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.

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.”

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.

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.

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).

As discussed in my post http://www.naresh.se/?p=5, I am trying to do a comparison between programs written in C++ and D. Why I am doing it is a question not to be asked but in any case, I am bored and would like to do something fun. I thought this is the nice way to have fun. We are going to write a Complex class and a main to test it and compare it with D. I am using Code::Blocks and mingW for C++ and Code::Blocks and Digital Mars D compiler for D. Saying that, read the previous post to know how to use Code::Blocks (CB) or RTFM.

Of course I am the critic reviewing the Raaz 2 movie by Mahesh Bhatt starring Imran Hasmi, …. , another actor and actress… What the fuck? What kind of critic am I when I don’t even remember the names of the actors/actresses in the movie? Well, never mind, infact after watching the movie, I felt that I had not only wasted 2.5 hours of my critical time but also wasted quite a lot of energy before the movie in speculation and raising serious expectations. So why am I wasting my time writing a review. Because there are lot of negative subtle messages in the movie which needs to be brought to light. Being an Indian and follower of Hindu religion, it amazes me that movies which are downright racist and making fun of the greatest religion in the world are made in India without any repurcursions neither from the media and nor from the people themselves. All of these does affect me since I am not living in India. Most of the people outside of India know about the great country from the movies which are produced there.

Recently I came across D programming language. It is the successor of c++ with some Java like features. Since I am a C/C++ lover, I have a stupid feeling when I start coding with either Java or C#. I still will give a try and see how many points does it gain on my scale. Though I haven’t seen any widespread use of D. D was invented by Walter Bright of DigitalMars in December 1999 (http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?WhatIsD).