AB's Reflections

Category: Thoughts

  • A cynical engineering take on 3 Idiots (movie)

    It’s not everyday that I board a moving bus to reach the movie theatre. Then again, neither do I get to watch movies like 3 Idiots daily. Ever since I watched the movie on 29th Dec, there’s been something about the movie that’s been bothering me. It’s not that I had any kind of expectation from the movie to feel disappointed although it had been getting rave reviews from many avenues. While the movie seems to have tickled the funny bones of the masses, it seemed to hit upon a raw nerve in me. And this has been manifesting itself in the numerous facebook status messages [1] I’ve left on the movie since watching it.

    I read a few reviews and articles [2] on the movie that seemed to be consistent with my feelings of the movie being overhyped. But they too seemed to miss some points. So, here I have an entire post lined up taking on the movie.

    When you have to mock, mock. Don’t preach.

    A funny movie is fine and 3 Idiots definitely scored in that respect. However, it did cross the limit in my books on some respects, particularly on the poverty front (Raju’s family) and treatment of the elderly (Raju’s father and yes, even Virus). All this is fine if you are making a mindless comedy like numerous ones before. But, when you tread into the message giving territory, it just doesn’t go down well. A few explicit examples:

    1. The 3 happily trespass upon the director’s property, one of them into his daughter’s bedroom while the other two deface his property. The director sees the face of only one, and is actually truthful about it. Anyway, this act which would’ve landed them in jail is conveniently brushed aside and totally forgotten by making Raju jump out of the window. “Truth alone triumphs” is not the message from episode I suppose.
    2. And on the topic of truth, lying brazenly to your paralyzed best friend and playing with his emotions may not exactly be the best way to cure him. As far as I remember, even Munnabhai did a better job in such cases. Raju once again saves the day here by a prompt jump back to action and showing that he does see through Rancho’s tricks.
    3. As if one trespass was not good enough, Rancho and Farhan break into the director’s office to steal a question paper, all in the name of friendship. Raju once again saves the day morally here by sticking to his new way of life and tossing away the paper (how one can set an engineering paper that will fail only a select student and how actually getting hold of that paper will help anyone {as people who’ve written open book engineering exams will attest} is another mystery best left unanswered). Of course, the director rushes to the hideout of the gang and tosses them out. This is where mother nature, the Delhi electricity supply and the good old vacuum cleaner come to the rescue adding insult to injury to who knows what.

    Oh well, at least they didn’t shoot some Indian minister dead and try to awaken the public. Oh wait….

    To me, Calvin did a much better job at taking on the education system and I’d gladly stick to Calvinisms than Baba Rancho’s verses any day. I also couldn’t resist the urge to put this in:

    Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
    Apple seed and apple thorn,
    Wire, briar, limber lock
    Three geese in a flock
    One flew East
    One flew West
    And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

    That’s the source of the title of the movie “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest”, which is definitely a no holds barred take on authority and systems. Watch it if you can and don’t expect to feel anything remotely close to the way you felt after watching 3 Idiots (I wonder how you’d relate the 3 geese to the 3 idiots)

    Also, on the topic of following your dreams, here are a couple of gems:

    1. Bill Watterson’s Keynon Commencement speech from 1990 – “SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED”
    2. Richard Hamming’s talk – “You and your research”

    It’s not like engineering’s going to ruin your life for sure. Why, I have even done a photography course here in IIT Bombay under a professor who did his engineering (again at IITB), but is into visual communication.

    How old are they and what period are we looking at? They still blog in 2020? No new iPhone version in 10 years! I’m confused.

    This was one of the aspects of the movie that really confused me and the engineer in me had a field day putting together the timelines and ages. One thing I’m sure of is that the movie starts off in the future, somewhere around 2020. This follows from the fact that in the flashback people are seen using mobile phones, youtube, wireless internet etc and that would set the flashback in the present period. Ok, granted that this is not a sci-fi movie, but still, Rancho did file those 400 patents…

    As for the characters ages, nothing out of the ordinary, but a couple of characters come of as oldies, notably Suhas and Pia. As per the flashback, Pia’s supposed to be a doctor engaged to Suhas. That would put her in the mid 20’s and Suhas in the mid to late 20’s given his Management degree and foreign work location (he must have worked abroad for a while or inherited a fortune, otherwise I don’t see anyone gifting their fiancee’s watches worth Rs 4 lakhs). So, this means the following:

    1. An 18 year old was romancing a woman in her mid 20’s. In fact by the time Rancho graduated, she’d be nearing 30 at least.
    2. The doctor and the manager, i.e., Pia and Suhas waited till they were over 40 (or at least Suhas was) to tie the knot. Now that’s dedication for you. I think the director missed a trick here, and the love story plot should have been on these 2…

    That was quite a trip

    Yes, I know, it leads up to Leh and not Ladakh. Still, that was quite an impromptu trip – over 1000 km lasting at least 18 hours.

    And no geeky post can be complete without an xkcd reference. Too bad the characters in 3 Idiots didn’t have this kind of an attitude:

    You should start giving out 'E's so I can spell FACADE or DEFACED.

    Notes:

    [1] A list of all the 3 Idiots related facebook status updates in reverse chronological order:

    1. Did Chetan Bhagat do to the 3 Idiots with his blog post what Rancho did to Suhas with the green chutney?
    2. 3 Idiots is a case of bad credit… or is it credit risk gone wrong?
    3. Some 3 Idiots Math: P (5% < Length of 3 Idiots taken from FPS < 70%) = 99.9966%
    4. More 3 Idiots: Always nice to have a simmering reality show to go with a movie… That too for free.
    5. ICE:IIT::Ladakh:USA
    6. 3 Idiots had its heart in the right place no doubt. Too bad I couldn’t trace its brain…
    7. Avatar appealed a lot more to the engineer in me than 3 Idiots
    8. Lessons from 3 Idiots: 1. Directors should have their offices on the ground floor. 2. Engineers are in serious need of a suicide hotline. 3. Doctors should always carry a vacuum cleaner with them. 4. If you are an MBA grad working abroad, then don’t wait till mid to late 30s to get married, or else your bride may run away to Ladakh to ride a scooter. 5. The Airtel network is better around a remote bridge up north than in the IITB campus & at home in Bangalore.
      6. Pencil wood is also flammable in high oxygen environments & so that’s another factor to worry about – http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen

    [2] Excerpts from the reviews and articles on 3 Idiots:

    Rajeev Masand’s review:

    Going home after watching 3 Idiots I felt like I’d just been to my favorite restaurant only to be a tad under-whelmed by their signature dish. It was a satisfying meal, don’t get me wrong, but not the best meal I’d been expecting.

    …

    The film, in the end, is a broad entertainer that plays to the gallery, well-intentioned but sadly muddled.

    Apurv Nagpal’s review:

    I wish life was as simple as Rancho made out. I wish it was as easy to top an engineering college, life’s issues resolved themselves as easily as shown in the film. The second half, which had a surprise identity crisis thrown in, raised some problems which it was implausible that were not discovered / resolved earlier. But the humour / fun keeps you going through it all.

    …

    My father said after watching it that if you’re willing to suspend disbelief, its an enjoyable film. That’s a pretty fair way of putting it, after all, we do the same for Bond films and a lot of action thrillers. Its just that I didn’t expect to be doing it for a rom com set in an engineering college….

    “From Three Idiots to a Nation Of Idiots” by Sagarika Ghose. The last two paragraphs summed things up quite nicely:

    Yet a film whose central message is “the education system sucks”, “we learn nothing at our centres of excellence” and “teachers are unable to teach and only want to ruin students lives,” is a rather dangerous film. Three Idiots disdains the rigour of study, pours scorn on wanting to better oneself through the sadhna of learning and instead seems to suggest that to be happy in life we all need to drop out, sing songs under the night sky and not bother with studying hard because studying hard is a waste of time. As a former IITian has pointed out Rancho, in the film mocks Laplace Transform, the equation written on the blackboard, as an example of rote learning. Yet without Laplace Transform, Hirani’s computer would not boot up! This former IITian says he has never come across a teacher like Prof Virus, and believes that in its fashionable disdain for education, the film is dangerously juvenile.

    Yes, our education system needs urgent reform. Yes, we need to relook at our exam system. Yes, we need to ensure that parents do not pressurize children. But in the pursuit of educational reform, we cannot allow standards of excellence to be lowered. India’s IITs and IIMs must be applauded for the world-class minds they have thrown up, these are institutions that are respected the world over. Lets not start lampooning Indian engineers by showing them as students who deliver babies with vacuum cleaners. Let’s get real about higher education, not engage in an escapist fantasy and convince ourselves that education does not matter. After all, Rancho could be a subversive because he was a genius student. For those who are not geniuses, alas, there are no short cuts.

    Update (6/1): Missed out the webcomic review.

    Update (12/1): Just came across this fantastic contraption that is bound to bring back memories of our dear friend Lobo from the movie. Too bad he didn’t have an iPhone, otherwise even Virus might have been persuaded. Anyway, check out the video of this iPhone controlled wi-fi quadricopter.

  • Interning on FOSS 1: Open Source Development

    I’ve been interning at Sun Microsystems in Delhi from May 1st and during this period, I’ve had the opportunity to research a variety of open source applications. My initial project was to explore and research various open source applications suitable for use by students and compare them against each other and with the proprietary alternatives. There are indeed a bunch of alternatives available for the software we use during the course of our day to day work.

    I managed to submit a paper on “Components of an Open Source Operating System for Sustainable ICT Education in Schools in Developing Countries” to the HICSS conference, and I’m starting off a multi part post with my learnings on open source software and development.

    One of the interesting works that I read on open source development was Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and The Bazaar”. This is probably one of the definitive works on open source development, and a number of theories stem from it. In fact, quite a few papers that I referred to during the course of my research cited this work. He has postulated the following principles in the essay:

    1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
    2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).
    3. Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.
    4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
    5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
    6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
    7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
    8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. (The full version of Linus’s law – Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow)
    9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
    10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
    11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
    12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
    13. Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
    14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
    15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
    16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
    17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
    18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
    19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

    Most of his principles are for software development in general, and so also apply to open source development. The key learnings form his essay are two-fold. First is that it is important to have a working prototype of the project before making it open source, or at least trying to find other developers who’d be interested in it. Second is that open source attracts a wide variety of talent that can be put to various uses, ranging from bug finding, to improvement suggestions to actual coding. Thus, it is essential to treat the participants in the right manner as everyone could make an important contribution.

    One of the other observations to be made about open source development is the vital role that the internet has played in creating the synergy that exists between the developers, users and other contributors of any open source project. In fact, Eric Raymond has said as much in his essay:

    … Another (in hindsight) was that the Internet wasn’t yet good enough.

    Before cheap Internet, there were some geographically compact communities where the culture encouraged Weinberg’s “egoless” programming, and a developer could easily attract a lot of skilled kibitzers and co-developers. Bell Labs, the MIT AI and LCS labs, UC Berkeley—these became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent.

    Linux was the first project for which a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool was made. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993–1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet access made possible.

    In essence, open source development has a lot of potential when used in the right manner. In fact, many companies use it quite strategically and couple them with interesting licenses (I’ll cover licenses in another part). There are also quite a few organizations championing free (as in freedom) software with the FSF (Free Software Foundation), headed by Richard Stallman being one of the pioneers. There is also a bit of controversy in the Free/Open Source world with some preferring the term free to open source. This has however not deterred organizations from leveraging open source development strategically. Open source development may not be practicable in every situation, particularly for routine software development in enterprises, but it definitely has its merits and I’ll be looking at other aspects of open source software in subsequent parts.

  • Filling in the gaps

    This post marks the end of my longest gap in posting to my blog since I started it. So, what have I been doing in this period? Well, for one, I was really busy organizing the Systems Continuum 2009 (one part of the rolling seminar series of SJMSOM). In addition to this, there was the usual academic loads. I am also part of my school’s IT team. So, its been pretty busy over the last 3 months :-).

    I have quite a lot of posts in the pipeline & here’s a list of those that I’m planning (I’ll link to them as I complete):

    • Stock market game on Rails – A game I’d developed for our cultural fest (made it open source on rubyforge)
    • Follow-up on University 2.0 – I took a session in one of our Systems club meetings
    • Experiences using Google Sites & Apps
    • Experiences from Continuum 2009
    • Online toolkit for college goers – similar to the college goer’s freeware toolkit

    That’s a fair number of posts, so let me get started on them.

  • Do education institutes need wikis?

    Now that many companies have adopted wikis internally and are beginning to understand their power, why should education institutes be left behind. After all, the knowledge density in education institutes is bound to be as high as, if not higher, than in most companies. Moreover, content creation is part of any education process, and a wiki is an ideal medium for refining the content and making it available to a wide audience. So, what are the stumbling blocks in the widespread adoption of wiki or any knowledge/content management system for that matter?

    Challenges

    IBM has WikiCentral, an internal deployment of the Confluence wiki, and I was one of its 125,000+ users. We had wikis for our project, our team and various initiatives. In fact most of the documentation, FAQs etc of our project were on the wiki. So, we could easily refer to them and keep them up to date at the same time.

    However, I have found a couple of limitations in wikis during my stint with IBM. Firstly, a wiki (barring wikipedia) is not the reference source (no prizes for guess the first) which means that even if we manage to aggregate a wealth of information, not too many people are going to actually refer to it. This can be tackled in some ways through publicity, which is precisely what was done in IBM. The second and biggest problem is the content creation part which is due to the lack sufficient contributors. Even wikipedia faces this problem (different scales though). I have ended up being one of the handful of contributors to quite a few wikis.

    Wiki for SJMSOM

    Finding the critical mass of contributors to sustain a wiki is the toughest challenge, and it gets even tougher with a tiny user base. However, I have not yet given up on wikis :-), and now that I am back to being a student, I find that a wiki is an ideal fit for this environment. There is a lot of information that is exchanged among students, and most of this would be of value in the future too. However, this information in the form of emails and verbal communication which makes the persistence quite low. So, a wiki with its persistence and ease of editing is an ideal medium to store all this information.

    I did some exploration of different wiki options on the internet, and found two that were well suited: Wikia and Zoho. In fact, Wikia already has a section for students. However, Zoho has better access control (supports domain level access control), and I chose it as the platform for my b-school wiki. Of course an internal wiki deployment would have been ideal, but I’m just doing this as an experiment to see if it works out.

    I have been doing some work on it, and the support for HTML embeds is quite handy for adding different widgets on pages. I have currently kept the wiki visible to the public with the ability to add comments. However, editing is restricted to students from SJMSOM (my b-school). It is currently a work in progress, and I am still trying to find the tipping point of contributors 🙂 . So, if you have any comments or suggestions, do share them with me.

    P.S. My father has blogged on a similar topic “How Important Is Technology For Knowledge Management?”, and it doesn’t seem to be very encouraging for my experiment 🙂

  • Ah! browser… Ugh! browser

    browsers

    Is Prism really an evolutionary step?

  • What does your city say?

    Paul Graham’s latest essay “Cities and ambitions” touches upon the topic of the way a city can influence a person’s ambition. The post is US-centric, but there are quite a few interesting points in it.

    No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

    ….

    Does anyone who wants to do great work have to live in a great city? No; all great cities inspire some sort of ambition, but they aren’t the only places that do. For some kinds of work, all you need is a handful of talented colleagues.
    What cities provide is an audience, and a funnel for peers. These aren’t so critical in something like math or physics, where no audience matters except your peers, and judging ability is sufficiently straightforward that hiring and admissions committees can do it reliably.

    ….

    Some people know at 16 what sort of work they’re going to do, but in most ambitious kids, ambition seems precede anything specific to be ambitious about. They know they want to do something great. They just haven’t decided yet whether they’re going to be a rock star or a brain surgeon. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it means if you have this most common type of ambition, you’ll probably have to figure out where to live by trial and error. You’ll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

    I was not able to entirely appreciate the points made regarding the various cities, having never visited any of them. However, I can draw some parallels with the Indian cities in which I have lived, mostly from a personal point of view rather than a professional one. I was born in Bangalore and spent the first 12 years of my life there. This was of course before the IT related growth, and the Bangalore of today is a lot more crowded and busy.

    My next 10 years were in Chennai, one of the 4 Indian metropolitan cities. Chennai is a relatively serious and conservative city (my friends used to complain every time rock concerts bypassed Chennai and went to Bangalore). My last 3 years have been in Kolkata, my native place and another metro, and the lifestyle is quite relaxed. The weather of a city seems to have a considerable impact on the attitudes of its citizens (something my mother mentions quite often).

    So, what quirks have you noticed about your city?

  • Lies, leaky abstractions and children

    I recently read the essay “Lies we tell children” by Paul Graham, in which he analyses the way in which adults create an abstracted and somewhat idealised world for children.

    I’m using the word “lie” in a very general sense: not just overt falsehoods, but also all the more subtle ways we mislead kids. Though “lie” has negative connotations, I don’t mean to suggest we should never do this—just that we should pay attention when we do.

    It is a lengthy, but thought provoking essay, and explores the different reasons for which real information is withheld from children. Reasons could range from just maintaining control to the difficulty of putting information in context.

    Due to this, the world in a child’s mind takes a binary form consisting of absolutes – right and wrong, good and evil, black and white. This theme can also be seen quite clearly in movies for children (think of any of the Disney animations). However, during the transition from childhood to adulthood, this binary abstraction of the world begins to leak just like any computer related abstraction. Children begin to see the different shades between black and white, and general inconsistencies in the explanations given to them by adults. Some theories seem utterly illogical while others begin to make more sense. The real world also begins to test many of the ideals taught to them.

    In this way, the journey to adulthood is somewhat like the transformation of a black and white world with two shades into a full colour world. Some misconceptions persist into adulthood, with inquisitiveness being the best tool to combat them.

    Paul Graham’s conclusion from the same essay:

    We arrive at adulthood with a kind of truth debt. We were told a lot of lies to get us (and our parents) through our childhood. Some may have been necessary. Some probably weren’t. But we all arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies.
    There’s never a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. They’ve forgotten most of them. So if you’re going to clear these lies out of your head, you’re going to have to do it yourself.
    Few do. Most people go through life with bits of packing material adhering to their minds and never know it. You probably never can completely undo the effects of lies you were told as a kid, but it’s worth trying. I’ve found that whenever I’ve been able to undo a lie I was told, a lot of other things fell into place.
    Fortunately, once you arrive at adulthood you get a valuable new resource you can use to figure out what lies you were told. You’re now one of the liars. You get to watch behind the scenes as adults spin the world for the next generation of kids.
    The first step in clearing your head is to realize how far you are from a neutral observer.

    So how many misconceptions have you been able to shake off?

  • To diigo or not to diigo – a del.icio.us dilemma

    I had posted on my online bookmarking dilemma a couple of months back, and had decided to try out two services – diigo and del.icio.us – based on a basic evaluation of different bookmarking services. I tried out both services for about a month and a half in parallel, by using the diigo extension for Firefox to post simultaneously to diigo and del.icio.us. Last month I switched over to the del.icio.us extension for Firefox to post solely to del.icio.us, and I have continued with this primarily due to its better Firefox extension.

    Following is a run down of my observations during the trial run with the two services:

    Firefox extensions

    I found the del.icio.us extension more handy to use with its suggested tags (your own plus from other users when available) for the bookmarks. The diigo extension on the other hand only had tag auto-completion from the list of tags already used, with no suggestions from tags used by others (it did show other users’ comments when available). Also, the del.icio.us extension provides a button to bookmark the page (something built into the browser Flock by the way) while diigo requires you to either use its toolbar which results in loss of screen real estate (similar to the StumbleUpon toolbar) or right click on the page and choose the bookmark option from the menu (also provided by the del.icio.us extension).

    In addition to the ease of bookmarking, the del.icio.us extension also provides a sidebar to search through your bookmarks without having to visit the site.

    Website experience

    Currently, the diigo site is easily better than the del.icio.us site which has not undergone much of a change in recent times. diigo provides a much better interface. Also, the del.icio.us site is quite slow.

    diigo bookmarks

    That said, this is due to change soon with both services running private betas for their new sites. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten an invite to either site though I put myself on the waiting list almost 3 months back. However, from what I’ve seen online, the new del.icio.us site looks similar to what is currently available on diigo. See if you have better luck getting into the beta sites:

    diigo beta

    del.icio.us beta (TechCrunch coverage including screenshots)

    Truth be told, I have not had to visit the website of either service much other than to bulk organize some bookmarks and make some setting changes.

    Special features

    diigo has a much larger feature set than del.icio.us, like text highlighting, posting to other bookmarking sites (something I used throughout to keep in sync with del.icio.us), page caching (this seems to the USP for some users if you look at the TechCrunch post comments on the del.icio.us preview) etc. However, on last try, some features like posting bookmark list to a blog (I discovered that diigo was running on Rails due to the error pages I saw when trying to access this feature), seemed to be buggy. I gave up on the post to blog feature on diigo and switched to del.icio.us which seems to work quite well (though the site leaves much to be desired – the password is in plain text).

    Final thoughts (at least till the previews are released)

    del.icio.us seems to be serving my online bookmarking requirements quite well (too well if you look at my daily bookmark posts) for the time being. diigo has its uses especially if you are collecting bookmarks for some kind of research – the highlighting can be very useful for annotations (you can also see others’ highlighting if present) and the page cache (available but done manually) should ensure that the page is still available in some form even if the source goes down.

    I’ll probably give both services another parallel trial run once the previews are released. And the fact that the import/export feature on both services is quite good, switching back and forth between them shouldn’t be much of a pain (though repeatedly typing “del.icio.us” like I did in this post is).

  • Online bookmarking dilemma

    I have been facing the problem of which online bookmarking service to use for quite some time now. This is due to the fact that I have the StumbleUpon and Google toolbars installed on Firefox, and also have accounts on deli.cio.us, blinklist and digg (and possibly some others which I can’t remember right now :-). Too diversified for my own good you say. Well my thoughts exactly. So, if you have any suggestions or comments be my guest.

    So let me do some old fashioned analysis on this subject. First off lets list my requirements:

    1. Convenient to use from browser (few steps to bookmark page)
      • browser extensions/bookmarklets to bookmark and tag pages – Brw Extn
      • tags suggestions or better yet auto tagging for known pages (a la StumbleUpon) – Tag Sugg
    2. Easy to search through bookmarks and tags – Easy Search
    3. Sharing of bookmarks – privacy settings per bookmark – Share
    4. Post to blog/other service on a timed basis (something like daily/weekly bookmark lists) – Timed posting
    5. Proper public Atom/RSS feed of bookmarks – Pub Feed
    6. Import/export bookmarks – Imp Exp

    Googling for a comparison of these services gives me this Read/WriteWeb article from about a year ago, but it’s missing Google bookmarks. Looking at the list, diigo does seem interesting though. A shot at Mashable turns up an article on a list of 50+ social bookmarking sites – so much for consolidation. However, furl and bluedot do look interesting (and I have heard of them before) – save copies of the page along with the bookmark hmmm…. sounds a bit like Clipmarks. Looks like we have 2 new candidates for the lineup. So here’s the final lineup for the comparison: StumbleUpon, Google bookmarks, deli.cio.us, diigo, furl and bluedot. Now onto the comparison table (based on my experiences with some of the services, the 2 articles I mentioned and information on the sites) – column headings based on requirements list above:

    Service Brw Extn Tag Sugg Easy Search Share Timed posting Pub Feed Imp Exp
    StumbleUpon Y Y N Y N Y N
    Google bookmarks Y N Y N N N Y
    deli.cio.us Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
    diigo Y Y Y Y Y Y Y
    furl Y N Y Y ? Y Y
    bluedot Y ? Y Y ? Y Y

    Looks like we have a tie in the feature comparison between deli.cio.us and diigo. I’ve tried deli.cio.us before, but diigo does seem quite feature rich and promising. In fact diigo seems to support posting bookmarks to rival services. On the other hand, deli.cio.us is quite well known and supported almost everywhere (wordpress.com even provides a widget), and I have found people posting their bookmarks to their blogs on a weekly/daily basis (possibly using technique like this). Then again diigo is a lot easier to type when making a review :D. It was reviewed favourably on cnet.

    Jokes aside, let me try out diigo for some time before I make the final (I wonder if there’s any such thing as “final” ) decision. Now only if there was some way in which I could get my shipment of bookmarks from StumbleUpon to diigo somehow.

    To round things up, just a few notes on some of the other services:

    • StumbleUpon is still quite good, especially for its “channel surfing” ability, but it’s not the best suited to be used as a bookmark manager. Also, the bookmarks feed does not seem to be supported on some sites twitterfeed and tumblr. So, sharing this way is ruled out for the time being (it does work with Google Reader which supports sharing)
    • Google bookmarks is also quite easy to use through the Google toolbar, but there’s no way to share the bookmarks or set their privacy. They did add the missing Import/Export feature sometime back, so we could expect the feature set to grow. Also, there is not much integration with other Google services like notebook, browser sync etc, which makes the service seem a bit orphaned right now.
    • I’ve tried blinklist, but the problem with that was the browser bookmarklet which didn’t load properly all the time. So, it failed at the basic level itself.

    Update (20/9/2007-4:00pm IST): I’ve started using diigo and imported my bookmarks from deli.cio.us, which is a built in feature, and also installed the diigo toolbar on Firefox. The bookmarking and highlighting feature seems to be working properly, with the ability to post simultaneously to deli.cio.us and other such service (as a backup). However, the daily blog posting doesn’t seem to be properly implemented (getting error messages – seems to be done using Ruby on Rails) yet. So I have set up deli.cio.us for this, and the posting seems to be working properly.

    Update (21/9/2007-10:25pm IST): Google has added a shared stuff service which allows you to share websites with others. It is not integrated with Google bookmarks at the moment, but the email feature is linked to your gmail account, plus there’s an RSS feed. So, 2 of the missing features in Google bookmarks (sharing and public feeds) could possibly be taken care of by this service.

  • The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences

    One of my friends pointed me to the article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” by Richard Hamming after I had sent him the link to Richard Hamming‘s talk “You and you research“. The article itself is quite thought provoking and makes you take a different view at Mathematics, something which we take for granted.

    He presents the evolution of Mathematics quite beautifully – how various parts like algebra, number system, geometry came into being, and how they fit into the world as abstractions of what we observe around us. Now only if we could get Maths to effectively abstract the stock market ;-). Maybe Warren Buffet could give us some pointers on that with Buffettology.

    On a side note regarding the talk by Richard Hamming, it is also quite thought provoking and makes you think about what you want to do in life, and setting your priorities accordingly.