I recently had this dream, a nightmare if you please, that the chocolate factory is actually run by the Oompa-Loompas. There is no Willy Wonka, or at least not anymore! The Oompa-Loompas run the factory and they have a vague memory of what Willy Wonka was and so they try to be him; though they have to also run the mill and do the impromptu dances. The chocolate factory still makes great profits selling its chocolate, though Grandpa Joe feels that its not as wonderful as he remembers it. But what does Grandpa Joe know, he is an old man. Of course, the tragedy is that Charlie, who is actually Willy Wonka in disguise, is turned away because you actually have to be a Oompa-Loompa to work at Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory.

Fortunately this is all just a nightmare and nothing like this can ever possibly happen in real life. Phew!

I saw this on the door of one of my Professors, Larry Moss, who is a mathematician and a logician. Couldn't help laughing. (I feel it should say "Therefore, Penguins are some old TV shows", anyhow..)

For a while now I have been using the Sumatra PDF viewer on windows as opposed to Acrobat Reader (which is pretty much the standard). The main reason is this: when I am working with Latex or Tex and generating pdf documents Acroread is very annoying because it holds a lock on the PDF file. This means that part way during compilation pdflatex complains that is cannot open the PDF file for output. I then have to close Acrobat Reader, rerun pdflatex, and then open up the file and go to the particular page to see the changes. That entire hassle is eliminated with Sumatra PDF.

Sumatra PDF does not hold a lock on the file. Which means pdflatex runs to completion just fine. Further Sumatra detects that the PDF file has changed on disk and refreshes itself! When it does this refresh as far as possible it stays on the same page (it does not do an effective restart) and hence I can see the little edit I made immediately. Sumatra PDF is a bit slower that Acrobat Reader, has less features and has crashed on occasion. Despite that, it says me a large amount of time when working with Latex. Highly recommended for these purposes.

Sumatra PDF

http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/

MikTex

http://miktex.org/

India has a odd situation with respect to politics and government. Most well educated people don't want to have anything to do with it. These fields are not considered 'good' or 'respectable' career options. The people who run the administration and drive the policy making are the ones who were the bottom of your high school or college class. No one who has the skills to be anything better considers politics to be a respectable enough life goal. While I was in India I thought this was normal and maybe even the right thing.

Why is this? In large part because we see the ugly side of our politics too often: the crudeness, the outright dishonesty, the corruption and the incompetence. "I don't want to be in there, fighting the pig in the mud".

Case in point: Growing up in Kerala I have heard this man  make too many inappropriate and distasteful comments on the state TV channels. He is the sort of textbook politician whose uncouth manner paints such a low picture of politics in my state that it deters most well to do people from having anything to do with him and his ilk.

Last week we had the terrorist situation in Mumbai that left everyone saddened and apprehensive of the future in the region. Mr Achuthanandan, who is currently the Chief Minister of the State of Kerala, shows up at the home of one of the commandos, Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan, who died fighting the terrorists. Why? To use a rather blunt metaphor, its a bit like a dog pissing on a pole to mark its territory - the obligated visited to show your solidarity and to establish your political presence.

The deceased Major's father decides that he does not want to entertain any such display in his house and he tells Mr Achuthanandan to leave. What would someone who truly felt for their loss do? What would someone who is touched by the situation in Mumbai and for those who lost their lives there do? And what does Achuthanandan do?

Major Unnikrishnan's father refuses to meet Kerala CM

Kerala CM insults slain Major's dad.

American politics can be very interesting - a bit more that some of the popular sport here. Once in a while however you come across absolute gems, like this one by Amazon (seriously, this is on their homepage - sheer genius!):

And in the explanation of this is:

This Meter is Measuring...
This meter was calculated by comparing the all-time sales of the following groups of items.
   Republican: Waterford Holiday Heirlooms Republican Elephant Waterford
   Democrat: Waterford Holiday Heirlooms Democratic Donkey Waterford

"Waterford Holiday Heirlooms Democratic Donkey".... ha ha ha. Brilliant!

Google has released a new browser called Google Chrome. I had heard of this project a while back when I was working at Google and I have been hoping ever since that they release it so that I can finally get off Internet Explorer.

So Chrome is fast, feels light weight and uncluttered. After playing around with it a bit I have replaced IE as my default browser (finally). This is just their Beta 1 release but it feels so good.

There are a few things that I would like it to have such as integration with the fingerprint authentication service so that the logons I created previously work with Chrome as well.

You should try it out:
http://www.google.com/chrome/

There is a fun comic here about chrome:
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

And many YouTube videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGmO7Oximw8
"Browsers need to get better because they were designed for an era when web pages were doing completely different things..". I agree.

I have heard from places that Chrome does not work well with Silverlight. Personally I don't care too much because I don't use Silverlight myself. I have never been convinced enough to install Silverlight because I felt that it would make an already slow and frustrating browsing experience degenerate a bit more. Which is interesting because now that Chrome is so fast i probably don't mind the penalty of Silverlight slowing it down a bit. So if some folk at MS write a good Silverlight plugin for Chrome arrogant little uns like me might try it out.

On Privacy

You should also read the privacy policy (if you care about such things). No, no one is stealing your passwords, but someone can be watching your "behavior":
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html

I for one have disabled the auto-suggestions feature as explained here: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=95656&hl=en

Its a nice feature, but when I think through the implications, I'd rather not have it. Your mileage might vary.

Now can someone write a fast, lightweight and feature rich Email and Calendar app so that I can get rid of Outlook?

Summer is wrapping up. What a summer it was! In about a week I should be back in beautiful Bloomington to continue on my PhD.

This summer I got myself

• An ex-girlfriend
• A wife
• A hot girl to hang around with in Vancouver, Canada (the most livable city on the world)
• Lots of fun experience dealing with US border crossings
• My first non-trivial car accident
• An Acratech Ultimate V2 ballhead
• A Flashpoint carbon fiber tripod
• An HP Tablet PC
• A new sword
• A deep understanding of Parsing

and more...

As I write this I wonder how much of my life I have expended looking at this -

Life!

ps. The ex-girlfriend, wife and hot girl are the same - everything else in the list is different (for example the ball head is not the same as the tablet PC).

...for an internship this summer. I found this:

Jorge Cham is always giving away our secrets.