Problem 1: IP

I have started a small series about the problems I think about regularly and have found no answers yet. Here's the first installment:

For all the non-ComSci folks out there, IP= intellectual property. Its the buzzword used by everyone these days to protect their innovation.

Intellectual Property is the basis of patents, licenses, copyrights and everything guarding unauthorized use of knowledge. If I be audacious enough to proclaim that knowledge should not be hoarded and should be made freely available to all, the age old argument of "reward for innovation" crops up.. nobody can innovate with an empty stomach and it would definitely be bAAAAd to have some smart ass marketing guy steal your years of research and create a million dollar startup out of thin air.

The situation is worse than it seems to be. This became visible to me when I left the academia. Without the academia's massive library at my disposal I need to have ACM and IEEE subscription to get a decent article on any advanced topic. If all the work done by the academia is such a closely guarded secret, how can they even complain about the growing divide between the industry and itself? I refuse to pay $20 for a single paper!! I have been meaning to check the latest in digital search trees and all google, ask.com and yahoo search engines leads me to is some totally shallow ppt or to citeseer, which inturn redirects me again to ACM/IEEE.... Arrrghh

Let me stop picking on academia for a second and focus on the rest of the world. Piracy (of ideas, content) exists when supply does not match the demand. Apple is cribbing about fake iPhones in China, had they launched it there(one of the fastest growing economies), they wouldn't have lost the market . Software piracy falls in the same category.. its very rampant in India, being an Indian I can tell that no one would pay $300 for a genuine copy of Windows on $400 machine that they assembled at home. Most of the sales guy tend to concentrate on only the local markets.. bad strategy in my opinion.

We live in a predominantly closed society. If everything was open, we would have a better chance of surviving the future... Just like Maemo and Ubuntu were spawned off from Debian, some new and better OSes would have spawned from Windows(XP?) and OSx. We would have better algorithms and the knowledge distribution would have been uniform rather than spiked throughout the world. This is not to say that you wont have cheap knockoffs of a Macbook pro.. but atleast it will give Apple/MS an incentive to innovate.. it will be a tougher competition, not lack of it.

Gadget bonanza...

A week ago on Black Friday, I purchased a Canon Rebel XT DSLR camera. It's not the coolest camera on earth, but it is the perfect entry level camera for a hobbyist and amateur photographer like me and fits smugly into my budget too. I had been busy for the past few days getting acquainted with all its features, terminology and the sheer number of settings to be made to take a sellable pic. Since I hardly get any time these days, I was taking a long time to get "OMG" pictures..

Just when I thought I had my share of toys.. I got another shiny one.. Nokia N800. At Mailshell, we have an annual game event when we play some RPG and the whole company plays against the bots or someone online as a team..but the trouble was that the developers almost never had the "right" operating system and it took ages to get the games working on all the machines.. The CEO, Tonny, decided to give everyone a common platform, a Nokia N800.

Its a neat little piece of hardware running a modified version of Debian. Unfortunately Tonny underestimated the geekdom in the development team :P. The CTO flashed the device and upgraded the OS to a newer kernel. I installed ssh, opened an xterm on it and was apt-getting away to glory, started pairing it with all the bluetooth devices I had access to (keyboard, cell phone)... i.e we did everything, but played games on it. The damn thing wouldn't connect (mostly because we had just hacked the stuff to run on the beta OS)... nevertheless it met its purpose.. we hacked away as a team :D.

I can hardly wait for the weekend to really get dirty with it.. for starters I will install a sniffer on it with crackers and keyloggers to see how much data I can gather during one casual stroll to the neighboring Starbucks :P .. just kidding.

What's going on?

I was just reading my past few entries and realized a dip in content quality and quantity. Most of you would have assumed that after joining the workforce my life has become monotonous with me working from 9 to 5 and having an early dinner and sleeping early at 10 (ew ew.. bored guy cooties) . I assure you that is not the case... After a bit of soul searching I have come up with a list.

1. I am in CA dude!! I have been exploring this place for the past 6 months. There were hardly any weekends when I was home. San Deigo, LA, SF etc etc.. so less time with my computer during weekends.
2. Joined the workforce so no time during the weekdays.. of course you would argue that I am not working for the whole day, but there is something about f*ing with your brain for eight hours that renders it useless for the rest 12 hours... I dont even bother to log in to my IM.
3. I have CABLE now.. after 6 years without the tube, its back to ruin my schedule. It has taken the time away from reading, music listening, podcasts and other activities that caused info overload and instead made me addicted to useless comedies, thrillers and reality shows.. the writer's strike has come as a blessing.. no matter how hard I try I cant resist it.
4. Travel does not excite me much.. I have seen the tallest trees in Yosemite, ice capped dormant volcano from a height of 15000 feet during free fall, world famous waterfall(Niagara).. so any new landmark has a pretty high bar to cross to make it to my blog.
5. Linux.. is ready for prime time. There is hardly any tinkering I need to do with it.. makes me almost miss the RH7 days. So there is no interesting hack to boast about.
6. I hardly check out any new softwares these days.. few years ago I used to test almost all the linux versions that used to hit the magazines, try all the new audio players etc.. am pretty content with my ubuntu and Debian boxes... plus am working with my own software so any free non-braindead moment is meant just for my stuff.
7. My adult life has adulterated my innocent little geeky life. You know you are in a mess when you keep track of bills, taxes, policies and loans :(
8. I can hardly use my blog with an open mind... there is alway an HR, relative , friend watching.. waiting to get offended.
9. Lastly.. I finally got a DSLR and am trying my best to tame the beast.. but the instructional books and videos say that it will take weeks for me to master the basic modes :( .. assuming I am clicking everyday!!
10. I didn't like the idea of a 9 item list.. so this is the 10th one, just for the heck of it.
    

Call of the wild

So after a month of nightmares and living in constant fear of escaping the orbit of earth(yeah.. I feared that the most.. weird).. I finally sky dived at Monterey. It was an experience I'll cherish for life. Big cheers to Bay Jump. The tandem masters and the photographers had made me super comfortable and were totally professional with 1000+ jumps under their belt.
Now that I did it, I find myself wondering why did I do it... I am definitely not an adrenaline junkie , nor was I "not scared" of jumping.. probably I was just arrogant about doing it.. more arrogant than I was scared.

The jump was from a height of 15000 ft and the chutes came up at 5000ft. Thats a free fall of 10000 ft. It took about 1.5 minutes to cover that distance, 15-20 secs of which were wasted in shouting, screaming and getting used to the fall. In the remaining few seconds I just felt numb, not scared.. just plain numb, and appreciated the beauty that engulfed my pshyche. The scenery was breathtaking.. mountain peaks rising from the clouds, birds flying below me, the bay with its extraordinarily sparkly water and just the visible curvature of the earth... neither words nor any photograph can do justice to that.
Check out this video.. I look scared to death(which is about 10% how I actually felt.. kudos to the videographer) and my vest got fluffed up giving my tummy an extraordinarily rotund appearance.

Email scam!

Many of you guys would have recieved spam mails by some rich guy in Nigeria (or some such place) wanting to offload money and asking your help in doing so. I was not sure of the consequences if I had gone with the scheme. What could the money transfer do to me anyway? I learnt it the hard way.. well I did not goof up.. instead it was my roommate who did it few months ago.

Few months ago, before moving out(after graduation), we decided to sublease our house. My room mate, lets call him XYZ, took the initiative of finding someone. He posted ads on craigslist, various user groups, mailing lists and what not. Finally one day he victoriously declared that he had found a hot blonde from London who wanted to move in a month early and was ready to pay $4000 (our rent was $810.. I smelled rat but who was I to dampen his spirit). Quite surprisingly, within a week or so he got a check for $4000. Since that was gonna be shared amongst us, I kept my suspicion under covers and joined the celebration.

(This part of the story was revealed to me after it happened).
A week later XYZ was contacted by the girl saying that the rent was not fair and that she had checked out various websites and wanted a fair deal. Being the "decent guy" XYZ is.. he agreed to pay $3000 back and since, supposedly the English blonde was low on cash, XYZ money ordered it to her. And then the inevitable happened.. the cheque bounced. XYZ got conned of $3000 which ended up eating up all his savings and cancellation of his credit cards connected with that account. The bank did not want to help in the case of an international fraud.. neither did the police. The school lawyer could only help so far as filing a report with the police and putting up a public notice letting students know that email scam threat is very real.

As sorry I was for XYZ, I was amused and curious as hell. I asked him to forward me few of the emails. Email scammers are not as high tech as spammers so analyzing the emails was quite easy. All I had to do was to do a geo lookup of the MTA ip address. The IP addresses pointed to some location in Mexico.. not London.

Generally these cases go unnoticed because people dont want others to know. I called XYZ yesterday and he told me that he saved 5 other friends from similar scams. These scams are not as uncommon as you think... so beware of trolls on various public lists.