Hari's Corner

This is a song sequence from a real movie, honest. Note that I am not responsible for any damage to your delicate eyes and ears.

I am now desperate to watch this movie and declare myself a Disciple of this Actor. )

(Discovered through Lightning Strikes Everyday)

I thought it would be fun to compile a list of blogging tools that not many people might be aware of. Mind you, most of them are for the hardcore geek-types and all of them are not your run-of-the-mill PHP/MySQL driven CMS type blogging solutions. Most of them publish static, fully self-contained websites, but in a blog format. I think a few of them are also dead projects, not having been updated in years.

But it is interesting to check out. Here are a few I found out (mainly using Debian's package manager).

Blosxom - This is described as a lightweight, yet feature rich blogging tool. Mind you, it's written in Perl, so I guess not many present day bloggers would be comfortable dabbling with CGI scripts and such.

hobix - This one is odd. That's all I can say about that. Check out the website and prepare to be stunned. )

chronicle - This one is described as a tool that will convert a directory of text files into a blog with an RSS feed. Appropriately called a blog compiler.

nanoblogger - This is a blog tool that you use entirely from the UNIX command line. It relies on no database, no GUI, nothing except a few simple UNIX command line tools to generate a complete blog-like static website. It does support plugins which sounds interesting.

tDiary - This one seems to be another online diary generator powered by Ruby. The original site is in Japanese, so I'm linking to the Debian package page.

I've not tried or tested any of these tools, except nanoblogger (very perfunctorily). But I always enjoy discovering such hobbyist software projects that never make it to the mainstream.

It is my strong opinion that talent often goes unrecognized by the majority. I think the reason is that even to detect talent, you need a bit of it in the first place. Not a lot, but enough to understand the speciality of that talent. On the other hand, mediocrity recognizes and understands nothing beyond itself.

You see, I believe that each of us is born with something that we can do better than others. Sometimes, it takes a long time, hard work and painful effort even for the individual concerned to recognize and nourish it. For a few people, their special talent comes so naturally to them that they end up not valuing it enough. Rarely do you see child prodigies. In such cases, the whole world has no choice but to sit up and take notice.

I think the best organizations in the world are the ones which detect talent early and discipline it quickly. Microsoft of the early days is a prime example in the software world. The ability of Bill Gates and co. to pick up talent and mould it made them what they are today. But sadly, most software companies today lack this instinct. That is what comes out of cutting corners in HR management.

Like all areas of specialization, I think Human Resource management is a key discipline in any business. But if you check out the HR department of most software companies today, all you can see is a bunch of incompetent, inexperienced staff who sit around imagining that HR is just about recruitment, hiring, firing and paying salaries. It's not. HR goes far deeper than the day-to-day activities of man-management.

The main reason why there is a high rate of attrition in the software industry is the HR staff of organizations. Not only do they neglect talent, they actively discourage it because they cannot see beyond their own limitations. And even if they do, they are too insecure to give it its due reward.

A prime example of talent gone unnoticed is my brother who is an extremely talented OS programmer. Most companies he applied to rejected him because he did not have so-called "experience" in a job they consider as constituting valid experience. But today, he earns far more doing what he enjoys and does best than even top programmers do in the Indian software industry. It was the inability of these software companies to notice his talent that helped him find his true potential. If he had, by any chance, been recruited by any of the Indian software firms, I'm sure he would be wasting his potential, sitting in an office and churning out code that any trained monkey can churn out.

I've figured out a couple of things in b2evolution today.

• The plugin system is really powerful. Many options I was never aware of earlier are configurable using the plugin management system. For instance, I have just now enabled smilies in comments and it automatically displays the list of smilies for commenters as well. Took me this long to figure out that smilies could also be rendered in comments.
• b2evolution rocks. Much better than WordPress in my opinion because it is so configurable. This along with a far, far superior widget management system, easy multi-blogging and a powerful, yet intuitive templating system, I am so glad I moved to b2evolution. :yes:

On a side note, I also discovered how to remove the rel="nofollow" attribute in comment author links, but this one took me a while longer to figure out because the anti-spam plugin was automatically re-inserting the nofollow. This confused me for a while, but it turns out that even this behaviour can be configured within the plugin's options.

Finally, I've enabled Gravatars here on an experimental basis, but based on user feedback, I'll either keep it or remove it.

I'm glad to announce that I've got my first book published.

Important Update: Due to several editorial mistakes (read: they mangled my original manuscript), as of now I've officially requested this book to be removed from circulation. Needless to say you needn't guess what would be my mood at present.

Update 2: I'm told that it's near impossible to remove the first edition from circulation, but before the second printing, the mistakes shall be corrected.

It's a non-fiction children's book written for the "Prodigy" series of books by the publishing firm New Horizon Media. My first topic was Adolf Hitler and I managed to condense his entire story to about 80 pages of simple English (not easy!). I got my author copies today.

Anyway, I scanned the cover page:

I'm not involved in marketing the book in any way, so don't look at me for copies.

I wanted to ask my regular readers whether you would agree with a couple of changes I propose to make on this blog regarding the blogroll and commenting system.

First, I want to put all the external links/blogs in a separate blogroll page by itself, instead of using the sidebar to list each link. Several bloggers have already done this, but I have refrained so far because I wanted your website to get the SEO benefits. I appreciate your link back (whether you have linked from the sidebar or not), so I wanted to retain the sidebar blogroll.

The other proposed change is to reward my regular commenters. I want to remove the "nofollow" attribute on comment URLs, so that people who leave behind their website URLs get their links recognized by search engines. I'm sure most of you would not have any objection to this set up

On a side note, I want to know how many of you use Gravatars so that I can implement it on the comments page.

So let me have your views on these.