies.
Continue Reading »

Saw this on an advertisement banner outside a bike shop going down El Camino Real just South (is it South?) of Stanford and had to do u-turn to go back and take a pic:

What can I add?

We’re going to be adding a bunch of Flickr and other multimedia links on this site…check in on them, early and often, as they say! And please do send in your suggestions, favorites, least favorites, and the like to be included in the WadiView section. (Oh, and check out what we have so far!)

Sorry I have been MIA for a bit. A couple or three things jump out from the New York Times, NPR and the ‘Net this morning.

Firstly, a shout-out to my peeps, so to speak. There’s a clip on Google Video today of an interview with two of Pakistan’s most prominent bloggers on an English-language breakfast show. Well worth watching, what with Pakistan in the news in such a big way.

[Original at The Teeth Maestro’s blog.]

Then there’s an op-ed in the NYT this morning by the country director for the Institute of War and Peace Reporting providing his personal perspective about the bombing of the Serena Hotel in Kabul, a watering hole (and just a place to hole up) for expats, particularly. And there have been other stories about Afghanistan in The Times, on NPR, other places in the last few days. It seemed to hit me; is it a coincidence that the Western Media and Zeitgeist is sitting up and noticing–or should I say acknowledging, since some information has always been around–that Afghanistan is down the tubes because the Taliban, as Mr. McKenzie tells us, have now started a policy of targeting westerners?

The other thing that jumped out at me was from a series that NPR is doing on Muslim Women in Britain.
Continue Reading »

Mohsin Hamid’s latest op-ed is pretty good. Recommended reading for anyone who wants to know how things looked/look from the perspective of the every day life in Pakistan. You can read it here, on the Washington Post site.

I attended a talk by him at Stanford last year, and my first reaction was that what he was saying, the world view and experiences were the experiences of any Pakistani of our age and station, so to speak. (I think he’s about a year older than me.) And he writes well. It’s good to have him around, with his facility with English and “global” culture to bring that voice, that view of the world to the table. And given his visibility and position as a globally-best selling author, to have what he says read and noticed.

[Of course, I am still very disappointed with him and others of our generation and/or background–and this even includes, to some extent, folks like Imran Khan, who made sympathetic noises–for initially supporting the military take-over in 1999. But more on that as and when I can write–or maybe some readers can comment and discuss that aspect.

Just learnt that a Ghayabana Namaaz-e-Janaza is going to be held for Benazir Bhutto after/with Friday prayers at the Masjid-e-Farooq-e-Azam in Concord, California. I am told it is off the Clayton Exit, across from the Safeway and near the BART Station and there will be a prayer meeting (Du’a) at the BART Station afterwards.

Sorry about the late notice, but I just found out.

There will most probably be services in other places around the world. Please feel free to post information in the comments section here to inform others.

For those not familiar with the concept, “Namaz-e-Janaza” is the South Asian name for the Muslim prayer said at a person’s bier before he or she is interred. There is a tradition of saying the exact same prayer “ghayabana”, or “in absentia”, in situations like this where a lot of people not physically present at the burial want to participate (or in cases where a body is not found; but that’s another story).

As a matter of clarification, I am forwarding this not because I am a fan or follower of Benazir, her father, or the PPP, but for all their faults and follies, both she and her father were in a tradition of South Asian and/or Muslim leaders going back at least to Akbar, who chose to make at least a public connection with the more folksy interpretation of their constituencies’ faith(s).

In my book, she gets credit for being the only Muslim leader I have every heard invoke Ijma, the Islamic concept of consensus as a source of community self-governance .

The discussion on KQED about Benazir’s passing and it’s aftermath went well and the audio archive should be available at:

http://www.kqed.org/pgmArchive/RD19/20071223/week

Used to be a time when one’s work e-mail address was often the primary address you had. One of the main reasons was that Hotmail’s 1 MB and even Yahoo’s 5/6 MB just couldn’t be where you could hang your hat and receive brickbats and bouquets (especially if they were high resolution pictures of bouquets). Of course, some people also felt that having the words “Hotmail” or “Yahoo” in your address didn’t sound too “professional”, either. But over the last few years, that reason has faded, both because the pervasiveness of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail made it a moot issue, and because those that still had a hang-up about it started using other services like PoBox.com or domain forwarding services like the one that gives you the choice of becoming you@yourprofession.com and so on. Which brought us back to the size limitation as the main reason.

And then it hit me yesterday; with the Gmail-initiated increase in mail quota by almost every online mail provider, we are now at the point where, in a lot of cases, the online services are providing you with a larger mailbox than your employer!

The old cliche about down being up in certain cases just came up in my day job as a tech writer in the semiconductor industry; apparently, in this industry, sometimes, DOWN can be UP and UP can be GROUND.

Just discovered this:

http://damnsmalllinux.org/

Interesting…anyone used this? Comments? Input? Gotchas? This-is-cooler-than-sliced-bread’s?

Interesting insight, that. Friend of mine forwarded the following link a little while ago:

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/11/29/497861.aspx

Interesting new initiative:

http://www.stopbadware.org

There’s been quite some discussion about the Wikipedia, triggered by the recent report from a Caltech grad student analysing the anonymous edits to the encyclopedia. See for example:

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker

and

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6947532.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/6949153.stm

A few points from a recovering Wikipedaholic:

The whole situation does not “prove” that that Wikipedia is useless or open to manipulation (at least not as easily as most press reports are implying). Note the following para:

“The text, deleted in November 2005, was quickly restored by another Wikipedia contributor, who advised the anonymous editor, “Please stop removing content from Wikipedia. It is considered vandalism.”

Secondly, journalists are doing such a hack-job of this. The para I quoted above seems to imply that this was something unusual and the message from the editor was spontaneous–it’s not; the message is now an everyday–or several times every second (and I am not exaggerating)–occurrence. The report on the BBC’s site was even worse.

What all this does do is help us see what unethical behaviour folks are up to–Diebold, and everyone else.

Technorati tags applicable to this post: Wikpedia

One of the things a lot of us here in Silicon Valley like to do is hike. And we are in Northern California. We do live in a valley. And my favorite time to go hiking is an hour before sunset, so by the time you get to the top of the hill, so to speak, it’s just before or just after sunset. And then the view that you are rewarded with is, quite simply, this:

That photo’s from Ivanomak’s photostream on Flickr, by the way. (Click on the pic for the large size–it’s even more amazing at that size.) We’re going to be adding a bunch of Flickr and other multimedia links on this site…check in on them, early and often, as they say! And please do send in your suggestions, favorites, least favorites, and the like.