.. a poem by (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley) comes to mind.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
With prescient élan, the mention of the ‘trunkless legs of stone’ evokes the image of a forlorn tower of stone, much like the increasingly disrupted and abandoned, formerly high profile construction projects in Dubai. A shattered visage of the Bedouin of old, with a sneer on his wrinkled lips and the lone sands that stretch far away – complete the image of recklessness and decay, that now emanates from a city that strived to be a jewel in the crown of the middle east.
Will it ever recover?
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
Usually, if you were to use something like,
``
class testform(forms.Form):
n = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=Models.objects.filter(id=32773), empty_label="All")
you’ll end up with a drop down box populated with “M objects” rather than a field from the model.
Instead, this works better,
<br></br>class vModelChoiceField(forms.ModelChoiceField):<br></br> def label_from_instance(self, obj):<br></br> return "%s" % obj.name
class testform(forms.Form):
n = vModelChoiceField(queryset=Models.objects.filter(id=32773), empty_label="All")
t = testform()
print t
And you’re done!
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
Woo, finally.
(http://cluud.in) is a new service to help you discover new places and follow conversations about your favorite places in your city. This means you can plan out where to go in real time – getting input from everyone who has talked about it! Neat.
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
From an address on “America’s place in the world” that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry) – one of my favorite comedians of all time – gave at (http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/2009/07/04/americas-place-in-the-world/) (which you should totally read in full, btw – its hilarious superbly penned).
When referring to the well known idiom of making lemonade if life gives you lemons, he makes a pretty interesting point.
So let me look again at that holy text: ‘if life gives you lemons, make lemonade.’ Huh? But… but… Lemons are amongst the best and most wonderful gifts of nature. They are adaptable, versatile and delicious. A slice for your gin and tonic – juice to zing life into salads, stews, fish and seafood. Oil and sweetness from the rind and zest that is pure and perfumed and precious. They are a staple of what doctors agree is the best dietary regimen we can follow. So if life gives you lemons, shout ‘Thank you, Life, thank you!’ But the American response is ‘make lemonade’ in other words – just add sugar and sell it.
Add sugar and sell it. This can be translated across into culture, can it not?
How very true.
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5cfd7324-762b-11de-9e59-00144feabdc0.html
Interesting analysis on how Asia has faith in western economic theories, but none in their management practices.
Moreover, we’re improving trade with all kinds of FTAs being signed between ASEAN and other asian countries – whereas the US Congress has actually let a number of intra-americas FTAs die.
I just hope that the emulation of the west that is fast becoming the norm in Asia stays limited to the better aspects of society rather than the deplorable ones.
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
Just to put it out there, but David Cramer – who developed the spectacular django-sphinx project – omits a crucial piece of information needed to install Sphinx into your Django models. So if you find that everything works perfectly well, but your search results are 0 in number – this is what you should do!
You have to add ‘djangosphinx’ into INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py, in the main django directory.
Link,
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
A quote from Gao Xiqing, the man who runs the China investment corporation (and manages $200 Billion in funds for their sovereign fund). Here’s something I came across in the (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/fallows-chinese-banker<br%20/>%0A) – his explanation of the financial derivatives debacle..
If you look at every one of these \ products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people.
I was predicting this many years ago. In 1999 or 2000, I gave a talk to the State Council , with Premier Zhu Rongji. They wanted me to explain about capital markets and how they worked. These were all ministers and mostly not from a financial background. So I wondered, How do I explain derivatives?, and I used the model of mirrors.
First of all, you have this book to sell. \ This is worth something, because of all the labor and so on you put in it. But then someone says, “I don’t have to sell the book itself! I have a mirror, and I can sell the mirror image of the book!” Okay. That’s a stock certificate. And then someone else says, “I have another mirror—I can sell a mirror image of that mirror.” Derivatives. That’s fine too, for a while. Then you have 10,000 mirrors, and the image is almost perfect. People start to believe that these mirrors are almost the real thing. But at some point, the image is interrupted. And all the rest will go.
When I told the State Council about the mirrors, they all started laughing. “How can you sell a mirror image! Won’t there be distortion?” But this is what happened with the American economy, and it will be a long and painful process to come down.
Well explained indeed. I’ve always felt that the measure of how smart someone really is stems from the lucidity of their explanations of a complex topic to an uninformed audience.
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.
The other day, someone pointed me to an article about how a small section of the Indian population has stashed away close to $1.5 trillion(!) in secret swiss bank accounts. Curious that I am, I promptly went ahead and searched for this amazing piece of information on the web, and found –
Dishonest industrialists, scandalous politicians and corrupt IAS, IRS, IPS officers have deposited in foreign banks in their illegal personal accounts a sum of about $ 1500 billion, which have been misappropriated by them. This amount is about 13 times larger than the country’s foreign debt. With this amount 45 crore poor people can get Rs 1,00,000 each. This huge amount has been appropriated from the people of India by exploiting and betraying them.
Sources for this available (http://www.google.com/search?q=swiss+bank+report+india&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a) \
Click “Read More” or scroll down for more!
Turns out, this information was taken from a chain email that was forwarded to a bunch of people by an (as yet) unknown source – and promptly taken up by the smaller sections of the Indian web media, and certain bloggers who ought to have known better. This became mainstream news, people! Almost ALL of them started making moral judgments about the extent of corruption in the country too! :)
I was rather intrigued when I saw that there were Actual figures posted on these websites. Given the high levels of secrecy which swiss bankers are known for, this seemed rather surprising!
Black money in Swiss banks — Swiss Banking Association report, 2006 details bank deposits in the territory of Switzerland by nationals of following countries:
India—- $1456 billion
Russia—$ 470 billion
UK——-$390 billion
Ukraine- $100 billion
China—–$ 96 billion
(http://www.aftab1.com/2008/10/1500-billion-black-money-in-swiss-banks.html)
and
Depositors money in Swiss banks — Swiss Banking Association report, 2008 details bank deposits in the territory of Switzerland by nationals of following countries:
Top 5
India—- $1891 billion
Russia—– $610 billion
China—— $213 billion
UK——– $210 billion
Ukraine ———– $140 billion
Rest of the world —-$300 billion
(http://www.pratikbijal.com/blog/?p=112)
The organization mentioned – the Swiss Banking Association – fortunately, does exist. And so do their annual reports – available for (http://www.swissbanking.org/en/home/taetigkeitsbericht-2007.htm). Their latest report is available on their front page.
I used google custom site search to query words like “1456 billion” and “India”. Since the german name for India is “Indien”, I also tried that, as well as other words I thought might be pertinent.
Zilch. Nada. Nix.
The URL I used was (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&q=india+site%3Aswissbanking.org&btnG=Search). Feel free to try it out yourself!
I downloaded most of their reports and gave it a brief glance as well, to no avail. There were absolutely no mentions of any country’s deposits, save some tables and charts which highlight their growth, tax treaty information and sovereign wealth fund information. In fact, in the german versions of the 2006 report – there are only some 5 mentions of the word “Indien”. The latest report features “India” some 8-10 mentions times, and thats pretty much it.
Does anyone have any pointers on whether this information actually exists – perhaps I’m missing something?
Seriously though. The web media needs to REALLY do some research before they start proliferating information that is so clearly false. This is rather harmless as misinformation campaigns go, but this sort of collective ineptness in validating your sources (which I thought was one of the cardinal rules of main stream journalism) – highlights just how far this medium has to go before it can be accepted as an authentic source of information.
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If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.