Varun Nair’s Personal Blog

Onam Aashamsakal (Happy Onam) !

Happy Onam world! Did you know the legend behind Onam?

I am missing my family right now, am missing the slightly different mood on this day and especially missing the home food.

Makes sense

Dheeray dheeray ray mana dheeray sub kuch hoye,
Maali sainche sau ghada, ritu aaye phal hoye.

~ Sant Kabir

Wordle graphic of blog home page

Feed a block of text or a URL to wordle.net, tweak a few options (words layout, font, colours etc.) and voila! you have a cool looking frequency-based cloud of the words in that block of text. Click on the thumbnail below to see it in action, the input being the URL to this blog. Cool, isn’t it? This is not just a good tool to play around with but can also be used to generate graphics for presentations, documents etc.

Google Chrome - try it out!

Google Chrome, the browser from Google is here. Read the comic, the announcement, my review or other reviews. Or better still just download it and try it out.

It is fast, looks good, works as expected in most cases and also has a few cool things up its sleeve.

Times of India flicks from Twilight Fairy’s Flickr stream

Since ages technology has kept on making it easier to share information. From Gutenberg’s press to current day blogs it has become easier to record something and share it with others. The Internet is especially powerful in this regard. The Internet in general and Web 2.0 in particular have made it easier for content creators to become content publishers. However safeguards, both hard and soft, that exist in traditional media are non-existent or weak in the real world.

10 years ago it was probably more difficult for a photographer to share his work with the world. But this automatically made it more difficult to copy his work. Today any photographer, even a super-amateur, point-and-click, smile-please, photographer like me can have a dedicated Flickr stream But with the ease of sharing also comes the ease of copying.

Case in point - the great Times of India using Twilight Fairy’s picture without her permission. And when she brings this up with the editor no apology is forthcoming, the discussion about compensation stops at the low figure of Rs 1500 and Twilight Fairy is asked to sue or shut up. Nice going TOI!

By its very nature online media is more “free”, more free than traditional media in the sense that creating content, publishing content, accessing content, all are much easier (cheaper) than traditional media. Preventing plagiarism, technically, is usually not possible and all schemes will fail sooner of later. The only way to reduce plagiarism is for at least the biggies to be ethical and for the law and government to make it easier to prosecute and penalize copyright violators.

Sigh. TOI used to be my favourite daily around 10 years ago. But is has been steadily going downhill ever since, so much so that I stopped reading it years ago.