Hari's Corner

India has wiped out Sri Lanka 4-0 in the home series. All of a sudden there are questions asked about the second best ODI team in the world because they have lost four matches in a row. In a sense it was inevitable that there are calls for change from former cricketers and experts, most notably Arjuna Ranatunga.

Why this sudden fall from favour? Marvan Atapattu put on a brave face during the first couple of matches, but in the third and fourth ODI we could just feel that he had lost the plot. Except Muralitharan, none of the Sri Lankan bowlers found their comfort zone in this series. We played on some fantastic batting tracks and the nature of the Sri Lankan bowling attack has been exposed. His captaincy too has been come under heavy criticism, but I feel sorry when the captain is accused for not leading the team properly. After all, his 87 off 100 balls in Pune was probably the right tonic for his team to put up a fighting total of 261 on the board. But then, after the early breakthroughs, Sri Lanka just couldn't keep up the pressure against an Indian team already strengthened by their supersub, Suresh Raina. And in the end, that substitution was crucial - he steered India home after major hiccups in the middle order.

In analysing Sri Lanka's failure in this series, I can think of a few reasons why they haven't really performed. First of all, I think that they are not at all comfortable with the new ICC rules: the powerplay and the supersub. They haven't really found an answer to the powerplay situation - when to utilize it and when to bring on their ace card Muralitharan into the attack. On more than one occasion, Atapattu appeared all at sea while utilizing his powerplay: not knowing whether to attack or to defend. On the other hand, India has benefitted greatly because of the supersub rule. They have played their cards judiciously and made full use of the powerplay situation, both while batting and while bowling. I always felt that the new supersub rule would benefit teams like India which have more specialists than all-rounders than teams like Sri Lanka, which rely on batting all-rounders like Dilshan and bowling all-rounders like Maharoof. I think that was the case here. For a long time Indian cricket had been suffering from a lack of flexibility which an all-rounder provides. The question always was about whether to pick four bowlers and one all-rounder or five specialist bowlers in the team. The lack of a real quality all-rounder always hurt badly. The new supersub rule has really solved one aspect of the issue. The other aspect of playing an extra batsman has been solved by the presence of Dhoni for the time being. We can now pick four or five bowlers according to the situation and then supersub them out when needed. Dravid has used this effectively to India's advantage and the results were there for all to see.

Another reason why Sri Lanka has failed here is the match conditions. We play a lot of day games in this country on a variety of pitches and under different weather conditions. Early morning moisture does play a role in influencing the decision at the toss. And all the tracks have been quicker and more batting friendly this time around. Spinners haven't really been able to attack the batsmen as much as they would have liked. Compare this to Sri Lanka, where the conditions are vastly different and most matches are played on slow pitches at the Premadasa in Colombo with an odd game played at the SSC or at centres like Galle, Kandy or Dambulla. The pitches are usually slow to start off with and get slower and lower as the game progresses. Sri Lankan slow bowlers love such conditions under lights. Unfortunately for them, these Indian pitches haven't really deteriorated as the game progressed and we have had excellent batting conditions in daylight. Then again, Indian batsmen love the ball coming on to the bat and we have always prospered on tracks with true pace and bounce.

All in all, I wouldn't count Sri Lanka out yet. Atapattu sure needs a change in strategy in the last three ODIs. He has to sit down and assess the conditions as well as how to use the new ICC rules to his advantage. He has to be more aggressive while using Murali and Chaminda Vaas. It's important that Sri Lanka bag a couple of wins at least going into the test series to keep up their morale. They will be motivated by that and they need to regain some pride. They are still a strong side and even in their loss at Pune, they showed signs of resurgence. India should not rest on their laurels but try and polish off their opponents while they're still down. That will be the acid test of Dravid's captaincy - how to motivate his team to do just that now that the series is in the bag.

Picture courtesy: uk.sports.yahoo.com

I was helping my brother upgrade his newly launched forum from SMF 1.0.5 to SMF 1.1 RC. All right, so we should have gone ahead and installed 1.1 RC in the first place. But since Fantastico allows installs of 1.0.5 with a single click of the mouse, we thought it would save us the trouble of uploading the installation files and upgrade later at our convenience.

Actually it is a simple upgrade procedure. Just upload and overwrite the old SMF files with the upgraded versions of those files and run upgrade.php. Right! That's what I was thinking too.

It appears that SMF will not work unless you absolutely set the file permissions exactly the way it should be. So first, the upgrade script refused to work at all. At that point, we thought we had somehow screwed up the installation because we kept getting HTTP 500 errors. So we started with a clean plate and reinstalled SMF 1.0.5 all over again and restored the database. Then we tried upgrading again and we got the same error. Now I was convinced that something else was wrong and we had done exactly what the upgrade procedure told us to do. Then with a little bit of searching around in the SMF forums, we realized that there was a problem with file permissions. Finally we managed to set the correct file permissions 755 to upgrade.php and it worked fine. Although there was a bit of trouble with the cache loading the previous error pages which at first led us to believe that we had made another mistake, it sorted itself out all right in the end. We'll now be working on bringing the forum back online after making a few changes to the templates.

I had mentioned before that SMF is definitely not the most intuitive forum software out there from the administrator's point of view. Whatever be the drawbacks of phpBB, it is definitely a much more user-friendly and admin-friendly forum software. However I think the current problems are quite minor and with some time, these little niggles should be smoothed out by the developers of this feature-rich forum package. I eagerly await the next major release of SMF (whenever it is due).

By the way, phpBB has released 2.0.18 after a long period and it's a massive upgrade for those who are doing the code changes manually. Just a tip if you have a heavily modded board - I would suggest applying the upgrade in an offline test server and test it out thoroughly before you take it to your live forum. In any case, always follow the golden rule: take a back up of everything on your server before you proceed. Better safe than sorry!

When I watched Mahendra Singh Dhoni start off against Sri Lanka in the third ODI in such a belligerent fashion, I thought, "if this guy can stay for half an hour, it'll be good entertainment. Whether India wins or loses this match, it'll be good fun." When he went on and on, I thought "I just get the feeling we are on to something here!" (imagine Harsha Bhogle's voice at this point). By the time the match was over and Dhoni had completed his single handed rout of a demoralized Sri Lanka, it was a mixture of immense pleasure and awe at having witnessed one of the most belligerent knocks in One Day Cricket. Beating Adam Gilchrist's ODI record for the highest score for a wicket-keeper batsman was no joke. Dhoni has certainly written his own rules in International cricket and it's probably his ticket to Test cricket as well as he very unsubtly pointed out at the post-match presentation.

I'll just add a couple of things here. First from a purely cricketing point of view, I think Dhoni is one of those players you don't tamper with. Sure, it's easy to praise the guy when he's got a huge century playing so aggressively. But it shouldn't blind us to the fact that he's going to have days when he won't score at all. It's natural that a guy playing with such aggression cannot score big runs every time he steps in to bat. Unfortunately, this century might well alter things for Dhoni. The typical Indian reaction to his knock was one of euphoria, but then the expectations will also rise higher the next time he walks in. There will be experts calling for Dhoni to "play with responsibility and utilize his talents properly." There will also be those who feel he should continue to "play his natural game." Whatever may be their advice, I think Dhoni should be left well alone to do his own thing. For the good of Indian cricket, nobody should ever tamper with his style, technique and most importantly, mindset. Fortunately, we are in 2005 and experience has taught us how to handle such players. When Virender Sehwag first made his way into the Indian team, he brought such a refreshing attitude which endures to this day. There were some who felt that he should "tone down" his game, but luckily he has stubbornly refused such advice and his aggressive attitude has survived up to now. In the 1990s, it might well have been a different story. In 2005, we welcome such players in Indian cricket. No longer are we obsessed with technique, foot movement, finesse and so on. In the era of Mahendra Dhoni, Yuvraj Singh, Irfan Pathan and Virender Sehwag, we've learnt to accept that it's the results which count, not the means. It doesn't matter in One Day cricket whether a guy scores a boundary off an outside edge slashing wildly or scores it off the most beautiful, picture perfect cover drive. Runs are runs and that's what matters ultimately.

There is another issue which I want to raise here. It's about rewarding our cricketers for such brilliant performances. During the post-match presentation, when Ravi Shastri announced the special cash prize of Rs. 10 lakh for Dhoni's performance from the cricket board, I was staggered for an instant. Don't get me wrong - I really did think that Dhoni's record breaking effort deserved a special award. However, let's be reasonable about it. In the euphoria of victory, the local cricket association, the state governments involved and sometimes the BCCI offer huge gifts to players for one-off performances like this. Cricket experts and commentators start groping around for superlatives in their excitement and enthusiasm to eulogize the player. In fact during the post-match review show, good old Kris Srikkanth actually went to the extent of comparing Dhoni with Viv Richards! There is nothing new in all this especially in Indian cricket. However, Rs. 10 lakh is a staggering sum. To add to that, I read this in this morning's paper that Dhoni's home state government is giving him a sum of Rs. 5 lakh! That's 15 lakh earned in a single day! I agree that this was a special performance and I can understand that sponsors sometimes offer huge amounts of money from their own pockets for an especially brilliant one. But think about it: when the BCCI or the state association or the government offers such rewards, whose money are they giving away? With whose authority? How can a single, individual performance in a team game, however great it may be, be rewarded so lavishly? I think such knee-jerk, emotional responses to success in Indian cricket need to be toned down. Tomorrow if Dhoni scores a couple of ducks in a row, are they going to take it away? Let's not deny that there is a streak of irresponsibility in the behaviour of our governing bodies in such situations. I could understand a sum of Rs. 1 lakh even. But 15 lakh! That is surely going overboard. All said and done it's just a game and come to think of it, we've not even won the seven-match series yet. Ok, ok, so it's a religion. But perspective is such a good thing. Let's use it for a change.

Picture courtesy: uk.sports.yahoo.com

There was a peculiar LaTeX problem that I encountered recently with the tabular environment. Controlling the appearance of vertical lines between columns can be a real problem. It was particularly baffling me because although there is a \cline command to draw horizontal lines spanning between a few columns, there was no corresponding command to draw a vertical line that spans only a few rows. By default, when you create a tabular, you can draw vertical lines between columns, but only if they span the entire length of the table.

You can see what I mean, by looking at this screenshot.

As you can see, drawing such a table is not straightforward. It's easy to draw those horizontal lines, but not at all possible to draw vertical lines which don't span the entire table. There was a workaround which I found after asking for help at CQF.info. The solution was to use the \multicolumn command.

Here is the code which produces that effect:

\begin{tabular}{lll}
& X & Y \\
\cline{2-3}
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{Number of bulbs used} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{100} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{100} \\
\cline{2-3}
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{Average life (hrs)} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{1300} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{1248} \\
\cline{2-3}
\multicolumn{1}{l|}{Standard deviation (hrs)} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{82} & \multicolumn{1}{l|}{93} \\
\cline{2-3}
\end{tabular}

It's fair to say that LaTeX is not particularly strong when handling tabular material and so you have a lot of additional packages which provide environments such as supertabular, tabularx, longtable and so on. However I am glad that I could resolve this particular issue, although the code involved is much longer since you have to use the \multicolumn command repeatedly. A better solution would definitely be appreciated.

I have always been interested in digging for interesting blogs on blogspot.com and one thing which struck me was how useful the random/pseudo-random "next blog" feature is (when you neglect the occasional spam blog that you come across). It seems to, in a sense, connect so many blogs together and gives a sense of community to the whole blogging business. Another fact is that many bloggers with the blogspot.com address seem to group together with other blogspot users to form "clubs" within themselves. They comment on each other's blogs, feed on each other's blogging talents and thrive on a potentially large audience for their writings. It is a fascinating phenomenon of the blogosphere that so many thousands of people have a medium of self-expression which actually attracts like-minded people to form such social networks. But since I'm hosted on my own site, I have always felt a little bit left out of the mainstream blogging world as represented by blogspot.com.

Before I created my blog, I was aware of blogspot.com. So what prompted me to create my own blog with Wordpress rather than getting my blog hosted on a free blog hosting service? I would say two factors: one was that I had my own web host. I had no reason to look beyond this. Secondly, I was quite uncomfortable with the idea that (theoritically) one day somebody could just shut down the free hosting website and I would be in no position to retrieve my writings. Highly improbable, I know, but it is a kind of psychological feeling of insecurity that you are not in control under such circumstances which influences such decisions. Having decided to host my own blog, at first I was seriously considering using bBlog until somebody on LinuxQuestions.org recommended WordPress as an excellent personal publishing tool. I haven't looked back since. After all, why would I want to host my blog on somebody else's property when I can do the same with much more control and power on my own web space? The fact that I can take regular backups of the database at whatever time I want makes me feel that much more secure.

This is not to say that blogspot is bad or anything. I really think that blogspot has really helped in making blogging a mainstream phenomenon, easily accessible to everybody who is connected. Being taken over by google has also given it a kind of security. In fact, if anything, free blog hosting services seem to be the trend today. You can now own a WordPress blog without your own web hosting space at www.wordpress.com. At present though, it seems to be invitation-only for users of Flock, the new Mozilla-based web browser on the block. But it just shows that the concept of free blog hosting is really taking off in a big way. It just remains to be seen how many of the free services can sustain themselves over the years with a growing number of bloggers adding more and more load on their servers.