Carthik Sharma

My ambition was to set a science fiction book in as far into the future as I could imagine, while not assuming anything presently known to be impossible.

- John C. Wright. (from Jef’s web files). What can I say about a man, who has two children called Orville and Wilbur Wright? Or who, when asked “What writers influenced your novels?”, replies “Whom am I copying, you mean?”. Interesting, perhaps?

I started finding out a little after I ran into a post at Ryan Boren’s blog about the Golden Transcendence, and my first thought was, “What a pompous title!”. I did, however stop by at the Amazon page for that book, read a few reviews, searched a bit and promptly decided I will not be a peace till I read the books and make up my mind as to how good the books are.

Ah! but we are digressing! I helped Ideal Rhombus move to wordpress by writing a hacked version of an import script for Matt, the blog’s owner. He was kind enough to do the most inexplicable thing - show appreciation of my work. He has bought me not one, not two, but all three of the books by John C. Wright that I wanted to read. Thank you, Matt.

I was able to help Alan move, too, and he has promised me some Mexican tamarind candy in the mail. Alan is a graduate student in Chemistry at Berkeley, and has an awesome collection of Soda bottles and other bottled drinks from all over the world. I look forward to getting him a “Goli” Soda when I next go to India. Oh the joy of learning the art of drinking from those bottles without getting the latest contagious disease!

All this may sound exciting, but what really made my day was reading a hundred things about Nuclear Moose. Craig is the funniest, most lovable member of the WordPress crew, and I was really surprised to find that he took the time and the effort to type a list that long, in reply to a comment I left on his blog.

All this makes me feel like a thousand people hugged me (and I don’t mean “crushed”).

Filed by Carthik at 1:31 am under WordPress, Blogging 2 Comments

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I saw this movie, Terminal yesterday. Wonderful movie. I noticed that in a close up shot, Catherine Zeta-Jones’ face is shown in bad light, and the imperfections in her skin show up, but besides that, this is a movie that is different from the regular hit movie. A bit too oh-so-perfect what with all the arranged unbeleivable coincidences and all, but parts of it were truly hilarious.

Thanks to psasidhar I got to know of The history of Jazz in a picture. This is not the first time a close friend has blogged about something which is very much on my mind, as if on cue, but actually through a pure coincidence.photomatt likes Jazz, and that is among the reasons why Wordpress v1.2 is called “Mingus”. Ever wanted to see what the real Mingus looked like? There you go!

Now you must be wondering why I mention WordPress, and Terminal in the same post. Go see the movie! As it is, this post is enough of a spoiler.

Filed by Carthik at 6:28 pm under Movies, WordPress 1 Comment

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I had fun helping Jennifer fix a sinister problem with the entries she imported from Movable Type, yesterday. The backslashes were missing. I cannot describe what a backslash(a.k.a Reverse Solidus, or Reverse Virgule or Reverse Slant) looks like, cause I cannot type a backslash and have it appear in this post*. That is because WordPress runs on backslashes.

Yes, it has remained a closely guarded secret, and I will let it out. WordPress is powered by backslashes. WordPress eats backslashes.

An unsuspecting user left a comment on a WordPress FAQ entry, and he mailed me expressing desperation at the mysterious disappearance of the backslash from both the post and the comment.

Bob Bemer is the man to blame for the extra work the WordPress devs have been putting in lately, especially Ryan Boren (who has been systematically working towards eliminating this problem.)

To get to the point, Bob Bemer added the backslash to ASCII to be able to represent the logical symbols for logical AND and OR in ALGOL. An interesting read.

* Just kidding: WordPress users can represent a backslash in their posts using “& # 0 9 2 ;”(without the spaces or the quotes, thus : \

Filed by Carthik at 6:48 pm under WordPress, General 3 Comments

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While trying to use the Press It! bookmarklet with FireFox 0.9, I got the following error :

Deprecated method document.getSelection() called. Please use window.getSelection() instead.

So I fixed the bookmarklet to be :

...createRange().text:window.getSelection();}void(window.open('http://...
where it said
...createRange().text:document.getSelection();}void(window.open('http://...

(changed document.getSelection() to window.getSelection() )

To fix yours, if you are using FireFox 0.9, right click on you Press It bookmarklet in the BookMarks toolbar, click on “Properties” and edit the code as I did above in the “Location” field.

Filed by Carthik at 12:07 pm under WordPress, Blogging 7 Comments

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