Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

From the wonderful Fly, You Fools! webcomic by Saad Akhtar. Read the full strip.

You know what I mean. What were they thinking? Here’s a helpful explanation by an APC employee:

I understand your concern with not wanting to be woken up at 2am to be alerted that power has gone out in your residence. I use the software at home to disable the audible tone as well, however, I think taking a look at it from a different approach may be ideal. Is the UPS your source of power for your alarm clock in the morning? What would occur if you were to have to wake up at a specific time during the week, and your alarm clock, which is not powered by your UPS, powers off due to a blackout, even if it is momentary? I think it would be ideal in this scenario that the UPS wakes you to notify you of a power failure. That would allow you to possibly find an alternate source of power for the alarm clock, or, if power is to be restored within a reasonable period of time, to reset your clock so that you wake up on time.

Right. That’s why. That horrible shriek is meant to wake you up. If, like all real people, you have an alarm clock that runs on batteries and prefer a full night’s sleep, it turns out that you can disable it. This works on most common APC UPS models with the USB cable. Windows users should install APC’s PowerChute software. It apparently has an option somewhere to turn it off. On Linux, the apcupsd package will do it for you (make sure to plugin the USB cable first):

Read on...

Supriya Thanawala of the Hindustan Times wrote in asking if I had noticed how online community spaces over the years have grown to discourage pseudo-anonymous identities. I responded noting several trend lines:

1. Internet adoption is growing, making governments increasingly more conscious that this is a new space they ought to be governing. That’s where the cyber cells and ISP IP logging come from.

2. Any medium where an individual can be reached with little effort will be misused. Postal mail has junk marketing, telephones have telemarketers, email has spam, each cheaper than the previous. As the medium grows and becomes a worthwhile channel for junk messages, service providers come under increasing pressure to keep it usable for normal users. They do this by either requiring some real life id (such as by your ISP) or by limiting your use of the service (such as mailing list providers that limit the number of people you can directly add to your new list).

3. The web is a public medium. Anybody can see anything posted there. The web is also very large, so resource discovery, and not access, becomes of primary importance. Blogging became popular because of this curious nature of the web. A blog was both private because nobody would find it until they got referred to it somehow, and public because you could always share the link. Online spaces felt like intimate communities in the early days because there were so few people online and you either knew who they were, or guessing that became an interesting game. As that count grew, partitioning spaces becomes important. Today’s Facebook is more or less private. You decide who your friends are and only they can see what you write. The rest of the web can’t.

4. Early blog+social networking spaces like LiveJournal and Friendster have been grappling with anonymity and fake identities for long. Here’s something I wrote a few years ago. Some have attempted banning them outright, while others have tolerated them but ended up with mixed results (see this for a particularly entertaining example – those profiles originated in a very non-funny flamefest elsewhere, after which their makers decided to keep them going for a while). Facebook has taken the more pragmatic approach, allowing for the creation of “pages” distinct from profiles that users can interact with.

5. Facebook arrives at a time when the web is increasingly seen as having little direct revenue value. Money is made via advertising, not from users paying up (in contrast, LiveJournal was profitable for several years because users paid for accounts with extra features; Flickr runs on the same model). The Pages feature on Facebook is largely seen as a marketing vehicle for a film or a product that users pay for off the web. This brings in marketing language, sanitised humour when there is any (notice that TV sitcoms are never as funny as the spontaneous writing of the Aaj Sholay community), and a referral to everything by a real world name in a manner that respects trademarks and copyrights.

So where is all the anonymity and creativity going now? It exists as always; it’s just out seeking new corners for itself away from the public eye.

(I suspect some of this isn’t quite true anymore, but I haven’t been thinking about it. Your thoughts?)

Years ago, at my first job, I attended an annual day talk by the founder and chairman of the group of companies. The man had started from scratch and built a 200 crore conglomerate with a range of business interests. This was supposed to be a pep talk about what visions he had for us, the newest company in the group, but he couldn’t help starting with a little about himself. His greatest pride in life? That he had never had a job working for someone else.

Well, so much for holding on to mine. Related reading (via @thej).