e pur si muove

Recent visitors to e pur si muove may have discovered a few new features during their latest visit to the site proper. The most prominent of which is probably the user avatars (pictures) that show up when you leave comments on my posts.

This is basically how the installed avatar system works: when you leave a comment, you are also encouraged to leave an email address (which won’t be shown on the site) and a website address. Wordpress then figures out what avatar to display in this order:

1. If your email address has a registered Gravatar, the Gravatars plugin will display that.
2. If your URL has a favicon registered, the Favatars plugin will show it as a favatar.
3. If you have a registered Comvatar on the blog, Comvatars will show that.
4. If none of the above apply, Comvatars will pick a random image for you. If you don’t like the resulting monkey or space alien next to your name, then either get a Gravatar or change the setting if you are a registered user.

Some other features: when viewing single entries, Wordpress will display a list of other posts it thinks is related.

There’s also plenty of under-the-hood tuneups: installing a cache, and also widgetizing Kaushal Sheth’s Fluidity theme so that it plays nice with one of Wordpress’s most recent innovations. (Kaushal hasn’t released a widgetized version yet so I did it myself. Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t too tough.) The upshot of widgetizing is that the sidebars are now organized in (what I believe to be) a much more organized fashion, with blog-specific stuff on the left, and my stuff on the right.

And all this without compromising on the already available features of being able to write LaTeX and a built-in wiki. Yay!

I’m still messing around with a few plugins: FAlbum, Custom Field, and Canvas. Will update if I do decide to keep them installed.

technorati tags:wordpress, widgets, plugins, avatar, gravatar, favatar, comvatar, theme

Superman finishes a final in double-quick time:

This Superman excuses himself from a lecture on wavelengths:

Ah, school.

technorati tags:superman, viral, video, youtube, school, exam, lecture

Having had some programming experience, I’ve seen computer programs with backdoors and undocumented features. Today, I met a computer program which promised a feature that didn’t work. It was happily described and outlined in the documentation, yet the program itself steadfastly refused to acknowledge its capabilities in the aforementioned respects.

Sigh.

This news release is absolutely priceless. Choice quote (italics mine):

Activists familiar with street protests outside the venues of annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are in for a different treat at this year’s gathering.

Singapore, the host country of the mid-September event, is sparing little to ensure that it lives up to its legacy as an affluent city state where universally accepted democratic principles — such as the right to freedom of association — are banned. The South-east Asian nation’s penchant for thought control will be evident enough for the expected 16,000 delegates.

Till now, a broad group of activists who have written a letter to Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, requesting the government to permit the traditional anti-Bank protests, have still to receive a reply [...] The World Bank, however, has stepped in to assure activists that space for civil society is being negotiated to avoid what some critics of the international financial institutions says will undermine the credibility of the Bank’s claims to promote good governance, accountability, transparency and democracy.

[...]Sinapan Samydorai, head of Think Centre, a human rights NGO, told IPS. ”Locals trying to express any political opinion in public will require a license. The licenses are often denied to locals. [...] The government may permit a selected number of foreigners to march peacefully — with the required license — to show-case that there is ‘freedom’ in Singapore. Controlled and managed, it will boost the image of Singapore.”

According to [M.] Ravi, the government does not compromise on this measure to control dissent and alternative views in the country. ”It is extremely serious about the bans against public demonstrations.”

The recent parliamentary elections in May, where the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) was returned to power, served up large helpings of the bizarre quality of Singapore’s ruling dynasty. The country’s founding figure, former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, father of Lee Hsien Loong, justified these authoritarian measures as a mechanism needed to transform this malaria-infested trading port in the late 1950s to a development success story.[...]

Yet Lee Hsien Loong did not consider such violations of political and civil liberties a problem. On the eve of the poll, he was quoted as having told ‘The Straits Times,’ a government mouthpiece, that ”the political system here is as fair as you can find in any country in terms of your being able to stand up, to have a view, to organise, to mobilise and participate.”

”(You do) not need a lot of money or a lot of power to get moving,” he was quoted as saying.

Shalmali Guttal, a senior researcher at Focus on the Global South, a regional think tank, wishes that was really so. ”This year’s annual meeting seems very suspicious to us because the World Bank and the IMF are still uncertain about the calls by civil society for demonstrations to be permitted. Failure will only prove to us that the hegemony of these institutions continues at the expense of democracy.”

For her, public participation on the streets outside the meeting’s venue “is the only available option for the victims of the Bank’s programmes to protest. The meeting’s credibility will suffer if demonstrations are banned.”

Sure, you can be cynical and talk about how the World Bank is doing this only as a PR move. But at least they are doing it in the spirit of the principles of which they believe they stand for. Contrast this to our usual rhetoric vide pragmatism, that restrictions on civil expression are necessary (if not quite sufficient) prerequisites for the stability of our society, and that debating abstract ideological concepts such as “free speech” and “the right to protest” are irrelevent to our daily lives.

I wouldn’t go as far as to castigate my own country as having a history of being a “malaria-infested trading port”, but having conquered malaria for the most part, can’t we now start working on more high-level improvements to our living conditions?