The climate today just reminds me of this song:

Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head
And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed
Nothin’ seems to fit
Those raindrops are fallin’ on my head, they keep fallin’

So I just did me some talkin’ to the sun
And I said I didn’t like the way he got things done
Sleepin’ on the job
Those raindrops are fallin’ on my head, they keep fallin’

But there’s one thing I know
The blues they send to meet me won’t defeat me
It won’t be long till happiness steps up to greet me

Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turnin’ red
Cryin’s not for me
‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complainin’
Because I’m free
Nothin’s worryin’ me

[trumpet]

It won’t be long till happiness steps up to greet me

Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head
But that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turnin’ red
Cryin’s not for me
‘Cause I’m never gonna stop the rain by complainin’
Because I’m free
Nothin’s worryin’ me

Just back from vacation at Tarkarli.

Tarkarli is a beautiful beach some 100kms north of Goa. It is one of those untouched beaches where you will not find a lot of tourists. The water is crystal clear and the beach has a very gentle slope. Few places are rocky and good for snorkeling. If you are lucky you may see dolphins too.  It is very close to the water fort of Sindudurg, keep this on your list of places to see if you go to Tarkarli. You might also like to visit lake Dhamapur

Here are a few photos for you to see:

tarkarli

If you love beaches then this one is a must see. I would like to thank Abbas and India Someday for organizing this trip. Was a real fun experience.

Starting today, you will see ads on this site. These are ads are brought to you by Ads4Good. Revenue generated from these ads will be donated for a good cause. I have chosen that it be used for education.

If you have a blog, do support Ads4Good.

There are two ways to live. One, adapt to your environment, and survive. And two, adapt your environment to yourself. Man has survived in some of the most wretched terrain on earth by following the later. Adapting the environment to suit oneself is in fact the very essence of being human. It is what distinguishes us from animals.

Animals who try to survive by striking a balance with their surroundings are easy victims to a predator who comes in and begins to change the environment to suit his needs. We humans have hunted several such animals to extinction by doing just this.

Lets apply this to today’s world, where have destroyed most other animals, and the real competition to man comes from man himself. Those who wish to survive, need to realize that adaption to your environment doesn’t work against other men. It will only grant a very lowly existence. Those who wish to rise to the top of the nature pyramid have to be efficient modifiers of their surroundings. Does this method work? If it didn’t I don’t think we would be the dominant species on the planet today.
Would you like to go extinct? Or would you like to bring about change? I for sure wouldn’t like going extinct. What to change is best decided by looking at what troubles you the most. If nothing troubles you too much… I think you are going the way of the dodos. What troubles me? Well, a lot of things, but that is matter for another blog post.

I always advocate changing your surroundings to suit yourself. The best way to survive is to change the world to suit you. It is the original human spirit that got us out of the dark ages. Be the change you want to see. It is the most human way to live.

My site has recently been getting a lot of spam. Just deleted some 500+ spam comments. Real boring work, to moderate a site.

Several of the spam originates from a UK based ISP.

I have marked this as spam in wordpress but the IP addresses keep changing… Does anyone know what else I could do to keep away these spammers? I don’t like capchas and don’t want normal readers to have to do that.

Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.

Winston Churchill

The modern world has a lot of marvels, if you look at it from the eyes of someone who lived a few decades ago.

For years I have wanted a service that would send me updates from various sources on the net to my IM.

I am almost always online. Most services I use frequently have RSS feeds, however problem with RSS always was that you had to poll it for data. Yes, there are readers that will do that for you. But I have always wished for a service that would do this for you.

I found chatterous, it however was a bit sluggish in sending messages and you could only have one feed for per group. Friendfeed on the other hand was fast, worked well, allowed me to aggregate feeds into one channel. With this support for instant messages friendfeed becomes really handy. I am a fan!

If you have not tried friendfeed, maybe you should give it a try.

Don’t count on donations is my advice.

Selling consumer software: very tough, but can be done by one individual.

Selling to businesses: very specialized, much easier to make your first $100K, but you can’t be a one-man shop.

I found this advice in a comment on hacker news. I would say, I do agree with it.

Python is an awesome language. The objective of a programming language is to instruct the computer what you want it to do. Ideally, the lesser instructions you need to give, the better the language. What makes python awesome is not just the ease of programming or readability but the availability of a large number of really useful libraries. You can get directly to what you want to do, and let the machine bother about the rest.

Let me give you an example: Say you want your computer to read out all the post from an RSS/atom feed. Just put together a few lines of code as follows:

import feedparser;
import speech;
import sys;

feed = "http://nunespascal.com/feed/";
if len(sys.argv)==2:
	feed = sys.argv[1];
d = feedparser.parse(feed);
for e in d.entries:
        print e.title;
        speech.say(e.title);
        print e.description;
        speech.say(e.description);

If you wish to download python you can get it from the official python download page. A lot of flavors of Linux would already have it installed.

You will need the libraries feedParser (To read RSS/atom feeds) and pyspeech(To read out the text). These are not part of python by default. You can download them, or install using easy_install. Here is some very good documentation on easy_intall.

Malcom told me today that my blog looks really old. I couldn’t disagree that the theme has not changed for a long time now.

I did try searching for a new theme, only to realize how much I love the simplicity of this theme. I did find a few bugs that creeped in when I was making changes and fixed those.

So I settled for a change of colors. Hope you like it.