a farewell to YACCS

The precious few visitors that this ego-fondling portal of extremely biased rants and raves may have noticed the results of a forced rhytidectomy. As I attempt to restore elements from the old platter, you, dear visitor, may have noticed that the comments that you may have left/noticed/read/responded to in the past are gone. Kaput. Poof! The kind of thing Griffin was known for. Here's what happened.

It all started in 2002, when YT started blogging with Blogger. It was free, easy, reasonably popular, but lacked certain features that today's bloggers take for granted. One of these was support for comments on posts (yeah, duh!). Google's acquisition of Blogger didn't help matters too much. Comments arrived, along with some other features, in 2004. So what does a hapless blogger do till then? Try a third-party offering. Haloscan and YACCS were the leading offerings then. A mental coin was flipped and I chose the latter. It had its problems, but then so did Haloscan. Procastination and the lack of any easy way to migrate comments from YACCS meant that I never adopted the new commenting system in post-Google Blogger.

The first cog in the merry wheel came in 2006 with a big redesign featuring a new templating system, a more interactive editing experience and more reliability. The only hitch was that YACCS didn't support this new system yet. So I stayed with YACCS, but made a mental note that I'd have to try and find a way to migrate the comments from YACCS to the Blogger system -- either with some convenient piece of software out there or by churning out some code myself.

The final blow fell recently on August 19, 2008, with the announcement that the YACCS service would be discontinued starting December 23, 2008; here's the text of the announcement reproduced from the main YACCS page:

YACCS will discontinue service on Dec 23, 2008

YACCS will discontinue its service on December 23, 2008. After this date, you will no longer be able to access comments, either on your site or through the YACCS homepage. Please download/archive your comments before this date. Thanks to all the supporters, translators and bloggers who have supported YACCS over the past seven years.

This left me no choice but to move to Blogger's commenting system. I went all in and adopted the new templating system as well. As I still continue to restore pieces from the original portal, I know that I'll have to write some code using the GData Blogger API. The good thing about YACCS is that it allowed me to export my comments in CAIF. That's the Comment Archiving and Interchange Format, something that Marcus Campbell came up with.

Thus I bid adieu to Hossein Sharifi's creation that has served this blog well for what few comments it managed to invite.

Indibloggies 2006: vote for this blog (please)

Zounds! This portal of Bollywooden bile, this altar of "no mush just slush," this podium for the adoration of all things celluloid has been nominated for "Best Entertainment Indiblog" at the Indibloggies 2006. I am more shocked than Salman Khan was when he won the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor (kuchh bhii hotaa hai!). (Click here to vote)

This oryzivorous cinephage is thrilled and truly honoured to share space with some very fine bloggers. (Click here to vote)



(Click here to vote)
If you cast your valuable vote for this space, I promise to contribute generously to the Lawrence D'Souza Creativity Trust, and say nice things about specious NRI-friendly movies, and walk about unshaven with an unwashed baseball cap wearing clippers on my nose ... No!!! I would do anything for votes, but I won't do that.

You can't do anything about your dysphagia about the nominations for (and eventual winners of) the Filmfare Awards, but you can make a difference with your vote.

eii! Please vote. (Click here to vote)

kaanuun sirf sazaa degaa; sazaa kaa mazaa nahii.n legaa. tum mujhe voT do; mai.n tumhe.n mazaa duu.Ngaa. (Click here to vote)

Thanking you sincerely,
100% aayuravedik ja.DiibuuTiyo.n se banaa sampuurN swadeshii

(Click here to vote)


update: [February 23, 2007]: Voting closed on February 20, 2007, and the electronic ink has dried on the results. This space has failed to achieve popular glory, despite the "you voting for me?" spiel. The dead rabbits be damned, it's time to be faithful and depart and return to the old mean streets of movie malarkey; as far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a blogger ... (we should feel lucky we even get to make cheap acerbic swipes anymore).

the spanking new blogger interface

ROCKS!! more info here. An index of my posts. A way to add my mugshot (for all those who really care to see what I look like ... I hear silence). A way to 'Nuff said. Segue to Anti's take

happiness all around: another one bites the blogistan dust

As JR continues to gloat in anticipation, I welcome old BC lawns alumnus, quiz mate, frustrated quizzer, frustrated intellectual, partnerless soloist, anand sivashankar to the blogging world.

And on a related note, fellow blogger Aditya gets published in the TOI. It's an article on outsourcing. Which reminds me of this Wired article that Aranyak pointed me to. The writer takes the story to the other side of the spectrum (India). The only problem: the photographs got tagged with the wrong names -- specifically, the last two photographs have their names switched around. Easy to tell if you're Indian.

the limits of free speech

Blogging is liberating: I know that, all my friends who blog know that; all the bloggers I don't know know that. But, there are limits to blogging. A little slip can cost you plenty. Take this example: Michael Hanscom, A Xerox contractor at Microsoft, is a frequent blogger. His blog is called Eclecticism. On October 23, 2003, he made a post titled Even Microsoft wants G5s, which included (a) information about where he worked at MSFT (b) a photograph of the loading deck at the place, and some presumably innocuous lines commenting on the presence of Macs on the MSFT campus. Nothing derogatory. Just simple observations. At 2 pm, on October 27, 2003, he found himself without a job. Although, the sensationally titled post Microsoft fires Mac Fan for Blog Photo spun off a long discussion thread, it seemed to overlook the key issue: This was not about Microsoft hating Macs. This was not about Microsoft hating bloggers. This was a simple security violation. It took on a different form, but (a) and (b) above comprised a faux pas that became fatal for Michael, in a "being employed" sense. It may seem drastic to third-party observers, but one could easily make a strong case for the higher-ups. And Michael does not paint a different picture either. He understood even then how bad it looked, and was ready to make amends. In utopia, he might have had a second chance. The ourse of action that MSFT adopted was unfortunate, but here's wishing Michael the very best in his search for a new position. The trackbacks on his posts offer mixed reactions, the most generally common being outrage at MSFT's action, which has been viewed as "hasty". Would the reactions have been less inflammatory if this had happened in a context other than blogging? Say a more private one?

new blogger

straight from JR's welcome, here's another plug for Kalyan's BakwasLOG.

blogger will be free: Yay!

Blogger (my blog providers) have a paid version of their blogging engine called Blogger Pro, which goes for an annual fee of $35, and provides more features (including an RSS feed). Now that Google has acquired Blogger, it's no longer a struggling startup and so the need for a paid service has passed. This means that the Pro services are going to be rolled out in the free version in a few days. Yay!

no comments

Just to make the visually obvious official: YACCS, my comments server, went down a while ago, and is still staying there. I'm hoping for a speedy recovery. In the meantime, if you're itching to rant/blast back, drop me an email (see left sidepanel for relevant information).

blogger woes

{see also: last rant}

Blogger goes and does it yet again -- someone's been playing with Dano again, and now if I log on via Mozilla (as I have been doing these last couple of months), I get some acid-washed-out badly formatted poor excuse for an edit console. Needless to say, it opens fine in Internet Explorer. Although they have moved from IIS to Apache following the Google acquisition, they are still serving off a Windows box and are designing for all users on Windows machines. I really wish Moveable Type had its own hosting space.

new blogger interface

Just logged on to my Blogger browser-based edit console, and was greeted with a smacking new interface. Is this Dano?
What really rocks is that I can now open this console in Mozilla and have the same edit space as in Internet Explorer. The previous iteration of the console didn't behave well in Mozilla, and gave me a much reduced left-aligned window, forcing me to open up Internet Explorer. With the recent release of Firebird (I tried out this new avatar of Phoenix, and I must admit, it rocks ...), this is a really really welcome change.

blogger error message for the day [aka "the more things change, the more they remain the same"]

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80004005'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][TCP/IP Sockets]General network error. Check your network documentation.

/Functions/getHostID.inc, line 10

how personal should your blog get? [ref: Dating a blogger, reading all about it]

First of all I am unsure if 'should' is the right word. How personal may your blog get. No, that's too authoritarian. I'll stick with 'should' for now. My blog posts have been a mix of impersonal posts, detached link clusters, personal ups and downs, but never have they hit that point in the narrative where one may picture an emotional sink tending to maudlin (extreme cases of sob-sob). Extreme joy, sure. Posting gripes about stuff is one thing. Whining is another. The Internet is teeming with different species of readers, some detached, some understanding, some cynical, some rude, some dumb, some clearly on the wrong boat. By making your blog personal (well, too personal), you could end up with one or more of the following results:

* Increased traffic, since a lot of people will empathize with your situation (hi, I know what you are going through...). These posts can go from being predictable yet welcome to perhaps, encouraging (I had a case of the latter, when I posted about my house being broken into last summer)

* Frequent readers clicking away, because the post went from being 'potentially interesting' to 'yet another senti- trip'

* A different relevance in the blogosphere: very little importance is afforded to aggregating blogs (which merely cluster content from elsewhere). What makes a blog interesting/important is the chord it strikes among the people who visit it again (obligation to visit a friend's blog; interesting content; interesting points of view; like interests; long-lost friends; new friends; staying in touch). This point can actually justify the extent to which your blog can get personal. People who know you would knowingly nod as they read your outpourings (or their jaws could drop at your newfound sensitivity!).

Clearly, I need to organise my thoughts better to make this post even remotely interesting. Hit the 'X' now. Close the window. Spare yourself.

And there's always the question what if you built a blog and no one came?

And just in case you were really wondering why NYTimes articles don't show up in Google searches (CS junta and Internet App Developers may skip the click)

misc-e-rama

Mark Pilgrim decided to put together PyTechnorati, the inevitable Python wrapper for the Technorati API {previous post} | at long last and procrastination galore, I've decided to dive into the sea of RSS aggregation. I'm configuring Amphetadesk (my choice of news reader). Next up, adding channels furiously, to get myself a single page every day to monitor. | The Dano project at Blogger promises some interesting features including new template tags for archives, site feeds (wonder if this is only for premium members), owner metadata. The question (as always) is: when will things stablize? They're still running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000 [Information courtesy of Netcraft]

Movable Type unleashes competition for Blogger

How ironic it is to report on Blogger's competitor SixApart (the makers of MovableType) from within my Blogger-provided space. SixApart is all set to launch a similar system called TypePad later this year, which would provide budding bloggers and prospective MovableType users with an online storage system and an editing portal (just as Blogger does), thus eliminating the need to (a) find/hire server space from hosting companies (b) install MovableType on their servers. {The Guardian: Battle of the blog builders}

I GOT A JOB

Yes! Yes! Yes! It's Gudi Padwa. Auspicious auspicious. It's also April Fool's Day. But I don't think that counts. Glad to have made it through this long (in retrospect, rather brief) time flooding the internet and numerous job sites and networking channels with my qualifications and skills. And of course, constantly waging a battle against the easy way out.

As an addendum: My publish request to Blogger worked! A coincidence?

bloggerama continues

These guys at Blogger are about to qualify as people most trying of my patience. A brand new hiccup (to add to the existing ones, of course, not to supersede them). I try to republish my archives and I get Error 203:java.lang.NumberFormatException: (server:page). Great. These guys probably never heard about usability. There I go complaining about the quality of free stuff again. However, it must be noted that they have migrated to Java ... but still running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000.

softwar

An extract from one of the recent spate of reports and warnings from MSFT (all emphasis with bolding is mine): Microsoft has warned users that most versions of its Windows software have a "critical" flaw that, if exploited, can allow a hacker to usurp control of a system or network when a victim visits a Web site or uses an e-mail program (The flaw, in case you were interested, was in the Windows Script Engine). Ever since the Slammer Worm, I decided to pursue an old worktime relief activity: finding out what webservers different famous domains were running. People who have been following the news reports every time a new virus hits the Internet will not be surprised to know that a lot of Government sites use IIS (the victim of numerous attacks in the past, present and forseeable future): the CDC (which grows popular every time a new disease attacks the world -- to be more precise, every time a new disease that has affected the rest of the world affects someone in the US of A, which defines the world as itself) is but one local example. What is interesting is the information returned by a query on Netcraft's Uptime Survey Site for the CDC: The site www.cdc.gov is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Linux. Of course, my hosts Blogger are running IIS as well (Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on Windows 2000).

updates: Blogger
[followup to Blogger QoS]
At least they have a new error message "Error: Object required (server:disco). Please try again.[more info]". [more info], however, takes me to the same error, so this is, in programming parlance, a different interface to the same implementation. Tch tch! Perhaps it's time to try out MovableType. In advance, may I present How has Blogger changed your life?.

malayalee blogs

Found out last Friday that I had made it to yet another list of Indian bloggers. Only this time it was a list of Malayalee (read: natives of Kerala) bloggers. Maintained by Manoj M Prabhakaran, a Graduate Student at Princeton. Kind of him to include me in the list, although the few of the blogs I sampled there seem to be heavily political. But then Malayalees have had the clichéd reputation of being a scheming people. But this is also probably a good time to thump my chest and remind people of the rich cultural heritage of my home state.

Blogger QoS

It's not often that I'm caught ranting about the free services I avail of on the Internet, like Blogger in this particular case, but this case is a prime example of all the problems with Blogger that I hope will evanesce once the merger with Google is complete. Updates don't reach the pages that frequently. Lately, I've been getting "Archive error" problems on republishing my archives. The Blogger help pages and troubleshooting pages are rather ineffective in this regard. And I couldn't find a blessed email address. All I found was a note saying that they didn't have the time to help free users (which means countless people like me!). Something in the documents caught my eye: something about XML. Had these guys suddenly moved from a hacky underbelly and attempted to work out a sane design for the product and in the process break everything that worked before (things like JavaScript-based comment systems, for example)? I had to find out. I tried following the instructions in their response about FTP problems. But I couldn't view my FTP logs (of course, there could be a valid reason for this besides the big software move). Then I notice the [more info] link in my web interface and click it to be taken (back) to their troubleshooting page. Scroll all the way down. And there's a link that says Discuss. Somehow this carried some contextual information that was otherwise denied to me and I was taken to a formatted page where the following stared back at me:


Error!!!


XML Error loading ''


A string literal was expected, but no opening quote character was found.


at line 27, character 26
<font face="Arial" size=2>

That last line was important. Just the information I needed. And this was their code in the template. Having had dealings with ugly markup that pretended to be XML, I knew that the '2' was missing the double quotes. I modified the template, but now the error refuses to go away. I know they still use Microsoft Publishing Software [sic], so it will probably be a long time before (a) the error vanishes, if at all, and (b) my sidebars are updated. Till then, c'est la vie.

Addendum: Just figured out something else. That error page was something that happened at Blogger. They stepped on their own toes (ROTFL). It was just a coincidence that I had the same problem. Hope they fix it soon.