I normally don't write about politics on this blog. So this is not a political discourse or a book review (book review will follow at http://harishankar.org)

I began reading Jack Welch's book "Straight from the Gut" today and I can tell you that part of the story is literally true: it's absolute tripe. I couldn't even read half the book without feeling annoyed by this egomaniac's self-absorption.

Reading these kinds of books is enough to turn even an ardent fan of a capitalistic society towards communism.

Unlike Lee Iacocca, who comes across in his autobiography as a warm human being and a family man though a brash, arrogant businessman, Jack Welch simply comes across as having no humanity and no concern for human life. He is just a corporate machine (though a successful one) and his arrogance is of the "holier-than-thou" smug variety, not the down-to-earth brashness or plain-speaking of a Lee Iacocca.

This is just a rant though. Haven't had much to talk about lately, so I'm just letting off some steam here.

You know, the power of CSS is unbelievable when you really tap into its latent power. From the earlier theme, I was able to completely change the look of this site without touching a single tag of XHTML. Every layout change was made within the CSS file. This means the site looks exactly to web robots and other scripts. The changes are purely visual.

I still plan to use the older theme on and off as it's just one click away. But I just wanted to use this theme just as a variation and to get feedback from my readers. If you think this theme is too plain, just let me know.

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The ICL tournament is really getting my interest now. I think Twenty20 is here to stay. It's interesting to watch some of the international veterans like Lance Klusener and Craig McMillan still playing such competitive cricket. The intensity has definitely been higher than I expected at first. It's better than the current India vs. Pakistan Test Series which is going nowhere with such dead flat batting wickets. The fielding standards have been quite good too.

P.S. There seems to be (at least) a couple of other "Indian Cricket League" websites out there (and one of it claims to be an "official" website) which is bound to create some confusion. The site I linked to above *is* the official website of Zee TV's ICL.

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I am casually attempting to write a parody of Harry Potter. After all, I do write parody articles, so I thought I should try to attempt to parody a full-length novel. I've already fleshed out a first chapter and it seems to be quite easy since J.K.Rowling provides such excellent "parodyable" content to work with. I just hope this one comes good. Maybe if I really put in some effort into it, I might get it published.

It's not easy to sustain humour over several chapters and I'm trying to avoid the pitfalls of most parodies. Here I'll just try to write down a few rules to keep in mind for myself:

1. Don't resort to silly jokes. It just takes away from the "parody" aspect.
2. Be subtle to a degree. But not too subtle that the joke is lost on the reader.
3. Stick as closely to the original storyline to keep the comparitive value alive, but don't mimic the original too closely. Add variations to the theme to make it interesting.
4. Try and look for "clever" points to exaggerate and improvise.
5. Take a serious concept and twist it to a level where it becomes ridiculously funny.

Now, that's a handful.

I've been disinterestedly watching one of those "Live" doctor TV shows, where a prominent (or publicity-hungry) member of the medical fraternity decides to take questions from telephone callers and disperses advise. Most of these shows, at least here in India, take a spot in News networks at various non-prime time slots of the day. I'm quite surprised that people actually bother calling, to be honest. Most of these gems of wisdom are just common sense suggestions wrapped in semi-scientific jargon and more often than not, these doctors always ask viewers to consult their own doctors for specific advice. I mean, anybody with a little knowledge of human anatomy could answer such questions.

The only value of these programmes seem to be to fill up time. Of course, there is the occasional specialist who has useful knowledge to share, but most of them seem (understandably) reluctant to go beyond vague generalities. To my mind, such programmes do their bit to encourage self-medication more than anything else.

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I'm trying to write a simple, SQLite-driven blogging tool optimized to displaying images. This is because I'm yet to find a lightweight blogging tool that doesn't take up megabytes of storage space and a MySQL database. I also don't like the current crop of "image gallery" or "photo album" scripts either, most of which are bloated, feature rich and use thumbnail-generation which is suited for high-resolution photographs rather than comic strips.

SQLite seems a very good option for small applications. It suits a lightweight image blogging tool which will organize images in simple categories and require no thumbnail displays. It'll be light on features which other blog software consider standard. Most likely I'll release the source code under the GPL.

The only problem with SQLite is that most PHP setups don't have the SQLite module installed by default. But I'm determined not to use MySQL for this as it will defeat the whole purpose of simplicity.

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I've had it in my mind to write one or two tutorials/HOWTOs here, but I'm not sure how many people will really benefit from them.

It all depends on whether you really want to see a tutorial on creating comics in Linux. The other is one on how to add a basic RSS/Atom feed to a static website (or one which isn't powered by a dynamic script with a built-in syndication mechanism).

If anybody is interested, let me know and I'll get myself to do them.

I've been watching the just-concluded NKP Salve Challenger series which pits the top domestic cricketers in India against each other in a triangular tournament and during the commercial breaks, I've noticed a couple of new fairness cream advertisements that target men. While I've always detested products that promote discrimination on the basis of skin colour whether they target men or women, these new ads have taken them to a nauseating new low.

It's not just the racist aspect that annoys me. I can accept that racialism will always be a part of our societal make-up, but the fact that these ads assume that the potential customer is dumber than a flea really gets to me. To put it a little crudely, no matter how much cream or lotion you apply on a buffalo, you cannot change it into a white cow. These skin creams are nothing more than glorified sun-protection lotions with mild bleaching agents to remove tan. But going by some of these ads, you would think that a black-skinned man or woman can transform into a perfect caucasian within seven days. On second thoughts, I think the marketing agencies which cooked up such messages might have understood the intellectual capacity of their target audience better than I have.

Apart from that, these ads always kindle the baser instincts of human nature, glorify a disgusting form of discrimination blatantly and unashamedly and spread all the negative stereotypes associated with dark skinned people. A sad reflection on society's obsession with peculiar notions of physical beauty.

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Talking of cricket and the Challenger series, I wonder why the National selectors couldn't wait till the end of the tournament before announcing the ODI team for the home series against Pakistan. The whole tournament was over in just 4 days and surely the selectors could have given prospective players the extra match opportunity to prove their ability and worth. Sadly for players like Dinesh Karthik who had one bad game initially, their performances came too late in the day to make an impact on selection. So long as selectors stick to this bizarre policy, we'll continue seeing some strange decisions being made.

The series itself was interesting because it highlighted a couple of good prospects in the seam and spin department, notably Praveen Kumar and Amit Mishra. The former is a skiddy kind of bowler who has enough movement in the air to trouble the best batsmen at the international level, but he needs to add a yard or two to his pace to be really effective. As for Amit Mishra, his leg spin has seen vast improvement and I can see him giving Piyush Chawla tough competition during the rest of the season. On the batting front, Badrinath was really unlucky to miss the call from the selectors as was Suresh Raina, but I'm willing to bet that their opportunities will come quite soon.

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One way communication gets a bit tiring in my opinion. I know I've said this before, but an amazing number of people never respond to e-mail messages (or even seem to read them!), never seem to return telephone calls and to top it all, don't seem to think it's a big problem in the first place. This notion of being "too busy to respond" seems to have become fashionable these days. Well, I have news for such people: it's not a question of being busy or otherwise: it's a question of effective time management. If you cannot find time to communicate, then either you're a lousy time planner or you're just not interested in the communication. I would much rather prefer a negative response than no response at all.

The reason I raise this issue again is because it seems to be spreading to blogs as well. A couple of years back, bloggers seemed keen on promoting two way communication and social interaction by actively participating and commenting on other people's blogs. These days, the same people seem to be getting more and more self-centred. And then they blame the RSS and Atom newsreaders for this! No use blaming technology for something that is fundamentally a social issue. If you can find time to blog, you can find time to comment on other people's blogs. Anybody who tells me otherwise fits into the same category that I mentioned above: they're just not interested in the interaction.

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I'm trying to find hosting for my brother's website ToonsAndComics.com. While his hosting expired a couple of weeks ago, I've still not been able to recommend a suitable host to move his forum to. He signed up for brinkster but the basic plan did not feature MySQL databases so we were back to square one.

If anybody can recommend a good, fairly reasonably priced host, please do so. I've identified a couple of free hosts for temporary hosting, but I would like a long-term solution to his problem. Hopefully within the next few days, we can get back ToonsAndComics online! For those who've been wondering what's been happening to that forum, my sincere apologies for the delay in restoring the service.

I was watching the national broadcaster of India, Doordarshan for a little while today and I suddenly realized how much of a relief it is to watch something other than fluffy, mind-numbing, noisy, non-stop entertainment. With the explosion of private television channels, we've been flooded 24x7 with mindless crap in the form of music, movies, daily soaps, reality shows, sensationalist news and other assorted bird-droppings. Doordarshan might not be a modern, efficient or glamourous TV network run by an equally flamboyant, jet-setting media moghul, but it certainly does show some interesting, off-beat educational programmes and has the biggest geographic coverage across the country. Their lack of professionalism and quality in production is a real issue, but at least there is some intent to educate and benefit the public.

I think every country needs at least one public broadcaster which is not motivated purely by profits and driven by the need (or greed) of private corporations.

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I know that I've been complaining about the new house where we moved in, but I realized how lucky we were when we inquired about house rents in various areas in our city (we were looking for one temporarily for a friend). Some of those rents make me shudder when I think about it. Land values have blown way out of proportion and I have a feeling that the greed of people is a contributing factor in this inflationary trend.

People who are lucky enough to own houses or plots in prime areas in the city are sitting on virtual gold mines and they're complacently aware of the fact. There will be a bust, one day, folks! As Papa Hari always says, what goes around, comes around.

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I am currently suffering from a creative burnout after I spent the last three or four days working furiously on my WordPress-to-b2evolution importing tool. From what I can see, it looks to work well and all I need is to release it to the b2evolution community so that everybody can benefit.

I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with WordPress in the past and every new upgrade has been a disappointment. The real motivation to create the importing tool was a selfish one, but I have to admit that I felt a surge of pleasure when I could finally ditch WP instead of whining and complaining all the time.

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While on the same subject, Drew has been extremely kind and accommodating when I was furiously trying to make my converter from WordPress to b2evolution work on this server. He has been patient and very obliging in fulfilling my numerous requests during the last few days. Thanks again, Drew!

I would also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank François Planque, the maintainer and lead developer of b2evolution who has really been working overtime to ensure that my migration was successful. He also made a few code changes in b2evolution to help me accommodate my old WordPress permalinks. His timely responses to my queries ensured that I didn't lose much time in the process. Wish all FOSS project developers were half as obliging! Thanks, Francois!