February 28th, 2006 §
This is so deserving of WorldChanging.com attention.
Alka Zadgaonkar wrings plastic waste for profit.
A Ph.D. in organic chemistry in Nagpur, India has put into practice a plant that converts all sorts of waste plastic into fuel oil, petroleum gas and solid petroleum coke. It can work with all kinds of plastic waste, and doesn’t need the waste to be cleaned first. A fractional residue containing metals is the only possibly harmful by-product.
Alka and her husband Umesh, are buying in 5 tonnes of plastic waste everyday in Nagpur at prices attractive to rag pickers. They are wringing fuel oil out of that unsightly pile and selling it to industries in the Butibori Industrial Estate, on Wardha Road out of Nagpur. Production from their plant, Unique Plastic Waste Management & Research Co Pvt Ltd is sold out for the next year.
Reading the article gives some insight into the method used, as well as the difficulties they had to face in starting this up — their offer to let the government make use of the technology got stalled, and they finally struck it out on their own with a bank loan.
Their son, Akshay, is a geek, and the “youngest” MSDN developer in the world, at 12!
That encouragement led Akshay to become at 12, the world’s youngest Microsoft Certified Software Developer [MCSD]. The Zadgaonkar family was sent tickets to Seattle for a private meeting with Bill Gates. [Akshay, yet to finish college is interning with Microsoft at Hyderabad.]
My first thoughts on reading about this on some other site was that this too will be a hoax — snake oil — so to speak, but I think this one passes the ultimate test of legitimacy – a google search (just kidding).
Man, if these guys were in the United States, she would have been a millionaire, and VCs would be lining up on their porch. Not in India, though:
But at the Zadgaonkar household, values have hardly changed. Success sits lightly on this family of knowledge seekers: Alka refuses to give up her calling as a teacher.
Somebody take up on this, and start disposing of plastics in a useful way, please.
(If you eat at Subway, you can help, by saying you don’t need the plastic bag for the sandwich 
)
February 28th, 2006 §
The NOC at UCF posted a warning, asking UCF computer users to not use Google Desktop V3. Good call!
February 23rd, 2006 §
Upload files, browse on server using filenice. Been looking for this for a long time. Takes the hassle out of managing files uploaded through ftp.
February 23rd, 2006 §
Slideshow for photos using javascript – easy to add a slideshow to your ebay auction listing now – GPLed too.
February 21st, 2006 §
This shouldn’t be so hard to understand:
Tags are not categories.
Enough has been said about this already — I hate to be a semantics-fiend, and I dislike discussing things like tags with my hat on, all serious, but this one is clutching me by the throat.
Now the fact that wp.com reads the categories a post is assigned to as “tags” and tell technorati, ice-rocket and whoever else is listening that the tags for the post are the categories I put it in, it is terrible to think that I don’t really have tags. I would have “tagged” this very post with “tags” if I had real tags. I am not going to create a new category just so I can tag this post “tags” — kosher??
So categories can be tags but tags cannot be categories. Categories are like the huge signs you see on aisles in supermarkets – “Food”, “Hygiene”, “Frozen” etc, they guide you to sections where you can find what you are looking for. Tags are like the labels on the products themselves.
Categories organize, hierarchically. Tags need not. Tags provide meta-information, Categories need not. Tags cross-connect, Categories do not. By cross connect, I mean, when you go looking for posts tagged with “Flickr” on technorati, you find posts from various sources, all about Flickr. Now if you go searching for posts tagged with “administration” in technorati, you will find everything from system administration tips to posts regarding the NASA, the NSA, and general verbiage – largely due to poisoning from people who can’t get the difference between tags and categories straight, for the most.
Get your semantics right, wordpress.com folks – please If you don’t you are doing a disservice by poisoning so many indices that work by means of tags. Earlier today, for the nth time, I ended up with a wordpress.com blog as the result, and the entry was totally unrelated to what I was searching for on IceRocket.
And technorati, shame on you for saying
“A tag is like a subject or category. “
If I were in the business of earning my subsistence from the concept of tagging, I would try hard to make a distinction between the old and the new that I am offering, and to elucidate the advantages and novel uses of tags.
February 20th, 2006 §
Animal Farm Democracy – Almost entirely correct, except, Craig, governments, like people have the freedom to choose who they want to be friends with. No one’s saying Palestine’s not a democracy, but some folks are trying to get the folks they like elected – I’d say it will all play out on it own, given time.
February 19th, 2006 §
MailListStat for analyzing mailing list statistics. Seen in action at wp-hackers.
February 18th, 2006 §
Wodehouse sticks around long after the brits are gone – Wodehouse has a perennial readership in India, in some circles — I was initially amazed to learn that he was not a favourite worldwide, or in the US.
February 17th, 2006 §
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Microsoft will close the book on its FrontPage Web-design program with the release of Office 2007, formerly known as Office 12, late this year.
Words fail to express how much I hated Frontpage, for its ugly code, indecipherable menus and options and general incompetence. All those who “know” how to use Microsoft Frontpage will soon be left in the lurch, just like so many times before, when a big corporation decides to shelve a successful product. All the training, time and effort spent by non-techies into learning how to use the monster will now be a waste.
This is a big disadvantage to using proprietary programs and tools – the discontinuation of the program or tool, or even the absence of updates can force you spend more time, and possibly money, and cause much heartburn. Try using open source alternatives in the place of such products. You will never have to worry about the product becoming obsolete or discontinued, if it is in the top of it’s domain. Knowledge you earn by learning to use open source tools is open too, and the very nature of open source OSes makes you educated, informed and capable of fixing your own problems.
February 17th, 2006 §
Ignore comments in SVN – workaround. May not be of interest to anyone else – just a bookmark.