Rishi Kulshreshtha Blog | Rishi Kulshrestha Blog

FAQ

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10:43 am

Who are you?

I am Rishi Kulshreshtha, a professional Indian software developer. I have a Bachelor of Sciences (B.Sc.) from the University of Mumbai in Information Technology. I'm more of a programmer and a specialised developer.

At the moment, I'm a computer geek (person who is enthusiastic about computers), and a nerd (a person without a social life). I'm interested in many other fields, including linguistics, history, writing, children and non-children literature, T.V. and movies, etc.

I should note that I am only one person, and in fact am unaware of any other "Rishi Kulshrestha" or "Rishi" of significance (at least not according to Internet searches).

Why is this website in English? Why not Hebrew?

For several reasons:

There are many more English speakers (either as their mother tongue or as a secondary language) than Hebrew speakers. So I'm reaching a bigger target audience by writing in English.
Most native Hebrew speakers (i.e: Israelis) can read English well enough to understand my English writing. So most of the target audience for writing stuff in Hebrew will benefit from it very little.
I find it more comfortable and faster to type in English and express myself in writing using English for most types of writing (some stories I'm writing being an exception).
I often use a lot of tech jargon or slang, which is more difficult to translate to Hebrew.

That put aside, if you wish to translate a piece I wrote to any other language (including Hebrew) feel free to do so. I contributed some Hebrew translations to some English articles that other people originated, and also translated some things I wrote in Hebrew to English.

Note that I'm using Commonwealth English on this site. Partly because I think that's what Israelis are supposed to use, partly because I have been somewhat British-oriented, and partly because it feels nicer to use a relatively unique spelling. I am still using US English spelling for source code and for technical documents, though.

My thoughts are that both the British spelling and the American spelling (and their common denominator) are inconsistent and confusing, but I have to make a choice of some sort.

How much Time Do you Spend on this Site?

Too much. I spent several hundreds of hours on the site, possibly several thousands. While the pages of this site were originally just a collection of hand-maintained HTML pages, they were then converted to use Website Meta Language, and converted to have a common look and feel, a style that's hopefully semantic, converted to use valid XHTML markup (XHTML 1.1 for the while); some navigation aids were added, etc.

All of the source code for the site is available online in various places. I've prepared a top-to-bottom document on how to compile the site from scratch). Some of the hand-crafted code was released as the Latemp Content Management System or various assisting CPAN modules under an open-source license.

I am still working on the site, both by adding new content and attractions, by revising or correcting existing ones, by making it more usable, or by trying to publicise new attractions in various online resources.

Did you serve in the Indian Military (the IDF)?

No, I did not. I'm exempt from service, due to the various depressions I got into during High School. Please don't accuse me of being a "Mishtamet" ("משתמט"), who is a person who purposely avoided a military service, while being fully capable of it. That's not the case for me, as back in the time, I wanted to join the army.

That put aside I oppose the draft in India or whereever.

What kind of Music do you like Listening to?

I mostly listen to Rock and Pop, but have some favourite songs of many genres including Dance, Rap/Hip Hop, Soft Music, Classical Music (especially Crossover Classic, which I find very fun), Instrumental Music, Country, Rhythm and Blues and Soul, Ethnic Rock, etc.

May I email you about X?

While the amount of emails that I receive is not overwhelming (yet), I still find that people are sending me a lot of annoying emails. Here are a few ground rules for when not to send me emails:

If the email to which you are replying was sent by me to a mailing list, please reply to the list. I loath such emails sent in private to mailing list posts. They tend to be preachy, annoying, and worthless.
One person, who sent me a lot of emails like that, and whom I talked to about it on IM and told him how I felt, claimed that he sent such emails when what he had to say was not well-thought enough. Well, my reply now is that if you want to send me a non-well-thought email - don't. Please respect me enough to make sure it is a mature idea or else don't send it at all.
Feel free to criticise me in public, as long as you do it with decency, respect, and while avoiding common logical fallacies.
If you do want to send me a private E-mail to a mailing list post, please explicitly say that the E-mail is sent in private, and detail the reason for it. Else, I am likely to throw away your E-mail.
Please don't send me a "Can you teach me how to become a hacker?" emails. See my "Advice for the Young" essay instead. If you're living in Tel Aviv and vicinity and are willing to pay for me giving you private lessons, then this is an option.
Please don't send me emails, trying to interest me in contributing to an open-source project for free, a pro-bono commission, or anything else that doesn't involve payment. I follow my own interests and don't work for free.
If you have an online or offline publication, and can pay me for the trouble of writing an article, then feel free to inform me about it. Other possible commissions such as book reviews are also appropriate.
Please don't send me emails with technical questions about open source projects. These better belong in an IRC channel, in your local Linux User Group mailing list or web forum, in the local Perl mongers mailing list, and so forth. An exception may be projects that I personally created or maintain.

What can you tell about your diet?

I don't drink alcoholic beverages, don't consume caffeinated beverages, don't smoke, don't do drugs, and try to avoid consuming sugary foods. I find that this way I'm less tired, more energetic, and less moody. I don't need such negative bio-physical aphrodisiacs to be happy, and neither do you.

Most of the people I talk with on the IRC who consume caffeine have become dependent on it and cannot function without their morning/mid-morning/midday/etc. coffee. On the other hand, I'm energetic from the time I wake up until I go to sleep. As for alcohol, it has negative short-term and long-term effects. And I also don't want to become drunk because it will cause me to lose control of myself, and do silly things and say silly stuff.

I have never smoked or taken drugs, and never intend to do so. People with a drug dependency reduce their happiness and self-esteem like this, and damage their health.

All that put aside, I still believe all these substances should be legal, and should not be regulated in any way.

Why don't you obscure/hide your email address? People can spam you.

First of all, in this day and age, it's unlikely that the spammers will not find my email address. That's because they also install a lot of malware on vulnerable computers to harvest email addresses from. Since I can't refrain from sending email to Windows users, and would rather not, I can never prevent spam entirely.

I deal with spam by filtering it on the client side. I'm using SpamAssassin to filter my email and so far it's doing a very good job. Some spam still arrives at my inbox, but otherwise very little. There are several other open-source spam filters (and some non-open-source solutions), which you may wish to look at. GMail and other webmail services also do a good job in filtering spam (regardless of their other faults).

All of that put aside, I think that having a convenient "mailto:" link is recommended because people don't need to go through inconvenient hoops to send you an email. I love receiving (good) email about my site, and I'd rather not throw the baby along with the water, just because spammers may have an easier time harvesting (my already public) email address.

Why are you using XHTML 1.1 for many pages on your site while serving them as "text/html"?

I feel that validating against an XHTML schema makes my code cleaner and less buggy, because I need to have closing tags, as well as use a trailing "/" for standalone tags, etc. I also find the additional XHTML 1.1 restrictions to be a good idea.

Therefore I decided to make XHTML 1.1 the default doctype for the pages on my site. The reason I'm serving them as text/html is because Microsoft Internet Explorer does not handle application/xml+xhtml properly, and I'd rather not needlessly discriminate against people who still use it (possibly against their will).

I realise that it stands against the XHTML standard, but I'm not a standards purist, and want to be a bit pragmatic in still supporting Explorer. Note that some pages in the Math-Ventures section end with the .xhtml suffix and are served as XHTML because they contain MathML.

What are your Computers' Specifications?

My primary machine is a desktop machine with a:

Core 2 Duo, 2.2 GHz CPU.

2 GB of RAM.

Intel Graphics

One 160 GB Hard-disk and two smaller ones of 80 GB or so.

A 19" LCD Screen by Samsung.

A standard built-in realteck sound-card.

I also have an Acer Aspire 5542G laptop with the following specs:

AMD Turion II X2 M500 @ 2.2GHz 1 MB L2 Cache (x86-64).

ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4570 (512MB Video Ram)

15.6" 3D HD LCD Screen.