So there are only a few days left for me to change my weblog address. Geocities is shutting down ftp in a few days and I need to be running. Haven't found a new place yet, and would be out on the street in just a few days. Hopefully, I will find a shelter quickly and get back to action. Wish me!
This is one thing that we all talk about all the time, and now we all have started taking it for granted. Prabu mentions about flash heavy pages that look good but takes ages to download. Ashok mentions about the vsnl connection that only gets slower by time. I remember those thousands of times when I keep staring at a page to load and finally give up and forget it. It is really frustrating. But what is even more frustrating is the reasons behind this bandwidth crunch, which is more political than else.
There is a great lot of fat pipes that carry gigabytes of data every second under the Indian ocean. And they even run very close to the coastal lines of India. But we can't access them simply because we have a government that does not want you to be happy. For the extra revenue that they generate by the control, they don't really care how happy you are. And everyone knows how much vsnl sucks, and still we need to stick on to them.
It is only recently that I became aware of the fact that I used take these problems as granted. I realized that when I saw bandwidths like more than 100kilobytes per seconds(Normally when we say 128kbps, it is bits, not bytes/sec) being normal. I was amused to see my downloads of 100s of KBs complete in hardly a few seconds. It is as if you copy from a neighbouring machine. Dunno when we will manage to see such cool speeds.
There are more such things: Distance from Singapore to US is more than double the distance between Singapore and India. But calling India on telephone costs double than calling US because those countries are directly interlinked. And again, it is easy to link these countries directly, government permits, because there are lots of optic fibre lines already running along the Indian ocean. But unless some serious policy changes happen(we are only making a beginning these days) we will be in a timezone ten years behind rest of the world.
I started the morning at work going around visiting weblogs(After checking mails, I mean). One change that I am seeing these days are javascript errors that are coming in truck loads from a lot many weblogs. Out of 7 blogs I checked, 4 had javascript errors and each of page had many of them. The maximum I noticed was seven errors in a page. And my page(one of the 4) had 3 errors. :-(
I actually despise using javascript. And I hate generating glorified pages with a non standard environment. It is not with the spirit of html and it defies the very reason for which html was created. But what is unfortunate is that my own weblog has some of it and I have to be using them as they are required for all the freebees that I am using(like yaccs). Add to it I have little interest in trying to understand or debug these things. :-(
My frequency of updating blog has been falling quickly. Some how I am not finding much to write these days. Earlier, when I did not have any thing, I used to write for the sake of writing, now that I realize that is no fun I just leave it blank. And Oh! I had decided to avoid blogging about blogging, just realized that I am writing one. ;-) Blogging on blogging is becoming so frequent and rampant that I was beginning to get sick of it. Looks like it is unavoidable! Next few days are going to be busy ones for me and may have to spend long hours travelling. And that is going to reduce my blogging frequency furthur.
Was planning to attend Dr. Kamat's condolence meeting on 7th. Ended up working late hours instead. :-( Could have managed to check out some books of Dr. Kamat and probably say hi to Vikas Kamat. Had enjoyed reading some of Dr. Kamat's books like 'maru payaNa' and 'pravAsiya prabhnDhagaLu' and loved reading his articles like this on places where I spent my child hood.
It is about Google's much talked about page ranking mechanism. And why it does not work too well when it comes to weblogs.
The page ranking mechanism, for those who do not already know it: Google ranks webpages by the number of hyperlinks to that page in the internet. It is not so simple but it works some thing like that. Now, when it comes to weblogs, almost every blogger has a big number of links to his blog in the net. The links come from weblog directories, the blogging tool hosting sites like blogger, retrolinks from other bloggers and many more. A big number of links to an active blogger's page comes from the comments that the person leaves on other blogger's pages, or one's own pages, as it is a practice to put a link to one's blog with each comment. And bloggers generously mention about posts from other bloggers and add links to their page. With all these, in hardly a few months time, a weblog will have hundreds of links to the page on the net. And this means that the page rank will soar, even though you hardly have some 10 to 50 visitors coming in every day. Advantage blogger! ;-)
Added to that, Google gives some extra importance to pages that get updated very frequently. The more frequent you update your pages, Google's crawler comes back more frequently to check your page for new content. To realize that, check Google cache for rediff or any other news site, and check cache for a less updated site, may be your own. You would see yesterday morning's page for rediff but your page in Google cache may be a week old. I presume frequently updated sites find a better page ranking(not sure about this) which again increases a weblog's page rank.
And this is probably why we all bloggers see our pages getting a lot of traffic coming in from Google! ;-)
And here is one interesting case: One of my old posts gives a link to this site, where you can download the game pacman. And if you give a search for 'old pcman game download', my page ranks better than the site I have linked to! Note: plase read the warning given in my post if you plan to download the game.
The title is amazing, and it touched me. Come with Us is the new Guitar number from chemical brothers from the album 'Star Guitar'. As I watched the video on channel [v], I had that instantaneous feeling of wanting to be there, and go with them. The video begins as a train journey, where you look back at the world that you are leaving behind as the train moves forward. It is the exact picture that you would get when you are travelling in one our slow moving trains sitting near the door looking out and enjoying the breeze. As I think about it, I think about the abundance of joy that may be awaiting at the end of the journey, in a new place, and a new world. And I relish on telling the rest of the world I am leaving behind: Come with Us, to a world full of joy, peace and pleasence, fresh air, freedom, fraternity, a world utopic. And I see my own happiness there, I see the world of John Lennon's Imagine.
Have been busy for some time and had to do some travelling that kept me away from here. My blog must have missed me. ;-) I would not like to admit that it is actually otherwise. ;-)
Now I don't have to repeat all over that Gocities is stopping FTP service for free users. But can't help writing it here. It was not a surprise or some thing but still I was not prepared. Wish to subscribe to premium service but $$9 per month translates to 'too much' in Indian currency. And I have no plans to generate revenues from my blog(Psst.. are you willing to pay me, I'll give you ad free access). ;-) Think blogger may soon go paid way but that is one thing that does not worry me, I am willing to pay. Seeing that there is a link to end of free from evhead, that day may not be very far. So right now I am on my search for another website to host my blog. Can't move to blogspot coz I want to host images and would rather not put them in a separate server.
Update on my site stat: A good number of people are coming from Google looking for 'yahoo password breaking tool'. Sorry for them, I haven't got any.
