(Note that I am now running MT 3.35, and I’m not sure Solution #3 below works in anything below version 3.3x.)

1. Use the RegEx Plugin;
2. Use the CustomFields Plugin;
3. Use category basenames.

Disclaimer: I’ve lifted this solution from a thread in the MT forums, and copied it. I don’t claim to understand the regular expression at all. It just works.

Here’s what you do:

1. Grab the plugin (here), and install it. If that link is broken, I’ve got the same thing locally, here.
2. Rename your categories 1FirstCat, 2SecondCat, 3ThirdCat. Note that you can also do 01FirstCat, 02SecondCat, etc. This may actually be preferrable, given the way these things are sorted if you have more than 10 categories. In that situation, the sequence will be 1, 10, 2, 3 …; while, with the double-digit numbering, it goes correctly 01, 02, 03.

3. Somewhere in your code, add this line:

       <MTAddRegex name="RemoveSortNumber">    
       s|^([\d\.]*\s*)||    
       </MTAddRegex>
   

4. Now, when you use the <MTCategories> tag, add the following argument

       <$MTCategoryLabel regex="RemoveSortNumber"$>
   

5. Basically, this is stripping digits from the start of the line.

Pros

• Easy to implement
• Requires minimal ‘treatment’ of categories

Cons

• Does not work with dynamic publishing — returns a smarty error.
• You have to know your way around regular expressions to modify the code.

Note that much the same thing can be done with the superb MT-Macros plugin. That’s really a three-and-halfth solution, because, as I see it, it’s only a refinement of the RegEx solution.

Option 2 : Use Arvind Satyanarayan’s CustomFields Plugin

1. Grab the plugin (here), and install it. Use the latest release, 2.0 RC1. This will not work with the earlier release.
2. Add a custom category field. Call it something like CategoryNum or some such. Check the required box — this prevents creation of a category without filling in a category number. The category type should be a single line text field so that you can add categories easily later.
3. I’m not going to get into how you get the custom fields to appear — Arvind’s documentation is exemplary, and bears close study.
4. Note this, though: the custom category fields do not change the entry editing screen, but the category creation screens.
5. Now when you create a category you should see a box at the bottom with your custom category. Give it a number (something like 01, 02, etc), in the sequence in which you want your categories to appear.

6. Now here’s the trick. Over at his own plugin forums at Movalog, there’s a thread where Arvind tells of an undocumented sort feature in Version 2.0RC1 of CustomFields. You can add an argument to the MTCategories tag and force a sort by a custom field. Here’s what Arvind says:

   this is a new feature (that I haven’t publiciszed or documented at all for lack of time) introduced with v2.0. To resort by a custom field (called “Foo Bar”), the following syntax is used (on MTEntries, MTCategories or MTEntries):

       sort_by="CUSTOMFIELD:Foo Bar"     
          sort_order="ascend|descend"
   

   So supposing you wanted to resort categories by the Foo Bar field in descending order:

       <MTCategories sort_by="CUSTOMFIELD:Foo Bar"    
           sort_order="descend">
   

7. So in our case, with the CustomField CategoryNum, the code would be:

       <ol>
       <MTCategories sort_by="CUSTOMFIELD:CategoryNum"    
           sort_order="ascend" show_empty="1">    
       <li><b><$MTCategoryLabel$></b>    
       <br /><$MTCategoryDescription$></li>
       </MTCategories></ol>
   

8. Essentially, all you are doing is sorting by the custom field, and then displaying as normal.

Pretty nifty.

Pros

• Very easy, flexible, endless possibilities
• Doesn’t require processing of a string.
• Demands no special knowledge of reg-ex syntax.

Cons

• None that I can tell, but it is a Release Candidate and — so the discussions on the plugin forums say — sometimes quirky. I’ve had no problems whatever.

Option 3 : Use the category <basename> to sort

This one’s sort of homegrown. Here’s what you do.

1. Name your categories as in Option 1 above, 01FirstCat, 02SecondCat, etc.
2. In the category editing screen, unlock the category basename field. It will default to the category label and has the numbers you’ve just given them (if you’re starting from scratch, that is; otherwise skip this step, the basename won’t change).
3. Strip the numbers from the basename and lock the field.
4. Remember to change your archive file path specifiers and mappings in the Settings - Publishing - Archive Maps so that your category archives are built with the basename rather than the label.

5. Now, instead of using the <MTCategoryLabel> tag, you use the <MTCategoryBasename> tag, passing it through any formatting filters (for upper/lower case, etc). For example:

       <ol><MTCategories show_empty="1">
       <li><span style="text-transform: capitalize; 
           font-weight:bold;">
       <a href=<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>">    
           <$MTCategoryBasename$>    
       </a></span><br />
       <Does this work?></li>
       </MTCategories></ol>
   

6. Basically, you’ve swapped the category label and the category basename. Now MT sorts categories by the label, in the numbered sequence you’ve set up, but uses the basename of each category for display.

Pros

• Simple and basic. Requires no plugins, downloads, installations
• Publishing-mode neutral; it makes no difference whether your pages are static or dynamic. MT is just being forced to read another field altogether.

Cons

• Inherently limited and restrictive — it forces you to a given syntax in your basenames and labels. The basename can’t have spaces, just underscores and numbers. So if you have a multi-word category label ("01 My Favourite Things") the basename, after stripping the numbers, would be my_favourite_things. That’s really ugly. So you’d have to either limit yourself to one word categories, or run MT-Macros or the Regex plugin to get rid of the underscores.
• Requires fiddling the archive mapping and file path specifiers.
• Horrendously inelegant as a solution.

My choice? Option 2, without a doubt. Arvind rules!

Here’s the mail:

Subject: Warning for Most Dangerous VIRUS
> PLEASE FORWARD THIS WARNING AMONG FRIENDS, FAMILY AND
> CONTACTS:
> You should be alert during the next days:
> Do not open any message with an attached file called “Invitation”
> regardless of who sent it, It is a virus that opens an Olympic Torch
> which “burns” the whole hard disc C of your computer.
> This virus will be received from someone who has your e-mail address in
> his/her contact list, that is why you should send this e-mail to
> all your contacts. It is better to
> receive this message 25 times than to receive the virus and open it.
> If you receive a mail called “invitation”, though sent by a friend, do not
> open it and shut down your computer immediately This is the
> worst virus announced by CNN, it has been classified by Microsoft as the
> most destructive virus ever.
> This virus was discovered by McAfee yesterday, and there is no repair yet
> for this kind of virus. This virus simply destroys the Zero
> Sector of the Hard Disc, where the vital information is kept
> SEND THIS E-MAIL TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW ,
> COPY THIS E-MAIL AND SEND! IT TO YOUR FRIENDS
> AND REMEMBER: IF YOU SEND IT TO THEM, YOU WILL BENEFIT ALL OF US

Of course this is rubbish. But that’s hardly the point. The question is, why is that even the most obviously idiotic computer virus warning message makes us abandon all common sense?

But our fear also comes from our now near-complete dependence on computers. The least hint of threat to the computer is a threat to our existence and civilization generally. No wonder we’re in a tailspin.

Every computer virus warning makes us suspend disbelief. Ordinarily, we Google anything and everything, even each other. Yet we never bother to Google a virus warning. We just kick it along, pushing it along its trajectory to urban legend status. Take the present email. A Google search for: 

+virus +invitation +"olympic torch"

yields 68,700 hits. Of these, the top 10 or so all report this as being a complete hoax.

One look at the mail should have made it clear that it’s bogus. What’s the zero sector on the hard drive? Presumably, the boot sector. And what good is it shutting down the computer? How will that help the virus to go away? You’ve got to start it some time, yes, to get rid of the danged thing?

A virus is, by definition, software. It simply cannot ‘burn’ (or fry, boil, steam, blanche, roast, poach, bake, grill, sear, cremate, singe or even warm up) your hard drive, which is a physical, mechanical thingy that goes whirr-whirr-whirr. A burn will happen if your reverse the power supply cable and fire it up. That can’t happen with a virus.

At worst, the virus might wipe out data, but so what? You’ll be adding more in no time at all. In fact, you’ll probably be relieved to rid yourself of the junk you knew you ought to toss but somehow just couldn’t stop the tremble in your finger over the delete key. This is, of course, a known pathology now, called the DKNY (Delete Key? Not Yet) syndrome.

So why panic? What’s the worst that’s going to happen if it is real and your data dies? No one’s going to jail, or losing their life, liberty or even the after-dinner ice-cream (now that would be a total disaster).

It’s best to follow the general mantras: Just don’t open any attachment from anyone you don’t know. Use a good virus scanner that checks your incoming mail. Use a spyware killer (I love the lavasoft product line). You don’t let every klutz waltz in through your front door and lie down on your couch. So why let in virus-encrusted mail?

For much higher safety, I strongly recommend Mailwasher Pro from Firetrust. I’ve written about this before. It’s a really nifty utility: it scans any number of mailboxes, auto detects if it’s spam or virus, let’s you delete off the server and ensures your inbox is nice and clean, and only filled with junk from real friends.

Here are some links to sites confirming the hoax-status of this virus warning

• Urban Legends Reference Page
• Olympic Torch Invitation Virus Hoax at Hoax Slayer
• Sophos — Olympic Torch virus warning is really a hoax
• Olympic Torch (virus hoax) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• Invitation virus hoax, aka Olympic Torch virus hoax

Here’s my very own Martha Stewart style upgrade recipe …

Ingredients

1. One working control panel to access your site (my host, Bluehost gives me the popular CPanel, so I’m presuming you have that).

2. A download of the latest xMTx version to which you want to upgrade

3. A good zipping/compressing utility, one that creates tarballs (.tar) and gzip (.gz) files. You’re going to need a .tar.gz file. I’m sure this works just as well with a .zip file; I’ve just never tried it. I recommend 7-zip — fast, creates much smaller files, does both .tar and .gz, and, of course, free.

4. The usual utensils — computer, hard disk, mouse, keyboard, live internet connection.

Method

1. Download the tarball — the .tar.gz file from SixApart.

2. Unpack it on your local drive (use what you like, I just use 7-zip throughout). It will create a folder called MT-n.nn-ll where n.nn is the version number (like 3.35), and ll is the language code (en for English).

3. Rename this folder to mt (lower case), if mt is the name of the folder that contains your installation. If you’ve installed mt to the cgi-bin, then rename this folder to cgi-bin. This is important: remember to organize things so that you have a folder called mt and all the other folders and files of the installation below that. Should be like this:

4. Rename any files you’ve customized or edited in that the newly-renamed mt or cgi-bin folder that you’ve customized or edited. Specifically, these could be any standard files or, more likely, the default search templates. Rename them to anything you like, or they’ll over write your existing files.

   Example: if you have a customized version of default.tmpl (the default search template in the search_templates folder), then, in the newly downloaded-unpacked-renamed folder (created as above), you need to rename default.tmpl to something like default-335-tmpl, so that it doesn’t over-write your custom version. Do this for all your customized files.

5. Zip it up. Pack up the new installation set that you have on your local drive (the one with the renamed folder and files) to create a .tar.gz file. I recommend you use the free utility 7-zip. If you are using 7-zip, see below for instructions on how to make this .tar.gz file.

6. Upload the newly baked .tar.gz file to a folder immediately above the mt installation on your server. If your mt is installed to /public_html/mt, then put the .tar.gz into /public_html.

7. Unpack on the server. From your CPanel, go to File Manager. Go into your public_html directory. Click on the uploaded .tar.gz file. In the top right corner, you will see an option for extracting the contents. Click that. Another window opens, showing the extraction from the .tar.gz. If you’ve followed instruction, your new files will go straight into your old mt installation, over-writing any existing files.

That’s it, you’re done! Now just go to your mt login page and the upgrade process begins.

Serve hot with a scoop of relief.

I find this a whole lot simpler than trying to ftp a 10MB installation, which is the size of the extracted mt installation. On an erratic connection, this can take hours. The other alternative, viz., uploading the factory-shipped .tar.gz to your server, extracting it, and then copying over individual files and folders is equally cumbersome.

The beauty of this is that this doesn’t delete any files. So if you’ve got other plugins, etc., already installed, they’ll all remain intact.

The topping. Creating a .tar.gz file with 7-zip

1. The reason I use 7-zip is that it gives me the option of doing the .tar.gz in one place. There are others that do this too (WinRAR didn’t, last I checked; you had to use it with a separate utility like WinGZ), but this one’s free and fast and creates significantly smaller archives.

2. First, right-click the mt folder (the one you’ve renamed). In the context menu, select 7-zip, and add to archive. In the 7-zip main interface, select .tar as the format.

3. It will generate a file called mt.tar.

4. Now right-click mt.tar and again select 7-zip and add to archive. This time select .gzip as your format option.

5. It generates the mt.tar.gz file.

6. Basically, you’ve zipped twice, once to .tar and then to .tar.gz. You’ll notice that the 10mb installation is now down to about 2.3 MB, much easier to deal with.

Hope this helps. Bon apetit!

A copy of this is on the SixApart community forum.

Thanks for contacting us - we have received other recent reports of this error, and it appears that some recent changes to the organization of our site may have broken this feature. Please be assured we have filed a report for this issue, and hope it will be fixed as soon as possible by the responsible team. We would expect that this feature will resume working as before, or that if any updates are required to your configuration settings, that these will be communicated to you.

The presence of the error in your Activity Log when creating a new entry as a result of this issue should not affect the publication of your entry or other features in any way - it is just the case that the optional weblog promotion via our Recently Updated List is not currently functioning. If you would like to prevent the error from occurring, however, you can do this by disabling the feature, such that the update ping attempt will not be made. To do this, you will need to delete your Update Key from the “Recently Updated Key:” setting, under Publicity/Remote Interfaces on the Settings > New Entry Defaults for each of your weblogs, saving that change. The update ping will then no longer be attempted.

Good to know that someone’s paying attention! EOP

with my cell phone

Is this going to be the future? Everything on one phone — music, pictures, video, email, web? That’s a perfectly ghastly idea and is certainly my vision of hell on earth. These phones are incredibly invasive and take time from the things that matter — books, music, poetry, reading, conversation. More on that anon, requires more thought, I think.

Nokia 6681Here’s the phone.EOP

I wonder what exactly our beloved FM (that’s Finance Minister, guys, not a radio station) does. As far as I can tell he spends an entire year preparing for The Budget, delivers it, and then goes on to do the same thing all over again.

Time was when the late Nani Palkhivala filled an entire stadium when he spoke on the budget, and thousands of people crowded in to listen to him dissect the thing. Imagine. A whole stadium. That’s like someone filling Wembley or the Royal Albert Hall or Madison Square Garden.

And what difference did any of it make, the budget, Palkhivala or anything else? What difference does it make even today? The rich are still getting a whole lot richer, and the poor a whole lot poorer. Wonderful.

India shining.EOP

The problem was this: how best to seamlessly migrate the blogs, retaining users, passwords and all customizations, without having to reconfigure MovableType from scratch?

After some trial-and-error, I figured out a way. I don’t claim that this is the best, or even the only, way in which to do this, but it worked for me and should work elsewhere, as long as the new host meets certain requirements (listed below). Here’s my recipe for shifting MovableType to a new host, based on what I did.EOB

Ingredients

First, some assumptions:

1. That you can access your MySQL database, and know how to use the export, import, drop, empty and SQL query functions. Very likely this is through PHPMyAdmin
2. That your target/new host runs the CPanel control panel. If you’re using anything else, I can’t help you, though the overall instructions may still be useful.
3. That you’re already running MT 3.2. This may not work for an upgrade; in fact, it very likely won’t, because, as far as I know, Version 3.2 uses a different MySQL table structure from the previous versions.

Separate the eggs: Backup and export your existing database.

This is critical. Log in to your existing MySQL and export the entire MT table. I prefer to do two exports, one each for the data and the table structure. But that’s only because it’s easier to upload at the other end. Remember to export with the create tables and inserts ticked on.

Heat the oven: Upload and install xMTx

On your new host, upload and install xMTx. For the upload, I strongly recommend using the Cpanel File Manager. It allows you to upload easily right from your browser, without going through an FTP client, and, more importantly, has a nifty built-in unpacking utility that will unzip/unpack your MT files. Remember also to upload any customizations and plugins you may have made.

What I do is this:

1. Upload the core MT distribution;
2. Unpack/unzip it;
3. Upload a tar.gz file of my customizations and plugins (which I generally keep in a separate directory anyway). Unpack them, and, if you’ve configured the tarball correctly, it will unpack right into the MT folder, over-writing where necessary.

Tip 1: If you’re as much a maniac as I am about using MT Plugins, then you’ll soon have realized that it’s damn near impossible keeping track of what goes where — the folder hierarchies, the customized files, etc. Besides, I also customize some of the core libraries so that my uploads go to pre-defined directories and all uploads come up with pre-designated code. If I muddle all this with a default MT distribution, I’m bound to lost track of some file essential to a plugin. So what I do is to keep a separate folder called mt on my local machine, and store all the plugins and customizations in that, preserving their required folder structures and placements. Then I create a tarball of this entire folder. Now, when I need to ‘customize’ a new MT installation, I have only to upload this folder and unpack it. Since the core distribution is always unpacked to a folder on the root called mt, unpacking the customizations-folder from the root (using Cpanel) will automatically add the plugins and customizations at their appropriate places.

Tip 2: to quickly create tarball files:

1. Use 7-zip (freeware) to create a .tar file;
2. Use Win-GZ to turn the .tar into a .tar.gz file. Download Win-GZ

I’m not going to get into the details of the MT installation and initialization procedure, which are well set out in the MT documentation. Remember only that before you install xMTx, you must create the necessary database, database user, and add the user to the database with full privileges. The Cpanel interface is quite intuitive for that. Remember to update your mt-config.cgi as [documented][9].

Blend at high speed: Enter your new xMTx installation

Okay, now that you’ve uploaded MT, your customizations and plugins and set all the correct permissions for the various .cgi files and such, initialize the system. After that, you’ll log in to the default MT interface using, of course, the default login (Melody) and password (Nelson).

Okay, you’re in. First off, create a new user, preferrably using the same login and password you had earlier. Remember to give this new user (you) full access to the default blog, ie, all privileges. Also remember to rename the default blog. Do one rebuild. I don’t think it’s strictly necessary, but it doesn’t harm. Don’t worry about paths and settings at this stage.

Now log off as Melody Nelson; log in again using the new user you created. Go to the authors page and delete Melody Nelson as a user.

Log off and close this browser window. Onward!

Add seasoning to taste: Upload additional files

I forgot to do this, so I’m making a note of it, though it’s self-evident. Rememebr to upload all the additional files for your website including:

• Your css files (important!);
• Your template files (important!);
• downloadable files, if any;
• image and picture files;
• and, generally, anything that’s not stored in your database.

You can upload and unpack a zip file of these files, or use an FTP client (I use CuteFTP).

Pour into prepared pan: MySQL and PHPMyAdmin Adding the table structure

Here’s the next nifty bit. Enter your new host’s Cpanel again. Go to the MySQL page, and from there to the PHPMyAdmin page. You should be in your database. You may have to select your database if your host allows more than one, from the drop-down list. Select it.

Now select all the tables in the database and drop (read, delete) them. Open up a good text editor — I use TextPad — and open the MySQL table-structure file you exported from your previous installation. You can upload it directly into your MySQL database using the import function or, alternatively, use the SQL Query function and copy the entire table into it. Since your export has the create table and insert into lines in it, this will replicate your entire earlier table structure.

Do not repeat with the data export file just yet. You need to edit this file before you upload/insert the data (populate the table).

The critical thing now is to change the paths to your templates in your exported data file because it’s extremely unlikely that your earlier template-paths match the paths on your new host.

For example, earlier path name:

   /home/net/somehost/domain/html/templates

While the new path name might be

   /home/accountname/public_html/templates

Ideally, you should do a search-and-replace for the old path names and substitute them with the new path names in the exported data file.

Done? Fine. Now in PHPMyAdmin, upload or insert the contents of your freshly-edited exported-data file into MySQL.

The topping: full rebuild

That’s about it! Try logging in now, with the username and password you used on your previous host — you should be through without any difficulty. Remember to do one full rebuild.

Sit back and savour: tuck in!

All this sounds terribly complicated, but, believe me, it’s a whole lot simpler than trying to re-configure the xMTx installation from scratch.

Lastly, one important thing to note: do not try and merely shove the exported table/data into the database of the new host. You just won’t be able to access the xMTx interface, no matter what you do. You have to go through the process of installing and initializing the new xMTx installation, logging in, adding a user and so on, as described above. Frankly, I understand the first bit, but don’t quite know why it requires you to log in and add a user. But that’s a small thing, given the huge saving in time and effort. Doing it like this, I was able to move all four installations over to Bluehost in less than 30 minutes. Doing them over would have taken three days.EOP

One of the references in that article is to the W3C page on Character Entity References in HTML 4. There is a detailed table there of all character entity references with their HTML codes and CData numeric codes. Unfortunately, the table is difficult to decipher. I’ve taken that table and re-formatted it for easier reading. Presenting the W3C-based table of Character Entity References…EOB

Notes:

1. For HTML Entities, use ampersand & and semicolon ; before and after the given code. Thus, nbsp should be written &nbsp;
2. For numeric data, precede the code with ampersand & and hash/pound #, and follow it with a semi-colon ; Example: &#249;

I hope you find this useful!EOP

Tharoor has thrown his hat into the ring for the next UN Secretary–General’s post. He lobbied hard recently in New Delhi, cutting across the spectrum of political idealogies. This doesn’t say much for any ideal he may claim to represent, but rather a lot about his ambition. His responses to Dutt were, almost without exception, directed only to this end, including saying at one point that the records of several nations must be replete with records of his fine work.

Arguably, there are two views on that, especially his stand on the US policy in Iraq before and during the onset of the Iraq war. I think he had a real chance there, but tripped over his ambition and politically nimble feet.

That apart, there is one very compelling reason India should not support his candidacy. By convention, none of the permanent members of the Security Council have ever had one of their nominees as the Secretary–General. That makes a lot of sense, given that the each of the permanent members has a veto. To have both the veto at one end and your nominee initiating proposals at the other could upset what is clearly a very delicate balance. India deservers a place on that Council, and sooner rather than later. Let’s not kid ourselves about it, or be swayed by Pakistani rhetoric. Financially, India is second only to China now in terms of GDP growth and well ahead of the others, including many western countries. International business interests in India are huge and perhaps on less shaky ground than even China. India is a nuclear power. The balance of power in South Asia very largely depends on India’s continued political stability and ability to marshall forces at short notice. None of this can be wished away. None of this should be sacrificed to the personal ambition of one man, no matter how good, competent or dedicated he may be. If Tharoor is in the top spot at the UN, India’s chances of getting a place on the Security Council evaporate.

When Dutt put this to Tharoor, his answer was to say that the last time he checked, India was not on the Security Council, so what was all this brouhaha about? Also, he said, although of Indian origin, as Secretary–General, since he wouldn’t be taking instructions from New Delhi, he wouldn’t be answerable to India, but to all the members of the UN.

From a man of Tharoor’s intelligence, the first answer is not just naïve. It is the sheerest chicanery. Let me put it like this: if Tharoor gets what he wants, then the next time he checks, India still won’t be on the Security Council. And the second answer is — and Tharoor must know this — at one level thoroughly irrelevant. That is precisely the reason why the permanent members haven’t put forward their nominees. Unless, of course, Tharoor thinks that different rules apply to him than did to every other Secretary–General. At another level, it is blatantly untrue. Were it true, Tharoor would not have to lobby New Delhi. Like all circular reasoning, this, too, serves but one purpose.

Surely this must cast a shadow over the suitability of his candidacy. Here is a man who is willing to use his considerable felicity of language and personal charm to bend public opinion to further his personal ambition. In his own mind, there is no distinction between his ambition and the future of the UN. How can he be expected to put the institution before himself?

Shashi TharoorThis is really a double tragedy. If Tharoor was less full of Tharoor, more truly independent and less given to posturing, he might indeed be a worthwhile candidate. He is intelligent, he is accomplished, he is eminently clubbable and easy to like in limited doses. But his hubris keeps getting in the way. A casual visit to his website makes one squirm in embarassment. There is a flashy flash movie intro, complete with portraits. More photos of himself are in a dedicated photo gallery, all prominently flaunting that ridiculous and extremely déclassé haircut (or lack thereof). There are reviews of his books. There are lists of his books. There is a glowing bio that tells us (among other things) that he got his PhD at the age of 22. Now there is a separate section devoted to his campaign for the top job at the UN. I don’t understand this at all. Why should a man in his position have a personal website at all? And worse: this one is described as the “official” website of Shashi Tharoor. Are there unofficial websites? Fan clubs? Roadies? Is this a diplomat we’re dealing with here or a pop star?

And then there’s his writing. I picked up Bookless in Baghdad a few months ago, because I thought the title was arresting (Tharoor does have a way with words). But all enthusiasm was assassinated on page one of the preface.

“Bookless in Baghdad is a collection of my essays on literary topics, which have appeared in a variety of publications over the past decade. They span a broad range of concerns emerging from my own experience as an Indian writer (and reader!), but they share a literary provenance: none of my writings on non-literary subjects have been included. All the essays have been written for the layperson rather than the academic specialist.”

Well, well. This is truly an accomplishment. In the span of three sentences of reasonable length, we are told that Tharoor is a prolific writer and voracious reader; that his (literary) essays have appeared in many publications; that he has been writing these for ten years; that he has wide-ranging interests and concerns; that this is but a sliver of his oeuvre; and that he is capable of putting out literary essays fit for academia (which I seriously doubt).

It gets better. Somewhere in the next paragraph, we are solemnly informed that “this volume seeks to assemble my ruminations on aspects of the literary experience that go beyond any single book”. Whatever that means. But note, please, that you are in the presence of a Presence now. Unlike the rest of us lesser mortals, Tharoor does not just think. He ruminates. And he is unafraid to say so, and say it often.

I am truly glad that in this view of Tharoor and his writing, and particularly BiB, I am in excellent company. The [San Francisco Chronicle][] carried an excellent review of the book some time in 2005. Here is an extract from that review:

As he puts it, in his new collection of essays titled Bookless in Baghdad, “My novels are, to some degree, didactic works masquerading as entertainments.”

Concerned, perhaps, that the disguise was too good, Tharoor has included three expository postscripts (one per novel) within the first five pieces of the book. These involve a lengthy explanation of the role of a 2,000-year-old epic as a vehicle for modern satire, a defense of pop cinema as a serious subject, and some thoughts on conflating fiction and nonfiction. All are topics of inherent interest, but not when harnessed for self-promotion, and Tharoor steps quite heavily over this line.

In pieces reprinted from a dozen publications over the past decade, Tharoor makes frequent reference to the “raves” his work has received, unabashedly rejects more critical assessments, laments the shortage of time his day job allows for his writing and indulges in an exuberant confession that “there is nothing quite like the thrill of publishing a book.” Moments such as these make for squeamish reading once around and become downright repellent in repetition. Because of an unfortunate editorial decision to publish the essays unexcised, the reader is lectured on the “responsibility of the creative artist” not once but thrice in near-verbatim passages (it has to do with Moliere, edification and cultural identity, by the way) and will be reminded regularly that “the very word novel implies that there must be something ‘new’.” I don’t begrudge a belle lettrist his bon mot, but I don’t relish being able to finish his pretty phrases for him.

It’s a shame that Tharoor has focused so much of his talent on unnecessary self-approbation, particularly as it eclipses some stellar essays on subjects just as germane to his literary vision.

Today, unfortunately, that penchant for building the Tharoor brand-equity is likely to come at too high a price, certainly for India and possibly for the rest of the world.

Thank you, but no thank you, Mr Tharoor. Get a haircut instead. You can even write a book about that. How about Hairless in Harare?EOP

Let’s look at something that seems to have slipped the Times: the law. The Wildlife Protection Act prescribes a jail sentence of upto six years for illegal hunting (read poaching). Salman was given five. The issue, therefore, is not whether the Judge enlarged the sentence beyond the limits permissible in law but one of proportionality. The Times’s argument is that the sentence is disproportionate. Therefore, it follows that, according to the Times, this is a venial offence.

And that is something it most certainly is not. At the time it happened, as I recollect, Salman Khan and bunch of other stars sped off into a restricted area late one night. He shot a cinkara, an endangered species of deer, one listed as protected under the Wildlife Protection Act. With him at the time was the actress Tabu, and I remember her saying in a later interview that she and her friends were unaware that hunting was illegal. “There was no sign there,” she said, or words to that effect. Well, well. And I thought Tabu was one of our more sensitive and intelligent actors. There’s also no sign anywhere in the city saying hunting of film stars is illegal: does that make it open season on the film industry?

Killing any animal is a crime. Killing a protected animal is a statutory crime. There is just no excuse for it. And there can be no mitigation. In fact, what the Times (and others of the film industry who have spoken up for Salman) seem to be saying is that because he is a celeb and, therefore, an Important Man, he should be let off lightly. The Times’s argument defeats itself and the editor is, as they say, hoist by his own petard.

This case is also about people like Valmik Thapar, and the cause for which they have fought for over 20 years. The country’s forests and wildlife aren’t just a mess: they are in imminent danger of vanishing. We cannot forget the tragic findings of last year, about the horrific decline in the country’s tiger population, including in some of the major reserves and National Parks. What to do about this is a decision each of us has to make at every minute of our lives. Do we shoot wildlife? If yes, then with guns or only with cameras?

That was a decision Salman Khan made, and he made the wrong decision. He had every reason to know that it was wrong. He has the privileges of knowledge, education, wealth and information — privileges that are not commonly available to India’s Everyman. Yet, perhaps insulated from reality by over-immersion in a make believe world, he chose to break the law. Let’s not get into whether he hunts because it’s his way of compensating, or why he has such a wild need to assert his alpha male status in the public eye. That only trivializes the debate. What is relevant here is that he knew, or should have known, that his decision was wrong; and yet he took that decision. There is no mitigation.

In fact, Salman Khan had another choice. He had the power to say no, and the right to publicize that choice and its wisdom. It would have gone far, not just for him, but for the thousands or hundreds of thousands who (inexplicably) adore him. He could have set an example, a right, wise and mature one. Instead, he chose to set quite the opposite: his actions say, “I am Salman Khan. I can break the law. I follow no law but my own, and if it gives me pleasure to shoot a defenseless animal from a distance, then so be it, and nothing can be done to me. And look, you there, you, too, can be me. You, too, can do as I do.”

No, he can’t. And, no, they can’t either. And yes, he did have a duty to tell his followers that. And here is where the Times goes hopelessly wrong: he is not being punished, or being punished more severely, for failing to set an example; he is being punished for a crime he committed, deliberately, wantonly and knowingly, confident and secure in his infallibility. All that the Judge has said, and rightly, is that he need not have done this. He had the choice. He is not someone forced to poaching to feed a starving family. He did this for pleasure. He knowingly broke the law for fun. He knew better than that, and he ought to have demonstrated his respect for his fellow creatures, and for the law. His crime is not trivial, it is serious, and the law sets a price on it: the law wants five years of his life. This is about the rule of law being applied, firmly, to those whose very actions expose their innate belief that they are above the law.

So when the filmwallahs claim that Salman is a “soft target”, they are utterly and totally wrong. There was only one soft target here. It had four legs, not two. EOP

Hi, about your blog …

The same thing happened to me, except I don’t use outlook express. I use Mozilla Thunderbird. Things worked fine for a while, then suddenly, yesterday, it started asking me if I wanted to make it default or not. Of course, saying yes, no, or never ask again didn’t do a thing. EOB

Before I go into what I did to fix it, let me explain this happened to me once before. Symptoms were the same: click a mailto: link, get about 30 IE windows with “page can not be displayed” and thunderbird always asking me if I want it to be default. I found the mailto key was unreadable. What I tried doing then was the WRONG THING to do. I tried changing the security permissions on the parent key (which happens to be the hive) hkeyclassesroot and propagating it to all the children. BAD MOVE. From that point forward Windows would hang at the welcome screen and never get to the point of logging in. Reinstalling Windows fixed that one, but that’s never painless. In this case, I keep another bootable partition for just such an emergency. What I didn’t realize was my bootable partition was XP64, which of course won’t run XP32 install. So I had to install from CDROM, then create a third partition, install to that partition (because I don’t like using c:\windows as my windows folder, and you can’t override that from CDROM), delete it from the C:, reinstall, and now all is well.

Needless to say, I wasn’t happy when I just started getting the “would you like to make it default?” message. :)

Your suggestions didn’t work. I wasn’t able to apply the permissions as the user or as another user (in this case Administrator).

What I did, which appeared to work…

I went into Set Program Defaults. For Email client, it was set to none. I changed it to Mozilla Thunderbird, and applied. Windows took a long time, but it didn’t throw an error.

Went back into RegEdit, and the key was still locked. I tried adding some users, no go.

What I did, is try to add the administrators group. I got access denied, but I didn’t quit, so the permissions were still there. I then went to advanced, owner, and try to pick a new owner of “administrators”. It gave an error, but it didn’t stop at that tab and went back to the “add permissions” tab. Then it would let me apply it. Closed RegEdit, reopened, and now I could open the MailTo key, and I saw the subkeys, but they weren’t accessible either. Went through the same gyrations for each of the subkeys until they were all set, then turned on “reset child permissions to inherit” on the MailTo key, and now all in good.

Now for what caused it.

I installed the Office patches a long time ago. So I don’t think it was that.

What I do think it…

My wife uses Hotmail under her account. Thunderbird is the default client, but it isn’t configured. So everytime she would click a mailto, thunderbird would pop up asking for configuration. She’d cancel it. This happened enough that she called me at work to see if could fix it. I think I can talk her into using thunderbird as the client through Hotmail, but if I can’t, I think this error may come back.

Fortunately I think I know how to fix it now.

Charles.

Strange that it didn’t work. I had exactly the same problem on a second machine after I installed the Office patches, and I used the same solution (mine) and rectified it in no time at all. The way I see it, I’ve always had a dual user profile/account on all systems; perhaps that makes a difference.

Incidentally, that’s another lesson I learned the hard (very hard) way a long time ago, when my account profile got corrupted and I had the most hellish time getting back into my system, accessing my files and getting to work — only to find that all my heavy customizations and settings had been torched. Now I just have a second profile and, periodically, I copy registry keys over to that profile. It’s like a mirror account: all settings are identical, just the login is different. Both accounts even access the same data folders! Whether you use either of these solutions, I’d strongly recommend creating a profile account anyway. EOP

Naitthani should get some things straight. Nudity is not obscenity. Accidents happen. Life sucks. But none of that gives her the moral — or any other — right to police us. And she is supremely unqualified to judge anything or anyone.

The lady from Delhi made an excellent point, saying this was all disproportionate. She was absolutely right when she said we ought to be focussing on issues that matter like why the Government allows illegal constructions to come up and then goes ahead and demolishes them, but does nothing about the builders who committed the illegalities in the first place. This, of course, Naitthani rubbished by saying it was irrelevant and what really mattered was whether someone’s mammaries (or part thereof) had popped into public view.

The professor from JNU set her right beautifully, I thought, when he said that to say that the model in question had “been stripped naked before the whole nation” was to run down a professional just doing a job. Naitthani’s response was, of course, a vapid smirk. You know what’s really obscene? That’s right: it’s the execrable Pratibha Naitthani. Everything she stands for or professes is abominable and is itself the most obscene thing imaginable.

And yes, that includes even the rantings of Pramod Navalkar. As the xMumbaiMirrorx puts it:

Mr Pramod Navalkar thrives on publicity, and we would be loath to give him any if his silly pronouncements on the wardrobe malfunction were merely an exercise in throat-clearing.

But when his unthinking babble affects and causes harassment to an entire section of society, we feel compelled to respond. Navalkar’s demand, first for an investigation and then for a re-investigation into the wardrobe malfunction during last week’s Fashion Week shows that he has truly no meaningful issues to raise in the Legislative Council.

His allegation that the malfunction may have been deliberate is objectionable not only because he smells motive in an accident that was distressing for the models concerned, but also because it highlights how obsessed he is with playing Mumbai’s moral papa. If the police inquiry causes further embarassment to the models, it is not his concern. In fact, he could well take malicious delight out of their discomfort and is perfectly capable of asking for a third probe if the second one too exonerates the show’s organisers.

Isn’t the same equally true of every one of the thought-challenged who see filth everywhere? Now that’s a thought: what is it that makes Navalkar, Naitthani et al see life as an envelope of sewage?

Pity for them that we now even have the “official” sanction to the whole imbroglio: it was an accident after all.

Gravity rules, ok. EOP

After hours of combing the net and trying various solutions, I figured out what the problem is: the permission settings for the key have got corrupted. The cause? It seems to be an update to MicrosoftOffice (SP2 or SP3).

There is a solution: and there is no need to reinstall XP. Avoid the scorched-earth solution if you can.

What you basically need to do is to take control of the key. Evidently, it can’t be done through the registry editor — simply because the Registry Editor doesn’t allow you to do very much to edit the key or change permissions. Even if you get control of the main key, the sub-keys often don’t get changed. The trouble persists. If, for some reason, you can’t take full control of the key (see below) and its sub-keys, there’s another solution.

How to take control of the key and its sub-keys

Go to the HKCR\mailto key, ignore any error message (if you can) and then:

• Click Edit and permissions (or right click on the mailto key and select permissions)
• click advanced,
• click add,
• click advanced,
• click find now.
• One by one, add the Administrators (note the plural), System and all users on the system.

After each addition, give them full control of the key and its subkeys.

Back on the Advanced Security Settings for MailTo tab, click owner and check that the \machinename\adminstrators are shown as the owner.

Exit the Registry Editor.

If this doesn’t work, see below.

What to do if you can’t take control of the mailto key and its sub-keys

Fundamentally, this requires you to have more than one user account on your system, with full admin rights. I do this as a matter of course, for safety’s sake — you can always bounce general registry keys from one to the other unless something has gone really wrong.

So log out of the ‘damaged’ user and into some other user account which has full admin rights. Go off to the Registry Editor. Get to the mailto key, and add administratorS, system, and all users, including the damaged one, following the procedure outlined above. Remember to give them full control of all keys and sub-keys. Check the owner tab and make sure administrators is shown as the owner.

That’s it! You’re up and running again!

Back to Adam. Found he had a brilliant (hardly surprising) alternative using Brad Choate’s MTSQL plugin (are the