I do love the Onion Channel on Youtube.

I will start posting amusing but fairly well sourced wiki articles here occasionally.

Starting with the article on Toilet related deaths & injuries. I love the caption for the photograph :)

Also has fun part about how Elvis probably died. Highly recommended read :)

Quoting from Anna University’s guidelines for submitting a ‘project report’

Appendix 1: Sample Code. Font style: Times New Roman, Font Size:12 and 1.5 line spacing.

Shoot me now.

Exploring the English Wikipedia randomly, I encountered this template used to approximate the current live population of India. It uses the following simple formula:

(1176242 + 42.197260273969 * days_since(2010,1,26)) * 000

It’s based on population at a specific data + projected growth. The ‘update’ is done by (best guess) some bot hitting action=purge every night to re-do the calculation.

And where is this used? After looking at the template’s info page, the only article this seems to be used in is the India article, and that too only for population density statistics, rather than actual population statistics. Weird, since if Density can be calculated based on projection, I guess population could be too.

The machinations that people invent on Wikipedia are very fascinating! I hope to discover more over time. If you’ve suggestions on places for me to look (please, no WPBannerMeta / associated templates!), leave comments!

Absolutely hilarious, but you could easily dub out a few words and have it pass for real. Not sure if funny or sad.

Has quote about how Jesus was Indian, because among other things, because “Parents had a son without having sex”.

This entire BBC series (Goodness Gracious Me) is incredibly hilarious. Most of them are on Youtube. Highly recommended.

Thanks to QCoder from #wikipedia-en for the tip. Cheered up an otherwise bad day :)

Trigger warning: Completely inappropriate background music for the subject matter being discussed

I ran into this very interesting video from Senthil‘s facebook feed. The part that I found most interesting was the sense of entitlement – that despite not knowing anything about what they are going to be hired for (aka Programming), and admitting it to everyone, they still expect to be given jobs when they want.

While this would make sense in someplace like the military, where you go in and then train, it makes no sense for graduates of an engineering program, where they spent 4 years of their life training. They claim that they spent four years studying programming but can not pass a simple written programming test, and do not want to even attempt writing it.

I don’t understand engineering students, and I’ve been surrounded by them for the last 5 years.

Tor is one of those things that you don’t really need at all until you really really need it. I don’t need it right now, but I still try to help it as much as possible. One of the easiest way to do so is to run a flashproxy (has nothing to do with Adobe!) on your browser – super simple to setup, and effective for people looking for bridges.

The easiest way to use it if you’re a Chrome user is to use the CupCake extension (the initial colorscheme is a bit… geocities-y, but I’ve sent in a patch to fix that). You can also add this snippet to your Mediawiki wiki either as a userscript or gadget. If you’re running a site, you can simply use the snippet on the flashproxy site to have it run for all your visitors.

I am too young to remember Microsoft doing anything that could be considered effective ‘Embrace, Extend & Extinguish’ (my first browser when using internet at home was Firefox 0.9), and hence could never appreciate the general suspicion with which everything Microsoft was viewed with. Google’s handling of Reader has remedied that for me, however. I was around to witness all the events that Ed Bott at ZDNet discusses, and hopefully I have learnt my lesson.

Fool me once…

Whatsaapp (and GTalk) has completely replaced SMS for me. The only sore point was that it was not ‘Android’y enough – looked too much like an iOS port, but it worked well enough (and had enough people in it) that my forays into Hike were never long enough. The latest update fixes the design to be a lot more flat and pleasing to the eyes, and I’m quite happy to stick to it. (Plus I just ran into their post about why Advertising sucks, so doubly happy to support them :) )

You might have heard of bash.org. If not, do go there! (And I am sorry about your afternoon)

Mediawiki maintains something similar, but much shorter in size & form, at Bugzilla quips. I already appear a few times, but will try to appear some more!