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Yesterday I installed a cool 'photoblog map' in the Photoblog's Archives section. It allows you to see photos region-wise on the world map. To start with, each dot on the map links to a page containing thumbnails of photos taken in that region. Mark Zemen has made it real easy for anyone to use the photoblog map on their blog. All you need to do is create a template for generating the XML file that feeds location info to the flash map. It took me five minutes of work in MT to do that.

I usually take Gartner's 'prophecies', 'surveys' and 'magic quadrants' with huge dollops of salt. They are good for using as quotes in presentations to scare the gullible but reality is mostly otherwise. I did so again when I read their report on the IPSec protocol.

The first fallacy in their statement is the 'younger technological rival' part -- SSL encryption technology is the grand daddy of IPSec, not the other way around. But yes, SSL VPNs are newer that IPSec VPNs. They are more as an afterthought rather than ground up. VPNs have existed in many forms. You had MS PPTP VPNs, L2TP VPNs and even unencrypted simple IP over TCP virtual networks. IPSec was considered strongest.

Secondly, SSL VPNs are not a replacement for IPSec VPNs. They are convenient for most people which is why they are increasingly used. You don't have to install any client software. All you need is a web browser to initiate an SSL VPN connection. They will succeed over IPSec VPNs in most remote applications. But IPSec will still be around for network-to-network VPNs.

Thirdly, IPSec is an integral part of IPv6. So is Gartner suggesting that IPv6 will be dead? :-) In fact, I predict, when IPv6 becomes widespread, it will be easier to use IPSec than SSL because SSL is more of an IPv4 technology and using it as VPN will mean more overhead for applications in the future.

Welcome to the Makar Sankranti / Pongal / Lohri / Bhogali Bihu / Bhogi / Sakarat / Kicheri edition of the Bharateeya Blog Mela. Isn't that amazing? Seven different names for a festival. It happens only in India.

Apologies for the delay. Blogging has been pretty low this week and I had to spend quite some time scouting for the best and unique ones. Not to mention, that 24x7 blogmela, Desipundit, makes my life more difficult :-). But as anyone can agree, it is all fun in the end. So now that the Sun has begun its northward journey, let's begin our journey into blogistan.

Searching for something
Akshay Mahajan is out on the streets of Mumbai searching for the Byculla Soufflé. And the best samosas in town. Ram talks about his visit to the historic Ajanta & Ellora caves. Varnam writes that the recent discoveries in archaeology may just prove that Indians are the oldest farmers.

Books and related
On what is the one of the firsts in the Indian blogosphere, Sonia Faleiro podcasts an excerpt from her recently launched book The Girl. Amardeep Singh points out the recent additions of Indian-oriented works at Project Gutenberg, the free online ebook project. Vikrum Sequeira reviews his recent read - Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality.

Tech peck
Arnab Nandi lists his reasons for not liking the new Intel Macs. Michael Parekh talks about a non-obvious solution to managing the tons of gadgets and their accesories you have in your drawer. Amit Agarwal has a nice photocasting guide for those unfortunate to not own a Mac (Photocasting is the photo equivalent of podcasting). Veerchand Bothra talks about the mobile industry crying foul over piracy. Notice how they all come up with the same failed solution to counter piracy. And you'll know the losses they project will have a margin of +/- 50%, once you read what Rashmi Bansal has discovered.

On current stuff
Samanth expresses his dissappointment over the Hindu appointing their "internal independent ombudsman". Ashish points out the problem in Tavleen Singh's fallacious arguments in support of free irrigation. Aks analyses the larger trends in how the CAT has evolved.

Naveen Mandava talks about the archaic real estate laws in the country being a major hurdle, rather than politicions, to the boom of the economy. Nitin Pai wonders whether cricket has ever helped India-Pakistan relations. Nandan says it is not the monetary compulsions but maintaining the old lifestyle is the reason why bar girls refuse to go out of news.

Spaceman Spiff proposes an idea for eliminating caste based discrimination, thereby removing the need for reservations. Shivam Vij has an interesting discussion on the possible conflict between labour reforms and reservations in the private sector. Gaurav Sabnis hates the word 'caste' itself.

Society, culture and related
"Objective art is meditative art, subjective art is mind art" - Karamadude attempts to explain these words of Osho. (I'd tend to agree with him.) Neelakantan says Shubh Labh epitomises capitalism more than anything else. Crystal Blur writes about a terrible disease on the loose, especially in the recent times - Sanctimonitis. Curious gawker writes about the irony of Indians celebrating on the inclusion of Hindi as a terrorist spoken language by the US. Sakshi Juneja informs us about celebrities participating in the Mumbai Marathon.

There we are. This week's short and sweet blogmela. Enjoy! The next blogmela will be hosted by Spaceman Spiff.

nilesh.org is happy to host another blog mela, ten months after the last one here. Nominations for 2006's second blogmela are now invited. The usual rules plus one apply:

1. All blogs must be written by Indians or must have an Indian connection.
   
2. All blogs must be written between the Saturday 7th January 2006 and Friday 13th January 2006 (ah!). 14th January is when the mela will be published.
   
3. The posts can be of any type except personal journal entries. You can nominate yourself without any guilt.
   
4. Nominations should be the permalinks to the post. Please do not nominate entire blogs. Link the post in the comments section but do not paste the whole post. You can even mail to me (mail AT nilesh.org) the link to the post.
5. Your site must not contain any pop ups or pop unders.
6. Vote for shutterbug.nu at the Indibloggies in the photoblog category. ;)
   

If you are intrigued by blog melas, visit the previous blog mela published by Harini. And a compilation of recent blog melas. Enjoy!

The year 2005 ended on a wonderful note, personally. With a couple of friends, I visited the famed Pangkor island over the Christmas weekend. It was an amazing experience and a first on an island for me.

Inspite of being quite close to the mainland, the island is a true getaway -- unspoiled beaches, thick dense rain forest, a small fishing village, and wonderful vistas. We did a small exploratory trip around on bike (yes, you get mountain bikes for hire). Initially I was dissappointed by the cloudy skies but realised that they were actually a boon in disguise for us. We did not fall dead from the heat of the Malaysian sun. The undulating roads, take you hundreds of feet up a slope into the rain forest and drop down sharply to pristine beaches and clear waters.

It was like childhood all over again -- short expeditions through the shallow waters to small untouched beaches, disregarding the sharp corals cutting your feet; trying to repair one of the bikes when it broke down, only to discover that the axle bearings have been crushed; sitting on the sand and looking into the horizon till dark and realise only when you start feeling hungry. I can go on. The only things we did not do were snorkelling, diving and kayaking. We left these for the next trip. :-)

The drive back from and to KL was wonderful too. The countryside evokes memories of South India, only more greener and more denser. The expressways are smooth as silk and pass through some gorgeous rain forests, probably the best preserved that I have seen.

Back in KL, the new year was celebrated at the KLCC (Petronas Towers) with a countdown and wonderful fireworks. The photos from the Pangkor trip will be posted in a few days on Shutterbug. Watch out. The next holiday destination - Taman Negara.

Found on the event list board of a recent IT conference held in Malaysia --

Ideal place for advertising a massage service, I believe. They know all starved nerds  would prefer going to a massage service which cares for their privacy. Best of all, it's mobile. So no forensic evidence either!

• Paladion brings SANS Training Course to India. [channeltimes.com]
  
• Paladion outlines Security Trends In India. [cxotoday.com]
  

Inspite of all the current hype which was built around the IITs the reality is that the IIT graduates have not served the country's interests the way they were expected to, because, they were rare commodities in the Indian market for engineers. Most of them were available floating around freely in America or some rare ones in the Indian MBA market. The reality also is that IIT education has nothing to do with the IT revolution and success stories in the Silicon Valley. Agreed many of the people involved in top positions in Silicon Valley might be ex IITians but it is the knowledge they acquired over the last 20 - 30 years and the entire shift in focus that they under went in their career after leaving IIT that helped them reach where they are today. Even today the software part of education at IIT is not world class. In fact it is a pity that they tied up with a private education company to spread the IIT, Kharagpur and IIT, Delhi certified courses through a shady arrangement with them (by setting up something called CEP, a private body with a managing director inside the IIT Kharagpur campus and FITT, another private body with a managing director inside the IIT, Delhi campus) in an effort to confuse the students that they were getting something from IIT.

So you ask who is this person so jealous of the IITs? There's more --

Looking at things around I am forced to feel that this country today has a mafia operating in the field of MBA education. A group of people with vested interests who want to keep this simple common sense education limited only to a few so that their starting salaries can be artificially jacked up to anything between Rs. 6 lakhs and 10 lakhs per annum. If they are so good then why don't our public sector companies too employ them and revive instead of going on sale. Why don't  we produce 2000 MBAs in each of the IIMs with such phenomenal facilities, acres of land and huge buildings? It is not done so that companies get intimidated by the huge infrastructure, in which just about 150 to 200 students are made to feel in the ninth clouds, and get compelled to pay astronomical sums of money. These schools therefore create an artificial scarcity and capitalise on it. If the number of students are not artificially and unnecessary limited the salaries perhaps would come down to Rs. 1.2 lakhs per annum at the maximum which is their actual worth and with more better quality MBAs the growth rate of our country might break the 2% to 3% barrier which the current number of highly educated MBAs have been able to give the country.

And then you ask again, who is this so jealous of the IIMs? Given the latest events in the Indian blogosphere, you should be quickly able to guess. Yes, its our respected professor and economic 'guru' Arindam Chaudhuri on his off-track, hypocritic train of thoughts!  Its fine to have more management institutes around the country but throwing mud at the institutions that have made India famous for? Nah! And don't you talk about "phenomenal facilities"! And well, its not just coincidence that Rashmi & Gaurav are IIM graduates, is it? And does anyone need to explain who is the real MBA mafia here?!

For the benefit of those who are clueless about this online drama, here is a gist. A few months ago, Rashmi Bansal, the editor of JAM magazine did an expose on the shoddy practices of the IIPM. Gaurav Sabnis came out in support of Rashmi on his blog and put in his opinion. IIPM, instead of clarifying their side, launched a smear campaign against Rashmi. IIPM was not happy about Gaurav's personal post either and surprise, surprise, served legal notices to both Rashmi and Gaurav for defaming IIPM through their blogs! And then the whole thing just exploded in the Indian blogosphere. There was an outburst of angry emotions on all the Indian blogs I ever knew. Desipundit has it all listed. The current episode has ended with Gaurav voluntarily resigning from his company.

Hats-off to a smart, rational, fearless girl for exposing the facts. Hats-off to a guy who stands up for the truth, his freedom of speech and great concern for his employer. Given the same situation, how many of the rest of us would stand up for our principles?

For those who are still wanting to join IIPM because they rank in the top ten b-schools in India, keep in mind that they were booted out of the Outlook Top B-schools list for various reasons.

I discovered recently that BEST, Mumbai's bus service has a website! And they have listed all bus routes and fares on the website, including a map of the routes. The website is a wealth of info, very unlike a government website. Don't forget to check the interesting history section and the electricity calculation chart. Here are some interesting tidbits I got from the website -

Bus Route No. 166 - plies on roads interconnecting maximum Hospitals.
Bus Route No. 161 - This route covers on the way maximum Oil Reservoirs and unpopulated areas in Eastern wings of the city.
Bus Route No. 9 - A network of large number of school and colleges is interwoven by this route.
Bus Route No. 320, 22ltd., 25ltd. - These routes have an outstanding feature of connecting two largest water reservoirs of the city.
Bus Route No. 1,66,202 - Round the clock operating bus routes.

The resolutions are a bit poor. Nevertheless, Google Maps now shows India in good detail.

The creative dabbler in me has awaken once again. After a couple of long weekends on the computer, announcing Palisade Online! Palisade is a monthly online magazine on Application Security published by Paladion Networks, where I work. I am on the editorial team and had also designed its earlier print versions too. However this time we thought putting it online will ensure a few things --

• Increase viewership by being more accessible.
• Will get indexed in search engines. Will increase casual surfer visits too.
• Easy updating of new issues, as compared to the tough PDF layouts in Adobe InDesign. We are using a CMS well-known for its power and simplicity.
• I won't be involved in every minor correction needed in the documents. Publishing can be delegated to someone else too.

So, if you are a security professional / developer / IT manager / student, you are definitely going to find the magazine interesting and full of rich, original and eclectic content. You can subscribe to receive notifications of new issue updates. If you have feedback about the content or the design--its still evolving--you can send it to us on this page.

P.S. As I just discovered from the photolog, I haven't updated it since the photobloggies results! Shame, shame on me. It makes people think …

I am on Mid Day Metro Mulund Edition. Nice to see my photos in print. Makes me feel happy that they look so much better than the web. These people have professional equipment to scan photos and slides. No wonder the print medium has so much impact. My former boss called up immediately to congratulate me!

I am so so pleased to know that shutterbug.nu is the Best South East Asian / Indian Photoblog at the photobloggies. Thanks again to all of you who supported Shutterbug. So here is the complete list of winners -

• Best American Photoblog - Orbit1
• Best Canadian Photoblog - Daily Dose of Imagery
• Best European / British / Irish Photoblog - Chromasia
• Best Latin American Photoblog - Momentanea
• Best Australian / New Zealand Photoblog - JinkyArt
• Best Chinese Photoblog - DownDream
• Best Japanese Photoblog - yamasaki ko-ji
• Best South East Asian / Indian Photoblog - Shutterbug
• Best African / Middle Eastern Photoblog - Kosoof
• Best Writing of a Photoblog - verba.chromogenic
• Best Black and White Photography of a Photoblog - chromogenic
• Best Animal Photography of a Photoblog - Ephemera
• Best Abstract Photography of a Photoblog - Deceptive Media
• Best Studio Photography of a Photoblog - Orbit1
• Best Photojournalism of a Photoblog - joe’s nyc
• Best Landscape Photography of a Photoblog - A Walk through Durham Township
• Best Toy Camera Photography of a Photoblog - Making Happy
• Best Street Photography of a Photoblog - Daily Dose of Imagery
• Best Portrait Photography of a Photoblog - Orbit1
• Best Kept Secret Photoblog - Superhero Journal
• Best Photoblog Design - rion.nu
• Best Under 18 Photoblog - FerociousCheese.com
• Best New Photoblog - joe’s nyc
• Photo of the Year - A Walk in Durham Township
• Photoblog of the Year - Daily Dose of Imagery

If you are a New Age / Electronica fan, if you love to have music at work or if its one of your regular 36 hour work shifts, you are definitely going to love listening to Workbench's albums. I just received my copies of Detour & Antistatic. I previewed the music online and was hooked immediately. Refreshing is the word. Highly Recommended.