How We Lost Simplicity

“Bring forth what is true
Write it so it’s true
Defend it to your last breathe”
- A famous mathematician

As a child, I was raised to grow up with the idea of 'truth' being finite. I was told that everything could be explained in simpler terms. And that every question has got a simple and effective answer.

But later as I grew older and got in a position to think for myself, I found out that all of those childhood concepts happened to be just a shielding shell that’ll make us want to live our life without entangling ourselves in the web of consistent uncertainty that we don’t see coming at us. And so called 'truth' was rather flexible and definitely was infinite. It was flexible to an extent that all the false statements could be proven as if they were true. Only thing required was the majority, which could be attained in many ways. One of the ways is through shrewd politics, and the other one is through the realization that we often term as ethics. I mentioned politics first because it is a tool often misused by people whenever they’ve to declare something as truth - even if it was in-fact true. The politics add drama to the otherwise boring situation that might cause any fun loving-easygoing person to lose his/her interest in it faster than a lightening vanishing into a thin air.
Again we are programmed to give attention to the odd and irregularly dramatic news because those are the ones getting hit on the front page of every news. (How else do you all think Hollywood is able to keep its entertainment business alive by focusing on rather simple concept and extending it into an hour and a half movie which you HAVE to complete because you don't know how it is going to end?)

All we can do is helplessly hope for the 'real truth' to be discovered such that the unreal ones won't mutate our thoughts with their logical trapbox. I've referred them as logical because if you notice carefully you'll find most the unreal ones have logical appearance to them which is very deceiving and are quite hard to prove their falsehood. Especially if you believe in logic rather than open-ended thinking (for the sake of simplicity), it's bound to trap you and make you its victim who doesn't know how to think outside of the box. But the ones who actually think outside of the box won’t believe into something stupid like these right away. They’ll insist on gathering more proof behind the truthfulness of such statements, which might actually take longer than anyone is aware of. This might trigger the person coming up with simple answer to redecorate it by attaching sufficient bells and whistles so as to convince those who oppose their thoughts. And by the time they've finished decorating with all the flares and creating never before heard or seen footage, the concept will be so complicated that even the 'real truth' will seem as if they're absolutely fickle.

By that time we'd have lost the significance of simplicity in the quest of finding it.

Check The "Internet People" Out

If you've been watching the popular videos on the net over the time, especially on youtube, then you might know all the people that this video is talking about. Creator of this animated video has portrayed each and every one of them distinctly such that you won't miss to identify even with their brief on screen appearance. And best part is backing original soundtrack which is absolutely hilarious.

September 11, 2001 Tribute

(Photo courtesy: *Micky*)

Firefox Tweak - Speed it Up

We all know that Firefox is a great browser which beats its only competitor, Microsoft Internet Explorer, in many ways. Its primary features are bullet proof security, extensibility, and usability in general since it complies 100% with W3C standard - all of which seems to be seriously missing from its rival.

But lately I've been having difficulty using Firefox. The main reason being the browser taking unreasonably longer time to load even the simplest site - like vanilla Google.com (not even iGoogle). I guess most of you are facing the similar problem in the newer releases of Firefox (esp above v1.5). In case you are experiencing this I'd like to assure you that you're not alone. At first glance the problem seemed like it has to do either with the network outage, memory overload, or one of the gazillion unknown potential reasons that could be causing the faithful Firefox to become slow and pathetic. But luckily, after bit of an analysis, it is evident that it has got nothing to do with any of the above mentioned causes. And the good news is that it could easily be fixed by tweaking the configuration of the browser and overriding its one of the not so useful built-in restriction.

Note that the effect of the following method could only be witnessed by the users having broadband connection.

STEPS:
1) On your browser address bar type about:config which will take you to the configuration page of the browser displaying various parameter that browser loads during application startup.
2) There you have to find three different entries and change each of their values as indicated.

Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true" by double clicking it
Set ""network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true" by double clicking it
Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to some number like 25 by double clicking the entry and entering number in the inputbox. This means it will make 25 requests at once. (This doesn't work in dial-up since such network has the limitation of handling only one request at a given time)

3) Create a new entry named ""nglayout.initialpaint.delay" by Rt. clicking anywhere on the body of browser and selecting New > Integer from the pop-up menu. Then set its value to "0". This is the amount of time browser waits before taking any action on received information.

4) Close the browser and restart it in order for the changes to take effect.

That's about it. Now your browser should be loading pages at a faster pace than before.

Happy Surfing!!!

Note: To those using IE, its highly recommended that you switch to Firefox. You can download this free application by following the link provided in the right column of this site in the section "Download Cool Tools"