Have you seen the JibJab flash movie making fun of Bush and Kerry? It's a hilarious piece of satire which riducules them equally without taking sides. The song is based on a Woody Guthrie classic "This Land is Your Land", and the publisher is not amused - They have threatened to sue the Spiridellis brothers for 'corrupting' the classic. It's ironic when the copyright holders are not the original artists themselves and they want to retain complete control over the work, beyond what the artist himself/herself intended. Guess what Guthrie had to say about his work:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

Oh yes, there are new pictures :-)

Bypassing NTLM

If your workplace uses the Microsoft Proxy Server you may have noticed that only a few applications can access the Internet. (These 'few' applications include, surprise..surprise.. Internet Explorer and Outlook). Since the NTLM Authentication is not published by Microsoft, it becomes a real pain to use Open Source applications instead of the standard IE and Outlook that you find in most workplaces. Help is at hand though - The NTLM Authentication protocol has been described in detail by some smart and inquisitive folks and if you have an application which does not know know how to authenticate with NTLM, but allows you to specify a proxy server (Mozilla Firefox can authenticate well - but you need to enter your username and password pretty often), you can use this NTLM Authentication Server which will authenticate with MS Proxy on one end and appear as a proxy server for your applications on the other end. It is a Python script, so you will have to install Python on your computer to run it. Once you configure the script (yes, RTFM) all you have to do is point your application to 127.0.0.1 at the specified port and the script will transparently act as a proxy server! Now go ahead and use any app you want to access the Internet!

I finally put up a bunch of pictures I had taken over the past week. If you are interested, here they are!

This Land!

The good folks at atom films are hosting this uproariously funny election time parody created by Gregg and Evan Spiridellis at jibjab.com. (Their server is struggling to stay alive, so I won't make things worse by linking to it). If you want the lyrics, here they are.

Priority People?

The United States has withheld it's contribution to the UN Population Fund for the third year running since it does not agree with the agency's support for abortion. Earlier, on Wednesday the United States said that it would not give any money to the UN's International AIDS-fighting fund since the US believes that abstinence is the best way to prevent AIDS. Guess who chipped in with $50 million the very next day? Bill Gates. His contribution to the UN fund to fight AIDS, TB and Malaria around the world stands at $150 million. Something to think about when people accuse him of being The Evil Person. If only someone would bail out the Population Fund too..

Johnny See-All

If the invisibility cloak wasn't amazing enough, here's a tool to actually see through clothes - Terahertz technology! Apparently using radiation in the terahertz region(frequency of one trillion times per second), it is possible to penetrate clothes and view objects next to the body, or the body itself. Due to the obvious privacy concerns, a British company Teraview has developed technology that allows security staff to use a handheld wand to scan people. Instead of showing an image on screen, it uses the signature of the reflected radiation to detect weapons or drugs. Interesting, but since the technology exists, will there be t-ray goggles in the future?

Here's the holy grail for Seinfeld lovers - The complete scripts! (Courtesy, Matter Mahadevan.)

Innovate or Die!

Remember the big browser war of the 90s when Netscape was vanquished by IE, never to rise again.. Netscape in a final dying act handed over its code to the open source community and thus the Mozilla project was born. Of course, Mozilla sucked just as bad as Netscape, but over the years, it has silently got its act together. The best thing it did was to split the bulky program into a thin browser and an equally thin email client. While Thunderbird, the email client, does not offer all the functionality of Outlook, I have been using it happily for over a year. The same goes for the light browser Firefox (The Browser Formerly Known As Firebird). Browsing with the downloaded version of Firefox can be a pretty plain experience, but it has a vast army of plugins which can help you do wonders with your browsing. Best of all, it does not support ActiveX which has been the biggest irritant in my browsing experience (ergo all the webpages which popup messages saying "Do you want to install the latest games update?" No, No, No... go away!). Of course, if you want to use Windows Update, you still need to use IE.

What has Microsoft been doing all this time? Precisely nothing. After it won the browser war, it decided to rest its gigantic arse and move on to find fresh battles. It has not released even a single update to IE that has improved the browser experience. (security patches notwithstanding) Cut to Mozilla and Opera which have introduced the best browsing improvement ever - tabbed browsing! (Now you don't have to open fifteen windows while browsing for porn). There are several RSS aggregators that you can plug into Firefox and Apple has announced the integration of RSS and Atom into their next release of Safari. Not to be left behind in the race to innovate, Microsoft has announced that it will not be releasing any further version of Internet Explorer. So apart from the security patches, if you want the next release, you have to wait for the next OS (which judging by optimistic estimates will be available in 2007, which means that you have to wait until 2009 to get a stable release with service pack 2).

I'm not a fanatic Microsoft hater, but the lethargy of Microsoft when it comes to innovating and improving the user experience frankly gets to me. Windows XP did improve a lot upon Windows 98, but it's sad that the Windows using world has to wait until 2007/2009 to get the next improvement. In the computing world, this the equivalent of 5 lifetimes. Apple has introduced a new version of its OSX every year for the past three years and the preview of the next version, Tiger has me drooling for a mac. Hopefully Microsoft will get its act together soon since the vast majority of computer users cannot use Linux for its complexity and Macs for their price. MIcrosoft is being upstaged in every field by small innovators. The Internet search engine and even desktop search is almost the domain of Google, the browser wars are tilted in favour of Mozilla and the server community is almost entirely the domain of Linux/Apache. The desktop user may be the last bastion of hope for Microsoft and I for one feel no pity.

Happy Independence Day to all ye folks out here! Though I'm not American, I feel just as good as anyone else about the fact that this country still believes in most of the ideals that make this place so different. A country that is so close to my heart and ideals. This ain't no time to get preachy, but let's keep the smiles on our faces, trash the paranoia and enjoy what life has to offer while believing in the rights of every other human being on this planet to the same. Meanwhile, here are some pictures from the fireworks on the Tempe Town Lake that I took on sunday night.

The Patent Busters

The good guys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have embarked on a patent busting project to get rid of all the stupid patents which should never have been granted in the first place. Like the Jeff Bezos (Amazon) patent for one-click shopping, or even the hyperlink. Check out their top ten list of insane patents for some real gems.

A Braille PDA

One of the coolest inventions ever - a PDA for the blind that runs on Windows CE and has built in Wi-Fi connectivity too! (and yes, Internet Explorer too)