Recycle bin

I, for one, think that Windows operating system's Recycle Bin is badly designed.  Systems like KDE copied the idea without improving and it bothers me every time I delete a file.  Here is the list of changes I would make to make it a little more user-friendly:

• There will be no Shift+Delete shortcut to bypass recycle bin.  After a while, bypassing recycle bin is in your muscle memory and you start Shift+Deleting all your files.  Until you lose a file or two.  In my design, you have to open recycle bin and delete your file from there to permanently delete it.
• There will be, however, an option to disable recycle bin for all deletes.  (All versions of Windows already have this option.)  By default recycle bin is enabled and a user can disable it if they want.
• The user would be prompted only when a file is permanently deleted.  It can happen for two reasons: the user has disabled recycle bin and they are deleting a file.  Or the user is deleting a file from the recycle bin itself.  If you are moving a file to recycle bin, you are not asked to confirm your action.  (Windows already provides an option to undo file deletions if recycle bin was used for the deletion.)
• Recycle bin would be maintenance free.  A file in recycle bin will automatically be permanently deleted after it has been there for a certain amount of time.  I often end up with my recycle bin occupying GBs of space, which is ridiculous.

Although I can't remember the last time I used recycle bin!  When the world is moving to the clouds, who wants to manage files manually? ;-)

Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky is one of my favouite authors.  Crime and Punishment is a novel that I had been meaning to read for quite some time.  I remember buying a copy of the novel when I was in my first year MCA.  I somehow lost that book.  I bought another copy of the book after I had moved to Hyderabad.  And I lost that copy too.  I had lent it to a friend who misplaced it somewhere.  Finally, I bought the current copy that I have, a hard-bound copy.  I don't like hard-cover books and I tried my best to find a paperback version before buying this one; but couldn't find any.  Good thing is that I read this book without losing it :)

I liked the novel.  Dostoevsky made me fall in love with Dounia; it wasn't just Svidrigaïlov who loved the way she looked as she was pointing gun at him.  Svidrigaïlov is probably my most favourite character in the novel.

As always, I collected some quotes along the way.  Some of these don't make much sense without the context.  But this is to record what I liked, so here's the list.

• But if one looks at men in all ways -- are there many good ones left?
• You'll never improve a man by repelling him.
• But facts are not everything — at least half the business lies in how you interpret them.
• Man is a vile creature!... And vile is he who calls him vile for that.
• As if madmen didn't talk sensibly.
• What idiotic ideas come into one's head!
• You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.
• To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's. 
• "Of course, I am an ass, but still... you are another."
• "God give peace to the dead, the living still have to live."
• We must be patient, and much, much can be forgiven.
• Don't be uneasy, mother.  What must be, will be.
• Vive la guerre éternelle.  (Translates to "Long live the eternal war".)
• Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large and a deep heart.  The really great man must, I think, have great sadness on earth.
• The more cunning a man is, the simpler the trap he must be caught in.
• "Human beings in general, indeed, greatly love to be insulted, have you noticed that?"
• "I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity."
• "What should I be without God?"
• "What all men need is fresh air, fresh air... more than anything!"
• Everyone thinks of himself, and he lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive himself.
• "But why are you so keen about virtue?  Have mercy on me, my good friend, I am a sinful man."

Random thoughts: Philosophy

Philosophy is not a set of ideas and thoughts.  It's a state of mind.  When you are a philosopher everything you see is philosophy, as much as everything you see is poetry when you are a poet.

Random thoughts: Point of view

You see from a satellite, you count all humans and animals and rocks and plants and oceans as one.  You see through a microscope, you count your own body as billions and trillions of distinct cells.

Now then, where do you want to see things from?

Random thoughts: Reality

For all practical purposes, only day-to-day realities are the real realities.

Oil and water

We share the same bed.
Yet, our dreams are different,
Our lives are different.
Like a cab driver and a tourist
We still go along.  Together.

Inspired by my own Tamil pseudo-poem, சக பயணி.

Devil's workshop

Sitting idle at home for a week can affect your mental stability.  Or so I think.  But how do I know?  I'll tell you.

Today is the 11th consecutive day I'm on sick leave.  All these days I am confined between the walls of something -- either my house or the hospital.  Even when I go to the doctor's I sit inside something like a cab (which I hate any day).  So it went on like this.

This morning I woke up and started checking mails on my phone.  Then I thought, "I need a device like this.  Simple to use.  Something that I don't have to wait for to wake up from sleep or to get connected to the Internet."  And then I thought this: "Maybe I could buy an iPad too.  How much would it cost?"  I know I wouldn't think this in my right mind.

Later in the evening, I was searching for Zune reviews and trying to find out how much Zunes cost in India!  I mean, what the hell?  I hope I remain sane until I go to work and not waste money on any of this.  God bless me!

Spell-checking Tamil words online

Checking the spelling of Tamil words (or any language like Hindi or Bengali or Telugu for which there are no good/easily accessible dictionaries are available) can be done using Google search.

I was just posting a pseudo-poem to my Tamil blog and I didn't know how I should spell one word correctly.  It could either be spelled as சருக்கல் or சறுக்கல்.  In this time and age we don't have a lot of people who can answer such questions.  So I ended up asking Google.  I did a Google search for both words.

One spelling has 2,720 occurrences on the Web while the other has 40,300 occurrences.  It's likely that the frequently appearing spelling is the correct one too.  Well, it's not guaranteed to be correct; but this trick works for most, if not all, practical purposes.

Random thoughts: Goodness quotient

Goodness quotient of a person varies -- or rather fluctuates -- over time.  But it's always between a low and high.  Whether someone is a 'good person' or not depends on, among a few other things, how narrow their goodness range is.  Or maybe there's no such generalizations as 'good person' or 'bad person'.  Maybe that's why Doolittle told Henry that he was a little of both.