BBC NEWS | Technology | Are Real and Apple playing fair?

To quote...

"And it does not get around the fact that fair use rights built into copyright law are being eroded by DRM technologies.If I buy a book or a CD, I can sell it, even though I only have a license to the words or music.

I cannot do the same with a downloaded music file, even though copyright law would let me, because the record companies have decided to take that freedom away from me."

American Food == Indian Heartburn

Learnt this the hard way but now I'm convinced - every time I eat American food at night, I have severe heartburn the following morning. Take for instance last night - I couldn't sleep till 3:30 and couldn't sleep beyond 8:30. A Pudin Hara tablet always douses the fire within but I've decided that if something (eminently avoidable) makes me pop a pill, it should be avoided - period. And yeah, I didn't eat like a glutton - I brought a box back home - gotcha there!

Making a case for MS on Linux?

While trawling the web this morning, I followed a link to this :article: on BW that made for interesting reading. I don't know if this is a possible course of action being considered by the management in the Office team but I can't see why MS would move along this path. The primary motivation behind investing in Office is to ensure that Windows licenses are sold too - the Windows OS and MS Office are symbiotic in that sense, the sales of one drives the sales of the other - buoying the company up.

But then again, MS makes a version of Office for Mac that many consider is far superior to its PC counterpart - so Apple's OS X isn't a threat but Linux is? I don't think that's the motivation really - it's just that Linux just isn't a mature enough platform for MS to invest it's dollars into - IMO!

Arun's Birthday Pictures

So you wanted to know what a FARTY it was - look at the pictures - and these are the censored ones ;)

MSNBC - The New iPod

Just in time for my birthday ;) Here's a first look at Apple's new iPod. With ideas from the mini and a sleeker menu interface, this revision of the iPod will most likely cement its numero uno spot in the world of media player. Go Pod go...

Googlism for Manoj Mehta

"Manoj Mehta is living the good life"

Ha! Ha! Ha! And what are you up to? :)

Google Search: http

Guess which page is most synonymous with HTTP? You'll find out when you click Google Search: http

As my office-mate said, Google gets it right!!!!

How to have a good relationship?

I discovered the key to being happy in a relationship a couple of years ago and found this quote Eric Lippert's blog to be closest to my epiphany:

Riddle me this, Google:

"More generally: I've learned by bitter experience that it is a bad idea to predicate your own happiness on the behaviour of other people. It seems crazy, I know, but one of the best ways to have a good relationship with someone else is to first learn to be happy by yourself. Happy single people are highly attractive to MOTASs compared to desperate, depressed single people."

Interestingly, Madonna croones about this too in Secret:

You knew all along
What I never wanted to say
Until I learned to love myself
I was never ever lovin' anybody else

So there you have it, expert advice from a single man :)

Can't concentrate anymore and it's only Monday :)

Been TPing for the last 1/2 hour but have now decided to get out of office and come back later. It's too beautiful outside to miss out but what to do outside? I didn't bring my running shoes today (as if I would've run if I had 'em on) and no one is playing ultimate. But wait, I have a nice headache right now (it arrived out of the blue), the cause of which might be the sleep deprivation and alcoholism over the weekend. So the revised plan for the evening is sleep a bit, go yoga, lift weights and return to opeece. Snooze time...

MS set to become biggest Unix supplier ;)

vnunet.com - Unix to beef up Longhorn: "By including SFU in Windows, Microsoft could rapidly become the biggest supplier of Unix software if Longhorn proves a success, undermining traditional Unix vendors such as Sun, HP and IBM, as well as Linux vendors' enterprise offerings."

This is why I love M$... Rather than shy away from competitor territory, it does everything it can to first encroach and then conquer ...

The Cheaps Fartyyyy - July 09 2004

Mr Arun Kishan, kuxx meister and self-proclaimed lady-killer, turned 24 on the 8th of July. Hi, Hey, Please, Cheap!. We went to Buca Di Beppo on Thursday night (it was supposed to be a surprise but he found out thanks to Bizo) and got him totally wasted - many kudos to Syed, D and co for a bang-up job. Arun thought that the festivities for his birthday were done for - why wouldn't he, the entire day was real action-packed. Arun threw a fit about the fact that he wasn't gonna get a surprise, he watched Dodgeball (funny itself), the veggie food had beef in it and finally we only got charged for wine at Buca - total bill for 14 people == $65!!

So it was no surprise that said Arun was completely clueless about the party Bizo and I had planned for the night of the 9th of July - come on, how could he have a clue, I mean! And when he arrived to an apartment flashing with lights and bursting with people, he was totally surprised and maybe a tad overwhelmed. Around 35 people showed up and drank a whole lot of alcohol - 9 bottles of hard liquor and maybe 60 bottles of assorted beers and wine coolers. And they were all packed like sardines in my tiny 1 bedroom apartment, so you can imagine how little space there was to move :) And then at 11:40, the cops arrived - 'nuff said...

Fun facts from last night:
- Most guys were trashed, me included. I was so drunk that I walked over to Vijay's at 3am, barely ate 1/2 a bagel, returned home and tried to watch Finding Nemo before crashing off.
- Karand was drunk even this morning - apparently drinking the better part of a bottle of Bacardi doesn't do much for balance and motor control:)
- Ashley was ...
- Twenty people left my place around 1:15 to go to Fenix Underground - no one made it to Fenix :) Better still, they left the four most drunk people to fend for themselves :)

I'll depart with an anecdote that will give you a measure of how drunk we all were; Karand tried to jump onto a car's boot three times, without success I might add, after which the two of us just sat on the tarmac and laughed. The big question is, why are Manoj Mehta parties Outta Control ;)

BW Online | July 8, 2004 | A Six-Step Plan for Apple

Now if only Steve Jobs ever listened...

Ennui - it's everywhere and in everything!

Work isn't just lighting the fire - zilch interest in what I'm doing right now. I'm hanging around for the interesting work to come my way but honestly, integrating tests into a new test harness just doesn't do it for me. Call me a whiny ass but I'm just calling it like it is. I've decided though that instead of complaining about this all the time, I'm gonna suck it up and do my day job to the best of my abilities instead of wasting my time at work. I'll leave after eight hours and work hard on my other interests by night... Positive no?

As of right now, Yoga, Table Tennis and squash keep me going. Now to hit those AMD64 manuals ;)

Mozilla Flaw Lets Links Run Arbitrary Programs

So there is a security vulnerability in all Mozilla variants that doesn't exist in IE for Windows XP - the Pandora's Box is officially open. A fix has been provided by the Mozilla organization that blacklists the shell: protocol and can be obtained :here: For those of you who are adept at modifying about:config, the fix involves adding a new preference as contained in the patch for Bug 250180 like so:

pref("network.protocol-handler.external.shell", false);

Windows XP users can read about the Shell Protocol :here:

Testing Page Load Speed - A case study

Dave Hyatt was a prolific Mozilla developer till he was wooed by Apple's Safari team. I have followed his work and read his blog over the past couple of years and find his insights into reflow, rendering and Safari very interesting. Hyatt explains why Mozilla feels zippier, in that it seems to render pages faster than the current version of Safari and sometimes even IE. Read :link: for more information...

To San Francisco we shall go

And to Seattle we returned... Will post pictures up soon and you'll know why I'm missing the fun times already.

Initial fix for the Security Vulnerability in IE

Microsoft has provided a patch to the bug in IE that caused a storm this past week. The patch can be downloaded from this :link:. This bug created a huge storm in the Internet community and many websites suggested that people should browse the Internet using alternate browsers. Though I personally like other browsers, I believe that security vulnerabilities exist in every piece of software that has been written, some more than others. But living under the impression that your non-IE browser is a 100% secure is plain delusion...

242 PGY is 2 years old

I woke up early this morning and noticed that it was the 2nd of July - it's two years since I bought my first car ever. The car hasn't given me too many problems, you could say that I've brought more grief to it than the reverse - an accident on the 2nd of September that shouldn't have occurred. But the funny thing about an accident is though you don't need to be in one, you become sharper once you are...

I've written about the pleasures of driving my car in the past. Though I drive only 4 miles to work, it's one of the things I look forward to doing. And though people might contend that I don't push my car like I should, I know what I enjoy and trust me, I do! Oh this reminds me, need to get new license tabs, damn the system...

Spiderman - 2

That I am a superhero fan is a fact. That I have every episode of Smallville is a fact. But I didn't know how much I liked Spiderman; till last night when I didn't go see the first show of Spiderman-2 on the night of its release. Oh well, I got my superhero fix this evening. Mehra, Donna, Darwin, Chris, Guhan and I were enthralled for two hours by the adventures, mis-steps and escapades of the web slinger. And boy, was I entertained...

The sequel has all the essential elements of the original only in larger measure. More angst, more and better action, more melodrama, a bad-ass villain and more laughs what with slapstick humour rearing its head in the final reel of the movie. The coming of age of Spiderman - here's a synopsis. Peter is suffering from existential angst, fighting the ennui that his day job, academics and life in general bring him. His real life didn't contain the thrills and spills of his life as Spiderman and his attempts at finding a balance went to naught. Mary Jane getting married to another man didn't help the situation much - the quagmire affecting his ability to produce web. I don't know about you but growing up was hard for me and being in love made it harder. I could relate with a lot of episodes in the movie because of the angst I've been feeling of late. It's weird but I feel so much better after seeing the movie because there is hope - Peter snapped out of it, so can I!

Then there is Doc Ock - a villain worthy of praise and eventually, sympathy. The movie ties many of the loose ends of the story and sets the tone for the third installment, due in 2007. The only issue I had with the movie was the number of times Spidey was unmasked but it did take the story forward, so be it. I'd give the movie a 9 out of 10 and recommend it to everyone as a must see, regardless of whether you're a Spiderman fan or not. And if you are a fan, trust me, the movie is top notch. As a departing note, I don't think I can enjoy watching Superman fly after seeing Spidey web sling - Spidey has so much more pizzazz compared to the monotonously surfing Superman.

Update: I saw Spiderman-2 a second time today and it's so mushy - it's insane. I wish there were more action sequences... :()