For personal tax payers, budget this year turned out to be depressing. No tax limit increase even though inflation has gone up. Yesterday I came across this funny look at tax system. In Kerala context, this can be applied to lot many things! This is apparently written by David R. Kamerschen, Professor of Economics, University of Georgia.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100.

If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until on day, the owner threw them a curve.

“Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20.”Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

“I only got a dollar out of the $20,”declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,” but he got $10!”
“Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got TEN times more than I!”
“That’s true!!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!”
“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

I got this as an email forward. Thanks Jiny! 

1. 5 minutes ago you were traveling to office at 80 mph. in your brand new car. Now you are traveling to hospital at double the speed in an ambulance, you wish there was ‘undo (ctrl + Z)’ in life!

2. You are already late, and your key is missing, you wish there was ‘find tool (ctrl+F)’ in life!

3. You are a bankrupt, after investing in some weird business, you wish there was ‘rebuild all’ in life!

4. The train is so crowded that you cannot get anywhere near that nice girl at the other end, You wish there was ‘zoom & view full screen’ in life!

5. After marriage you realize that there is bound to be a mismatch, you wish there was an valuation period’ or at least a ’sample download’ or a ‘demo version’!

6. One day you realize that you are turning bald, you wish there was ‘cut and paste (ctrl + X)/(ctrl + C)’ in life!

And the best one is,

7. The best part of the keyboard is U & I are together which is not always there in life!

BBC reports that Apple and Cisco has reached a settlement on the iPhone brand name.

Apple and Cisco Systems have resolved their dispute over the iPhone brand, with both companies agreeing that each can use the name for their products.

There are no details on what type of agreement is reached. Probably Cisco would have seen that trying to protect iPhone in court is not worth the money! By now everyone already identifies iPhone as the “cool mobile from Apple”. 

Today I came across fileswap, which allows you to upload a file and then get a file in return! It is a funny idea and I tried a few files. Most of the time I got interesting image files in return. Obviously the quality of the stuff on this network will depend on how people use it!

As you can guess, only text files, image files and pdf documents are supported. You cannot upload executables or zip files. This means most of the malicious stuff is automatically excluded. There is also a 500KB file size limit in place.

Another interesting site similar to this is the LinkSwap which allows you to swap links instead of files.  The risk with links is that it can go anywhere. Hence there is an approval system in place.

Another clone is the SketchSwap. This is the most interesting of all since it allows you to swap hand drawn images. Some of them are pretty good!

When you start Web application in RAD 6.0 (Rational Application Developer 6.0), the first thing you need to configure is the database access. In this article, I will show you how to configure DB2 database access in RAD. I assume that DB2 is hosted on a Windows machine.

First thing you need to configure DB2 is the DB2 universal JDBC driver. These can be taken from DB2 server installation or from DB2 connect installation. The files you need are,

db2jcc.jar
db2jcc_license_cu.jar
db2jcc_license_cisuz.jar

Copy these files to a folder. This can be anywhere(I would suggest that you keep this under Rational root folder).

I assume you have already created a server configuration in RAD. Now right click on the server (from server window) and click on “Run administrative console”. This will open up the administrative interface. Typically it runs at “http://localhost:9060/ibm/console/“.

Login by giving any userId. Click on “JDBC providers” under “Resources”. On the right side you will see JDBC providers listed. Click on “New”. Now select values as shown below.

Click on Next. Now fill the driver paths in the Class path as shown below. You need to change this to point to the folder where JDBC jars are stored.

Click on Apply button. Once you have pressed apply button, you will see a Save link above. Click on Save and then click on “Data sources” link on the right side. Fill in as shown below. Please substitute your DB2 server configuration (IP address, DB name and port etc.). Also note the JNDI name, which you will use in your application.

Click on “J2C authentication entries” on the right and fill in as shown below. This should be the DB2 userid/password. After completing this, press apply and return to Datasource screen.

Now you need to select the userid alias you have created from “J2C authentication entries” under component managed authentication alias as shown below. Please note that this is in Datasource screen.

Now you can apply and save the settings. Click on “Test Connection” to verify the settings. If you see a successful message, you are all set for DB2 access from your Web application!

Any problems? Mail me!

Do you know that internet is so advanced that now you can chat with God? Well, that is what iGod offers! It is very similar to Eliza, the therapist. I had a chat with God and it wasn’t much fun

Me:
 hello god
God:
Hello child. What is your name?
Me:
 i am jayson
God:
  Nice to meet you,  jayson.
Me:
 I want more money
God:
Why do you want  it?
Me:
 to be happy, god
God:
Are you  happy god ?
Me:
 what the?
God:
Are you surprised?
Me:
 yes i am you sounds like a 2 year old
God:
I wouln’t have known.  Do you mean your name is  me sounds like a 2 year old.
Me:
 ok forget it
God:
OK Thanks for trying to explain that to me.  I hear you.
Me:
 I repent
God:
That is interesting:  jayson said   repent.
Me:
 I repent I came to this site
God:
Thanks for the information:  jayson said   repent he or she came to this site.
Me:
 bye
God:
Bye.

You can catch a bit more intelligent conversation here.

It is interesting to see how online stuff is changing the gadgets we use. To regular blog readers, RSS feeds offer the convenience of reading everything at a single place.  So it was quite natural that someone will come up with a mobile phone which has an RSS button!

Samsung’s  ‘Mobile Wimax MITs SPH-M8100′ features a rather large RSS button along with number keys! You can check out photos of this cool mobile here.

Based on ‘IMS (IP multimedia service), it allows users to have access to data at the speed of up to 20mbps while they are aboard of a car moving at 60km/h. It means you can actually various kinds of IP-based service including VoIP, voice call, push-to-all service, VOD, RSS and etc. in real time. It also supports T-DMB and TV-out.

Recently while working on a J2EE project, I had to know the Struts version being used. The IDE used was Rational Application Developer. I couldn’t find an option in IDE which tells me the Struts version it is using!

The only way I could see was to open the struts.jar in Winzip and inspect the Manifest.mf. It showed Implementation-Version : 1.1. This means that RAD by default uses Struts 1.1.

I wanted to use the latest stable version of Struts (which is 1.3.5). Hence I deleted all the jars from WEB-INF/lib and then copied new jars from struts-1.3.5-lib.zip. Thats it!

My office is about 25Kilometres away from my home. There is a company bus from a stop about 2 Kilometres from my home. If I am on time, I take this bus or otherwise I drive my Maruti 800 to office. 

Of late I am trying to take the bus more often. The morning 2KM walk is a good exercise for the body and mind! Bus starts at 7:45, so I start around 7:30 from home. It is a pleasant time to walk - cool weather and plenty of fresh air

This short walk of 15 minutes is a good time to reflect on the life. Today as I was walking, I noticed a mother scolding her young child. The child is refusing to go to school. Mother tells him - “I will call the police and let them take you”. Suddenly child was very afraid and he became submissive.

This reminded me my first visit to UK. One of the things that surprised me most was the fact that british generally had no fear of their police. They respect them, but fear? - I doubt it. This is just opposite to India or Kerala where Police has a very bad and fearsome reputation. They do command some respect, but most people consider them as some kind of monsters.

Now the people themselves are to blame for this. Indiscipline is so part of our life that only a fearsome police force can control us. It is the fear of police that keeps most of the anti social activities in check. 

Recently there were some attempts to give a humanistic face to Kerala Police. Some videos were made  by public relations department which showed how politely police should handle people. When it was publicly screened, people were laughing it off. It was as if people expect the police to be brutal!

In Malayalam, there is a saying - “yatha praja thatha raja”. This translates to - “as the ruled so the ruler”. I guess it applies to our police force as well.

Taking brilliant flower photos! 
You don’t need to have a very high end camera to take brilliant flower photographs. What you need is a camera which allows manual adjustment of aperture, shutter speed and film speed (This is true for any type of photography).  Here are some tips I learned in a few sessions of flower photography!

0. Get a digital camera which allows manual adjustment of all controls - aperture, film speed, shutter speed, white balance etc. I use canon S3 IS which is not an SLR but still good enough.

1. Most important thing is to find the best angle, the angle from which flower looks most attractive. For this you need to look around the flower before taking the shot! Typically we tend to take the photo looking down which may not capture the true beauty.

2. When you compose your shot by varying aperture etc. ensure that the true colors are captured. If you are shooting in direct sunlight, the flowers may look white washed! So adjust various parameters ensuring that the true colors are seen on the LCD preview.

3. Ensure that the flower covers the entire photo. You are photographing a flower and want it to be the primary focus! You may have to use zoom for this. So get a camera which offers atleast 10x zoom.

4. Manipulate the background. You can place a white or black sheet behind the flowers. If that is not possible, edit the photo background later in photoshop.

5. Use a tripod! Using a tripod guarantees that the photo is sharp. Even a small handshake can make the photos appear blurred(This is true for any photography, but in flower photography there is nothing that prevents you from using a tripod!).

6. In direct sunlight, I found that using shutter speed priority mode with 1/250 speed gives good results. When you are not using tripod, ensure that you take photos at higher speeds.

7. Sometimes it makes sense to break the above rules. For example, if there is something more interesting than the flower, make flower the secondary focus.  Sometimes a flower in motion may be more interesting than a stationary one. Use your instinct!

For any camera, there is a set of must have accessories. Get it! For Canon S3 IS, I found this.

I received S3 IS on thursday. I love this camera.  It has all the features a beginner to medium photographer needs. The only bad thing I noticed so far is the rather “fragile looking” built in flash. I doubt it will last more than few months.

Here is my first masterpiece using this camera. It is the macro shot of vinca rosia flower at home. It is shot in manual mode around noon and came out really sharp!

Ebay India offers a lot of good electronics stuff. You can find a lot of stuff that is difficult to find in the neighbourhood electronics shop. It is also easy to pay (Paisapay) if you have an account in a “new generation” bank such as ICICI. But there are some things you need to be aware before buying any stuff on Ebay India. You should not use the number of positive feedback alone before making a decision. Here is why,

Final price may be different from item price
Since the competition is high, sellers tend to underprice the item and then increase delivery or other charges. So always check the total price you need to pay before making a decision.

Check the seller feedback
This is a no brainer. Sometimes you will see that people have given positive feedback even though there are problems with the stuff. Indians generally are ready to swallow minor problems! So read feedback carefully. An example is this positive feedback - “Checked everthing works fine, does warranty needs a card or the bill is enough?”. The real question he is trying to ask is - “Where is my warranty card?“.

Beware of the warranty trap
You will notice that a lot of items are advertised with a warranty. In reality, this is not manufacturer warranty. They don’t give any manufacturer warranty (I suspect some of the items are smuggled or refurbished items). What they mean is that if there is a problem, you need to send it to the seller and get it repaired! As you can imagine it is a big hassle.

Beware of pirated items
If you see something really cheap, chances are that it is a fake or an old item. This applies not only to games and software but even to memory cards (CF or SD cards)! There is no effective way to identify this beforehand. Leave it to your luck!

Never deal outside Ebay
If you started a deal in Ebay, close it in Ebay. Some tend to negotiate outside to minimize Ebay fees. But if something goes wrong, you are screwed. Also pay for your item using “PaisayPay”. This gives you some protection from rogue sellers.

Last week I signed up to Google Adwords which allows me to advertise my site on Google partner sites using Adsense. I started a new campaign to see how the whole thing works. The whole setup process takes only 10 minutes and all you need is a credit card.

Initially, you start with a “basic” account which simplifies ad creation process. Being a geek, I immediately upgraded it to “Standard Edition”. This offers a huge set of options  such as content targeting, site targeting, geographic targeting etc. It will take sometime before you are familiar with the set available options. 

When I tried to add my first ad, I came across a problem. My idea was to promote my blog as the “best blog from India”. But unfortunately Adwords doesn’t allow putting superlatives such as “Best”! Here is the error I got,

This seems funny since any ad served by Adsense is clearly marked as “Ads by Google”. So why can’t call my blog the “best blog from India”?

After correcting the error, I released my first ad to the internet world. In a day, Google served over 10,000 impressions of my ad! I got around 80 visitors through the campaign. But all of this comes at a cost, and hence I paused my campaign for the time being

But this confirms one thing. If you have a ecommerce site, advertising using Adsense will get you a lot of new customers and business.

I have bought a brand new Canon S3 IS powershot camera from Ebay. It is yet to reach me and I can’t control my excitement. The seller has provided a tracking URL for the camera and I am refreshing it every minute

S3 IS will be my 4th digital camera. My first one was a Kodak camera bought in 2000. It was a 2MP camera with horrible photo quality, but neverthless was worth over Rs.20,000. Last one was a Canon A80 and it no longer works. I am yet to come across a digital camera which worked for more than 3 years!

I decided to buy Canon S3 IS due to following reasons. Will post a detailed review once I get hold of it!

1. Excellent feature set
S3 offers 6MP which is good enough along with 12x optical zoom. It has got image stabilization which is quite useful when you use zoom. Users of this camera also reports that the image quality is quite good. Uses AA batteries (I hate Li-Ion battery based cameras).

2. User reviews at dpreview 
I use  dpreview for quality camera reviews. The users of S3 IS camera has posted a lot of information which influenced my decision.

3. Amazon reviews 
Lot of positive feedback at Amazon as well.

4. Pbase/Flickr photo gallery of S3 IS 
I am impressed by the photos at Flickr and Pbase taken using S3 IS.

5. The price 
It is priced below Rs. 20,000 on Ebay India. I was looking for a 12x zoom camera below Rs. 20,000.

You can buy Canon PowerShot Pro Series S3 IS 6MP from Amazon.

We all are used to email spam. I get around 100 spam mails daily in my Gmail account. Thankfully most of these are identified as spam by Gmail and gets moved to spam folder automatically.

When I started this blog, I never thought that spam would be a major issue. Initially I haven’t added any comment moderation. Within a week, I started seeing spam comments mostly related to pharmacy and drugs. I started manually deleting spam and soon I realized it is not going to work.

In Wordpress, under options->discussion, there are a couple of spam fighting measures available. I enabled comment moderation which automatically puts a comment in moderation queue if it contains 2 or more links. I have also enabled common spam word protection. This means that any comment which contains words in this list will be automatically put into moderation queue.

The solved the problem for a few more days. Then I noticed that I have over 100 comments to moderate. Now sorting through 100 comments to find a genuine comment is not something you would cherish!

Wordpress provides something called comment blacklist. If any of the words in this list is part of the comment, the comment will be nuked. It will not appear in moderation queue. So I analyzed few spam comments and added the common words into the comment black list.

I had hoped that these measures would solve the spam problem. Soon I realized that I was too optimistic. I started getting a lot of comments and it contained black listed words with spelling mistakes! For example, the word viagra will appear as viegra or something similar.

Looking at the spam comments I noticed that all of them are coming from a set of specific IP addresses. So what I needed was a way to blacklist IP addresses.

In Wordpress, under manage->files you can see the .htaccess file. This can be used to block a specific set of IP addresses. So I added the following entries in this file (Substitute the actual IP address instead of 127.0.0.1)

order allow,deny
deny from 127.0.0.1
allow from all

So today, I have no comments to moderate. Thank god!

Notes

1. There are sophisticated spam fighting tools such as the Akismet which is distributed. I am yet to use it.
2. It is better to disable trackbacks. Tools such as trackback submitter is widely used by spammers.

I live in Kerala, a south indian state which boasts very high literacy rate. But intellectual property rights is not a big issue here. It is quite common for people to pirate software, movies and music.

Then came Rishiraj Singh. He is a senior inspector general (IG) in Kerala police and is known as a tough officer. So when he was put in charge of the anti-piracy cell it was natural that things would turn ugly.

Rishiraj singh started raiding CD/DVD shops frquently and lot of fake/pirated CDs were destroyed. But he then took it too far. He had sent notices to police offers saying that all video lending libraries are illegal! CD/DVD lending library owners filed a petition in the Kerala high court and high court ruled that lending libraries can operate as per law. But the matter is not yet closed and the whole issue is a hot debate in Kerala.

Copyright law is intended to protect innovation. It ensures that somebody’s hardwork is not stolen and sold. Obviously lending videos is a completely different issue. If we apply the same law to books, all existing book libraries will have to be closed!

I did a quick look at the Indian copyright act (1957). Now here is a paragraph from the act.

51.When copyright infringed:- Copyright in a work shall be deemed to be infringed —
b) when any person —
(i) make for sale or hire, or sells or lets for hire, or by way of trade displays or offers for sale or hire, or

This statement indicates that video lending libraries (and book libraries) are illegal if we strictly apply the law. But again, if we apply Indian law strictly, atleast 90% of the population will be in jails

But there is some reference to book library in the law.

The following acts shall not constitute an infringement of copyright, namely…
(o) the making of not more than three copies of a book (including a pamphlet, sheet of music, map, chart or plan) by or under the direction of the person in charge of a public library for the use of the library if such books is not available for sale in India;

I think an amendment is required to clearly provide an exemption to libraries(video and books). It is pretty obvious that if someone likes a movie or an audio album, he will buy it rather than take it on rent frequently! I don’t think libraries will have any impact on the revenue streams available to copyright owners.

This blog is powered by Wordpress blogging software installed on a dreamhost machine. Dreamhost is an employee owned Web hosting service and is popular with bloggers. Dreamhost offers “one click installs” for a lot of Web applications and Wordpress is one of them.

Within a week of Wordpress 2.1 release, Dreamhost has enabled an auto upgrade link! With a single click I could upgrade my existing Wordpress 2.0.5 installation to Wordpress 2.1. Before upgrading, I did take a backup of my blog (there was nothing much in it :)), but the upgrade went through without any issues.

But then I noticed that there were some database errors under the category link. First I thought it was due to some error in the upgrade script. But looking closer, I found that the problem was with theme I was using! Interestingly, Wordpress 2.1 release broke a lot of themes out there and mine was one of them. It was to be expected since 2.1 release had major changes.

And hence I switched to the typoxp theme. It appears to be an ideal 3 column theme for a “text heavy” blog.

Recently I came across the yesfollow project. This is a campaign against “rel=nofollow” attribute usage in blog comments. I can identify with their sentiments, but I don’t agree with them completely. Anyone who adds value to a blog entry by adding meaningful comments do deserve the credit, but only if his comment is related to the content he has on his own site! (For example, if I have a blog on chess and if I comment on a blog which deals with politics, should I get the link credit? I don’t think so!) 

If you are not clear about this whole issue, I will explain it for you.

Whenever you search on a keyword in Google, the web pages returned are based on the Google page ranking. The pages with highest rank will appear first and hence will get more traffic.

Now how is this pagerank determined? One of the key parameters is how many Websites link to your blog or Website. If many people refer your Website, you will have a better pagerank. This is a cool idea and in most cases will ensure that most relevant pages are displayed for a search keyword.

As blogs started appearing in internet scene, people realized that by commenting to blogs, they can increase their pagerank. So spammers started using automated tools to bombard blogs with comments. Soon it was apparent that some mechanism is required to fight the spammers. Then came the “rel=nofollow” attribute.

When “rel=nofollow” is added to a link, Google and other search engines ignore the link for pageranking. This means that there is no advantage in comment spam since your link is worthless.  Soon all the blogging platforms (Wordpress, Movable Type) etc. started added “rel=nofollow” to all the links in the comments automatically.

But unfortunately, this didn’t help in reducing the spam. Spammers have kept their comment bombing on. Sometimes they do get traffic via clicks on the comments.

I do agree with yesfollow that “rel=nofollow” is yet to have any impact on blog spamming. As a blog owner you need to be watchful of spam and should delete it immediately.

But there is a reason why Google wants us to use “rel=nofollow”. Note that relevance of a Web page to a keyword is determined by pagerank. So if I provide a lot of “meaningful and useful” comments on a lot of blogs, I do get a lot of inbound links. But that doesn’t guarantee that my site is relevant to the comment text or search keyword!

Hence if yesfollow becomes  widely used, the pageranking algorithm will have to be modified. Google will have to identify the blog comments and then discount them in pagerank calculation.

Yesfollow guys, pageranking is not to reward someone, but to find sites which is most relevant for a keyword!

Here is another good email forward I came across, 

With a pile of 300 résumés on his desk and a need to pick someone quickly, my boss told me to make calls on the bottom 50 and toss the rest.

“Throw away 250 résumés?” I asked, shocked.

“What if the best candidates are in there?”

“You have a point,” he said. “But then again, I don’t need people with bad luck here.”

- Becky Horowitz(Reader’s digest)

Most of the email forwards I receive are junk or hoaxes. But sometimes I come across little gems in them. Here is an inspiring short story which shows sometimes your biggest weakness can even be your biggest strength!

A 10-year-old boy decided to study judo despite the fact that he had lost his left arm in a devastating car accident. The boy began lessons with an old Japanese judo master. The boy was doing well, so he couldn’t understand why, after three months of training the master had taught him only one move.

“Sensei,”(Teacher in Japanese) the boy finally said, “Shouldn’t I be learning more moves?” This is the only move you know, but this is the only move you’ll ever need to know,” the sensei replied. Not quite understanding, but believing in his teacher, the boy kept training. Several months later, the sensei took the boy to his first tournament.

Surprising himself, the boy easily won his first two matches. The third match proved to be more difficult, but after some time, his opponent became impatient and charged; the boy deftly used his one move to win the match. Still amazed by his success, the boy was now in the finals. This time, his opponent was bigger, stronger, and more experienced. For a while, the boy appeared to be overmatched. Concerned that the boy might get hurt, the referee called a time-out. He was about to stop the match when the sensei intervened.

“No,” the sensei insisted, “Let him continue.” Soon after the match resumed, his opponent made a critical mistake: he dropped his guard. Instantly, the boy used his move to pin him. The boy had won the match and the tournament.

He was the champion. On the way home, the boy and sensei reviewed every move in each and every match. Then the boy summoned the courage to ask what was really on his mind.

“Sensei, how did I win the tournament with only one move?”

“You won for two reasons,” the sensei answered.” First, you’ve almost mastered one of the most difficult throws in all of judo. And second, the only known defense for that move is for your opponent to grab your left arm.”

The boy’s biggest weakness had become his biggest strength.