Of Blogs and Oranges..

My heart, it aches for The Girl.

Through the long dark night
By the glow of my PC
Lines of code appear.

It’s true. The best things in life are free. Like Project Gutenberg. Mozart. Mum’s cooking. And my new iPhone!

I won an iPhone at the launch of Reliance’s new iStore at Palladium last evening. And I’m posting this straight from the iPhone, courtesy the WordPress 2 App – another of life’s excellent free things!

Had a delightful 20-minute game of chess in the evening.

So this chap from Taiwan who calls himself ‘Little Gray” has now officially written the manual for winning and *still* being a huge loser.

http://www.destructoid.com/man-beats-world-of-warcraft-156593.phtml

He is the first ever person to officially beat the huge World of Warcraft MMORPG, after completing all 986 achievements in the game, killing 390,895 creatures, dealing out 7,255,538,878 points of damage and completing 5906 quests on the way. That’s more than 14 quests a day.

Wow. I was just telling Abhijeet the other day that the people who expounded on the Omnipotence Paradox seem to have had a lot of free time on their hands. Turns out there are more people with more free time than WoW anticipated.

Here’s an interesting WordPress theme I came across, that converts WordPress into a CMS for movie reviews and downloads.

The WP Theme is called ‘MovieSitePress’. Movie Site Press is a rather generic name, but the idea behind this theme is that anyone can install this theme, add information and images about a few movies, and easily create a movies website that is based on WordPress.

Screenshot of the Movie Website theme/plugin for WP

It has a polished UI that uses AJAX, and comes with appropriate features like automatic image resizing, embedded videos, and movie ratings.

A really interesting feature in this movie website theme for WP, is the twitter updates plugin. This plugin tweets new posts, thus getting in new users to your site.

You can download the theme here.

This theme creates pretty sites, but it’s not free. At the time of going to press, this theme cost $47. I think it’s a good price, since making the same features would cost in the region of $600.

Get the wordpress theme from the MovieSitePress website.

Blogging, Forum and CMS software definitely take the hard work out of publishing websites. While you can always create a free account at blogger for a blog, installing your blog on your server gives you awesome power to modify and customise. However, it is easy to neglect the downside of installing and running complex software on your server – vulnerabilities.

“With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility”
- Uncle Ben to Peter Parker

The more complex a system, the more chances of errors, bugs, and other vulnerabilities creeping in. If you have any custom software like Wordpress, Joomla, PHPBB, vBulletin, CMSMS etc. installed, you really really (really) need to keep it updated.

If you run many websites (like I do), you can easily forget to keep the software on them up-to-date. But the consequences can be nasty!

Bloranges.com was hacked recently. There was no visible change to the site, but a Denial of Service (DoS) script was installed, that would attempt to take the server down.

Thanks to Jeremy K, who pointed out the hack for me. I’ve fixed stuff for now on most of my websites, but one. I’ll get cracking on that soon.

So folks, don’t fall prey to the it-won’t-happen-to-me syndrome.. and yes, please take regular backups!

Someone deposited a four-month old cheque into my account. It cleared, but messed up my calculations. And the cheque for my visa application bounced. Gah!

In memory of the event. On the Intuos 3 (6×8) in Photoshop. Click on it to download the larger size.

The Hindu religion (and it’s associated languages) has distinct concepts of Paap v/s Punya, but surprisingly there is no equivalent to Punya in English. What is the opposite of ’sin’?

At first glance, one seems to easily find words to describe the opposite of ’sin’. However,  sin is essentially a religious term. On the other hand, a ‘good deed’ does not necessarily have to involve religion. An atheist, for example, would be uncomfortable with the idea of ‘commiting a sin’, but comfortable with the idea of performing a good deed. In other words, the opposite should carry the heavy religious connotations of the word ’sin’.

Furthermore, the word ‘deed’ is not even appropriate. A sin is not necessarily a deed, but can rather be simply a thought or even a feeling. Consider, for example, envy or pride.

A further complication arises when I realise that Sin is defined slightly differently in the Biblical context: The state of Sin is the opposite of the state of Grace, i.e. one who has fallen from Grace is in Sin. So is Grace the opposite of Sin?

And no, the answer is not Cos.

Don’t give up on Paint so soon, bud!

This is a remake of a banksy original.

And this is inspired off a CNet Flash ad.