So I have been moping around the house with nothing to do. Watching the Indian team play cricket in the T20 world championship proved a waste of time and energy. The utter lack of good stuff to watch of TV never fails to surprise me. With the exception of the occasional cricket, there is absolutely nothing worth watching on Indian TV… nothing!

I did manage to play a fair bit of Modern Warfare 2 before my laptop would start complaining of overheating. My great days of gaming are behind me, though I did enjoy the game. I couldn’t help feeling the levels have gotten a bit shorter though.

After wasting time on all these sundry activities, I would just sit and think. I have been extremely busy for the past 5-6 months, and this is something which I never had the time to do. It has been one hell of a roller-coaster ride, full of ups and downs. Things have been very different for me of the past one year or so, but the last few months have been utter madness. And now, more than ever, there is a big question mark in the horizon. I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen to me even one month down the line. The more I think about it, the more scary it gets. I used to enjoy this at first.. the uncertainty, the randomness.. but I am getting tired. I miss being jobless and boring and carefree with nothing to do. No need to worry about work, no need to worry about where/how to stay, no need to worry about money. Now, there are so many concerns to think about.. My mind is never at ease. And I wonder if it was worth it. And I wonder how things would have been had I didn’t make those few very critical mistakes. But, fuck it. Life is too short for regrets. And I have evaded responsibility for way too long and I am learning to live with it now.

Yeah, its weird how much you start thinking when you have the time.

So if you haven’t heard already, Microsoft has declared that it won’t support flash out of the box unlike Chrome, which will be integrated with Flash. Their statements about commitment to HTML5 does sound very reassuring. I hope the days of browser incompatibility and ugly code are finally getting over.

On the personal front, I have decided that I am still not ready for a full time commitment to any employer as of now. Development contracts are pouring in and should be enough to keep me happy for a while. It is kinda disturbing when your demanding job prevents you doing normal things like shopping for essentials or getting a haircut. Anyway more about this later. I will have some pretty big announcements to make in a while.

So, just as a simple test, I have made a HTML5 version of http://munimkazia.com(xhtml strict) at http://munimkazia.com/index5.php. There is a nice piece of javascript code called html5shiv which fixes a few DOM issues of using semantic markup tags like <header>, <footer>, <article>, etc in internet explorer. Visit the website for more details: http://remysharp.com/2009/01/07/html5-enabling-script/. But I feel the most exciting things about HTML5 are the canvas element, the new input tags and  microdata.Audio and Video elements is also something to look forward to. If only those guys would stop arguing about what formats to support as standard.

If you are as excited as me about HTML5 and want to learn more about it, there is a nice online book you can refer: Dive Into HTML5.

Next step: Finish off this wordpress theme in html5! Sadly, I don’t have much time to fix even the smallest of issues with this wordpress theme, like the paddings and margins everywhere.

For those who care, I have started working in Vavia Technologies as a software developer. Infact, its been almost two months since I have started working here.

Another interesting development is the new love of my life: Ruby on Rails.

Okay, I am getting back to work.

And I am most proud of the fact that my HTML code is extremely “clean”. I have not used tables or even divs. There are no “ids” or “classes” anywhere! Infact, if you remove the stylesheet, the page is still very readable and exactly how I would want it to look without styling. Some design philosophies I learned on various blogs

I was reading some blogs on typography and I got inspired to change the design of my site munimkazia.com.

I replaced the image banner with text and applied some nice css text-shadow effects. For those of you poor souls who are still using Internet Explorer, you won’t be able to experience this beauty.

Similarly, I have changed the mouse over look of all the links from underlines to shadow.

I changed the font of the entire text. I think this looks better than the old font.

And I am most proud of the fact that my HTML code is extremely “clean”. I have not used tables or even divs. There are no “ids” or “classes” anywhere! Infact, if you remove the stylesheet, the page is still very readable and exactly how I would want it to look without styling. Some design philosophies I learned on various blogs

Another minor change: I have changed the Google Analytics tracking code. I am now using the asynchronous code and move the javascript inside the header to conform to xhtml 1.1 transitional standards.

Here is another interesting thing: I done the entire design and testing process on Ubuntu. That means I have chosen font families which are completely safe and renderable on common linux distributions. Only after I had completed and uploaded the new design, I booted Windows 7 to see how things look in IE. My only concern was the lack of css text shadows in IE.

Another thing I am not very sure about is the footer links. I couldn’t think of anything better for now, but somehow I am not completely satisfied with the look.

The main task remaining now is to redesign my custom wordpress theme used here for uniformity, not to mention a lot of other fixes like the unneccesary padding on the post links on the right. Like I said earlier, when I feel the blog theme is complete and usable for other sites, I will package it and make it available for download.

Anyway, tell me what you think. For reference, I still have the old design at http://www.munimkazia.com/index_old.php, and the new design is at http://www.munimkazia.com/index.php.

MySQL is arguably the most popular database management system out there. It is open source and is the base to thousands of application platforms including LAMP platform. Almost every open source application uses MySQL as its database engine, not to mention the software which runs this blog and thousands of other blogs, WordPress. It is backed by a strong community of developers who contribute and maintain it.

Anyway, Monty asks all of us to spread the message so that the European Commission takes notice and basically halt the proceedings, so that Oracle cannot take control of MySQL.

Anyway, here is the link: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-saving-mysql.html

If you have two minutes with you, I request you to spread the message by email, twitter, your own blog, whichever way possible. Also, send off an email to the EC asking them to halt Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL as instructed in the post. Thank you for your time.

I was having one of those intellectual talks with Gaurav yesterday night, which went on till 6 in the morning.

One of the topics which came up was how people cook food for themselves. Since the past few centuries, we have managed to outsource various aspects of our living. Earlier on, people used to stitch their own clothes, bake their own bread, even grow their own crops and rear their own animals.

We have managed to systematically *outsource* many aspects of living to others. Now, you have bakers who will bake bread and other baked goods for you. You have clothing stores where you can buy clothes.

So why does every house still have a kitchen?

I envisioned that n years into the future(n being a totally unknown number), we would have outsourced this aspect of our living too. There will be properly managed food agencies who work similar to “mess houses” these days, except the standards of quality will be much higher. The food will be healthy and nutrious, unlike restaurant food or fast food.

These agencies or “food delivery companies” as I like to call them, may further outsource certain aspects of their business to others. For example, the cooking of rice could be be handled by another company, which cooks several different types of rice for several agencies. There could be another company which will handle the procurement of raw supplies needed for cooking. Maybe another company to handle delivery of food.

There are many unknowns too.. Like when will the food be ordered and How will wastage be managed efficiently.

Infact, the change has already begun. There are people who live in houses without kitchens and order food every night. In India, we have “messes” where single men pay a monthly subscription for two or three meals a day.

But as ridiculous as it sounds to eliminate the need of kitchens in houses today, I think this is totally possible in the future. Maybe a few centuries back, people couldn’t imagine houses without ovens to bake bread.

What do you think?