Carthik Sharma

Everybody’s made their point about how great RSS (or Atom) feeds are, and how they help folks syndicate content and keep in touch with a lot of websites in a very efficient fashion – problem is that everybody seems to not like to think about how to manage the syndicated content they read. The cool thing about feeds is supposed to be that you get easy access to a large amount of information, which you then should be able to process and digest sooner than you could have by just visiting each individual website and scanning or reading all the articles! With current feedreaders, the usage flow is like that of browsing – just that instead of clicking on, say, a bunch of bookmarks in your browser, you click a bunch of feeds in one panel that then open up a list of articles from the feed(blog) in another panel! It saves you some time, but not too much.

Alright, so you get the feeds from a lot of websites, but right now, things are getting out of control – at least for me they are. I cannot read updates from 200+ websites within an hour. Also, I don’t want to read everything written by everyone I find interesting. When such a large set of data is involved, I would expect to be able to manage and trim the data down according to my personal preferences.

So, basically, can we please have a feedreader with some intelligence, please? RSSOwl is neat in that uses Amphetarate to “rate” articles, but you have to manually rate what you read, and that is such a pain. There is a dropdown menu for the ratings, so it takes a few additional clicks and some moving around of the mouse to rate articles. I dislike how the UI is designed as well, and how one has to double-click a feed to read the contents. Needlessly complicated. Findory.com is neat too, but then it is not easy to use it to read a bunch of blogs. Searching for the blogs you want to read is so difficult in Findory! Adding a set of blogs you want to subscribe to is tough in findory – not intuitive in any case. I would love to see a desktop (or online) feed reader that learns from my behavior – what do I like reading?, what articles do I spend the most time reading?, without having me do anything extra besides just reading the articles in the various feeds. This is the only way I can keep on adding feeds of interesting sites, and hope to catch everything interesting in a reasonable amount of time. I suppose computer science is advanced enough to have thought about problems of organizing large amounts of data in an intelligible fashion, and that there must be folks who work on analyzing and utilizing usage patterns. This will be the next killer internet app – a feedreader that is intelligent, and magically presents you with the most interesting articles published the last day or two – by understanding who you are and what you like.

I got a whole lot of Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary the hedgehog) cds from the Ubuntu free distribution center.

I figure that good should beget good, and so am willing to pass on the free distribution, at my own personal cost. The reason for doing this is that though you do get free cds from Ubuntu’s shipit system, it takes an awfully long time, and what’s not available immediately has very little worth. So I decided to re-ship them. If anyone wants a copy of the live and install disks of Ubuntu 5.04, please leave me a comment with your postal address in it, and I shall ship it to you for free. If you don’t want to leave a comment, then you can email me at mail@carthik.net.

When I was in India, I realized how slow downloads (still) are, and so it’s only fair that people who cannot download the images get the cds easily. I will ship them within a week of receiving the request.

ucf-iss-0003

Originally uploaded by Carthik.
Posted here by Carthik

My profile appeared in a neat little UCF brochure highlighting international grad students. The day of the photo shoot, I wasn’t feeling so great, and had a big problem smiling with my teeth showing.

I ended up at this interesting post inviting ideas for books for children’s libraries in India.

What a list! I hope it is around when I start buying books for kids.

All my computers are quitting on me. First it was the desktop and now it is the faithful old laptop. I woke up this morning to the sound of a grinder. My hard drive, apparently, thinks it is one now. I hope that replacing the hard drive will fix it. I had almost all of it backed up except for the photos from the most recent India trip. Trying to recover data will be fun, hopefully.

After a long trip back home, and a couple of days of getting over jet lag, I am finally back in the saddle, at the University.

• America’s pretty nice, with hot showers, green grass and all, and the trip to India was refreshing.
• I lost a shoe in transit, and got real close to hating myself in LA, when, after almost 30 hours of not having a shower it seemed to me that it is a no brainer to have showers in Airports.
• The best part about the vacation, though, was that I was more or less off of the Internet. That is a feeling I had almost forgotten – life without the Internet to distract and entertain me. Needless to say, I have a lot of catching up to do, on many fronts.
• I have f-spot up and running again, but with 495 or so pictures, it is gonna be a while before I get them uploaded somewhere. In fact, after a discussion with a close friend on the subject of the pain involved in looking through the gazillion vacation snaps friends like to show off, I might just put up a few select ones, and save the rest for posterity.
• I had great fun meeting old friends/seniors at Mumbai. I didn’t see any of Mumbai, but I did see the faces I wanted to. Nothing can beat the feeling of being within seeing and hearing distance of old, intelligent friends.
• One great moment of weakness I had while I was in India, one that shook me from my foundations and had me gasping for breath was when I went to the place in Bangalore where they sell DVDs for the equivalent of $2.50 per dvd. Some of the DVDs had 4 movies each on them, and some titles were extremely interesting. I was reeling, still, when we left the shop, and I was thinking about going back later for two reasons. One was that if I had started buying then, I would pretty much have lost a fortune – I mean, at that price, what is to stop me from buying too many of them? The other was that I wanted to think about whether I wanted to reward copyright violators and snatch away that teeny-weeny bit of money from movie makers and artists. I am talking about movies that are never shown in theatres ’round the corner – the ones that are made for film festivals, for the sake of art. I never thought I’d be one to experience such moral dilemma, but I did.

Somehow, I had a feeling that if I wrote this post using a bulletted list, I could get you to read through till the end

This is the day I got a metal tooth for keeps.
No, it is not made of gold.

Will the metal detectors at airports always go “beep” now?
Can I still put my head in the microwave oven?
Is the metal magnetic? (Can I get a ring stuck on my cheek, without the painful piercing?)

It feels so smooth to the tongue… irresistibly smooooth. Almost good enough to make me want to get all my teeth capped.

My father has made the most of my trip, and made me visit all the temples on his must-visit list. This time the trip was just a couple of days long. We went to north Kerala (Malappuram, Kozhikode), and visited 4 temples.

First was the temple where the Goddess is at her best, and most powerful – Kadampuzha. This temple has a ritual called “Muttarakkal”, where devotees can offer coconuts, which will then be cracked open on a rock in front of the deity. If everything is alright, the coconut will split into two cleanly. If, for some reason, the coconut does not open right, then one is supposed to keep offering coconuts until one cracks open just right. The temple itself is quite small in size, but the peace of mind one gets is amazing.

Mile after mile of moss-covered walls and different shades of green. Moist, pure air, and beauty everywhere – that is North Kerala – my favourite part of Kerala. After Kadampuzha, we went to the Navamukundan temple, on the river Bharathapuzha. This temple is one of three temples in the area, each temple dedicated to one of the trinity (Vishnu, Brahma and Siva). Offerings to one’s ancestors at this temple are supposed to be very auspicious, so after a dip in the river, I offered my respects to my ancestors, long deceased, and put their souls at rest.

Next, we headed to the Hanuman temple at Aalathiyoor. This is supposedly the place where Lord Rama described Sita, and gave Hanuman his ring to authenticate Hanuman as his messenger, and sent him off to visit Sita in Lanka, where she was being held captive by Ravana. This is supposedly the spot where Hanuman took a huge leap towards Lanka. the speciality of this temple is that Lakshmana, Lord Rama’s brother, has a seperate Sanctum. It seems that Lord Rama asked Lashmana to leave the room when he was describing Sita and giving Hanuman his ring. Lord Rama and his brother Lakshmana were inseperable, and so this temple is sort of unique in that they are not together.

The last temple on the list was the Siva temple at Triprangode. The legend behind the temple is that Markandeyan, a very young devotee of Lord Siva, who had his parents to take care of of, was scheduled to die at a very young age. When lord Yama came to take his soul away, Markandeyan approached Lord Vishnu (at the Navamukundan temple), to request him to please save him from death. lord Vishnu had to turn him down, and direct him to request Lord Siva instead. So off Markandeya goes to Lord Siva. He is said to have embraced a Siva Linga at the Triprangode temple, and Lord Siva is said to have killed Yama, the messenger of death, at this spot. There are a total of five Siva lingas at this temple. The first being the linga that Markandeyan embraced, the next three being the steps that Lord Siva took on the way to killing Lord Yama, and the last being the extremely angry Lord Siva, immediately after killing Lord Yama. The saints and other gods had to request Parvati, Siva’s consort to appear naked, except for jewellery to appease and cool Lord Siva down.

This trip was all the more special because the book I am reading right now, Roberto Calasso’s “Ka”, is a book with a lot of stories from Hindu Mythology. Visiting these temples and imagining the things that are supposed to have happened at these places makes one feel very …. special! I have always been the sucker for myths, legends and history.

The other day, I received a comment, which I had to beleive was spam, about how we should all turn to Pagan religions and return closer to nature. I feel lucky to be part of a tradition which still worships the primitive forces, complete with Serpent Kings, trees, rivers and forests. Who am I to say it’s wrong to worship the life-giving Sun, and all of nature. We could all do with some more interaction with nature, on a regular basis.