Nature is Weird

Very rare record of a jaguar fighting an anaconda.

Registro raríssimo de uma onça-pintada lutando com uma sucuri. pic.twitter.com/bQPGu9Cutn

— Biodiversidade Brasileira (@BiodiversidadeB) January 5, 2021

A green anaconda is resisting the attempt of the large black jaguar to drag it to the land surface. The green anaconda comes from the family of ‘boidae’ or boa species, which is commonly found in South America. This giant reptile is the heaviest and one of the longest existing snake species. While, the jaguar is the third largest cat species in the world with lightning speed of 80 kmph.

Both the predators in the video are inclined to take the other one inside their habitat, while the Panther drags the large reptile into the land surface, the heavy anaconda tries to fight back and plunges to the water. However, the Panther again attempts to get hold of the snake.

Adding close link to flash messages

The flash provides a way to pass temporary objects between actions. Anything you place in the flash will be exposed to the very next action and then cleared out. This is a great way of doing notices and alerts, such as a create action that sets flash[:notice] = "Successfully created" before redirecting to a display action that can then expose the flash to its template. Actually, that exposure is automatically done. But not closing or removing and that flash message will be there till the view is refreshed or a new action is served. [Read more..]

I don’t owe you shit

Originally uploaded by urbanwide

The question was “What happened to the release????” on ruby-forum. But, what followed was furious, funny replies.

As an example check this out:

and it's now 24 July, I don't think it's inappropriate to get impatient for a release
or an explanation of the delay. Heck, if they asked for help, they might get some,
but this silence is bad if the core team want to keep their credibility. Why should I
trust a core team that can't get its act together to take 2 minutes to write a blog
post explaining why the release was delayed?

This should help clear things up: http://bit.ly/diXfGx

If you wanna know what the rails community is all about (other than awesome) then read on. I develop Rails apps and I love everything about it, the Framework, community, blogs and the attitude is one among them.

Would I Survive No Internet for a Whole Month?

Can anyone, of the current generation, survive without the Internet nowadays? I don’t know. But if you ask me, the answer is plain simple NO.

Google Classic: Please Allow 30 Days for your Search Results

No. Not for a month. If there is no Internet there is no work. If there is no work there is boredom. If there is boredom and nothing else to do, then one should die. But, I want to live a little longer.

Blog once and educate 40,000 underprivileged children of India

Here is a unique opportunity to reach out and impact thousands of lives through your blog. Yes, sitting at your desk and writing a blog post can help educate 40,000 young Indians all over our country!

One of India’s most trusted and credible NGOs, GiveIndia is taking part in a competition on Facebook to win a US$1 million grant. The winner will be the NGO that gets the highest number of votes from Facebook users. The prize of $1 million will help put or keep 40,000 children across India in school for one year!

Imagine the IndiBlogger community coming together to spread the word and help the underprivileged children of India. The impact would be tremendous and together, IndiBloggers and GiveIndia would be able to gather the votes we need to win.

Voting in the competition is for one week only, from Friday, January 15 – Friday, January 22, 2010. Can we make a difference in the next 5 days? We sure hope so!

The link for voting, where you can also see more details of the competition is

http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/338730

There’s been lots of talk about how social media can bring change and make an impact on the world we live in. Well, here is one tangible way for us to take a small action that could have a HUGE outcome.

Nothing selected

and we say we work hard..

Netherlands runs out of criminals, has to shut prisons

The Dutch justice ministry has announced it will close eight prisons and cut 1,200 jobs in the prison system. A decline in crime has left many cells empty.

The Netherlands (where most drugs are legal) has so few criminals that it is now faced with the choice of shutting down its prisons and laying off the staff, or importing criminals from other countries like Belgium on a contract basis:

During the 1990s the Netherlands faced a shortage of prison cells, but a decline in crime has since led to overcapacity in the prison system. The country now has capacity for 14,000 prisoners but only 12,000 detainees.

Deputy justice minister Nebahat Albayrak announced on Tuesday that eight prisons will be closed, resulting in the loss of 1,200 jobs. Natural redundancy and other measures should prevent any forced lay-offs, the minister said.

Netherlands to close prisons for lack of criminals

Photography guide to beginners

A friend forwarded this link. I went through it and it is a SUPERB article to learn photography. You should also read the articles in http://photo.net eventually.

http://www.berniecode.com/writing/photography/beginners/

The SUN has finally set at Redwood Shores

We’ve been debating the merits of a possible IBM-Sun deal for a while now, and even Sun itself seemed to be in the dark as to if it would be a good idea to be bought by IBM. These debates are now all moot: in a surprise move (at least, I didn’t see any speculation about it) Oracle has bought Sun Microsystems, at USD 9.50 a share, which equates to a total of 7.4 billion USD. The news got out through a press release.

“Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) announced today they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt. “We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.”

“This is a fantastic day for Sun’s customers, developers, partners and employees across the globe, joining forces with the global leader in enterprise software to drive innovation and value across every aspect of the technology marketplace,” said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s CEO, also in the press release, “From the Java platform touching nearly every business system on earth, powering billions of consumers on mobile handsets and consumer electronics, to the convergence of storage, networking and computing driven by the Solaris operating system and Sun’s SPARC and x64 systems. Together with Oracle, we’ll drive the innovation pipeline to create compelling value to our customer base and the marketplace.”

“Sun is a pioneer in enterprise computing, and this combination recognizes the innovation and customer success the company has achieved. Our largest customers have been asking us to step up to a broader role to reduce complexity, risk and cost by delivering a highly optimized stack based on standards,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “This transaction will preserve and enhance investments made by our customers, while we continue to work with our partners to provide customers with choice.”

The deal has received unanimous approval of Sun’s board, and is likely to go down this summer, after shareholder approval.

About Oracle

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, please visit thes Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

About Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision — “The Network is the Computer” — Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://www.sun.com.

They’re Coming For You

The Great Indian Open Election will be into its first round as 143 million of the country’s 700 million voters cast their vote for the 15th Lok Sabha election in their attempt to form India’s next government — the shape of which is still eluding even the wisest political pundits.

The outcome in 124 seats will be determined in Today’s polling, which is just over one-fourth of the 543 seats. But these seats are crucial to the power bids of all contenders — UPA, NDA, Third Front, Fourth Front, and many bit players whose support, too, will be desperately wooed as the group with the highest tally gets down to winning friends and influencing MPs after May 16, the summer day when all results will be announced.

But, whom should I vote for? this is the question which everyone of us must ask ourselves and answer. This should not be driven by emotions, religion, caste, community, money, favour. Every vote counts, everyone should use the power of vote. But the question remains, whom should I vote for?

We should do some research about the candidates contesting in our constitution. There are many sources of information one such source of information is national election watch (NEW) .

The National Election Watch (NEW) is a nationwide campaign comprising of more than 1200 NGO and other citizen led
organizations working on electoral reforms, improving democracy and governance in India.

National Election Watch is active in almost all states of India and has done election watch for all states and Lok Sabha elections since ADR, along with couple other organizations, won the PIL in Supreme Court in 2002 to making disclosure of educational, financial and criminal background of electoral candidates mandatory.

Lot of people around the country are questioning what our elected representatives do. Do you know what the responsibilities of our elected representatives are?

Although a few responsibilities of the elected representatives are defined, the fact is that their responsibilities are very fluid. In fact, citizens and voters of their constituency can and should approach them for any problem that affects general public – be it related to education, health, transport, or any issue affecting general public.

The purpose of this site is several fold:

* Give information on the elected representatives – everything that they give in their affidavits.
* Give information about a constituency – various human development index parameters.
* Give a chance to the general public to give comments on work done by their elected representatives.
* Rate various representatives based on peoples’ comments and improvement shown in their constituency during their tenure, etc.
* Feed this feedback back to your elected representative, so that he has a chance to work on the feedback received from his constituency.

National Election Watch has made comparative charts of contesting candidates available via myneta.info, releases comparative charts for top 25 Phase 1 Red Alert Constituencies.

Other sources of information:
smartvote.in
adrindia.org
myneta.info
and ofcourse: nationalelectionwatch.org