Suramya’s Blog

when two girls are best friends and really close they are called sisters but if two guys are best friends and close they are called gay? Why can’t they be brothers?

Just something that I have been thinking about.

- Suramya

An American architect Bryan Berg has created a replica of the Venetian Macau using 218,792 playing cards from 4,051 decks of cards. It took him 44 days to create the model which measures 33 feet by just under 10 feet.

Bryan Berg with the world’s largest house of cards

All I can say when I see this is: Wow! It takes skill to do something like this and its just wow. If you are in Macau then do check it out. Its located in the Macau’s Cotai Strip.

Source: American architect beats his own record after creating the world’s largest house of cards | Mail Online.

- Suramya

I have talked about books and publishing industry before but since I am not an author I can’t give you first hand views on how the publishing industry works. Luckily others can. Charles Stross is an author who I really like and he is doing a series of posts on his blog about Common Misconceptions About Publishing (CMAP). He has made 4 posts so far and each gives a fascinating view of the industry from an author’s perspective.

Check them out here:

• CMAP #1
• CMAP #2: How Books Are Made
• CMAP #3: What Authors sell to Publishers.
• CMAP #4: Territories, Translations, and Foreign Rights

Out of all the posts listed above I like #2 and #3 the best. #2 explains how a book gets from a concept in an author’s mind to a finished product in the market. I think its a great read for anyone interested in publishing and how it works. #3 explains what authors sell to publishers and what a standard contract consists of, again quite interesting how the entire thing breaks down and how the remuneration works.

I don’t write fiction, but if I did I would find these posts quite informative on how the entire process works and knowing that gives a person advantage when they try to sell their manuscript to a publisher. So if you write or are planning to, do check out the posts above.

- Suramya

I was reading the latest post on the Flipkart Blog where they talked about how they lost a customer because they addressed him informally in their correspondence with him and it started me thinking about how important it is to make sure that you address a person correctly. The problem is that the ‘correct’ mode of address changes depending on where you are and who you are addressing.

Till I went to college (before 1999) mode of address was easy, anyone in the same generation as you but older was called Bhaiya/Didi (elder brother/sister), anyone younger than you was called by their name. Any person from the older generation was either called Uncle/Aunty or by their relationship to you. Oh and teachers were called Sir or Mam. Over all quite easy to remember.

When I went to college in the US everything changed and it was a shock. Suddenly I was supposed to call my professors by their name which I felt was rude and when I started working I kept calling my bosses Sir/Mam. It wasn’t me being formal but just showing respect which thankfully they understood. Still I was told to stop doing that and call them by their names. For a person coming from a background where you never call your elders by name it was a big deal and took me quite a while to get used to it.

Then I came back to India and was lost again, because by then I was used to calling everyone by name even when they had kids older than me. In personal interactions it wasn’t that big a problem but professionally it was an issue. If you called someone by their name they felt that you weren’t giving them the appropriate respect. So I ended up calling everyone senior to me Mr xyz or Ms Xmy.

Luckily for me all the companies I have worked for had people who dealt with Americans or had studied in the US so if I accidentally called someone by their first name it wasn’t an issue.

Now I have a simple policy in this regard, if you are my age or 5-10 years older I will call you by your name unless corrected and if you are older then that I will call you by your last name. This is for in-person meetings, for conversations over the phone I take my cue from whoever introduces me to them; if they called the person by their first name I do the same otherwise its was back to formality. (Though I have stopped calling anyone sir or mam and I tell all my juniors to not call me sir.)

The mode of address is a small part of dealing with a customer/co-worker but is quite important. You want to come across as an approachable person but not get too familiar which some people might find offensive and its quite a balancing act.

I sympathize with Flipkart that they lost a customer but in the customer’s defense he told them that he wanted to be addressed formally but they still addressed him informally so its understandable that the person got ticked…

Another way to annoy a person is to get the gender wrong when addressing them. I have made that mistake but thankfully the person I was corresponding with had a sense of humor and corrected me without getting upset. Since then I try to be extra careful when using gender based vocabulary in an email but to my dismay the name doesn’t always tell if a person is a male or female especially when you are dealing with names from another culture. So I rarely use gender specific words when I don’t know the sex of the person I am emailing/chatting with.

The funny part is that my name has been mistaken for a girls name a couple of times so I know what it feels to be on the other side. But still, I think most issues can be overcome if both parties are willing to work for it and have a sense of humor (Yes, I know sometimes humor doesn’t translate well across cultures but that’s for another post)

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

- Suramya

When we talk about Big Brother most people worry about government’s having the power to monitor what people are doing. Some worry about companies monitoring their staff but that too in the office. No one really thinks about how certain schools have decided to monitor their student bodies.

Recently one of the students at Harriton High , Rosemont Pennsylvania filed a class action lawsuite against the school alleging that Matsko (The Assistant Vice Principal) “informed minor plaintiff that the school district was of the belief that minor plaintiff was engaged in improper behavior in his home and cited as evidence a photograph from the Webcam embedded in minor plaintiff’s personal laptop issued by the school district.”

School teachers/board have absolute power over their student body, not in a physical or legal sense but the power and control is still there. They control the grades and they decide how the education is being imparted to students thus controlling the student’s future. In most cases this is not an issue but sometimes the school goes over-board. In Harriton High they decided that they had the right to watch over their student body even when they were not at school and used the Laptops that the school provided to enable them to do so.

Basically they used a remote-management product called LANrev, which enabled staff members to activate Webcams built into the MacBook laptops to take snapshots of the students without their knowledge. Officially the software was put in to track stolen laptops but as with all surveillance tools it was misused by the school staff.

On most laptops there is a light that comes on when the webcam is in use so that the users know when the webcam is activated. A lot of students noticed that the light came on intermittently and when they complained they were told that this was a ‘glitch’ and the webcams were not actually in use.

The best part is that the Laptop’s were firmware locked to prevent the students from verifying the official story. In-fact if a student jail-broke the laptop it was grounds for immediate suspension. This in itself makes me believe that the laptops were used to spy on the students. In addition it was mandatory for students to use the laptops provided by school for classes instead of using their personal laptops.

Stryde Hax: The Spy at Harriton High has a very nice technical writeup of how the school was spying on students and using the laptop’s webcams to take photos without the student’s knowledge.

Although the school has denied that they were spying on students not a lot of people believe them (including me). Oh I agree that it’s not an official policy but I am 100% sure that one or more staff members used the opportunity to spy on the students.

When I read the story the first thing that came to my mind was that the easiest way to prevent the school from watching would have been to put a piece of opaque tape on the webcam. That’s what I would have done…

Now that the story is out in public the FBI is investigating the case. This is a very scary scenario and if its not stopped immediately and the people responsible are not punished then it will set a dangerous precedent for other school’s and companies. What is to stop companies from using the laptops that they issue to spy on their users? Most users keep their laptops in their bedroom and I am sure they don’t want their company/office/school knowing what they do in the privacy of their own bedroom.

Source: SANS NewsBites Vol. 12 Num. 15.

- Suramya

Augmented reality, the words bring to mind a science fiction world where people wear glasses hooked up to computers that give additional information on the item being looked at. I have read scores of novels where this technology is in use by humans (both in a positive and negative sense) but till date this technology was still in the realm of Science Fiction.

Now this has changed. ThinkAnApp studio based in Buenos Aries has developed specialized software that allows them to create a tattoo that when viewed through a camera gets transformed into a flying dragon. Or anything else you want. Pretty cool eh?

Here’s what the Tattoo looks like when viewed through a camera:

Check out the video demoing the tattoo in action here.

This is just a prototype and isn’t released for public use yet. But it is a step in the right direction and slowly but surely we are moving closer to the day when the virtual world will overlay the real world and open up all the awesome possibilities that entails.

Source: ThinkAnApp – Augmented Reality (tattoo).

- Suramya

I always think that politicians don’t think and most are dumb as a doorknob (Just as an FYI my mom is a politician but is an exception to the above rule ). They just don’t think and make these stupid rules that are supposed to make life better or easier or something.

But once in a while they come up with rules that make so little sense that even a five year old would know better… Which makes me wonder how they survived long enough to become politicians. The latest example of their folly is a new law in South Carolina, US that requires all ’subversives’ to register with the government.

Basically the law states “Every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, of this State or of any political subdivision thereof by force or violence or other unlawful means, who resides, transacts any business or attempts to influence political action in this State, shall register with the Secretary of State on the forms and at the times prescribed by him. “.

Where “subversive organization,” means every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, of this State or of any political subdivision thereof by force or violence or other unlawful means; “ To top things off there is even a $5 filing fee for this.

When I first read about this, I thought that it was a joke or a prank. However after a little digging and reading up on it I realized that they are serious and that this is an actual law passed last year. Are the politicians/bureaucrats in SC stupid enough to actually think that any “subversive organization” is going to register with them?

I had a list of other such idiotic laws that I posted on the 1st version of suramya.com back in the early 2000’s. I removed that section when I reorganized the site but this article reminded me of that list. So I will see if I can dig up one of my backups of the site and recover the list of stupid laws that I had. Once I find them I will post them here for your amusement.

Do you know of any other silly laws like this? I wonder if I can find some Indian Laws that are similarly stupid online. (There is no way I am going to try searching for this offline)

- Suramya

Details: Rawstory.com Article
Original Source:

Last weekend Amazon and Macmillan Publishing got into an argument about the correct pricing for ebooks. Amazon wanted to limit the cost to $9.99 while Macmillan was pushing for $15. If I was just looking at this portion of the debate then I am firmly on Amazon’s side because as I have said before pricing ebooks at hardback prices makes no sense.

However Amazon lost all my respect and future business when it decided to throw a tantrum and removed all books from Macmillan and its subsidiaries from its listing (about 1/6th of the books in its listing) without telling anyone about it. Basically one minute the books were there and the next they were gone.

By this move instead of being gaining support for its stand for reducing costs they gained a lot of bad publicity and really pissed off a lot of authors whose books were removed from the listing without any fault of theirs. A lot of these authors posted about this on their blogs/twitter feeds/Facebook pages (I came to know about it from Mercedes Lackey’s posting on FB) and their fans are calling for a boycott of Amazon and are asking people to buy their books from other online stores instead. A lot of them have removed the Amazon affiliate links from their sites because of this.

Amazon then made a statement on Sunday that they are putting the Macmillan books back but at the time of this writing (4th Feb 2010) you still can’t purchase their books from Amazon except for used copies for which the Authors don’t get any royalties but Amazon still makes money on the sales.

When Amazon started off I did buy a couple of books from them but over a period of time I stopped because I was getting better deals at other sites. Then when I moved back to India their shipping costs made it unfeasible for me to buy anything from them.

Since I don’t buy anything from them any more, I can’t really boycott them, but if you do then do consider one of the alternatives listed below (Suggested by Mercedes Lackey):

• Firebird Arts and Music: FANTASTIC customer service. She ships anywhere. If there is a book you want but is not on the list, ask her, she can probably get it.
• Powell’s Books
• waterstones.com: A good store that UK readers might want to try

From my side I suggest the following additional stores:

• flipkart.com/: A Good store but only delivers within India.
• Barnes and Nobel: Used to be my Favorite store. Haven’t really tried to get them to ship to India but within US they are awesome.

Here are some posts that explain what is happening in a little more detail:

• http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/29/amazon-and-macmillan.html
• http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/01/30/a-quick-note-on-ebook-pricing/
• http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/01/all-the-many-ways-amazon-so-very-failed-the-weekend/
• http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/01/seriously-now-theyre-just-being-dicks
• http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html
• http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazonmacmillan-other-perspect.html

Support the authors. Don’t let amazon bully its way to the top.

- Suramya

I have talked about books and book piracy a lot of times earlier on this blog and this is yet another post about it, but it has some additional insights and comments on the phenomenon.

A couple of days ago I saw this article called Confessions of a Book Pirate. Check it out, its a really good read on what makes a book pirate tick.

On a personal note, a few days ago I made a comment in a forum suggesting that all members of the forum to purchase actual books in addition to downloading them. My idea was that if all the members purchased a book a month then it would help the authors and encourage them to write more, which is what all readers want.

Imagine my surprise when I received replies from the posters stating the no of books they purchase each month. The top two posters buy anywhere from 10-15 books a month. and most of the other members on the forum purchased between 3-10 books a month.

Imagine that. That’s a lot of sales!

Now some people might say that these people are robbing the authors by posting their books but they are one of the biggest purchasers of the same books that they post. I myself download a lot of books but then I purchase most of the books written by any author I like. I have ebook copies of most of the books I have because they are portable.

To give you an idea of the no of books I buy, I just shipped a container weighing 599.66 pounds from my storage area in US to India that mostly contains just books. (An average paperback weighs about 4-5 pounds) BTW this is in addition to the books I have purchased in India

Baen publishing, Tor books and others have embraced the trend by making non-DRM protected books available for a very reasonable prices ($5-$6 for a book at Baen) However other authors/publishers seem to miss the lessons that the Music industry is being taught. They are pushing for higher prices and delayed ebook releases to push up the physical book sales. Which makes no sense.

According to Amazon they sell 6 Kindle books for every 10 physical books when both copies are available for sale. Physical books cost money to sell, you need to print them, store them and ship them. For an ebook the only cost is the initial cost of creation which in any case negligible because the ebook can be created from the digital manuscript submitted by the author. However once an ebook is created, you never run out of copies. If you expected to sell 10 but end up selling 100, you still don’t have to worry about anything the same master copy can be copied a 100 times at no additional cost to the publisher.

eBooks are the future. Deal with it. If you (The publishers) don’t then you will go the way of the dinosaurs to make way for publishers who actually listen to what their customers what.

- Suramya

PS: For some reason I managed to get Wordpress to loose this post the last time, so restoring it again from the DB.

In my last post I spoke about the claim by EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) that your browser’s settings etc can be used as a fingerprint to identify you.

However since then I have been reading up on it a bit more and it seems like the test they use might be flawed and incorrectly identifying people as unique. I will be following up on it and will post any updates here when I have more information on it.

But personally I think the concept makes sense and is theoretically possible. Who know, it could be that the scenario is valid but there’s a bug in the EFF’s test code. Whatever the case may be, we will find out soon enough.

- Suramya