SITE BYTE
                 _____________PRATIK KANJILAL

California In The Raw

So you know Java, Perl, Ada, DHTML, SHTML and the rest of the alphabets and you’re pleased pink that Clinton has raised the portcullis on H1-Bs. But it isn’t going to get you far in Sili Valley unless you also know sushi. They do things a bit differently out there. When they say, ‘‘Let’s do lunch’’, the usual Indian euphemism for ‘‘Let’s do a deal’’, they’re only testing the waters. When they get downright serious, they say, ‘‘Let’s do sushi’’. Too bad they don’t have fish courses at NIIT.

But for the prospective sojourner to California, there’s a set of quick tutorials on this necessary skill at www.su-shi101.com. Apart from the history and philosophy of this exquisite cuisine, it includes life-saving tips on how to comport yourself at the sushi bar. You’re supposed to reverse the chopsticks when you help yourself from a communal dish, for instance. And you do not wave them about while you decide what you want to take next. And even if you are hopeless with chopsticks, you do not ask for a knife. It implies that the master chef, or Itamae-san, has made the sashimi too tough to eat. Since a master chef has the ego of an European statementist, he may just take that knife and commit supukku before your very eyes. Too bad this horrifying act’s definition is not listed on sushi101.com. You’ll just have to look it up on Askjeeves.com.

Virtual Stars
FIRST, there were daemons — little online ‘spirits’ that handled all your routine work, like mail management. Then there were wizards, which helped you set up and run programs (the paper-clip man in Microsoft Word is an interesting variation). And finally, we had virtual personalities. Or at least we had one — Ananova, the virtual newscaster at www.ananova.com. Ananova was Britain’s answer to the useful but utterly soul-less services spa-wned by corporate America. She runs on state-of-the-art digital animation and text-to-speech technologies and was inspired by some of the most beautiful women in public life today. Her green hair and her Russian-inflected name are a nod to the realities of the communications age, where the fake is more real than reality and where English is slowly losing precedence to other languages.

Ananova’s first words were also inspired by the networked age: ‘‘Hello World!’’ When a neophyte learns HTML or a programming language, his very first project is to write a script which can type these words on a remote computer screen. With it, he announces his membership to the online community. Ananova is only the first of a pack of online ‘intelligences’ who will be with us soon, in the form of handholders and benevolent spirits. Hollywood is using similar technology to resurrect dead stars for new movies. And sometime in the future, each of us will have a digitally-created online persona — an image of ourselves. A bit pixellated, but it beats MyYahoo! any day.

Legal Aid
TO DISCOVER just how out of touch your lawyer is, click over to Alan Gahtan’s Cyberlaw Encyclopaedia at www.gahtan.com/cyberlaw/. Gahtan specialises in intellectual property and Internet law in Canada and California and his site is a great resource for anyone either planning to start a website of their own or to get someone else’s into trouble. Apart from IPR law, there are separate sections on spam, linking issues, cryptography and digital signatures, advertising, e-commerce, jurisdiction and even protest sites. The design is awful, but the content is great. All the material carries responses and annotations by practitioners in the field.

Invaluable stuff for the Internet professional who, more often than not, has to make up his own mind on legal issues and then tell his lawyer what to do. In India, Internet law is lagging way behind the industry and only a handful of our lawyers even understand the new issues that have been thrown up, let alone know how to deal with them.

( The writer can be reached on pratik@crosswinds.net)

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