Carthik Sharma

Spiderman In India – wearing a dhoti (sarong?), no less. I’m dying to see this movie!

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.

Gmail as an online backup system
explains how, using a php script, you can backup essential files in your Gmail account, and recover them whenever you need to. Pretty much what I wanted to do with my Gmail space. I would not want to use that for personal emails – call me paranoid. So mailing lists and backups it will be, then. I should backup some zips and archives on Gmail space, and save my paid for server space for other goodies, like pictures.

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 : \

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.

My feed – now powered by FeedBurner — I like the browser friendly feed display, as also the statistics. Thanks

Matt, lead developer of WordPress takes his site down upon reaching #1 in a google search for “Matt”in fulfillment of his word. WordPress stays up though.

Paul Dorn’s Bike Commuting Tips: Why/How Bike Commute – Interesting read. I chuckle when I think of how involved using a bike to get from A to B has become in an advanced nation, and how one requires a tutorial to ride a bike to work.

phonespell.org — too bad mine says something about a ’sic-mama’

Send all your thunderbird/outlook mail to your Gmail account — Thanks!