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I am not sure what has made this change here at Splat, but if you noticed a procrastinating person like myself have been able to do something like post every day for more than a week now.

There have been 10 post in past 9 days.  Now, it is not a great feat.  There are many bloggers who do better.  It is an ongoing discussions of how many is too many and all things related to frequency of posting in blogs.  Anyway, I intend to keep this up as long as possible and provide with useful splats of information.  Both here and at a slower pace at KalaaLog.com.

Anyway, the actual point of this post, excluding all the above rants, is that I will be working on Udantak, hoping to capitalize on my new found energy.  Bloggers out there, please proceed to Udantak Blog and have the feeds subscribed.

Udantak is an effort to help out two categories of people that use the Internet - the bloggers/publishers and the readers/consumers.

For the past two weeks, there have been quite a handful of basic posts on XML here at Splat. Here is a round up and links to all of them.

About XML

• XML - Extended Markup Language

XML Applications

• XML Application - XHTML
• XML Application - RSS And Atom
• XML Application - SVG
• XML Application - MathML
• XML Application - OOXML And ODF

In terms of XML application, I could just keep going on. Some of the other things that are worth a look are WSDL and SMDL. WSDL or WebSerivce Description Language is a major key player already even though it has not yet become a W3C recommendation yet. SMDL, Standardised Music Description Language is for marking up musical notation. It is presently a ISO standard. As I said, there are a lot of applications of XML and you can visit the Wikipedia page for it to get an exhaustive (and volatile) list.

Blogs and Sites

• W3C XML page
• O’Reilly XML

Let me know if you would like to know more or anything in particular about XML. You just need to leave a comment.

If you found these posts helpful, do subscribe to our feeds: Splat Feed. Copy this or the orange icon link to your feed reader. (Want to know more about feeds?)

Why is it that as an organization or company grows large, it seems to start operating on the other side of moral line? Does it not seem like a pattern that seems to be followed by every behemoth out there?

This story is not about a malicious person. There are many of them out there, and we can put them aside for now. This story is about the successful organizations that have grown immensely. They start of humbly with noble mission statements, and they stick to it. The initial groups of people are most of the times, people with moral values. It is these moral values that give them success and they grow as an organization. From this stage onwards, they seem to be in news for all sort malicious acts.

Yes, this is about the code that Google “borrowed” from Sohu. (News credit: Thilak)

What is it about the nature of a large organization that has made Google come up in similar news? For that matter, what is it about large organizations in general, that makes them deteriorate from their noble mission statements?

Some of the causes for this are obvious and others are a bit more subtle. I will try to break them down into two categories.

• The Observer
• The Observed

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In view of the recent irregularities in the posting at Splat, I would like to bring to note to the readers of Splat, that feeds are available for the updates made.

Use the orange feed icon to grab the feed link.  Or you can use this: Splat Feed

To know more about feeds, you can go through some earlier posts:

• Feeds - RSS
• Feeds - The Orange Icon
• Feeds - Feedreaders

 

As the regular readers here might know, I have been dabbling with the arts quite a bit recently and that seemed to show up in all the posts here - increasing their quality and appeal.

After much thoughts and planning, I shelled out a bit of cash I had at Paypal on GoDaddy and bought the domain name: kalaalog.com

Kalaa means arts in majority of Indian languages and is derived from the Sanskrit word.

I got hold of the latest version of Wordpress blog engine and set a blog for it where I will be having more art related tutorials as opposed to design related tutorials we have here at Splat. At KalaaLog I would post ‘work-in-progress’ or ‘behind-the-screen’ screen shots of some of the artworks I create. Also, to the extent possible, I would try to cover the art field in India.

So, head over to Kalaalog.com, bookmark it and also add it to your feeds.

I get up this morning. It is a nice Saturday morning that I planned to spend by lazing around and doing some good original work for Splat. And as always, I open my Thunderbird to check out the updates on my tracked feeds, and I find this post, Recurring Themes: Two Topics I Don’t Cover Now, by Jonathan Bailey at Plagiarism Today.

I am an Indian, and the other authors here are all Indians. There are instances where my friends would say that I am more a non-Indian than a Indian because I take some stances that speak of Universal Brotherhood or something along those lines. But yet, I identify myself as an Indian and I am proud of it.

But that post by Jonathan, evoked a response of anger on the post in me.

India is the world’s most populous democracy and a rising Internet power. However, it seems to have an unusually strong problem with plagiarism. This problem is echoed by colleagues of mine that teach high school and college in India as well as mainstream media reports .

How could he generalize?

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