Penned Thoughts

I was reading The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins and came across this wonderful poem by Bert Leston Taylor in one of its footnotes. Here’s what Dawkins has to say about it, followed by the poem itself:

It is a a little-known fact that some dinosaurs had a ganglion in the pelvis, which was so large (at least relative to the brain in the head) as almost to deserve the title of second brain. This prompted the following delightfully witty verse by the American comic writer Bert Leston Taylor (1866–1921):

Behold the mighty dinosaur,
Famous in prehistoric lore,
Not only for his weight and length,
But for his intellectual strength.
You will observe by these remains
The creature had two sets of brains,
The one in his head, the usual place,
The other at his spinal base.
Thus he could reason a priori
As well as a posteriori.
No problem bothered him a bit,
He made both head and tail of it.
So wise he was
So wise and solemn
Each thought filled just a spinal column.
If one brain found the pressure strong,
It passed a few ideas along.
It something slipped the forward mind
’Twas rescued by the one behind.
And if in error he was caught
He had a saving afterthought.
As he thought twice before he spoke
He had no judgment to revoke.
For he could think without congestion
Upon both sides of every question.
O gaze upon this noble beast,
Defunct ten million years at least.

The puns and wordplay in this poem are so good! “And if in error he was caught he had a saving afterthought.” Haha!

One of my father’s favourite couplets goes like this:

कर्म किये जा फल की चिंता मत कर ऐ इंसान,

कर्म अच्छा करेगा फल देगा भगवान्।

Translation:

Keep working and don’t worry about results. If you do good deeds, god will reward you with a positive outcome.

This is often combined with the note that human beings are free to do whatever they please, that we enjoy free will. It’s only the results that we have no control over.

Every time I hear someone make this argument, my mind starts coming up with these counter-arguments that are always the same. I thought it would be interesting to round up these loose threads of reason and bring them into a cohesive whole.

Let’s imagine that a guy is walking down the street and is run over by a speeding car and dies on the way to the hospital. Ask any religious person if there is an explanation for the death of an innocent person in this fashion and they will be quick to conjecture that he must have done something sinful to deserve such a fate. This is divine retribution, they will say, for wrongdoings in this or a past life.

But in a world that has free will, how can an all-powerful god always arrange for the distribution of this sort of justice?

Did that car driver intend to recklessly drive on that particular street at that time of that day just so he could kill a person and ensure that god’s plan was carried out? Of course not.

So then does it follow that god made him commit this murder by pre-arranging for the victim and the car driver to cross paths with each other on the fateful day in this brutal fashion? Will the driver eventually have to pay for a crime that god made him do?

Like everything else in religion, the concept of divine justice simply does not fly in a world where we have free will. Either god has to force all the sinners in the world to flock to Japan just in time to be swept away in a tsunami or we have to accept that the people who died in the tragedy were innocent and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on their own free will.

The couplet above sets out that we have to work towards achieving our goals, but in a world where divine justice is in effect, there can be no free will, and it therefore wouldn’t make any sense for anyone to work for anything.

Why study hard for that exam when your passing or failing is entirely in the hands of god? Why drive sensibly when you know that you can only die in an accident if it is in your destiny? Why get out of the bed in the morning at all?

Look at the world around you: is it more likely that our actions are being governed by an all-powerful being and that none of us are in control of our destinies, or does it make more sense that there is no divine justice, that we are free to do what we want, that the universe is utterly indifferent?

Apple’s desktop operating system OS X Lion has a great file-sharing feature called AirDrop that makes it a breeze to send files across to Macs in your vicinity. It is one of the best examples of Apple taking something that is inherently complicated and re-imagining it in a way that your average user can make sense of it.

However, the feature has a flawed workflow that often makes it a poorer alternative to using the traditional file-sharing methods available in the OS.

To use AirDrop, users of both Macs need to click on the AirDrop item in the Finder sidebar (or hit Command-Shift-R on the keyboard). The Finder will then display all the Macs in physical proximity that have AirDrop enabled as well. You can then drag any number of files or folders onto any of those Macs and the person on the other end can accept the file transfer to initiate it.

I have several Macs in my house and I often want to transfer stuff between them. Using the traditional method, I can select the target Mac in the Finder sidebar and, upon logging in to it as a registered user or guest, transfer files to it directly.

With AirDrop, though, I either need to run back and forth between both machines to achieve this or station someone on the other end to do the legwork for me.

I think it would be so much more useful if AirDrop could locate and display all the Macs in your vicinity regardless of whether the feature is currently active on them or not. When you send stuff over, AirDrop could either throw up a notification on that other Mac requesting the user’s permission to initiate the transfer or, based on a preconfigured setting, simply carry it out for machines that are trustworthy.

I am not sure exactly how AirDrop works on a technological level—because, quite frankly, it seems like wizardry that it is able to connect two Macs based on their geographical nearness, even if they are on different wireless networks—and am therefore not sure if my suggestion is feasible, but it would definitely make the feature significantly more useful.

[Header image courtesy of the U.S. Department of Defense and AirDrop screenshot courtesy of Apple.]

A friend from Twitter listed A Wednesday as one of his favourite Bollywood movies, so I figured I’d give it a try, hoping to see it change my impression of the industry. I don’t think it did much in that regard.

It’s the sort of Bollywood movie that tries to portray itself as better than it actually is. It’s the kind of movie that bores you throughout and then adds an uplifting speech at the end to make it all seem worthwhile. It’s the kind of movie that most moviegoers feel the need to respect and like even though they may not actually have enjoyed it much.

I, for one, do not feel that need.

If everything else in this movie was stellar, I could have forgiven the absurd cinematography, but the rest of it wasn’t good enough to make up for it. There are at least twenty shots, totalling up to over two minutes of screen time (not all at once though), where the camera makes sweeping pans around the roof to show Naseeruddin Shah sitting, standing or roaming on the terrace in a pensive mood.

It’s almost as if it’s the first time the cameraman has discovered that a camera can be mounted on a crane and manipulated that way and wants to shove the effect in our face every five minutes. It’s like those people who buy iPhones just to show them off and have to fish them out of their pocket at the slightest opportunity. It’s annoying and immature. The score is horrible too, specially in the scenes described above.

It has absolutely no sense of pacing at all. This could have been a 40-minute TV episode and it would not have needed to sacrifice one bit of the plot.

The movie glorifies torture and police brutality and makes it look cool. Were we supposed to like Jimmy Shergill’s character and applaud the way he beat up criminals and took the law into his own hands? What if he beat someone up and it turned out that he was actually innocent? The movie does not address that.

For a serious movie, the subject of torture is not something you can use for comic effect and then brush under the carpet. The writers and directors of this movie have typical knee-jerk reactions to corruption and terrorism in India and they think their ill thought out solutions are the best ways to fix these problems. Clearly, they are not.

And the much ballyhooed monologue at the end, which seems to be the entire reason why people like this movie, was not great either. The sentiment was right but the dialogue was pedestrian and Naseeruddin Shah did not do a particularly good job of injecting the ordinary man’s plight into it.

The movie made great promises but failed to deliver on them. The only good thing I can say about it is that the acting was better than average, and that is indeed commendable, but I still wish I hadn’t seen this movie.

I’d rate it 2.5/5.

Today marks the closing of Caramel Cloud and Notificant.

As anyone who has tried to contact me through my Caramel Cloud email address and the company’s Twitter account knows, I have been unresponsive for the past month. That’s because I have been spending most of my time attending to a new business in the offline world and some of it writing for Macworld and have not found the time to answer those communications with the evasive responses that I have been getting so much practice at.

This was probably not the best start to this post, but I don’t know what else would be either. How do you tell the world that you failed? I don’t know. I didn’t even want to be the one to write this post, but then again, who else would? I thought my friends, and above all, Caramel Cloud’s customers, deserved an explanation, so here it is.

I had high hopes for Notificant. It filled a genuine gap in my own workflow and I had expected that it would do so in others’ as well. And it did too. Almost all the reviews the application received, from both customers and reviewers, was positive and encouraging. Even the negative criticism was polite and well-intentioned and I was taking down those suggestions and requests for implementation into the app in future.

Guess that won’t be happening now, huh?

But I do really have this note in Notational Velocity that currently has 29 bullet points. From the really small fixes, like adding pagination to the archive in the web app, to some great new features like recurring notifications and CloudApp integration and support for TextExpander and Automator, text messaging, Twitter and Facebook, natural language scheduling…it was all planned.

I made mistakes. I spent too much, I made some bad hires, I was too lenient and polite with people who didn’t keep up their end of the bargain, I missed some deadlines, I tried to delegate some work that I later realised I myself was best suited to handle. I got too excited about things like getting contacted by Apple for a possible feature on the front page of the App Store. I spent too much time over-thinking things. I didn’t have enough business acumen to see this project through, to make it profitable.

Oh well. You live and you learn. There were a few days after the initial buzz over the release of Notificant for iPhone had died down and sales were precipitously dropping to unsustainable levels where I was horribly down. I don’t know if that’s what they call depressed but that’s what it felt like. People in my family, my parents, they knew something was up.

Eventually, I just let go. I decided not to pursue this any longer. I know it seems like a very hasty decision, and maybe it was, but there really was no way out. This was a self-funded project and it was clear that I’d have to spend more to work on further developing the app. At a time when I hadn’t been able to recoup even 25% of my original investment, that did not seem like a very good idea.

I am dragging this out. The point is: Caramel Cloud and Notificant are no more. I have pulled the apps off the App Stores, but will keep the service around for a few more months, probably till September, to let its most recent purchasers get some value for their money. Maybe it won’t be enough; please pardon me for that. I wish there was another way more than you do.

…

The good news is that I did sell 2,200 units overall (iOS and Mac OS X combined) in the month of May. While that was nowhere near good enough, it was still our bestselling month by far and for that I am very thankful to all the people who spread the word about our app, to the kind folks in the media who wrote about it and to the customers who went out and bought it. Thank you.

I usually go through and proofread every post I write on this blog but I am leaving this one as it is because I may not be able to publish it if I start reading what I have written here. Please pardon the typos and other errors that must inevitably have found their way into this post. Thanks for reading.

-Aayush

Banks in India—and, I suppose, all over the world—are obsessed with security, as well they should be. Unfortunately, however, most of the restrictions and checks they put in place in the name of security not only make banking inconvenient, they actually make it less safe.

HDFC Bank, for instance, forces you to change the online banking password for your current account (and maybe other types of accounts as well) every three months. Needless to say, this is a monumental hassle. Even beyond that, however, it is a glaring security risk.

Human beings are not good at remembering passwords. And when you force them to try to memorise a new one every few months, they are going to do one of two things—they’ll either start using the same two or three passwords in rotation (which significantly reduces the security this measure was put in place to provide) or start writing them down somewhere, most probably on a much less secure location than their own memory.

This essentially ensures that, at some point, they will either forget to write down the latest iteration of their password or lose the full list somehow, whether it be on a scrap of paper or in a plain text document on their computer. In any event, it is clear to me—and please feel free to correct me if you think I am wrong—that requiring your customers to change their password against their own wish is a recipe for disaster.

Even setting aside the security concerns, it is just a pain in the rear. I am a reasonably tech-savvy person and have enough sense to not keep my pet’s name as my password and to not write it down on the back of the diary in my wallet or the notes application on my phone.

I use the immensely useful 1Password application on my iPad, iPhone and Mac to keep generating new and complicated passwords and keep track of them. I am not very paranoid about security—some would even say I am very not paranoid about security, to the point of being reckless—but in the age of web services getting hacked left, right and center, I figured it was a good idea to have different passwords for different accounts. 1Password takes almost all the headache out of managing all these passwords and allows me to securely keep them on hand at all times.

Even so, when HDFC Bank last asked me to reset my password, I was on my iPad, where the 1Password app is not, due to Apple’s restrictions for third-party applications on iOS, as well integrated as it is on Mac OS X and could not step in to replace the old password automatically when I changed it. I seem to remember having opened the app manually and replaced the password but, in any case, I cannot log into my online banking account using the password I have saved in 1Password’s database now.

And this is me, tech blogger extraordinaire, who is having a hard time keeping up with password changes that are abruptly and unexpectedly forced on me; just think of the poor masses who set “jony123” as their password everywhere and still manage to forget it at inopportune moments!

-Aayush

Apple is known for providing the complete solution. The iPhone ships with the SIM card inserted and, for the carriers that are officially supported by Apple in various countries around the world, the carrier settings preconfigured. In India, before the advent of 3G, you could purchase a factory unlocked iPhone from one of the countries where it was available (Australia, China (Hong Kong), New Zealand and United Kingdom), insert an Airtel or Vodafone SIM card in it and instantly start using EDGE to connect to the Internet.

However, since these companies introduced their respective 3G services in the country, Apple’s preconfigured carrier settings have become outdated and it has not bothered to update them yet. If you insert a BSNL SIM card on your iPhone today, you can manually configure it for 3G access, but with an Airtel or Vodafone SIM card inside it, the iPhone tries to spare you the complexities of manually configuring the carrier settings and therefore hides the relevant options.

How Do I Configure an iPhone for Non-Official Carriers?
How Do I Configure an iPhone for Airtel or Vodafone 3G?
This Is Too Complicated. Is There an Easier Way to Do This?
How Do I Find Out What Speeds I Am Getting?
What Speeds Did You Get?
Anything Else I Should Know?

How Do I Configure an iPhone for Non-Official Carriers?

To enable an iPhone to use the Internet services of non-official carriers such as Aircel, BSNL, DoCoMo, Idea, MTNL, Reliance, Uninor, Videocon and Virgin, go to ‘Settings » General » Network’ on your iPhone and enable “Mobile Data” if it is disabled. Make sure to also enable 3G on this screen if you are going to use it. Then tap on “Cellular Data Network” and enter the carrier settings such as APN, username and password on the following screen. To find out what these settings are, use Google.

How Do I Configure an iPhone for Airtel or Vodafone 3G?

The first step is to download Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility for Mac OS X or Windows and install it on your computer. On the former, it will be installed in your ‘/Applications/Utilities’ folder. Connect your iPhone to your computer and let iTunes butt in and complete its syncing procedure. Once that is done, launch the iPhone Configuration Utility.

Click on “Configuration Profiles” in the sidebar and then on the New button in the left corner of the toolbar at the top. Give the profile a name, any name, and a unique identifier in the format specified there (I gave “com.aayusharya.vodafone3g” to mine). You can leave the rest of the fields as they are.

Now click on “Advanced” in the pane on the left (to the right of the sidebar) and then hit Configure. Enter the following settings:

For Airtel 3G:
Access Point Name (APN): airtelgprs.com
Access Point User Name: <Leave Blank>
Access Point Password: <Leave Blank>
Proxy Server: <Leave Blank>
Proxy Port: <Leave Blank>

For Vodafone 3G:
Access Point Name (APN): portalnmms
Access Point User Name: <Leave Blank>
Access Point Password: <Leave Blank>
Proxy Server: 10.10.1.100
Proxy Port: 9401

Once done, click on your iPhone in the sidebar and go to the “Configuration Profiles” tab. You’ll find the profile you just created listed there. Click on the Install button next to it. Your iPhone’s screen will now spring to life and take you to the profile installation screen.

Wait! This Is Too Complicated. Is There an Easier Way to Do This?

Yes, there is. Since the settings are the same for everyone, you can have someone else go through all the steps mentioned above and give you a readymade carrier settings profile to install on your iPhone.

Excellent! Can You Do it for Me Please? I’ll Buy You Dinner.

Wow, talk about spoon-feeding! OK, you lazy bum, you can just click on the following links on your iPhone to download the relevant carrier settings profile to it. Here’s the one for Airtel 3G and this one is for Vodafone 3G. Click on the Download button on the page that opens (on your iPhone, mind you) and, like at the end of the steps described above, you’ll be taken to the profile installation screen.

Got it. Now What?

Click on the Install button and then on the Install Now button on the confirmation dialog that pops up. Done!

And That’s it?

If you have managed to come this far without screwing anything up and if you had already enabled 3G services on your SIM card by doing the relevant recharge, you should now be able to launch Safari on your iPhone and start surfing the Internet at blazing fast speeds.

How Do I Find Out What Speeds I Am Getting?

By using a free application for your iPhone called Speedtest.net Mobile Speed Test.

How Much Did You Get?

I have no experience with Airtel 3G yet but I was getting download speeds of about 4 Mbps and upload speeds of about 3 Mbps on Vodafone 3G in the small city of Siliguri in West Bengal. The ping time was also fairly decent at around 300 ms. It’s a great feeling, browsing the Internet at speeds of around 4 Mbps on a freakin’ phone!

Anything Else I Should Know?

There is a Personal Hotspot feature on the iPhone 4 that you may not have known of. If you’d like to share your iPhone’s 3G connection with your computer or any of your other wi-fi enabled devices, you can enable it in the network preferences. Once it’s enabled, you can join that wi-fi network from any of your other devices and browse the Internet on both your iPhone and that device using the 3G connection on your iPhone. It supports up to five devices.

However, this feature does not work with Vodafone 3G on an iPhone 4 if you configure it according to the steps described above. I have not yet found a way to make it work. Feel free to chime in in the comments if you know the solution to this problem.

Thank You! You Are Awesome! How Can I Ever Repay You?

By using your newfound Internet powers for the cause of good. Go make us proud.

And I am ‘aryayush’ on Twitter. ;)

-Aayush