SOPA, PIPA and Online Piracy

US wants the SOPA and PIPA legislation be implemented to curb online piracy. They cite the reason that the piracy is adversely harming the growth and IP of entertainment industry.

As a protest against SOPA and PIPA bills tabled by the Congress in US, Wikipedia, Google and other technology big players including  7000 sites have blacked-out. Here is the sneak peek- of Wikipedia page-

Although the bill is aimed at curbing the online piracy, it curbs the net users’ liberty. More about the legislation can be found at http://sopablackout.org/learnmore.

Akshar has beautifully summarized about the reasons and implications of this bill in his blog post. It is important we know about the legislation and the implications if it becomes a bill.

The creator of the www – Tim Berners Lee slams the legislation itself saying that the SOPA violates the human rights.

Clay Shirky, a writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies explains ‘Why SOPA is a bad idea’ in this TED video.

I hope more and more people become aware of the what those in power are up-to.

Update: Indian govt is coming up with Privacy bill. Its interesting to note the (so called) experts -
http://cis-india.org/news/constitution-of-group-of-experts.

Signs – a short film

Signs is one of the 2009 Cannes Lions winners short story that depicts a love story without talking. The film portrays the effective use of signs in communication.
A beautiful film!

The director of this short film Patrick Hughes later directed a thriller film-Red Hill which received positive reviews.

Books via Flipkart

Last weekend I ordered 2 books via flipkart – The Winning Way by Harsha Bhogle & Anita Bhogle and Does He Know A Mother’s Heart? by Arun Shourie.

Harsha is the voice and face of Indian cricket. He has conducted over 300 corporate workshops along with his wife Anita Bhogle. Their book gives the learnings from sport for managers and is based on business knowledge drawn from the sporting world.

If you know Arun Shourie only as a cabinet minister in Bajpai government, you are wrong. He is the only Indian politician I know of who has written ample number of scholarly books and articles. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arun_Shourie#Bibliography. His latest book which I have ordered discusses the perennial question that has grappled mankind since eternity: “If there is a kind,compassionate,all-knowing God,how can there be extreme suffering in this world?”. Shourie analyses various religious scriptures in his quest for the answer to this question. The book is an also a personal narrative of a father whose son has been suffering from Cerebral Palsy since childhood (Shourie’s son Aditya is now 34 years old )and of a husband whose wife is a Parkinson’s Disease patient. The personal narrative is particularly heart wrenching.

I got the first book delivered within 2 business days of order apart from 35% discount on both these books.

More about these books will come soon on this blog. Stay tuned!

Keith Jarrett Solo Concert

Keith Jarrett is a pianist who performs both jazz and classical music. Here is Keith Jarret playing piano – a footage from “Keith Jarrett: Last Solo”, Tokyo ’84 Encore.

Notice 2 different streams of music- one prominent in background. Truly genius.

His position on whiskey

The politician says it all…

In 1952, Armon M. Sweat, Jr., a member of the Texas House of Representatives, was asked about his position on whiskey. What follows is his exact answer (taken from the Political Archives of Texas):

“If you mean whiskey, the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean that evil drink that topples Christian men and women from the pinnacles of righteous and gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, shame, despair, helplessness, and hopelessness, then, my friend, I am opposed to it with every fiber of my being.

However, if by whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the elixir of life, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer, the stimulating sip that puts a little spring in the step of an elderly gentleman on a frosty morning; if you mean that drink that enables man to magnify his joy, and to forget life’s great tragedies and heartbreaks and sorrow; if you mean that drink the sale of which pours into Texas treasuries untold millions of dollars each year, that provides tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitifully aged and infirm, to build the finest highways, hospitals, universities, and community colleges in this nation, then my friend, I am absolutely, unequivocally in favor of it.

This is my position, and as always, I refuse to compromise on matters of principle.”

Source: http://dailysalty.blogspot.com/2011/07/my-position-on-whiskey.html

I am professional member of ACM

I few days back i became professional member of ACM. The membership for one year just costs $20.

As a member I got permanent ACM membership card. I also got access to a ebooks of Books24x7, safari books and Element K Courses and loads of other resources for professional as well as personality development.

Do become a member of this society; the resources are truly useful.

Utility to list Programs in Add/Remove Programs

I wanted a simple utility to create a list of all programs listed in Add/Remove Programs on my laptop. I searched on net for the utility and got a vbscript code for the same. However I tweaked it to my personal taste. Here is the code:

strComputer = "."
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery("Select * from Win32_Product",,48)

For Each objItem in colItems
WScript.Echo objItem.Name
Next

Write this code in a text editor and save the file with the extension .vbs. Open command prompt, navigate to the directory where you saved the .vbs file. Type following command :

cscript temp.vbs  > temp2.txt

Open temp2.txt and you will see the list of programs as follows:

Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.8
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Feedback Tool
Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin
Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1
Adobe Common File Installer
…..

By default, cscript command displays a logo when the script runs under CScript. The logo, which appears prior to any of the output from the script, looks like this:Microsoft (R) Windows Script Host Version 5.6Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1996-2000. All rights reserved.

You can get rid of the logo using //nologo option as follows:

cscript //nologo temp.vbs  > temp2.txt

Limitation:

This utility lists the programs that were installed using Windows Installer. That was my requirement. You can tweak it to lists programs installed using other installers too.

More about the Win32_Product WMI class is given on MSDN.

.NET tools/projects on codeplex

Here are some of the open source projects/tools developed in .NET which are available on codeplex:

1)      Silverlight Audio Player

http://slaudioplayer.codeplex.com

2)      Managed Extensibility Framework – New in .NET framework 4.0, this framework can be used for creating extensible applications and components.

http://mef.codeplex.com

3)      MEF Visualizer Tool – Helps to see what is going on inside the MEF Composition Container. A visualization tool for MEF.

http://mefvisualizer.codeplex.com

4)      .NET Gadgeteer – a rapid prototyping system for pluggable modules in place of plugging in electronic devices. The end user site is at http://netmf.com/gadgeteer. To learn more, check out a Channel 9 Video on it.

http://gadgeteer.codeplex.com

Check out more on CodePlex.

Patterns

What Are Patterns? by Nello Cristianini

In the above video, the speaker talks about patterns, its history and the significance and usage of patterns.

Wikipedia quotes for Nello Cristianini-

Recent research has focused on the evolution on gene families in mammals, the automatic detection of reporting bias in media content, and the development of a unified framework for pattern analysis algorithms.

VideoLectures.net  has a collection of good videos on a variety of subjects.

if you are interested in patterns, read Turing pattern on Wired.com.

Yahoo! Big Thinkers India Series in Pune

Yahoo! Research conducts a series of lectures quarterly under the Yahoo! Big Thinkers India Series. The lectures are conducted in Bangalore, however for the first time Yahoo hosted the April 2011 lecture outside Bangalore, in LeMeridian hotel in Pune. The lecture titled ‘web retrieval: The surprising role of users’ was conducted by Yeolle Maarek -a senior Director of Yahoo! Research.

Yeolle explained the role of users in a pretty nice way-it reminded me of film 21 in which Professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) puts up a stupendous job in his opening scene of the class.

Although the session was scheduled on a weekday (yersterday), we went to attend the session. The session proved to be a catalyst to think about something that we as web users should care about and was a good lecture in terms of content as well as presentation rather than those boring  meetings. Apart from this, the attendees got a nice and heavy snacks-the snacks in LeMeridian was really tasty, a key chain and a Yahoo! diary:) I know some people came solely for these things

I hope the video of the session will be available on Bigthinkers site soon. The recorded sessions of previous lectures are available in the archives.