England vs Germany
Football is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win. The words of Gary Linekar, the famous striker of the English team that lost to Germany in the 1990 World Cup semis.
As arch-rivals England and Germany gear up for the 2nd round match of the 2010 FIFA World Cup match later today, I am also getting a little more excited than usual. In school, I used to be an avid follower of football, reading and watching about the games as much as I could. I remember Oliver Bierhoff’s golden goal in Euro ’96 final and the famous match Germany and England played in the semis. Lately, I have watched only a few matches. Though the English have good players and play well, for some unknown reason, I have never liked their team- and always wanted them to lose. As I root for Germany today, here are some interesting pieces of information I collected for the pre-match consumption.
Games against Germany represent some of the lowest points in England’s 44 years of hurt. Of course England wants to win the World Cup but if we can’t, we at least want to be beat the German: a life-long England supporter in the Deutsche Welle.
The New York Times: “Three World Cups!” the Germans like to cry, gently mocking England’s sole success in the competition, a 4-2 victory over West Germany in extra time in 1966 at London’s Wembley Stadium, and comparing it with Germany’s success in 1954, 1974 and 1990 (all as West Germany, before German reunification). “Two world wars!” has been the English supporters’ response.
The British tabloid has been quick to draw comparisons between the game and the war. The Daily Star writes, GERMANY is set to kick up a Reich stink at the World Cup by playing in Nazi-style black shirts. The German tabloid Bild calls The ‘Daily Star’ headline is just sick. The SS and Fascist groups in Italy and England were known as ‘Black Shirts’. It says, it was the height of poor taste, coming the day after International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Independent gets humbler than the tabloids and makes a list of good things about the rivals including the invention of 23-year-old German university student, Paul Nipkow, who thought up the first electromechanical television system in 1884, without which, we would be listening to today’s match on the wireless. Read more in What has Germany ever done for us?
Germans watching the World Cup (source: The Welt)
The BBC reports that a psychic octopus said to have correctly predicted many of Germany’s previous match has predicted a German win in today’s match.
Since ’66 the Germans have always finished at least one stage ahead of England in the World Cup and there was a time, until that amazing 5-1 win in Munich in 2001, when they regularly got the better of us. But you don’t have to be burdened by history; the point is to try to make it… I see it’s the youngest side the Germans have brought to the finals since 1934. (The Independent)
Germans thrive when under pressure. (The Independent)
Germans: Eleven years ago, half our rival’s squad would not qualify as citizens under rules introduced by Kaiser (nice pictures): The Daily Mail
The Daily Mail also writes about how economy will boost if England wins and how people in both countries have stocked beer for the occasion.
In an interesting article, The Daily Mail writes, why do we love to hate them? It can’t just be that deep down we know they’re better than us at football, and particularly at taking penalties? Can it? The piece is aptly titled: Why we still love bashing the Boche: as we face Germany in the World Cup tomorrow, we salute the silly side of our old enemy.
The German and British Prime Ministers to watch the big game together during the G8 summit: The Local
The Guardian writes about “Das Englische Elfmetertrauma“, the famous penalty-shootout duels between Germany and England.
The Bild gives six reasons why the Germans think they will beat England. The Daily Mail has its own set of reasons why England will win.
Classic
The Welt has another interesting photo gallery titled Again and Again against England, with classic pictures from previous matches between the countries.
The Spiegel has a nice photo gallery too.
The Psychological War
According to The Daily Mail, the English FA wanted to book the five-star Hotel Velmore Grande for the Sunday’s game, but Germans were quicker. The Bild said They wanted to pitch up in the Hotel Velmore Grande for the quarter finals but the DfB [German FA] was quicker – and now we are getting ready in the luxury five-star accommodation for victory on Sunday.
Psychological War? Sure. Read ahead.
The man fielded for the pre-match press conference by the German team was Andreas Köpke, the German goalie who saved England’s penalty in the ’96 Euro Cup victory.
The German team recently visited the Lions’ Park in South Africa. The English team are called “The three lions” by the press, in reference to the English Coat of arms. The Welt has a photo gallery of the visit to the Lions’ Park. The Daily mail story also writes in length about it.
The Tabloid War
More World Cup
The Bild: What kind of people don’t watch the world cup ? (with a gallery).
The Telegraph: WAGS arrive in South Africa to back England. (I am of the opinion that England would make a better pop-band than a football team 
)
Disclaimer:
Traditionally, I’ve been a stronger supporter of Brazil and Italy and a sympathizer of Argentina and Spain. But since many of the players who were the reasons for my support have retired and changed, it’s hard for me to choose a team today
Welcome back to reality !
I’m sure you had almost started thinking of yourself as a global citizen as you wished each other “Merry Christmas” and partied well over the weekend. Especially to those in Kathmandu and cities. I’m sure some of you had already made plans for the New Year celebration. Life was sailing all right. You had those usual complaints and ideas on how to improve the system in the country but even without them, things seemed to be working just fine. At least they weren’t getting on your way. The crippling strikes (bandhas) and road-blockades wouldn’t deter you from doing your work or enjoying your leisure (Read: Nation of Strikes). Who cares about Nepalese politics anyway?
That was until I read the news today that next week onwards, we’ll have eight hours of power cut every day. Another 15 days, and the duration will be ten hours. Soon, it will be sixteen-hour a day.
Well friends, welcome back to reality ! I think power-cuts should be a part of our national priority and policy-agenda. Nothing, not even strikes, has as strong effect of grounding the unruly youths of the nation, as the power-cut schedule has. To those guilty of thinking of themselves as competitive and capable-of-anything generation of energetic youth, nothing is as humbling as this schedule. Back to where your belong, fellas!
Source: The BG Experience
It was about a year ago that I wrote a couple of posts on the same topic. I just went through them, and found some points worth repeating:
- I challenge you to contemplate – really stop and think for a moment - what your life would be like if you had to live 10 hours of each and every day without electricity.
- Jules West on Kura Kaani and Jai Nepal - It’s gonna be 82 hours/week from tomorrow. 12 hours for 6 days and 10 for the one remaining day. More reason to celebrate the glorious darkness in the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal.
- ShutUp, commenting on More Darkness - Oh BTW, I heard some stats that said the city with the most load-shedding (least electric power) – major city that is – in the world is Kabul, Afghanistan. Kathmandu is #2.
- sirensongs, commenting on The Load Shedding Conspiracy - Life, so blissed to be so utterly ignorant and so happily incapable of any voice and resistance, of anything at all beyond frustration, dejection and surrender. Of course, in Nepal, all this and more go on as if this is the way things should have always been. (from The Load Shedding Conspiracy)
With an predicted economic crisis (triggered by a liquidity crunch) in six months, and a foreseen political crisis in four months, load-shedding was just the missing ingredient for a wonderful new year gift for the population.
Ankur on Load Shedding:
अँध्यारोमा जन्मेको थ्यौ, अँध्यारोमै मर
घुस खाको पैसा बाँकि भए, जेनेरेटरमा भर ।
Meanwhile, I recently read about people like us declaring independence from Nepal and forming a separate country.
And, oh yes – Happy New Year 2010.
Solved: Plone installation Strange Error
Problem:
After installing Plone 3.3.2 as a standalone server from the Unified Installer in Ubuntu 9.04, adding a new plone-site (from the ZMI) produced strange error. I have been facing this for quite sometime now.
The Error Message:
Site Error An error was encountered while publishing this resource. Error Type: KeyError
Error Value: ''
Here’s the error log taken from the file instance.log.
Solution:
In the instance section of the buildout.cfg file, add the following (replacing your own timezone if necessary):
zope-conf-additional =
<environment>
TZ Asia/Katmandu
</environment>
Run the buildout again, start the Zope Server and the problem will be gone.
What happened:
For some strange reason, Python couldn’t pick up the timezone of my machine. We fixed that by explicitely providing one in the buildout.cfg file.
Matthew Wilkes told me on IRC, “when Zope creates a date object it uses the timezone of the local machine, if not otherwise specified. Every object gets a creation date, which is then stored in the portal catalog so it can be searched for. The catalog tries to normalise the timezones so searches don’t have to take account of the fact that 1pm EST is the same time as 6pm GMT. Zope couldn’t find my machine’s timezone for whatever reason, so used the timezone ”, which caused a key-error when the date-time machinery tried to look up what the offset from GMT is.” He said that they will have to work on making the installation process adress this strange problem.
Matthew has added a ticket for this bug: #9857.
Thanks, also to cbess (I guess he is Christopher Bess) of the #plone IRC channel.
More Help:
How to install Plone with the Unified Installer and managing projects with buildout. The later link also explains how to install Plone using paster, which I’m told is the ‘advanced’ way to do the thing
I’d prefer installing from my Package Manager. But there also seems to be some problem in Jaunty’s plone3-site package as attempting to install plone3-site from synaptic gave this error:
Setting up plone3-site (3.1.7-1) …
dpkg: error processing plone3-site (–configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 10
Errors were encountered while processing: plone3-site
Posted via web from Scribbles
Is a day job necessary for a startup owner?
Whether or not to keep a day job while venturing out on a startup is a key question for many entrepreneurs. Startup owners, in my opinion, should find/keep a day-job until investors are found or the startup starts becoming expectedly profitable. Some good reads on the web:
- 10 Reasons to Keep Your Day Job
- 20 Things Not to Do Before Starting A Busines
- Entrepreneur – You don’t have to quit your day job
- Pearls or Wisdom – You Dont Have to Quit Your Day Job
- Dan Grossman – Go to college and get a job
- Business Start-up Success – launch your business on a part-time basis then go full-time when profits will sustain
- TrackSuit CEO – Entrepreneurs: Don’t Quit Your Day Job
- To make your startup a success, keep your day job
- MoneyAside – Don’t Ditch your Day Job at Business Startup
- Tony Wright – Half-assed Startup – How to Start your Company and Keep Your Day Job
- Venture Hacks -Half-Assed Startup: Start your company and keep your day job
- Ron Conway Thinks You Should Keep Your Day Job
- Stack Overflow – When should you leave your day job to open a start-up?
- Paul Graham – How not to Die
- Guy Kawasaki -Nine Questions to Ask a Startup
- Why do most new start-up businesses go bust ?
- BootStrapMe -Don’t keep your day job?
- GapingVoid – Ignore Everybody (keep your day job) , The Sex and Cash Theory (keep your day job)
Has the SRK detention story been overblown?
Recently, bollywood superstar ShahRukh Khan (SRK) was detained for a little over 1 hour (according to the US authorities, 2 hours according to Indian news sources) in an American airport when he was travelling to perform in a show. It has been attributed to his Muslim name and is said that the Indian government had to apply diplomatic measures to release him. A lot of furor has been created since and heated comments from SRK and his supporters have been coming.
Profiling people based on their names, religion, country of origin, race etc is totally wrong. Worse is the unlawful detention, extra-judicial powers to law authorities, surveillance and the increasing attack on freedoms and civil liberties. This escalated after 9/11 and has been continuing unabated since. Many other countries have joined the league and freedom of people all over the world is being restricted day by day.
SRK isn’t an isolated case. On 15th August, a similar fate met Bob Dylan. Though SRK mighet be more popular than Hollywood actors, Dylan’s personality and role in the rights-movement some decases ago and in the protest of Vietnam war are stuffs legends are made of. A few years ago, a famous singer Cat Stevens who is a Islam-convert was deported after being denied entry to the US, also because of his Muslim name. Unlike SRK, he’s one of “them”, the western world. Studies by civil liberty groups claim that more than 5% of the American population itself is kept on a possible terrorist-suspect list and are subjected to harrassment at airports. A foreign minister of Hugo Chavez was “threatened and shoved” by airport officials, even after informing them of his identity. Even Nelson Mandela was (there have been reports that his name has since been removed) on a terrorist watch list prepared by the FBI which contiues to grow longer and longer every day. Similarly, names of many American leaders and people are also there. Forget America, former Indian president Abdul Kalam was also frisked in April at an Indian airport. “But I admired the calmness with which Abdul Kalam dealt with the issue himself and displayed so much humility. I expect Shah Rukh to do the same as I am sure he will. Only he can defuse the situation,” Times of India quotes Shekhar Kapur.
IndiaTimes blog has an entry that requests not to make a big deal over the SRK case. In my experience, South Asia in itself is a very racist place with the North-Indians in India and the residents of Kathmandu being the most frequent offenders I’ve seen. Sometime ago, a racist slur was made on an Indian Idol from North-Eastern India belonging to a Nepali-speaking community by a Mumbai FM RJ. In my observation, such behaviour is common, especially in the Indian capital, to North-Eastern Indians, Bhutanis and Nepalese of mongolian origin. Dinesh Wagle echoes my observations in a recent article. Kathmandu-residents are very intolerant of anybody from outside the valley and especially the Terai.
In my opinion, racism in any form, any where is deplorable. Such activities remind of colonial days. It is a good thing that India has risen to the capacity of defending its citizens even at the world’s sole superpower – maybe this reckons of days when it will stop being the sole-superpower. However, the basic flaw is in the state of civil liberties worldwide. Unless this realisation dawns, getting emotional over SRK issue may be benefitial to his upcoming movie that is said to be based on similar issues, but it will make no significant change on the way things are. They were never different. Just because SRK is SRK, expecting them to change is only stupid. The issue has been overblown.
The last two lines of the third paragraph were added on 17th Aug, 2234 (local time)
Posted via web from Instincts
Code Obfuscation
By Binit Thapa
“Real Programmers don’t comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.”
Obfuscation: confusion resulting from failure to understand, mystification. Try telling someone you’re a programmer and he knows you’re an ugly, boring specimen of homo sapiens [1] who has neither girlfriend nor time. Why, only today there was a discussion going on at InRev [2] about how less frequently the software team went to toilets. Once you are into the programming spirit, everything else becomes moh-maya [3]. When you misplace something, you miss find and grep4. And when you’ve got par with all the games you have, you start writing code for fun. Maybe a small useful tool or maybe a piece of code that only bows to its creator. While this technique is not new, it’s so unique and diverse that it can easily cause a mild heart-attack if you’re not a really good programmer. Here I’ll present some of the best ones, which I’ve collected over time. But I won’t explain those to you as I’ve never fully understood them myself.
C program
This is a valid C program that generates a nice poem when compiled. Author: James O. Coplien
The next one is prime number test by Abigail. This prints “prime” as 7 is a prime number.
perl -wle 'print "Prime" if (1 x shift) !~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/' 7
Next ones are taken from JAPH [5] section of CPAN.
camel-code
star-wars-code
love-code
The examples above were scripts with some meaningful output. There’s also poetry which may not produce any output but compiles perfectly and looks nice. These are some of those, all compiling perfectly in Perl.
While most of these are written in C/C++ and in Perl, hackers have created plenty in almost all languages. Code obfuscation is not only for fun. This technique has been used in making code very difficult to reverse engineer and hence secure. This is specially helpful Javascript where code is to be presented to the world.
I am signing off with some good references. Other examples are left as an exercise to the reader, etc.
Notes
1 homo sapiens – the set containing both programmers and Muggles
2 InRev – the company I work with
3 moh-maya – loving the materialistic things
4 find and grep – unix tools to search tokens in files.
5 JAPH – Just a Perl Hacker, scripts by Perl Hackers.
References
1. Wiki explains http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscated_code
2. The International Obfuscated C Code Contest – http://www.ioccc.org/
3. The Perl Poetry – http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl/prog3/ch27_02.htm
4. JAPHs in CPAN http://www.cpan.org/misc/japh
Download Code
C-program, Camel-code, tree-code, star-wars-code, love-code, poem-1, poem-2
About the writer: Binit Thapa is the Chief Software Architect of the Bangalore-based startup InRev. He has industry experience in scripting tools, Linux and Unix development environment, SOAP/XML and data storage technologies. He is a graduate of Bachelor of Engineering (IT) from NIT Durgapur, India.
Note: I would like to thank InRev, Binit Thapa and Bhupendra Khanal for making this guest-article possible. I welcome other guest articles on topics coherent with the theme of this blog.
