Michael Jackson MJ is dead!

I was flying to Helsinki from Copanhagen on the morning of Friday 26th June, 2009 and I read the scroll bar on BBC which gave the sad news. I could not believe it for a moment and thought it might be some other Jackson but sadly it was the MJ I knew. I have been hearing MJ since 1987 as far as I can remember. It was a great thing in the sense that I was in India and we didn’t have any medium except for the national TV and radio which rarely broadcast any international songs as such. My neighbor used to love break dancing and had a collection of MJ albums and thats where we listened and tried to dance. After I had access to internet, roughly by 1996-97, I was able to see his videos and watch his songs on MTV that finally began broadcasting in similar time frames.

I loved MJ for his passion and his stubbornness to do things as he would like to even if it was unthinkable and out of the world. In fact he was the first person that I know of who defied god. He was born black but wanted to be a white skinned guy. As abnormal as the thought sounds, he had a passion and willingness to sacrifice everything that he had from family to community to his own individual self. He believed in it and went through the pain and hell to finally achieve what he wanted. That is the kind of dedication and commitment that is required to be successful. The same also reflects in his songs and in his life. Of course he had his own share of criticism which you can find on other sites a many but the most important part was that he was the king of rock and became what he wanted to become.

A great inspiration for everybody around. May god bless his soul.

Surprising News for Seals!

The 2009 Canadian seal slaughter has officially ended, and we’re happy to tell you that this year, about three-fourths of the seals who were scheduled to be bludgeoned or shot to death during the annual war on seals were spared. More than 300,000 of these gentle creatures were scheduled to die during the blood bath on the ice, but more than 200,000 seals did not suffer the cruel fate that Canada had intended for them. They did not have to feel the pain of having their skull bashed in or feel what it’s like to have a hook stuck through their eye, cheek, or mouth—just so that their fur could be stolen for “fashion.”

This dramatic decline in the number of seals who were killed during the slaughter is largely because the price of seal fur has fallen over the years as the disgust over the slaughter increases. The European Union and the U.S. have banned seal products, and world leaders have spoken out against the massacre. Demonstrations from London to Hamburg and Los Angeles to Toronto have made the headlines, and kind people all over the world have sent a strong, united message that the seal slaughter must end.

While sealers bludgeoned and killed far fewer baby seals than they have in years past and people around the world are speaking out against the slaughter, our campaign is far from over. PETA will be fighting on for these defenseless animals until the Canadian government backs down and ends the slaughter for good, but we still need your help.

Please seize this opportunity to urge Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee to use their clout to help stop the slaughter, since all eyes are on Canada as it prepares to host the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Visit OlympicShame2010.com for new ways that you can help save seals, and keep fighting with us until we win this battle for mother and baby seals on the ice!

Support Peta!

Slaughterhouses: Where Racehorses Go to Retire…

https://secure.peta.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=2103&JServSessionIdr011=i71q1cwvf2.app303b

Every year, hundreds of thoroughbreds from the U.S. are sold to stables in Japan, where 90 percent of all horses end up in slaughterhouses. In most Japanese slaughterhouses, horses meet a frightening death. They are killed, cut apart, and end up as food for dogs and humans.

During a PETA undercover investigation inside Japan’s largest horse slaughterhouse in Kumamoto, we captured video footage of a thoroughbred’s last minutes. The horse is sprayed with water before slaughter—frightened and uncertain about what is happening. He panics, and at one point, just before being killed, he slips out of his halter and escapes inside the slaughterhouse, only to be caught—and killed—minutes later.

As many as 20,000 horses were slaughtered in Japan in 2008, partly because of overbreeding of thoroughbreds in the U.S., where racehorses are exploited as disposable commodities. Tens of thousands of foals are produced each year for the greedy racing industry, but there is no plan for what to do with them when their racing days are over.

Even horseracing stars can end up in a slaughterhouse. Kentucky Derby winner Ferdinand was sold to a Japanese breeder and a few years later, when they were done with him, he was sold to slaughter. During our investigation in Japan, PETA also discovered that Derby and Preakness winners Charismatic and War Emblem are at breeding farms in Japan right now. With their useful breeding days winding down, where will they end up? Learn more about the overbreeding of racehorses on our blog The PETA Files.

Look at the graphic horror on this link: http://www.petatv.com/tvpopup/Prefs.asp?video=Japan_horse_peta_short

Give your support to PETA and love the animals and environment around.

Source Code vs. Object Code…

Recently I was explaining a non-technical colleague of mine the differences between a source code and object code in our embedded platform and how we treat it from a legal perspective. I then searched the web for other related information and I found an excellent link which talks about expressiveness of the code be it a source or object or binary code. I totally agree with the interpretation in that paper.

It can be found on the following link: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/object-code.txt

I hope my company’s legal department does not start reading this otherwise we won’t be able to sell anything in terms of software except for hardware and the software that we do sell would then attain source code level purchase agreements even for binaries making it highly costly for our customers.

Anyways, it is a nice read. I am copying a gist of the article in here. Read the whole if you are more interested. I have also posted a forum topic on the FunComputing Forums at http://www.naresh.se/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2 where you can discuss more about it…

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The lessons that should be drawn from the above (i.e. article) are:

1) All computer code is human readable. Some forms are simply more convenient to read than others.

2. All computer code is expressive. Many of the ideas expressed in C code are also expressed in the assembly language code that results from compiling that C code, and again in the binary machine language that is the output of the assembler. Some content may be lost, e.g., source code comments are typically not preserved in object code, although variable names may be. But some ideas that are only implicit in the source code may be made more apparent in the object code, such as how a particular sequence of actions should be best expressed in terms of processor operations in order to obtain maximum performance from the machine.

3) All computer code is executable. In some instances it may be advantageous to transform the code into another form first, but transformation is by no means mandatory. An interpreter can be employed instead. Interpreters are in common use in computer systems.

4) “Source” and “object” are relative terms, not absolute categories.

5) The file DECSS.EXE is a particular expression of an algorithm for converting video files from one format to another. It expresses the same algorithm as the C code from which it was compiled. DECSS.EXE is coded in a binary language that is more tedious to read than the C code, but more efficiently executable by a Pentium processor. These are differences in degree only. If C code is protected speech because of its expressive content — and one can argue that a computer program is nothing but expressive content — then code written in a binary machine language that expresses the same algorithm should not be regarded any differently.

Missing class members ImageList in .NETCF

Recently I was trying to enhance CHMReader (http://code.google.com/p/chmreader-smartphone/) and wanted to use an image against CHM files which were shown in the FileBrowser dialog. The project was compiled for Windows Mobile 5 & .NETCF 2.0. I upgraded it to Windows Mobile 6 and .NETCF 3.0.  It is using a TreeNode class (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.treenode.aspx) which has the possibility to show such an image besides the name by using the ImageIndex property. This ImageIndex comes from an associated ImageList (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.forms.imagelist.aspx). The problem with .NETCF is that some of the (easier) members are not available. To add an image to this list, we need to use the Image Class (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.image.aspx).  And as can be seen, we only have FromHBitMap (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.drawing.image_members.aspx) available besides FromStream. We need to do a lot of things to draw an image from HBitMap so I decided to use FromStream.

The code is really simple.

FileStream strm = new FileStream(“CHMIcon.ico”, System.IO.FileMode.Open);
Bitmap bm = new Bitmap(strm);
imgList.Images.Add(bm);

This code compiled great. But when I tried to run it, I got exceptions such as not enough memory. I checked the icon file and it was around 3Kb. I googled for it and I didn’t get any straight answers. I finally decided to change the icon to jpg format instead and low and behold, everything started working perfectly.

Nobody in Microsoft told us that we cannot load icon files! Well, I tell it to you now, you cannot load ico files using this method. I wasted a couple of hours doing this before I decided to change format. An out of memory exception does not give much information and what the hell, I had my super computer resources available so there was no way it could go out of memory on an emulator. Microsoft needs to improve. Provide it in the MSDN for gods sake.

Anyways, no more ranting now since the stuff works finally. So you guys take care. The solution is more simpler then it looks.