Burn “doesn’t reinvent the wheel”, says its developer, Maarten Foukhar, using a number of existing Unix utilities to create, recreate, convert data, audio and video discs. It’s interface is about as simple as it gets — select the type of disc you want to create, choose among the given options, drag and drop the files into Burn, and click on the ‘Burn’ button. That’s it. Burn will make audio CDs, audio DVDs, VCDs, DVD videos, DivX videos, burn disc images, copy discs and more. It can work with a variety of filesystems, such as ISO, UDF, Joliet and HFS+.

Oh, and did I mention Burn is open source?

One of the factors that went into the decision to buy MacBeth was the availability of freeware. I was afraid that moving away from the Windows platform would mean having to give up freeware heaven. As it turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s true that Windows corners most of the free software segment — understandable since it accounts for a vast majority of computer users — but there is very decent pickings for Mac users as well. Here’s a quick list of the freeware I’ve been using reliably on my Mac (running Snow Leopard):

• Office Suite: OpenOffice
• Antivirus: iAntivirus
• Media player: VLC
• Graphics: Gimp
• iPod Manager: Yamipod, and not iTunes, which is very annoying
• Browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Opera
• IM: Adium

I’m sure I’m missing some…

~PD

ScribeFire proved pretty simple to set up: just enter your blog’s URL and it fetches most of the technical details itself. You can add brand new posts or even work on your existing posts. One done, they can be published directly or scheduled for publication at a specific time. They can be saved as drafts or private posts as well.

ScribeFire supports categories, tags and custom fields. You can add a custom permalink as well. The only niggle is the inability to upload images from your hard disk. One hopes the developers are working to iron this out since it is a significant drawback.

~PD

That’s right, I was convinced to change the names of major characters in The Secret of Fezar. Thus, “Kinnel” and “Tasil” took a tumble along with some key concepts and other names of people and places.

The siblings are now called Yavi and Fahe. It wasn’t as easy as doing a search and replace. These were well-know, well-fleshed characters, and changing the names was almost like saying goodbye to them and reincarnating them as new people.

Yes, Tasil and Kinnel will be missed, but I feel the change is for the better. I am liking the new names, but more significantly they fit better with my world. Also, “Tasil” was not an original name, since a Tasil exists in the Shadow in Eternity series, albeit in the background (Wahid’s wife, if anyone remembers Wahid).

All these changes were the direct result of some astute feedback from my editor. It also spurred me to work on a date and time system for the world the story is based in. More on that later.

Goodbye, Kinnel and Tasil.

~PD

This can’t be stressed enough: Make really you sure your URL says exactly what you think it does. If you slip up, you could end like the following sites who dashed the expectations of their visitors:

1. Penisland.com really is only selling pens.
2. Whorepresents.com has nothing to do with the world’s oldest profession.
3. Expertsexchange.com will not help with transition surgery.
4. Speedofart.com does not sell smelly swimwear.
5. Molestationnursery.com is really safer than it sounds.
6. As is Therapistfinder.com.
7. Powergenitalia.com isn’t a site about dirty superhero stories.
8. IPanywhere.com isn’t a threat.

(This list is nicked from here, who may have a few more examples.)

No, really, what does your URL say?

~PD

The Pac-Man doodle’s unprecedented popularity has made Google give it a permanent page: Google.com/Pacman. This is a “working” logo, so you could play it and and you could use it to search. Instead of the “I am feeling lucky” page, you get “Insert coin”, but it works the same way.

Go try it out!

~PD

It has some interesting features, including a Quick Snippets feature in which "hot keywords" are replaced on the fly by more detailed content. For instance, if I wanted Post2Blog to automatically make the text "Writer’s Log" a link and add a little tagline to it, I just need to specify it in the Tools –> Manage Quick Snippets list.

Apart from that, there are detailed formatting features, as well as options to upload files and images to your blog, to Flickr, ImageShack and via FTP. Post management features are also available. Smilies, code highlighting, spell checker, thesaurus — there’s lots more.

Yes, this post is created using Post2Blog. However, the software was last updated in 2007 and is currently unsupported. The links in the manufacturer’s site lead to a 404 and you must download it from Download.com.

The jury is out on this one. Stay tuned for an update.

~PD

Or do you just blindly tick the box that says you have read the privacy policy, terms and conditions, and what have you?

Are you sure you haven’t sold your soul?

This was obviously an April Fool’s gag, but does give you something to think about. Not sure I’ll sleep tonight…

~PD

~PD

With the spotlights set to turn on the Indian capital in October this year, the city’s authorities and Games organizers are in a panic about the” begging menace”. According to Delhi’s social welfare minister Mangat Ram Singhal, “We Indians are used to beggars but Westerners are not and so we need to clean up. We’ll catch them all.” With three mobile courts patrolling the streets “prosecuting” beggars, one little aspect has been conveniently overlooked — that we are talking of human beings, and about the violation of their civil rights.

Any resident — or visitor, for that matter — to Delhi in the past couple of years will testify to preparations for the Games in full flow. Dug-up main roads, incomplete flyovers, relaying of pavements, traffic diversions and more have made regular commute a nightmare, but one puts up with it in the hope that the relaid and widened roads and new flyovers will benefit the city eventually. That said, it is no secret that the primary reason behind this massive operation is not to make life any easier for Delhiites in the long run, but to show off to the rest of the world that Delhi is right up there, clean, efficient, progressive, with a standard of living comparable to any first world country. And for this to happen, anything remotely unpleasant has to be hidden from view: in this case, how the city has failed to provide, and even actively denied, basic human dignity to a massive population.

The privilege of middle class makes most of us see beggars and beggary as a “menace”. It’s an uncomfortable truth we’d rather not deal with from the comfort of our AC cars and buses, and is therefore convenient to dehumanize them by using this epithet rather than seeing them as people like us. This makes it easy to deal with how society and the system puts the value of their lives far below ours. Indeed, see how easy it is to divide people into “them” and “us”! Delhi’s authorities frequently quote statistics citing how 95 per cent of the city’s begging population are migrants, in other words “outsiders”, “thems”, which is apparently supposed to justify the city’s disowning of responsibility towards them. Somehow that is also supposed to make acceptable the manhandling like animals of poor/homeless/hungry/disabled people who have to beg for survival. Instead of providing for them, we treat them like criminals, pursued, hounded and abused for the crime of having migrated to the city in search of a better life.

Whether Delhi has the resources to host the Games in the first place is questionable. The city, like most other Indian cities, faces a power and water crunch. Already having overshot its Games budget, the Delhi government is now intending to dip into the common wealth. According to the latest budget, residents of the capital can expect to pay more for diesel, CNG, LPG cylinders, tea, coffee, cutlery, school bags, dry fruits, ghee, vegetables, public transport and many other common-use items. It is also a pertinent question that if Delhi has been able to set aside funds to host the Commonwealth Games, why that same money has not been considered for use to give its own residents, especially those most marginalized, a better life that will truly make it a city worth taking pride in.

The following video encapsulates Delhi’s Commonshame Games — how the city prefers to punish people for being poor rather than help them:

~PD

So anyhow, to cut a long story short, though eminence is a far-off nightmare dream, no harm in compiling a list of my own. Here’s hoping it doesn’t affect my relationship with my accountant, have a bearing on my sex life, or make me believe in religion…

1. Uninstall all IM software: Really, truly. In fact, getting away from the Net is good, on the whole, except that it sometimes comes in handy to look things up. I have to admit, I don’t follow this rule. I’m bad.
2. Don’t try to plot your novel if that doesn’t work for you: I find it impossible to plot out a scene-by-scene story. I just need to let stuff happen. I never expected Nira to catch the speld — she just did.
3. Don’t worry about chapters: Working chapters is usually something I bluff my way through. A chapter break happens when I think to myself, “Oops, I haven’t had a new chapter for ages.” It seems to work. After all, Terry Pratchett doesn’t do chapters, does he? He’s inspirational!
4. Characters without the right name have no life: I beg to differ with Shakespeare — the name is everything. A two-metre-tall nerdy Scandinavian called Bill would have turned out very different from Noah.
5. Give yourself a deadline and treat it seriously: I promise myself a treat when (and if) I meet the deadline.
6. Get some honest reviews: I’d rather know from friends that my precious work-in-progress is crap than from strangers.
7. If you get stuck at some point in the story, move on to something else: No point being frustrated with a part that just isn’t coming together. I move on to writing something completely different or to another part of the story. When I come back to the problem later, I’m always surprised how much the break helped.
8. Also, don’t write in chronological order if you don’t want to: I just write the bits I have figured out first and worry about what comes after what later on.
9. Writer’s block happens: So no point fretting over it! I try and enjoy the break and not feel guilty about it.
10. Free-writing really helps: In fact, they have proved to be an effective antidote to writer’s block for me.

If anyone has any other rules for themselves, I’m curious to hear.

~PD