The Abu Salem Case

Recently a lot of hype has been created reagrding Abu salem, the gangster extradit from Portugal with his muse Monica Bedi. Depending on which Indian newspaper you read, there are different versions of confession statements that man has given to the police. Whatever his statements are do we really know he was invovled in the Bombay blasts of 93'. I am not trying to defend the man here as you will see later. The police has not made any official statement yet as to what he has conffessed to ,so you have the media going beserk about his so called statements. As usual a high profile case is being mangled up by the CBI etc. Firstly the police should put out an official statement saying "Such and such is going on, and the rest is under investigation" Have a press conference, I am sure the high ranking CBI officers will like that opportunity to get into the limelight.
Now to his interrogation, man get the man to speak plainly through "any means possible". If he is involved and there is a lot of evidence against him, get him to speak in court about his involvement. Dont give the man a plea bargain or make him a govt witness. Find out his role and give the man appropriate sentence. For Monica bedi, do the same. Make her an e.g of what could happen to the aspiring starlets who wish to sleep with the enemy of India.
Sanjay dutt's name has come up again and for the upteenth time he has been linked to the underworld. The last time daddy dear saved his ass but this time he should be in deep shit theoritically. Is there smoke without fire? Going by the media reports(that's all I have sitting here), he has been linked time and again to the underworld dons. Unfortunately, we do not measure the celeberities by the same scale as we do other human beings. Not in the U.S and definately not in India. So if the Indian govt really wants to make a statement against the Mumbai underworld, get him, put him to trial and get him to speak too again "by all means possible".
Its been 12 years since the mumbai blasts and there is little justice for the victimes but there should be one atleast in their lifetimes. Its time to toughen up and put out foot down. At this point i am tempted to write "Jai hind" here but the realist in me tells me "NOTHING is going to happen"
Abu salem will definately go to prison as there is too much attention on him and he probably cant pay his way through now and so will Monica bedi but beyond this ... nothing is going to happen.

Honesty with Newspaper vending machines

I saw this the other day on the back of a WSJ vending
I think all of the WSJ vending machines have these now.
The first time I saw a newspaper vending machine here,
I thought to myself, "Wow people here are not that crazy,they dont take more than one newspaper from the machine, even though they can". They definately can, as the newspapers inside are all stacked up on top of each other, and once you put in the required coins, you open the front panel, and the whole stack is right infront of you. So if anyone wants to be mischieveous, he/she can take one for himself, one for dad, one for the neighbour, one for the office etc etc, but I guess mostly people don't. The only reason I can up for that is, you cant sell newspaper here to a recycler. I guess you can but then you will have to collect a ton of it to make any significant money out of it. The other possible reason is that most people are honest so this system works as there are tons of such vending machines everywhere. I say this for the smaller cities that I have seen here and I dont know about the bigger cities like NY etc.

Whenever I see such use of technology here, I always think what if a system/machine like this existed in India? So here is a hypothetical situation where a big Indian business daily decides to introduce such machines in India.

1. Most people will definately take more than one, just for kicks even though they may have no use of the extra one.
2. The local aunties will take more than three, the extra ones to use in household work.
3. Someone will change the sign behind to say "Taking two will make you twice as successful"
4. After some hotshot MBA working for the newspaper, realizes that evey such machine gives them only the cost of one paper back everyday even thought they put in 20 in a machine, he will then suggest to post a guard besides such vending machine to make sure people dont take more than one. Ofcourse he will then be rewarded with a raise and some other award.
5. After a few months both the guard and the vending machine will be discontinued because it will be too expensive to maintain and the old vendor system will follow.

Idiot Proof machines

I recently bought an ipod, returned it 'cos couple of days later the video ipod was anounced for the same price. As I write, I am listening to music on my ipod. The device has a very simple external interface, there are only two slots, one for the headphones, the other for the usb cable. To switch it on, there is button which does not say on, but there arent that many buttons, so a user will press one of the 4-5 buttons infront of him and the damn thing will come on. Pretty idiot proof in terms of external design. As far as the cables go, they are of different sizes, so you cant mess those up as well. Overall a b+ idiot proof rating for user interace.
Last night around 12 a.m after fiddling with my new video ipod, i got hungry, and went to Taco Hell to get some grub. Even though they take credit cards, at that point of time, i remembered that they dont take credit cards. The reason being, at Purdue, the damn joint never accepted cards. So being out of cash, I went to a drive through ATM.
First step at the atm. Insert your check card. Now there is a light over the slot, which says insert card here, there is a picture which shows which way to insert the card. So I inserted my card, while inserting it, had to push it a little bit, cos it wasnt so smooth. I then looked at the screen to greet me. Nothing happened. Well I thought, it didnt go in properly, so lets try again. Pressed cancel and again nothing at the prompt, nor did the card come out. Cursed a few times, thought about getting out of the car and give it a yadav style treatment(Couple of thumps here and there and kick as well) but then sized up the machine, realized it was way bigger than me, and decided against it. So pressed cancel again number of times. No use, so cursed louder this time. Took out another card and tried to shove that in as well, The purpose of this act was to pry the card out, or to get the damn machine to say something and it did- "This machine is temporarirly out of service" without giving my card back to me. I decided against cursing this time and just drove off.
Now incase another card was already stuck in that machine, the damn machine should have just shown its' version of blue screen of death so I wouldnt have to go through this crap. It wasnt showing shit when I got there and it was showing all sorts of shit when i left. This is bad design and anyone could have been caught in this situation. If the machine is screwed, it should say " I am screwed, do not use me". If there are certain scenarios left untested where the machine can get screwed and not show this message, then again it is a bad engineering job.
If the machine was not screwed, then I did something wrong which was to shove my card up the machine crack. Now when I shoved the card in, the card did not go in the slot(as it didnt read shit) but went into a space which was above the card reader inside, at an angle.I am taking the blame here even though I am not sure if that really happened. Now this is an e.g of not idiot proofing a design. An ideal design would be if i put my card in the atm machine, I should be able to put/shove it in one place only. If not, then an idiot like me would come and definately take up the challenge of shoving the card down its throat the wrong way and win as well just by instinct. Other such "yadav" instincts of mine are -if something doesnt move, push/pull at it till it does or it gives piece of you that you can move. There are a few others as well which I will don't want to disclose as I dont want to preach violence against machines.
Consumer goods manufacturers need to hire more yadav's to test their user interface apparently.

Visited States in U.S

Pretty cool hack. Looking at it makes me wanna travel some more. Should start making some plans for thanks giving I guess.


DIY here