Walk Alone

The last one and a half days were spent in improving the DTC. As expected, the sons of the soil who rave and rant about “people doing nothing for their nation” and “subversion of our language and culture” were barely involved. More the pity…

Bala suggested two tweaks - form buttons and live preview.

The buttons are a good step ahead. I was able to dispose off the awkward tabs I had inserted to space out some characters. And do they look cool!

Firefox running on GNOME in Ubuntu (92 KB)

Opera (with Standard Skin, not default win32 skin) running on win32. (52 KB)

Live preview eliminates the need to click a button to see the results. The stuff appears as you click on the character buttons. You can also edit the code directly from now on. This live preview idea uses innerHTML. Don’t ask me what that is - I can only say it takes a string of HTML as it is and is useful for DHTML. The code snippet Bala presented threw up problems on all systems except IE and FF on win32. So I had a look around and updated the code with a more elaborate version of live preview. Also, as the footer says, this version of DTC has been tested on a lot of browsers. Still, if bugs crop up, let me know.

Things begin with good intentions. You have to apply restraint and constraint for it to continue to have good intentions.

Bhise started his petition with good intentions. I asked him to desist from using the Instant Messenger as a medium for spreading awareness about it. There are other, less obtrusive means (the restraint part) - a single mail to his groups and his own blog.

Even the mail has potential to snowball unless (the constraint part) Bhise explicitly requests the recipients not to forward the mail. If they do want to help him (by all means, I do wish people would help him in this matter), host the link - on your own blogs, IM status fields and other non-obtrusive media. If someone is interested, he will either follow the link or ask you. This way, your commitment is tested too. Blindly sending the mail to your addressbook is like dropping a coin on a beggar’s palm - the deed is done and your conscience is salved.

I got hit by the exact event I warned Bhise about. I have done my bit for his petition. Signed it. Hosted a link - supported it with my arguments. And yet, I got an IM to “go sign it”. Now isn’t that irritating? Not exactly IM spam as of yet, but any bets on what its going to become? Unless it is controlled right now…

The one thing that was keeping me from recommending WP all-out to others was its import compatibility. Till now, I could import Blogger posts and make sure their comments were linked and counted. But I was not able to set their categories. I got this idea a few hours ago. Its my first PHP-MySQL code.

The MySQL query on lines 8-11 updates the post2cat table which holds the post-category linkages. The import script I am using somehow skips this detail. Once the posts have a legal category ID, it is a trivial matter to move them in the WP system.

// after initial install, this should be 3, check your wp_post2cat table, take last value + 1
$new_rel_id = 18;
// check the ID of the last imported post ID from admin interface
$last_post = 83;
// value of counter is the first imported post ID
for ( $counter = 3; $counter < = $last_post; $counter += 1)
{
    mysql_query("
        INSERT INTO wp_post2cat (rel_id, post_id, category_id)
        VALUES ('$new_rel_id', '$counter', '1' )
    ") or die(mysql_error());
    $new_rel_id += 1;
}

I will put up the full details of my WP install and an enhanced version of this code (two more queries to merge post authors and comment authors) on a static page later.

The French warship Clemenceau, a decommissioned aircraft carrier, is headed towards Alang for scrapping, unless the Indian judiciary halts its progress. The Clemenceau is reported to have upto 1000 tonnes of asbestos and other toxic chemicals like lead and mercury. Similar operations on the ship have been aborted in Spain, Greece and Turkey. Egypt stopped the ship in international waters for three days before hectic diplomatic parleys allowed the ship to use the Suez canal.

Alang, in Gujarat, is one of the largest ship-breaking yards in Asia. It provides a livelihood to an estimated forty thousand workers. However, as with many industries in India, its safety standards are dangerously below par. Allowing the Clemenceau into Alang sorely for economic considerations would have a deadly, irreversible impact on the shipyard workers’ health and the marine ecosystem in and around Alang.

Those involved in the decision making loop should :

1. Ask why three European Union nations refused the Clemenceau to be broken down in their territory and why Egypt balked for three days before allowing the ship passage through its waters.
2. Evaluate the quantity of toxic content on the ship (asbestos, lead, mercury, electronic component waste and so on) and its impact on the workforce and environment.
3. Ask the French to provide an honest (yeah right!) answer to this - Why wasn’t the Clemenceau scrapped in their own or any First World nation?

You can google on this issue or use your favorite search engine - look for french warship clemenceau. I used these pages as my reference - [1] [2] [3] [4].

Bhise has put up a petition. The details may be a bit skewed, but the intention’s all that is important - go here to sign it.

Maneka Gandhi is so busy throttling the Indian film industry (along with the Health Ministry, of course), that she’s probably forgotten that animals exist along the Gujarat coast. Petitions like this and the Indian judiciary (the French judiciary has given the greenlight to the Clemenceau) are our only hope.

adj. & n. (something) causing irritation.

Its late afternoon. Quiet (as quiet as a locality in Mumbai can get). You are figuring out how to make your page reload using Javascript, in which you are a novice. You have five tabs open in your browser and you are busy trying and evaluating the best method. And an IM contact pops a window on your desktop with a greeting that is so reeking of artifice, you lose your cool.

Your irritation causes you to take your IM contact to task for that pretense. What follows is a vicious cycle of irritation causing you to shelve your coding and take out your anger (frustration?) on the contact, resulting in a conversation which only serves to increase your irritation.

After it ends and you have your application ready, you wonder about the cost of that interruption.