2008 February | mere funde

Mighty push for Open Access

13-02-2008

Apparently Harvard University has mandated that all research publications made by its faculty members be made available for “free” (as in free beer??) online. It is a mighty push for a movement which recently started gaining a lot of momentum.

In a move to disseminate faculty research and scholarship more broadly, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted Tuesday (Feb. 12) to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.

However, if you read the discussion below the article, it is not very clear whether it would be available soon after publication, or there would be a time lag before it gets online for free.

Whatever the case may be, it is a step taken in the right spirit and right direction.

Link via: Mashable

Self betterment for greater good

By: Goyal

12-02-2008

Genthu

The study published here proposes that individualistic actions on behalf of people prevent a larger group of people from greater fluctations.

One thing is always true, the more individualistic the behaviour of those involved in the market is, the more stable the whole system becomes.

The compare youth hostel showers to equity markets (or any scarce resource), and try to prove that the greater stability can be achieved by a group of people working for their own good. Funny logic, but I would tend to agree. What do you think?

मैं और मैरी तन्हाई

By: Goyal

12-02-2008

Music

A beautiful piece of poetry from the song Yeh Kahan Aa Gaye Hum from the movie Silsila. The lyrics of the song have been written by the brilliant Javed Akhtar. The song is also especially good.

मैं और मैरी तन्हाई, अक्सर यह बातें करते हैं
तुम होती तो कैसा होता, तुम ये कहती, तुम वो कहती
तुम इस बात पे हैरान होती, तुम उस बात पे कितनी हंसती
तुम होती तो ऐसा होता, तुम होती तो वैसा होता
मैं और मैरी तन्हाई, अक्सर यह बातें करते हैं

स्वागत है

By: Goyal

07-02-2008

Blog

If you are one of those three (lemme count.. one, two, three, yup, thats all) people who do visit my blog and ~~read~~ tolerate the nonsense that I put up here, you would have noticed that the blog was out for a couple of days. Here is an official reason.

I had not been able to post in hindi for quite some while now, and I had done nothing wrong apparently. However, on deeper inspection, I did find out the reason for this. The database, provided by my kind host, used the latin_swedish_ci character set and collation. Because of this it did not support the hindi fonts. So I tried rectifying it by running some basic SQL queries (which is not saying much). So I backed up my database (important), and started fiddling around, and obviously everything went wrong.

So I had to go back to Ashish and ask him to setup a database with the UTF8 charset which supports the hindi character set. After he did that, I setup WordPress (2.3.3) and imported the posts, comments, images, themes, etc. Only one glitch remains. Due to an error in WordPress, the tags have been imported as IDs into the new database. I have applied the patch mentioned in the forum [I am so proud of being able to do that!!], but haven’t been able to reimport the tags as of now. Will keep you updated as and when that happens. Till then,

आपको हुई असुविधा के लिए मुझे खेद है

Belated B’day

By: Goyal

03-02-2008

Blog, Personal

It was on Jan 31st, 2005 that I started writing this blog. Since then a lot has happened. I have moved from a wordpress.com blog to a self-hosted one. I have written more than 300 posts. There have been around 10k hits on my older blog and around 2k on this one.

However, I have still not been able to post in Hindi on the new blog. I want to spend some time redesigning it, but haven’t got around to doing that.

But the more important thing is that I have kept going. And I think that the thing that keeps me going is that I think I would want to come back later, and read about how I have felt over time. I am too lazy to write a diary, and I think this is much better and easier option. Here’s to many more to come. Cheers!

PS: If you do check my archives, you will also see a lot of posts dated before Jan 2005, but those are posts from our, i.e. STAR-PLUS, older group blog at “East of Omaha“.

Vijit Jain: My thoughts exactly – they should have automatically created/suggested a circle of people already...
Ojas Sabnis: I agree with most points Goyal and I am also mighty pissed with the loss of sharing feature. I hardly...
Sumit: We have developed the habit of being “politically correct”. Everybody accuses Modi for Godhra...
Ojas: Anything that has story telling in it must have a mention of the greatest (or worst) storyteller of the...
Teanju: Thanks, All awesome

— mere funde

Mighty push for Open Access

Self betterment for greater good

मैं और मैरी तन्हाई

स्वागत है

Belated B’day

Twitter

Interesting!!

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