I'm just back from my four-day long holiday to Kulithalai (my grandmother's native place, in Karur District, Tamil Nadu). The Indian summer has well and truly arrived. Although I'm used to high temperatures, what really gets me is the dryness of the heat in the interior regions of the country. Heat with high humidity I can tolerate, because I sweat a lot and cool off in the process, but the kind of heat you encounter in interior South India in summer has to be experienced to be understood. You can almost see the waves of radiation off the rocky countryside in some places. This is heat of the throat-parching, head-splitting variety, not the sweaty, steam-bath kind which has the effect of sapping your energy, but is otherwise tolerable.

In any case, I'm back home now. Still recovering from the after-effects of the journey though.

Having used PHP as the logical choice for web development, I've always been a little mystified by cgi-bin scripts and never bothered to learn how they work. But no longer.

CGI scripts are nothing but scripts or executable programs. Apache simply executes them and renders the results. Of course, because every CGI program is an external application and requires the web server to start a new process, it makes the whole thing very processor intensive. The modern method of embedding scripts in web pages (most popularly PHP/ASP) which can be directly interpreted by Apache is a far more efficient method and I suppose more logical from a web designer's point of view.

However, there are still a few advantages to CGI scripts: you can use whatever language you wish to (plain shell scripting, Perl, Python and even compiled C executables). This offers many more options to the developer. Also in many cases CGI scripts are not limited to server "modules" and can directly use the underlying Operating System's functionality.

Rather than reinvent the wheel however, I'll point you to Apache's CGI tutorial which is a must read for any webmaster, web developer or server administrator.

Yes, CGI can be intimidating and complex CGI scripts can be a headache to maintain, but it's nevertheless useful to have an idea about how they work since so many websites still utilize this method of delivering dynamic content.

There's a neat little trick in b2evolution, which allows you to get RSS/Atom feeds for any category of posts on this blog.

If you wish to get updates only to a single category on Hari's Corner rather than the full feed, just do this:

• Copy the URL of the category or click on the category link in the sidebar.
• Add the text ?tempskin=_rss2 to the end of the URL.
• Use that URL as the feed URL in your favourite RSS reader.

You can also use ?tempskin=_atom to get an Atom feed instead of RSS if you prefer that format.

So instead of getting updates for every single post I make on this blog, you will be alerted only if I've made a post to that particular category. Use that feature as you wish!

Anybody who has a gmail or Yahoo e-mail address can access their e-mail using a desktop client with POP support. Although I guess a majority prefer the web interface for its convenience, I think a mail client is extremely useful and makes e-mail management a lot more sophisticated - and you get the best of both worlds in this case (web access as well as client access). The main reason I switched to a mail client is because gmail's new web interface is far too slow and unwieldy.

I use KMail in my Debian box, since it's integrated with the KDE PIM module as well as KDE's address book.

Here are some reasons you might want to switch to client-based e-mail access:

• Convenient way to read and compose messages while off-line and the ability to queue up messages to be sent at one particular point of time.
• Since messages are downloaded to your hard disk, you have a natural back-up for your important mail.
• Mail clients allow you to access multiple e-mail accounts within one single, unified interface. This facility also allows you to easily preserve old e-mail from previous accounts while switching to a new one.
• Transferring or backing up e-mail is as convenient as copying or archiving a directory.
• Since mail clients are desktop applications, they are responsive and stable whereas accessing webmail depends on the speed of the internet connection. Also a lot of webmail interfaces are bloated and slow (examples of this are the new gmail/Yahoo interfaces which really chokes the browser at times)
• Using a mail client feels more professional and business-like.

It's lucky I live in a country where superstores like Walmart haven't yet made an impact. I was reminded of this again, a few days back when I went to a small newly opened music store near my house. This shop not only offered a minimum discount of 10% for all products on display, they actually gave as much as 40-50% off MRP on many of the collections.

On more than one occasion I've come across an instance where a small shopkeeper/store owner is not only willing to give offer discounts to encourage sales, he is actually pleased to do so, in order to establish customer relationship. It's a myth that the bigger shops including supermarkets offer discounts because they can afford to. Fact is, they do enough business so they can afford to ignore individual customers far more easily and therefore they couldn't care less about customer satisfaction. The personal touch is also missing in the large supermarkets. Nobody even cares whether you're a regular customer for years at a supermarket (I know this by experience).

Big supermarkets and mega-stores offer (usually pathetic) discounts only to rid themselves of old stock and/or to undercut the competition and drive the small shopkeepers out of business. Apart from the ethical issues involved, indeed here's a good business reason for all of us to keep the small traders in business: preserve competition and don't let the supermarkets dominate the retail scene.