Books read in May 2007
Labels: books, May 0 comments
Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
Using Feedburner
Labels: feed, feedburner 0 comments
I moved to FeedBurner to manage my feeds for me. If you reading this via a feed reader, I request you to migrate to this feed, so that I can better track the number of people reading this blog.
The new feed also integrates a daily listing of my delicious links along with the feeds, which could contain everything from interesting book recommendations to articles on politics, economics and philosophy. Go subscribe!
Hi, I am a Mac
Labels: free software, linux, macbook, macbook pro, ubuntu 0 comments
My Daring Fireball T-shirt arrived today, in a really cool envelope from Oddica. If there were any doubts about my transformation from an Ubuntu Linux geek to a Mac fanboy, they should now be laid to rest :). For those who are not Mac fanboys yet, Daring Fireball is the holy grail of Mac related blogs.
About two years ago, even after having used Fedora, Debian and Gentoo for extended periods of time, I got frustrated fighting with my computer’s hardware to make it work. I was about to switch to a Mac (I bought a Mac Mini for evaluation!), when I discovered Ubuntu. I had been using Ubuntu full time since then. But, there was simply no getting away from the fact that Mac OS X was simply better, and I felt more productive on a Mac than on Ubuntu. Hence, two months ago I sold out and bought a Macbook Pro.
But I have not given up on free software just yet. I still use Ubuntu at work. I hold on to the hope that one day we will reach a point where the cost of freedom will not have be paid in productive hours lost. Until then, I derive inspiration from Mark Pilgrim’s ‘Freedom Zero’ and Jeremy Allison’s ‘Why We Fight’ and hundreds of other such compelling arguments as to why non-free software is inherently broken.
Redesign Notes
Labels: notes, redesign 1 comments
This blog has been redesigned quite significantly, courtesy Divya. The emphasis is on readability and elimination of clutter. Hence I moved the sidebar elements to the bottom.
There are still a few things left to do before it could be considered complete
- I am planning to move my feeds to FeedBurner, and update the HTML header and the links in the sidebar.
- I have been fascinated with the concept of Vertical Rhythm, ever since I read the book by Bringhurst. It is a bit hairy to do, especially when images are involved whose heights cannot be predicted in advance. However, Peepcode has an interesting technique that inserts appropriately sized DIVs to retain the vertical rhythm using Javascript after the page has loaded. Hope to get to it sometime next week.
- Finally I have to validate the page and hope nothing breaks :).
Please leave comments if you have any.
Surgery in progress
Labels: redesign 0 comments
If you are reading this after visting the blog URL, you will notice that the design has been stripped out. I am working on redesigning this blog a bit.
Please be patient.
Update: Most of the redesign is done now. Notes in a separate post soon.
Racial Profiling in the Singapore Rental Market
Labels: discrimination, economics, profiling, property, rental, singapore 11 comments
The first half of this month was a real nightmare. Apart from my Macbook Pro going away for some repairs, we were faced with the daunting prospect of looking for a new house. The rental lease expires in the middle of June. Singapore is experiencing a property boom, and there is apparently a supply crunch due to a large number of en-bloc sales. All of which means that prices have shot up to obscene levels.
Given my current fascination with the book Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan, I noticed a few interesting things in the entire process.
First, it is funny that when you ask an agent to look for a house for you, his incentives are not completely aligned with yours. His commission is directly proportional to the monthly rental that you end up paying. In such a scenario, he is less likely to try harder for negotiating a lower price for you.
Second, A property boom also means that apartment owners start getting pickier about the kind of tenants they are willing to put up with. We were turned down by more than half of the prospects because the owner did not want Indians (I did not bother to check whether they specifically meant the race, or the nationality).
Such an attitude may have come from stereotypes that exist about Indians (I am talking about nationality here). Somebody was recalling the other day about how they rented out their apartment to three Indians, and at the end of the tenure there were cockroaches running around the apartment. The implication probably being that Indians live shabbily and do not keep their premises upto Singaporean levels of cleanliness and hygiene.
In a chapter titled Economics of Information, Charles Wheelan has this to say about racial profiling in the context of the crackdown on drug dealers (he notes that in Trenton, crack dealers are predominantly African American males and the powdered cocaine dealers are predominantly Latino).
The question that matters is: Are we willing to systematically harass individuals who fit a broad racial or ethnic profile that may, on average, have some statistical support but will still be wrong far more often than it is right? Most people would answer no. We’ve built a society that values civil liberties even at the expense of social order. Opponents of racial profiling always seem to get dragged into the quagmire of whether or not it is good police work. It does not matter. If economics teaches us anything, it is that we ought to weigh costs and benefits. The cost of harassing ten or twenty or one hundred law-abiding people to catch one more drug dealer are not worth it. Might that change in the case of sustained terrorist attack on the United States? Sadly, yes.
My point being, The cost of harassing ten or twenty or one hundred Indians to rule out one more person who is prone to keeping his/her premises unmaintained and unclean are not worth it. Might that change in the case of Singaporean owners looking for prospective tenants? Sadly, yes.
Subversion 1.4 goodies
Labels: diff, subversion 1 comments
Subversion 1.4 contains a nice gem that I discovered only last week.
deepak@[~/code/statuspage]: svn diff -c 178
Index: data/quotes.xml
===================================================================
--- data/quotes.xml (revision 177)
+++ data/quotes.xml (revision 178)
@@ -56,5 +56,9 @@
<text><![CDATA[<p>Ideas are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribblers of a few years back.</p>]]></text>
<source>John Maynard Keynes</source>
</quote>
+ <quote>
+ <text><![CDATA[<p>Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.</p>]]></text>
+ <source>Friedrich Nietzsche</source>
+ </quote>
</quotes>
The svn diff -c can actually show you the changes made by a specific revision in the form of a diff. What is even better is that if you pass a negative value it can show you a diff which can be patched against your working copy to undo the change.
deepak@[~/code/statuspage]: svn diff -c -178
Index: data/quotes.xml
===================================================================
--- data/quotes.xml (revision 178)
+++ data/quotes.xml (revision 177)
@@ -56,9 +56,5 @@
<text><![CDATA[<p>Ideas are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribblers of a few years back.</p>]]></text>
<source>John Maynard Keynes</source>
</quote>
- <quote>
- <text><![CDATA[<p>Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.</p>]]></text>
- <source>Friedrich Nietzsche</source>
- </quote>
</quotes>