the chicken came first

picked up from Arnab's blog.


The chicken came first



Insanely creative

honour among thieves and other things

I read A twist in the tale by Jeffrey Archer s few months ago. Finding it good, I picked up another book of his that I found. Honour Among Thieves however turned out to be a sad story that simply loses steam after having built up quite some tension in the first 400 pages or so. To simply massacre villages after villages of poor Iraqi's and then tell
the reader that all was in vain is a little sad. And add to that, the bigger fact that 'poor' Saddam is no longer in power and his 'tyranny' has got nothing left to do in Iraq now, it was my mistake to have picked up the book. It is interesting to note that, the tyranny of dictators, be it Hitler or Saddam or whoever is almost like the staple food of fiction writers and pretty much every writer of thrillers has done one such book.

Software Patents in Europe

boom!
bomm! boom!
The software patents issue has come to a bad bad peak right now with loads and loads of free software coming under the scanner of those hawks from the big companies in Europe.
Europe was like the last stand and if Europe is taken, all is lost. The gravity of the situation doesn't hit immediately and not especially when someone like me writes about it.

This is what mplayer's site says

Closed for patent infringement

This site has been shut down because of numerous patent violations in MPlayer. The other free software Multimedia players are next.

The European commission has just passed its directive on software patents, violating democratic rules and procedures to the sole benefit of big non-European corporation and Ireland and to the detriment of small and medium sized businesses (which comprise 99% of the European software industry) and free software.

The European parliament will now be taking the last stand against software patents in a voting for which an absolute majority is needed. Such a majority is hard to come by in a parliament with a low attendance level.

But not all is lost yet as long as you decide it is time to make a difference and take action. This is our last opportunity to fend off software patents worldwide, there will be no second chance for the foreseeable future. Contact your local EU representatives and educate them why software patents are bad and why they must attend that parliament session to vote against them. For in-depth information and starting points to get active visit software patent page of the FFII (Foundation for a
Free Information Infrastructure) and NoSoftwarePatents.com.

Wish us luck, we will need it.

posting through email

blogger allows me to post through email
this is pretty cool, except i am not too sure if the formatting will stay
right

life on the slow track

most people live on the fast track, me chooses to sleep on the slow track.
that is pretty much what i've been doing for the past few days. been reading "the complete hitchhikers guide" and falling asleep regularly. to add to the lethargy thursday was a day off (having bunked the day's only llecture at 8:30 in the morning :)
people have been asking why i've been underground for such a long time now. maybe it's got something to do with my turning into a werewolf :D
anyway, been reading an enormoue amount of stuff recently. books i've read recently
catch-22 (joseph heller?), da vinci code and digital fortress (dan brown), rock star (?), the complete hitchhikers guide ... , hms ulysses (mac lean)
dan borwn seems to be this author that got lucky with one book of his. all his other books are very similar in feel to the overly successful 'da vinci code'. and alistair mac lean has a grip on me that will not break ever. i read ulysses again after many years and by the time i finished it, i was dazed.