The Advisory Boar

A letter arrived by email today addressed to "Dear Advisory Boar" and asking for advice about working a freelance job while learning how to program.

The boar felt oddly pleased, and duly rendered the advice sought.

Today's hearing at the district consumer forum in my complaint against Exide was for oral arguments. Unfortunately, only one judge out of three showed up, and no quorum was possible while hearing arguments, so they decided to adjourn all arguments to early November.

(Exide didn't show up to today's hearing, at least not by the time I left. So they don't know the date of the next hearing.)

Today's The Hindu—not for the first time—had an extra front page devoted to an advertisement from IIPM, complete with gushing top-half copy masquerading as news reporting. Over the past year or so, Arindam Chaudhuri's snake-oil salesman grin has been a frequent visitor to the back page of The Hindu, and many an innocent exclamation mark has been sacrificed to extol the virtues of IIPM. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of money that must change hands for this kind of coverage.

I'm not sure if it's more depressing that IIPM has accumulated such vast quantities of money by selling snake-oil, or that The Hindu is happy to soak it up and print acres of whatever drivel is sent its way.

(For those who are wondering, IIPM is the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, an unaccredited business school that is in the habit of suing anyone who points out that their advertisements are full of lies.)

The 2011 Maruti Suzuki Swift ZXi looks the same, but feels very different from my old 2005 Swift VXi.

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Hassath and I don't eat fish as often as we'd like, because buying good fish meant going halfway across the city to INA Market… until our visit to the Gazipur fish mandi today.

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Exide and I were to file written arguments in today's hearing. I filed mine (which was all of two pages long), but Exide sent someone to say that their lawyer was ill and to ask for an extension. This request was rejected without fuss, and the next hearing was set for oral arguments (after which only the judgement remains).

It wouldn't surprise me if Exide tried to file arguments at the next hearing (just as they filed their evidence late), but if so, I will object to their tardiness and repeated failure to comply with court procedure.

Here's an example of how to implement "tail -f" functionality in a Mojolicious application. It's not difficult, but it's not obvious how to put the many moving parts together.

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Today I recorded a Yellow-bellied Prinia Prinia flaviventris calling in the Typha reedbeds at Okhla Bird Sanctuary in New Delhi. The bird was very close to me—though I could not see it in the overgrown reeds—and one can hear its wing-snapping display in the recording. The incessant drone of Cicadas provides a backdrop.

Here's an MP3 file (which I created using Audacity), and here's an old photo of the species, also from Okhla.

(There are much better photographs on OBI.)

This is the first time I have used my new Olympus LS-11 recorder, and I am very impressed with the sound quality I obtained, given my complete inexperience at nature sound recording. I used the default 44.1KHz/16-bit settings, with the "low" mic sensitivity setting, and a recording level of 10.

I am delighted to have been able to record one of my favourite singers as my first subject. I've always tried and failed to describe the call to people, but now I can let the bird speak for itself.

Here's how I configured my Mojolicious application to set an appropriate expiry date based on the content-type of any static resources it serves.

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Another year, another National Awards screening at Siri Fort auditorium, and another special-effects award going to a big-budget Rajnikant film directed by S. Shankar: Enthiran.

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