My friend Geetha forwarded this article about the world’s hottest curry prepared by an Indian chef in a London restaurant.

The lamb curry named Bolly Burner, measures 855,000 on the Scoville scale - over 100 times hotter than the jalapeno pepper. He was inspired by the Andhra cuisine and uses Naga peppers and seeds.

From the article:

Before ordering the curry diners are required to sign a disclaimer saying they are aware of the nature and risks involved with tasting the curry before eating it.

This curry may not be on the menu everyday though.

… he said the Bollywood Burner may not regularly appear on the menu: “I would create it on demand for customers but will not include it all the time. I think it’s just too extreme a dish.”

The Bollywood Burner is being submitted to the Guinness World Records for verification of its status as the world’s hottest curry. The results should be announced in two to three weeks.

Read more here.

Grapevine High School in Grapevine, Texas proved that it was one of the stupidest schools in the country when it denied an overachiever her due last month because of a carelessly formed rule.

16-year old Anjali Datta topped her senior class out of 471 students and graduated with a GPA of 5.898, believed to be the HIGHEST in the history of the school. She graduated in 3 years instead of 4 (because she is very smart).

And what did her school do? Like a true rule-checking brainless robot, denied her valedictorian, which would have given her one year’s scholarship in college. The school’s reason was that according to their policy, “The valedictorian shall be the eligible student with the highest weighted grade-point average for four years of high school.”

Since Anjali graduated in less than four years, the school decided she was not eligible for valedictorian, even though she had the highest ever GPA of 5.898. Instead, they decided to give it to the second highest student 18-year old Tyler Scott Franklin who finished with a GPA of 5.64.

As if to put a band-aid on this, Grapevine High School created an on-the-fly award, “Valedictorian – Three-Year” just for Anjali Datta. How come they were able to add new awards when they were apparently not able to rectify a stupid law that discourages smart and brilliant students? Whatever happened to the America that rewarded intelligent people and overachievers?

From the article here,

“We’re doing what we can to extend an additional honor within accordance of school board policy,” said Megan Overman, a district spokeswoman. “I’m not going to say that this has been an easy situation. This is something that is new for all of us. We’ve not faced this situation before.”

Ms. Overman said the district researched the decision for months.

“There was a lot of thought involved in this. There is no perfect answer,” she said.

Maybe you should hire people who have the capacity to think, especially when a student’s future is involved, Ms. Overman. I don’t believe you put in even 5 minutes of thought in this. You said the district researched the decision for months. You showed your intellectual colours when you and the district came with this decision. Maybe there is no perfect answer, but you are a perfect idiot.

Read the email sent to Anjali’s parents. Typical “Hey, you’re great, blah blah blah…. but you don’t deserve it” mail.

Anjali and her family are obviously upset. From the article:

Anjali says she and her parents are baffled.

“I have not heard of any educational institution penalizing a student for excellence – for completing a demanding set of classes ‘too quickly,’ ” said her father, Deepak Datta. “Anjali’s experience will surely send a strong negative signal to other talented students trying to excel.

“They will most certainly be discouraged from trying to do their best – instead will be more focused on gaming the system.”

State officials say it is the local school district’s responsibility to determine the highest ranking student, and the state has no authority to get involved. At graduation June 7, Anjali will be honored for her perfect ACT score. She will be acknowledged as an honor graduate and allowed to address her classmates. But Anjali said it still doesn’t feel quite right. “This really diminishes the value of the valedictorian title,” she said.

Anjali will feel the hurt for a long time, but given her brilliant record, hopefully she’ll make it very big in life.

If you have a smart child who is an overachiever, do not let him/her study in this school. There are many other good schools that will reward your kids for their hard work.

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 version 1.0 on my Sony PSP an hour ago. It was easy and my PSP runs firmware 3.95 GEN 2. If you have official Sony firmware on your PSP, it won’t be of any use.

Here’s a screenshot of Ubuntu on my PSP. And its not a genuine ported Ubuntu, its just a shell application emulating Ubuntu.

Read my tutorial if you want to install Ubuntu on your PSP.

Google decided to join the “rebranding and logo changes” bandwagon by changing its favicon to a lowercase borderless g from the traditional G with a border.

The new favicon looks a little dull, but maybe its because I was used to the G for many years.

The 2008 National Spelling Bee was won by a 13-year old student Sameer Mishra from Indiana. There was a record number of 288 participants this year. Sameer Mishra beat Sidharth Chand of Michigan with the word “guerdon”, which means “something that one has earned or gained”. It was a close fight. This was Sameer’s fourth and Sidharth’s first Bee competitions. Sameer was coached by his sister who was also one of the contestants.

The profiles of other contestants are great and many had attempted the Bee before unsuccessfully. The youngest was an 8 year old boy Sriran Hathwar.

I love spelling competitions and have always followed them. The movie Akeelah and the Bee is one of my favourite movies. If you like spellings, English grammar/vocabulary and origin of words, you’ll really love that movie.

Read more about this on CNN and Yahoo! News.

Sameer Mishra is an American of Indian origin, so some of the Indian news websites lapped up the news.

Rediff.com misspelt the word American as Amrican in its title post!! Very good tribute to someone who won a Spelling Bee.

I wrote my first Perl module Twitter::Badge sometime back and just released version 0.02 with a minor change.

This module provides you with the API required to check any Twitter’s status and other details. The general procedure is something like this:

1. Install the Perl module with CPAN (Linux, Unix, or Mac) or PPM (if you use Windows).

Using CPAN, you have to do this:

perl -MCPAN -e shell

install Twitter::Badge

If you want to do it in one line:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install Twitter::Badge'

You can also download the source, and build the module with:

perl Makefile.PL

make

make install

2. After installing Twitter::Badge, test if its running with a simple example.

use Twitter::Badge;

# Try it with my Twitter ID
my $id = shift || 14512139;                   # define the Twitter ID
my $twitter = Twitter::Badge->new(id => $id); # create the object for that ID
$twitter->fetch();                            # get information for this ID

# Display status
print $twitter->name.' says - '.$twitter->text."\n"
    if defined $twitter->text;            # display status
print $twitter->name.' has '.$twitter->followers_count." followers\n"
    if defined $twitter->followers_count; # display follower count

You can find the complete documentation here.

This module is very basic right now and subject to change whenever Twitter changes its XML output.

The latest version of Twitter::Badge is 0.02. You may use it at your own risk.

Let me know if you would like any features added in this module.

UPDATE: I have a couple of screenshots (following Chittaranjan’s post) to help newbies use this module.

Screenshot 1 [code]

Screenshot 2 [execution]

It can be used in any Perl script, either executed on the command line or for the web.

If you’re a Perl developer or have developed simple CGI scripts, this will be a piece of cake for you.

What is with violinists and their carelessness these days?

David Garrett smashed a $1 million violin when he fell over after a concert in London over Christmas.

[February 13, 2008]

A Wiltshire man leaves a 1698 Venice-made Goffriller valued at £180,000 on the train.

[April 14, 2008]

And then, in today’s news, I read this:

A violinist who left his 285-year-old instrument in the back of a New York cab has played a concert to thank the driver who returned it to him.

The violin was valued at $4 million. The violinist Philippe Quint rewarded the taxicab driver with $100 and a 30-minute performance, plus tickets to his future show. Philippe Quint also nominated to the Grammy’s.

For someone of Quint’s stature, $100 is way too small a reward and smacks of extreme miserliness!

Maybe the next violinist who loses his violin on the train or taxicab better not even bother looking for it.

I keep seeing gimped/photoshopped images of the US presidential candidates all the time. My favourite one is Obama answering a phone call.

Today’s photograph in BBC News made me wonder if its real or manipulated. Obama’s palm seems way too big. Maybe someone at BBC wanted to try out her hand at photo editing. Or maybe he just has very long fingers.

Okay, you’ve seen the photo. Now get back to work.

Any C programmers out there who can fix a really annoying bug in a simple 10 line program?

» Here’s the C program that has the bug.

Ciao.

I just took my Nerd Test on nerdtest.com and scored 99.

Whats your score?