Hari's Corner

Humour, comics, tech, law, software, reviews, essays, articles and HOWTOs intermingled with random philosophy now and then

August 2005 highlights

Filed under: Bits and Bytes by Hari
Posted on Tue, Jul 10, 2007 at 08:39 IST (last updated: Thu, May 7, 2009 @ 21:35 IST)

In this series < Previous Next >
Once again, a look at some old, but notable posts I've made in the past.

A small note before I proceed. Because I really didn't have a dedicated audience back then (and even now, I count myself lucky to have a couple of active readers at any given time), I only think it's right that I try and revive at least some of the better-written ones for the benefit of new readers. So if some of you feel that I am recycling my old articles, you are (in a sense) right. But at the same time, this kind of thing also allows me to look back at what I was thinking back then and I find it interesting to add my comments on the same topics now. So hopefully you should find it interesting as well. I just don't want to link to my old articles without comment.

With that in mind, here are some posts from the month of August 2005.

Indian Cricket needs to move on - Incidentally it was my first cricket post on this blog. The interesting thing is, much of what I wrote back then seems relevant even today. Recently I even started a cricket blog to write about the game, but I have no interest in it now. Cricket no longer interests me. In fact, even back then I was kind of tentative about the whole thing and the World Cup 2007 fiasco sealed the deal for me. Besides, quite apart from my own lack of motivation on this score, I found that my regular readers were not exactly jumping up and down in anticipation of my cricketing wisdom.

XML and mainstream web development - Ahhh... XML. That beautiful meta-markup language that always fascinates me. In that article I actually wrote about the pitfalls of using XML in mainstream web design but at the same time acknowledged its sheer scope and power. I felt that XML might never become mainstream in web development. I still feel the same today although I myself feel a lot more comfortable with the underlying concepts. But XML still needs a programmer mentality and not a web-design mentality. Ah, well... at least with XHTML we have a cleaner, neater web markup language than plain old HTML.

Let's get back on track! - now this is an unusual article. Actually it was part of my (now defunct) LiteraryForums.org newsletter. I was getting extremely frustrated at the slow growth of the forum and the fact that I was pouring in tons of time and effort into it. Although things haven't changed much today, my attitude has undergone a considerable change. I have come to accept that LiteraryForums.org will remain a quiet, peaceful community with marginal activity. In fact, in many ways, I like it that way.

Customizing your Linux firewall - this is just a normal software article. Here I highlighted guarddog, which is a pretty neat, powerful GUI front-end to iptables. Those Linux users who find the iptables command line tool too cryptic or difficult will find this an extremely useful configuration utility. Even today I simply cannot figure out how to write my own firewall script from scratch. I cannot be bothered to.

In this series

5 comment(s)

  1. ...I don't have a dedicated audience ...I'm here always. I'm not much into linux stuff so hardly comment on those postsEven I don't like cricket and happy to see that I have company...

    Comment by Shrinidhi Hande (visitor) on Tue, Jul 10, 2007 @ 21:21 IST #
  2. ...I don't have a dedicated audience ...I'm here always. I'm not much into linux stuff so hardly comment on those postsEven I don't like cricket and happy to see that I have company...How much visitors you get per day? You have a very good page rank so I expect you're getting few hundred hits per day minimum...That should be good number...Keep writingKeep righting.

    Comment by Shrinidhi Hande (visitor) on Tue, Jul 10, 2007 @ 21:23 IST #
  3. Thanks Shrinidhi. Of course, I also meant that I don't have a particular subject to blog about and so I couldn't expect all my regular visitors to be interested in everything I post about :arrow:

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Tue, Jul 10, 2007 @ 22:03 IST #
  4. Err... Hari, I have your posts set up on my RSS reader and so I sometimes just get a little too lazy to comment. Count me in on one of those dedicated readers! :)

    Comment by Sudipta Chatterjee (visitor) on Wed, Jul 11, 2007 @ 11:46 IST #
  5. Thanks, Sudipta. I know that you read regularly. If you read what I had written carefully,Because I really didn't have a dedicated audience back then (and even now, I count myself lucky to have a couple of active readers at any given time)I know I have more than a couple of readers. I wasn't implying that I didn't have more than one or two readers overall. :)

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on Wed, Jul 11, 2007 @ 12:00 IST #

Comments closed

The blog owner has closed further commenting on this entry.