District 9 – A Review…

Last night I watched the movie District 9 (D9) and I was positively happy to have invested my time in watching the movie. It deals with quite a lot of issues about human kind, its so called humanity and the plights of so called aliens. In one form or another it shows the fight that exists between one so called well to do community and another. When the story is applied in another context we  see the same behavior repeated across various factions of the world and society in general.

Let me give you a brief of the story. An alien aircraft appears on top of Johannesberg in Africa one day. People are awed and expect things with light, sound, etc. to happen. But nothing happens, so humans force their way into the ship to find a huge number (a million something) of starving, disoriented aliens. They are given shelter in an area known as District 9. The story goes from here to tell how humans were afraid of them, how some lawless aliens created problems with establishing proper relations with humans, etc. After about 20 years, a huge relocation event is planned for the aliens to move from District 9 to District 10. And everything else happens during this phase in the story. To cut short, humans who don’t know those aliens (prawns) are intimidated, terrified or consider them plain stupid and treat them like an animal.

Everybody forgets that they were a higher form of intelligence who could space travel in such large numbers as well as have advanced weaponary.  Some of the other humans ofcourse were playing on these poor creatures by selling them catfood and getting their weapons in return. But doesn’t all these just show how fickle humanity is? Time and again we have noticed it with the greeks, romans, muslims, hitler, etc. All of these at one point of time or another treated the other kind as the humans treat aliens in the movie. Humanity is just a good excuse for a chosen few to enslave and abuse others. I really felt pretty attached to the aliens/prawns after watching the movie. As well as looking at the very real face of humanity and human kind was terrifying. Makes you feel that humanity is a farce and human beings are just another species of animals without any intelligence whatsover.

It is one thing to do so against another species and it is horrific to do so against your own kind. Think about the holocaust, crusades, inquistions, etc. and it really is disappointing to see such horrors transpired on human kind by a select few individuals to satisfy the lust for power/sex for a select few individuals. Spewing venom against people who are of a different kind, different color, different race, different religion, different culture, etc. is just not human. But I see it happening even now. People in US for example are in this economic times afraid that their jobs will be taken away from them. You can find a whole lot of URLs which point to their fear. They want the H1B’s canceled and only Americans employed in America.

Well well, just musing on humanity anyways… But all in all, it is a very good movie and I am looking forward to its second part which I guess will be produced since one of the prawns went back and promised to come back in 3 years to rescue our hero and change him back to human! Didn’t I tell you that the person who is trying to evacuate district 9 accidentally spills a chemical fuel that starts the process of mutating him into the same alien race whom he was trying to evacuate? Anyways, now you know most of the story. Go ahead and watch it. You would not regret :).

Exploding IPhones!

Sorry to pick on IPhone but I hate cults and iPhone users are one such followers of the cult. Also known as Steve Jobs cult. I think he is a good man but as with all good man, wants to start his own religion 😉

Anyways, the latest in iPhone is Exploding iPhones. Look at the link below:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Exploding-iPhones-Are-Latest-Headache-for-Apple-618978/?kc=EWKNLNAV08202009STR4

Now the best part is the EU is giving comments and getting involved into such allegations. I hope they give a kick in Steve Job’s A** as they did with Microsoft. iPhone also has issues with applications such as GV, google voice, etc. and again they do not have a policy of how to accept and reject applications. They do it on their own whim like a dictator and that is what I hate the most about it.

And as always, Apple is not reachable for comments. And as cult members, any person using iPhone or Mac will instantly come to the rescue of Mr. Jobs. Interesting part in the article are the reader comments which says more that what meets the eye/media in general. And now you know why cults survive 😉

Toggle Power Schemes in Windows Vista

It has been a long time that I did any batch programming in Windows (almost 10-12 years). Didn’t find a need for it. But with Windows Vista, I wanted to toggle my power schemes based on whether my baby was watching some videos in youtube or not. I generally want my monitor to turn off in a minute if nothing is happening. At the same time if youtube, etc. is running then the monitor should stay on. I created a power scheme for both these functionalities. Only problem was that I had to follow a long procedure to toggle between them. Right click on my desktop, click Personalize, select Screen Saver, click on Power settings and then the schemes would be visible. And Windows Vista is so good that it hides your most recently used power schemes. So you have to click on the down arrow and select the scheme that you want. Of course you need to close all the windows as well.

I was a bit annoyed by that and hence created the below small script to help me do the toggling with minimum clicks. Also gives me an option to change my mind and not toggle my schemes. Before using the script, please make sure that the power scheme and associated GUID exists on the machine. Modify the GUIDs in the script with yours and go doing things without the windows UI painful clicks. Send me your comments and questions if you have any. It is very easy to follow the script anyways.

**********************************************************
@echo off
echo Toggle Power Settings between Movie Plan & Balanced - www.naresh.se
echo The script assumes that both the plans are created and exists
echo Change the Scheme_GUIDs as available on your machine

For /F "tokens=4,5 delims= " %%A in ('powercfg -getactivescheme') Do (
Set pwrscheme=%%A
Set schemeName=%%B
)

rem set %pwrscheme%=powercfg -getactivescheme

set pwrscheme
set schemeName

echo Current Power Scheme is %schemeName%
set /p answer=Do you want to toggle the scheme (Y/N)?

if %answer%==n goto endScriptWithoutToggling
if %answer%==N goto endScriptWithoutToggling

echo Okay Get ready...

powercfg -setactive 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e

if %pwrscheme%==381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e goto toggleSettings
powercfg -setactive 381b4222-f694-41f0-9685-ff5bb260df2e

goto endScript

:toggleSettings
powercfg -setactive f1453bb4-3a7a-4373-bd18-fae8c5f067d2

goto endScript

:endScriptWithoutToggling
echo msgbox"PowerScheme is Not Changed">"%temp%\a.vbs"&"%temp%\a.vbs"&del "%temp%\a.vbs"
goto end

:endScript
echo msgbox"PowerScheme is Toggled Successfully">"%temp%\a.vbs"&"%temp%\a.vbs"&del "%temp%\a.vbs"

:end

**********************************************************

Euclids Algorithm…

Euclids algo is a nice one to find out the lowest common divisor for 2 given positive integers. I am once again going through Donald Knuth just for fun. Enjoy talking about it and posting your own suggestions / code on the following URL. You can also find my intial code on that link.

http://www.naresh.se/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5

Will keep posting and give you more of this useless (in terms that it does not help me in my daily work and probably will not help you as well, unless you are mathemacian but then you probably have more advanced libraries to carry out such stuff hence I am convinced that it is totally useless) albeit fun stuff.

Browser Wars! Adding fuel to the fire… ;)

I was trying to upload some photos to picasaweb and thought of doing it via google chrome this time. They would definitely have tested that site with Chrome and would make it better then the one in IE. Guess what, I can upload only 5 files at a time using Google Chrome. i.e. Chrome does not have support for extra addons / BHOs (browser helper objects) that IE or other browser has. So one gets reduced functionality with a reduced browser interface as well.

Hmm.. I like chrome. Infact I am typing this post using chrome. But things like that really annoy me. And for selecting each of those five pictures via a button is really a job best left to people who don’t upload much. This post is another one adding the fuel to the fire.

Browser wars! Who do you think would be the winner? For the time being I think it is IE8 since that is the only browser which I don’t have any problems with. My mozilla 3.0.4 crashed as soon as I had 2 instances open with one instance running a web based game known as Evony and another one running GMail and Yahoo. Safari 4 worked a bit better for sometime and suddenly one fine morning it hanged all the time. One instance running all the same in different tabs plus another instance running 5paisa TT browser.

Write me your experience / comments with different browsers and discuss your opinions in the forums!