Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

I have recently installed a gear lock in my Honda City. Its a lock that immobilizes the gear so you can’t change gears and is supposedly more secure than the basic car locks.

I was playing with it and realized that even though the lock stopped you from changing gears it is still possible for you to drive the car. All you have to do is press the clutch when you start the car and then just drive slowly. It works if you have left the car in the 2nd gear, if its in the 4th gear then its a bit harder as you have to regulate the clutch also but its possible.

The easiest way around this issue is to leave the car in a gear that makes it impossible to move the car without removing the lock. i.e. if you are parking the car while facing a wall, leave the car in 2nd gear and if you are backing up to a wall or another car then leave it in reverse. So even when someone starts the car they can’t drive away because the only direction they can go in is blocked.

Just thought I should share this.

– Suramya

Yes, I couldn’t resist making a play on “All your base are belong to us”. 😉

All readers of this blog know that I don’t like DRM (Digital Rights Management) because it restricts access to books/music/media to specific systems and/or Operating Systems. The following news confirms all the stuff I dislike about DRM’d systems.

If a person bought music from the MSN Music store are only allowed to hear it on specific computers and devices. Whats so wrong about that? you ask me. Nothing much except that Microsoft is the one who controls the licensing server and they can decide to shut them down. In fact thats what is going to happen by the end of the summer, MS is going to shut down the MSN music licensing servers and after that no new computers can be authorized to play *your* music that you have paid for.

So lets say you have this laptop and have authorized it to play your music, a few months down the line its hard drive dies so you get a new one and want to transfer your music to the new laptop. Unfortunately you can’t do that, because the licensing servers have been shut down you can’t authorize the new system. So all the money you spent on ‘buying’ that music has been wasted.

In reality with DRM’d files you are not purchasing the music. You are renting it. Other people can decide weather they want to continue allowing access to these files or not. This is my problem with DRM.

Another example, I bought a book online from Fictionwise. It is DRM protected and the reader software only works on Windows. I have switched from a windows system to Linux so I can no longer read the book unless I convert it to another format.Which I can’t do because its illegal to break DRM.

So what can I do? Should I have to keep one machine running windows to read this book? Should I crack it? Buy another copy?

Would you agree to buy a car that would only run on specific roads? No? Then why do we allow DRM’d information that is only accessable on specific computers/OS?

Think about it.

Thanks to open… for the story.

– Suramya

Reporters Without Borders will hold the first International Day against Cyber-Censorship in exactly one month from now. You can take part in the first worldwide, live cyber-demo that will begin at 11 a.m. (Paris time) on 12 March and go on for 24 hours.

Come and demonstrate in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square or chant slogans in
support of Internet freedom in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. Everyone
will be able to create an avatar, choose a message and brandish it in one of
the countries that are “Internet enemies.” You can protest for 24 hours and
turn the Internet into a way to put pressure on the cyber-censors.

I will be taking part. You should too.

Source: Newswire.ca

Reporters Without Borders Website: http://www.rsf.org/

– Suramya

Steve Jobs was in news a few days ago for his comment stating that Kindle will fail because Americans don’t read anymore. Well.. If that was true it would cause a decline in sales but as Jobs apparently forgot there are a lot of other countries in the world and some of them contain people who do read a lot. Even if 1% of the world wide population bought the Kindle it would make it a smashing success. Which if I remember correctly Kindle is.

The other point is that the people who do read, read a lot. I have been a member of the Book forum the past few days and most of the members over there are people who read atleast a book a week, some like me read a book a day. Just to give you an idea of what quantities of books I am talking about here’s an example: since 26th Nov 2007 I have read 74 novels. This doesn’t include the comics & magazines that I have read. and there are other people who read like this at this forum.

I know that some of the kids nowadays think that reading books is not cool. But you only have to see the line of people waiting to purchase the latest Harry Potter book to see the number of people who do read. Whatever else I may say about the hype for Harry Potter it has made kids interested in reading. So no I don’t think reading is a dying art. I usually do my level best to encourage kids to read and my favorite gift (both to give and receive) is a book.

Though I am not a fan of the Kindle system. Its is a DRM laden system that could have been a lot better without it. I would rather get a PDA and use that to read books as I don’t see the point of buying a device just for reading books and have another device for your general computing needs. I would much rather have one device that does both. On that front I finally found a good e-book reader software for my phone. The screen size is small but it is sufficient to read a book one para at a time which is perfect for when I am stuck somewhere without a book to read and need to pass time. Mostly when I am stuck in traffic or waiting for someone.

Ok, its late at night and I am tired so I will stop rambling now…

– Suramya

The net connection was down the past two days so I caught up on some of the shows I wanted to watch and found this Gem. It is a British comedy that ran from 1990 to 1994. Its based in an old people home where Diana Trent and Tom Ballard are the major characters. Diana is an old “spinster’ (in her words) who complains about everything and makes the life of the manager of the old folks home very difficult with her sarcastic comments where as Tom is a kind person who is always cheerful and spends most of his time dreaming about adventures.

Together the both of them form an unlikely friendship and they constantly wreak havoc amongst the younger staff and management in the home. In one of the episodes the take off for a ride in Diana’s niece’s Farari and send the whole home in a panic while they are trying to locate them.

Much of the humour is derived from how the elderly are expected to behave in their old age and how many of the residents don’t want to settle down and Diana’s sarcastic comments which usually go something like the following:

Jane (One of the staff): What a beautiful day it is…
Diana: Its been raining for 5 hours straight… Whats so beautiful about that?

Or

Tom is talking about God to Diana
Diana: Whenever you talk about God why do you look at the tree tops? Is God a squirrel that lives on the top of the tree?

I like comedies like this where there is no slapstick humor (movies like American Pie) or stupidity so I usually can’t watch more than 10 mins of the so called comedy shows that are currently on TV. No one can be that dumb. Other Comedy shows which I liked are Mind your language, Yes Prime Minister, Jaban Sambhal ke (Hindi version of Mind your language), I Dream of Jeannie and similar shows…

Anyways if you get the chance do watch the show. You might like it. More information on the show is available at the show’s Wikipedia page.

– Suramya

A little while ago the iPhone was released with a lot of fanfare for a very limited audience located in the US who would agree to be locked in an AT&T contract for two years. Almost as soon as it was released hackers everywhere starting taking it apart to get it to work with other carriers. After a lot of trial and error a method was found that didn’t require taking the phone apart and a lot of people installed it. If I had an iPhone I would have installed it, just so that I could use *MY* phone as and when I wanted to.

Then Apple went ahead and released a patch that turned the hacked iPhones (and a lot of unhacked ones) into bricks or very expensive paperwieghts. It may be legal for them to do this because of the User Agreement that people signed when they bought the phone but it sure isn’t ethical. They are now under a bunch of lawsuits because of this and if the courts agree it was wrong of them to brick the iPhones then and only then can the users expect to be reimbursed.

iPhoneSIMFree, the first company that offered an unlocking tool, has released a paid upgrade that resolves the issue and unlocks the iPhone once again but even this is a hack which uses a buffer overflow bug in Safari to run the fix. This lets the users use their iPhones but users of the fix should beware that at any time Apple might fix this issue and include the fix in the next mandatory patch that they push out, converting the phones into expensive paperweights once again…

Now, you might ask how does open source come into the picture? Well, if the iPhone OS was open source this would have never happened. Anyone and everyone would have the right to install whatever Apps they wanted and use it wherever they want.

This risk is there in any closed system. Whats stopping Microsoft from deciding that your data needs to be tracked and installing a patch on your system that lets them do just that? Infact a few weeks ago they installed an updated version of the Windows Update Service on computers that had the updates disabled. What is to stop them for doing it again and how many more of these backdoors are there?

In an Open OS like Linux or Open Solaris, a lot of people look at the code and at some time or other every line of the code has been looked at. This makes it a lot harder to hide backdoors in the OS itself (not impossible. Just very hard), which is not the case with Windows and iPhones. You have to do it the hard way and reverse engineer the system (which is against the law BTW)

Google is rumored to be working on an Open Source OS for the Phones, even Nokia and Samsung are working on an Open Mobile OS. So open systems are the way to go.

If you are looking for alternatives to the iPhone check out this article from Tech republic where they list out the top 10 alternatives to the iPhone. I am drooling over the Nokia N99 (16 GB of internal memory, a 3.2-inch screen, a 9-way joystick control, GPS, WLAN, and a 7.2-megapixel camera that lets you shoot DVD quality movies) right now. That will probably be my next phone. There are a couple of Linux phones out there too but most are still in the development stage… Lets see when they come out.

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

The US Navy apparently has too much money because it can now afford to spend money on rebuilding perfectly good buildings that happen to look like a swastika from air.

Few symbols are as well known in the world today as the swastika and while it is common perception that the swastika is a German Nazi Party symbol, it is in fact far older that the Nazi Party. The Swastika dates over 3000 years which makes it older than the ancient Egyptian symbol for life, the Ankh and the Christian Cross. The most ancient Swastikas have been discovered in Susa in Persia, Mohenjodaro and Harappa in Pakistan and Sammarra in Mesopotamia. It was also used frequently by the Greek and the ancient Indian’s. Infact the German’s actually modified the Swastik before using it.

In Hinduism (especially in AryaSamaj, which is the branch that I somewhat follow) the swastika is one of the most holy symbols after the Om symbol and is used everywhere, in Temples, Houses (My house has a couple), weddings.

Just because the Nazi’s used it doesn’t mean it should be banned. If thats the case then we should also ban the cross as its used by Neo Nazi’s, White Supremacists and Skin heads (Some info here); the celtic Cross (Also used by White Supremacists). In fact every major religious symbol has been used by hate groups. So why aren’t the rest banned? They should be if the follow the same logic that we use to ban the Swastika.

Yes, they should ban it where its being used to spread neo-nazi propaganda but stuff like this doesn’t make sense. There are better ways to spend money.

Source: The Raw Feed: Google Earth Forces Navy to Fix Swastika Buildings

– Suramya