The Pirate Bay Investigation

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The Pirate Bay - New LogoApparently you can get the documents for the investigation relating to whether The Pirate Bay is illegal or not by paying a large sum (about 40 grand). What’s their opinion on this?

They cost 6050 SEK for all of them (about 1000 USD). Our view of it? Why not just make a PDF, make a torrent of the PDF and seed it. We know a perfect place you can do that for free, and nobody would have to pay for all those pages of investigation. And a hell of a lot of trees would be saved… And even though the information in the investigation might be a bit personal at times (alcohol intake, sex addictions) we’re not suing the police for commercially exploiting the material they took from us without permission.

Ha ha, unbelievably awesome! The thing about file-sharers is that you can get stuff that is so incredibly hard to find today so easily there. They’ve got all sorts of rare movies, comics (some of which don’t even sell here) and books (some of which you suddenly need a few days before the exam). Major props to these guys!

Controversial Advertisements

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I was just browsing the BBC Feed and came upon this article about a controversial RyanAir ad. It’s pretty obvious what they’re trying to pull here, but frankly, it’s not all that offensive or anything. I’ve always wondered about people who get offended by stuff like this – what are they thinking? Perhaps, Oh my god, teenage girls will think they’ll get low fares if they dress like that! or maybe They’re insulting the dignity of the young women of the country. They are against British culture.. I can just imagine what would happen if those ads were displayed here. Actually, I don’t have to, I just know there’ll be more car accidents.

We have a strange dichotomy, there’ll be women in wet saris running around trees and wrapping themselves provocatively around the male leads of the movies but the slightest word about anything and cultures will suddenly become offended, women will become insulted and the world will go wrong. What a pathetic bunch of desperate people, here’s a point for you sociologists – this is what happens to people who can’t get any and really really want some. Face it, sex sells, and you like it that way. It’s like those little kids who do something and then act all sanctimonious about the whole thing in the hope that they’ll be the last person suspected.

Of course no one’s falling for RyanAir’s hilarious story explaining just why they aren’t going to be withdrawing the ad. If anyone goes out into the London streets dressed like that they’ll get frostbite, and pneumonia, and just die of exposure.

Here’s the offending ad.

Firefox Extension: Next Please

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This extension is a godsend for anyone who’s used to Opera’s Fast Forward feature. Basically what it does is recognise if a particular page has many sections, and then you can just use the “Next Please” button to skip to the next page. For example, if you’re reading a particular topic in a forum and you want to move to the next page of replies, you can just hit that button and go there instead of having to scroll down and click the link. Some of those pages that have a navigation scheme like: 1 2 3 4 and that’s really hard to navigate because you have to get the pointer just there and that’s painful on a touchpad.

The extension’s called ‘Next Please’. It’s really useful, now to see if it’s possible to use mouse gestures to get the task done.

The Joker is Dead

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Heath Ledger, the fellow who played The Joker in the latest Batman film has been found dead. Jesus that’s so sad, man. The inevitable facing-off-with-Batman jokes aside, it’s weird that people can die of an overdose of pills that were prescribed to them. I mean, is the normal dosage so close to the dangerous dose that it’s easy to kill yourself by taking too much? This explains that article I read a couple of days ago in some national medical journal about hundreds of thousands of people being admitted to hospital in the US because of incidents related to their being treated for something else in the first place. There was a reference to Israeli studies that showed that mortality rates dropped at a hospital during a doctor’s strike or something like that. Madness.

Ledger as The Joker

Justice comes albeit delayed

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They got them in the Bilkis Bano case. Finally. I know it takes time, but 6 years is long and if we think it isn’t then there’s something wrong with the system. I hope those psychopaths get put behind bars for ever. Sadly the guys who incited them will probably get away. Such is life, we must feed on the small fish sometimes.

Orkut – Send Scrap To All

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You know, we wish each other on all sorts of occasions, sometimes we call up a friend after a long while just to wish them on the beginning of a New Year. We do all of this because we care, or that’s the idea anyway. But tell me something, does it still show that you care if you replace that phone call with an automated calling machine that just calls each number in your phone book and says, “Happy New Year, X, I wish you a prosperous new year, and hope that you’ll enjoy yourself.” Man, that would suck. How different is this?

Orkut - Send Scrap To All

Of course I have to admit, it’s better than nothing. At least you get some greetings instead of none from people who you’re not likely to meet. Incidentally, guys, you’re all engineers you know, you’re all taught how to program in a hundred different languages, I don’t get why you don’t edit those scripts so that they stop appending the advertisement at the bottom. I mean, it’s trivial.

Deccan Chronicle Classifieds

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Pipe pointed these out to me. They’re hilarious! I never thought you could ever have fun reading the Classifieds but Deccan Chronicle has managed to break the stereotype once more. Let’s see what they advertise:

  1. Male Gorgeous: Male to Male only. Head to Toe complete relaxation body massage, Hygienic North, South India masseurs anytime.
  2. Body Massage: Male to Male (Hotels/Doorstep). Complete Relaxation. Good Looking Guys. High Profile. Only Male Service.
  3. Mohini Friendship Club: Hi profile male/female contact for nice, real friendship (for earning).

There are hundreds more of these Friendship Clubs, each of them offering nice, sober friendships (for earning) and many more massage parlours all offering exclusive male-to-male massage only from hygienic, good looking guys to relieve tension. Ha ha, yeah right.

Some photos I took while in college

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I stay in the college residential halls for a couple of hours and have lunch sometimes. Last time I was in Selaiyur Hall, having nothing to do I snapped a couple of shots of college. The camera on the phone is funny and has some funny settings, if you don’t change the default you’ll get pictures that look like the aliens are landing. Yes I just ran a script to resize some of them and then resized and put the rest in last, it shows doesn’t it? :D Design was never my forte.

Anyway, the point is, it’s a pretty nice looking college.

The Macbook Air

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Wow…

Macbook Air

I’m no Apple fan, but jesus, they make some beautiful stuff. Slightly less powerful than my current laptop and infinitely smaller for just 30,000 bucks more. I wouldn’t buy it even if I had the money and nothing to spend it on: stuff like this tends to break easy and I prefer rugged machines, but I can’t deny that it looks amazing. I wish I had 802.11n though.

In other news, I finally managed to move the old computer to the router and set it up as a headless server. It’s just sitting there, doing nothing at the moment but I plan on using it to download all my torrents and stuff. It’s got one non-working CD-ROM drive, so if you want to have a look at it you can. Also, keep away from Intex and Zebronics, they still fake ethernet cards claiming to be RTL8139D that are actually Silan Microsystems 92031. You can get them working properly with a little effort though. Such is life.

And Sun took over MySql? Interesting development.

EDIT:
And for the guy who came here searching for the driver for that NIC: Silan Microsystems Driver for Windows XP. You can also use it with ndiswrapper if you so wish. Have fun.

Vaikom Basheer – Perch – Moonshine and Skytoffee

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Moonshine and Skytoffee This Sunday, me and the family went for a play by Basheer performed by Perch at the Museum Theatre. Apparently my granddad used to tell my father Basheer’s stuff all the time, so the parents were rather enthusiastic about the whole thing. Pipe and Bikram were there too – gone out of their minds. Anyway, the show was actually pretty damn good, and remarkably low priced for such a nice job. The play itself is really nice, I wonder how much I’ve missed out from not reading Malayalam literature. That’s why it’s useful to know people like Samyuktha who’ll tell you about stuff like this and not reserve tickets when you ask for them :P

It was lots of fun and it had all sorts of memorable characters and the like, and though in the beginning it seemed a bit forced, after a while everyone just slipped into their parts and it went off really well. There were some nice bits where they came to the audience and played around with a few of the front seat people, having a little fun at their expense. Yep, it’s worth watching but unfortunately Sunday was their last show. You can, however, watch next week’s play Sangathi Arinhya: Same group, same time, same place. And yes, don’t worry, it’s in English.