Chat with Tom Riddler

I like to chat with this particular bot based on A.L.I.C.E . It is hosted at panbdorabots.com and is called "The Tom Riddler's diary" . It is fashioned after the Tom Riddler's Diary from the famous Harry Potter series, which most of you might have already guess. You have to quickly type in some text, after which a small timeout later, it erases and fades out your words slowly, and then its reply appears at the same place. Now, if you are a casual user, you would be thrilled to see the effects. But if you try to chat with it more than a while, you will go nuts.

Though I was not so interested either, I hit upon an idea where i can use it's Ajax urls to directly post and get the reply using command line. I built a small tool using shell script to do that. The same technique can be used to "Command-line"ify other simple ajaxpages.

You can download the tool here [ If my laptop is on. Check the top right section of my blog]. It is too simple for even GPL.. So I am leaving it in public domain.

Device drivers that "learn"?

Recently there have been advancements on emulating the processes of mammalian and other brains. If this continues, will it be one day feasible to write a general purpose device driver, that "learns" what it is supposed to do?

Here are some interesting links:

• Numenta Technology - numenta.com
• http://neuronion.blogspot.com
• IEEE Spectrum: Learn Like A Human
• The brain
• Neuroscience For Kids - Explore the nervous system

Are we mosquitoes?

Ouch.. grr.. Splat .. Haaaa

I just killed a mosquito. It was sucking the blood produced by hard work from my body by piercing through my skin, giving me pain and probably even diseases.

Was the last mosquito bite a punishment from God ? Was it right of me to kill the mosquito and thus stop the punishment ? Why would God be punishing me .. Is there any time when I did something similar to someone else ? Not just as me, but as a part of the society ?

Oh God .. Are all the oil rigs causing pain to mother Earth ? Just imagine.. The oil rigs pierce through the earth's crust like a syringe.. and suck out the oil from it.. oil stored and produced for thousands of years.. Are we really doing this to mother earth?

Okay. Now pause emotions and let rationality play. Those oils are just there from thousands of years produced by beings which were alive thousands of years ago. Of use to nobody otherwise. What is wrong with us using it ?
What could go wrong?

• pollution.
• cavity under land
• unstable geo plates

I dont know! to see if these and more problems can occur, we need inputs ..
like

• how much crude oil is available
• what are the shapes of it ?
• how deep is it ?
• how do we get it ?
• how much are we spending ?
• how good and strong is the skin of earth that is holding us ?
• how efficiently are we spending ?

And more information for which I am not expert enough to identify. And I am not expert enough to identify whether the information available on the websites has not been modified by greed and other evil factors. So sitting and calculating is out of question.

Till then all I can do is sit and pray to mother earth. "Oh Mother Earth, the greed and laziness of millions are at work at this. I will pray to them to control their laziness and greed. Forgive me as a child, or punish me as a part of this evil supporting society. "

And I also pray to my fellow beings "Let us all analyze this truthfully, and see if we are hurting Mother Earth. Let us exercise our truthfulness and intelligence into it. And if we are hurting mother earth, let us pro-actively change to better and renewable sources of energy."

[rant rant rant] Losing concentration.

Recently my interests and energies have been dancing like disco lights. One minute I feel the surge to write a particular device driver, the next moment I want to blog about some philosophy flashing in my mind. By the time I sit to write the blog, I get a crazy idea for a nice movie script! Something I have never imagined before. And before I even start, my mind is blank and I can't remember even the theme. OK . Next I try to concentrate on some XUL based project, and in 5 minutes hell breaks loose with a stunning idea that I can stream my tvtuner from my PC to my laptop I struggle and find that the software that is able to play the sound doesnt like being streamed , and one that likes being streamed, does not know how to enable sound on the card. I move back to the XUL based project and find my mind will grant energy only if I think about the scheme script I wanted to write for GIMP.

This is what happens in sample 60 minutes of my average life in the last few months. The domain of interest is even more varied.

• Photography
• Digital Photo editing.
• TV shows
• Inventions
• Cooking

My mind has gone over all these and more. In the last two months. I dont sit and think about them. These ideas come to me. Most of them when I least want them. Confuse me, tease me, and run away.

And I love ideas. I feel ideas are my life. But they keep running away :-(.

Can some one help me leash this "mad bull" mind of mine and tame it?

Indian software end-user's situation.

This is a modified version of my mail http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2005-June/003378.html
in the http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2005-June/003374.html thread

The [current software] scenario [in India] is such that the most people away from the s/w industry take software for granted, without considering the license [Doh! They dont even know that there is such a thing as a "license" for software]. When a non-industrial Indian installs software , they just press "next" when the License page is displayed.. Just as their hardware vendor or the next door "computer guru" had taught them.
And for those who do (may be if they have nothing else to read and bored ;-) ), they dont care because for most of them avoiding taxes and law is a matter of business and pride. It is a small percentage of "educated" population who really care about education.

As such [type of] people are more [, and] have flooded, communication between really ethical people [who have thus become sparse], with thirst for knowledge always gets either poisoned or blocked by the other "majority". As such, even for a person who is very ethical - who prays to God, you can find him using "Pirated Software" with all the good glory going on in his mind with the ignorance of Licensing.. You can find educational institution being opened up by lighting a Lamp in front of the Lord, providing IT education ... on pirated software.

In such a place where people are ignorant that ethics also apply very much to "new technology", you can find plenty of such mistakes like that of Sarath. [ And Sarath at least by my imagination, has done his work with a good mind - of bringing Free Software to the masses. And It has also been learnt that it is the ignorant media which over-glorified Sarath that he had developed a "New operating system", while Sarath struggled to explain them he only re-mastered Knoppix ]

In a different angle, there are these so called "Computer People" and "Computer scientists", upon whom other people used to look as Gods. Their word was always final. These software people or in newer terms "hardware vendors" or "computer assemblers", when questioned about the dialog they used to get about the license, just used to say "just ignore it .. press next". Their words were final. The user was bound to press next. And for the hardware vendors, they too were affected with the pride of avoiding the law. It used to (and still does) gives them the feeling "the law doesn't apply to me. I am the King". They dont realise themselves as part of the community [when thinking about being lawfull. Their brain somehow masks it]. And for those few who did, were crushed by the business of those who didnt.

Where is God?

This is a rather old writing of mine and resided at http://geocities.com/kamathln
The grammar and style of writing may be unsatisfactory .. so please tolerate :-) Text in square brackets [like this] are my new comments to text in red

When an old person searches for his/her glasses with them on already, we joke about it. Well how good are we at finding things? . God is all around us, even within us. And we ask God where he is! Well, if he is already around us why don't we see him? - These types of conversation might have gone on between the common spiritualists. The main problem is they don't say it properly, which leads to confusion! - "What do you mean by he is already around us?"

Let us discuss "WHAT" this god is. He keeps track of all the good and bad of what we do. He is responsible for the judgment of every action of what we do, what each and every thing does. From galaxies in total to each atom , each particle in an atom , each quark in the particle and what not. So, what is this guy? The answer is that God is the total sum of all existence. "Now what is this again ?" you might ask.

Compare the human brain and its cell. There are millions of zillions of these tiny wonders of the nature which on their own are hardly capable of thinking or taking complex decision like we do. But we cannot and do not take lightly the power of them being together and communicating to each other. We believe that every action we do leaves a vibration that can be sensed by the stars and other heavenly objects [I would love to rephrase this as "We beleive that every action we do, does affect every other element of the universe, in some way or other, whether perceptible to the human or not. This might be the way things are communicated or 'Signalled' between objects of the universe"]. "These vibrations are be very very subtle and can be neglected" is what a usual arguer or a common scientist comes out with. But here is where our "Brain cell argument" comes into picture. The effect of the signal from one cell can reach the brain even being so little ! This is because the signal reaches many neighboring cells. Now think about the "SIGNALS" that we leave or any other entity leaves. These do not reach just one star or heavenly object. These reach more than 10^11 (that is a number with 11 zeroes after a 10)stars in our own galaxy. Now that itself is a huge number. Then just realize that the signals actually reach out to 10^22 stars in the whole universe (that is the estimate the scientists have given us). And those are not just the stars that are out there on the black canvas at night. So by comparing it to the brain, we may guess that this whole thing might be able to "think" and "decide" about the signals got. And also try to realize what would be the effect on us if all these 10^22 stars sent signals back to us or the entity about their decision? Don't you think they have the power to act their decision on us or our environment? Cant this complex structure be the actual GOD? I agree that as the sun and the other planets, our moon , all these things are much closer to us than the other thing on the night sky, the effect of our action will be signalled strongly to these. And that is why the calculation of the good astrologers is always almost correct. But as they neglect the effect of the other heavenly bodies, their calculations can never be so perfect! Let us finally come to the answer. For the answer to be clear, let me change the question a bit: "Where are we?". The answer is ,"We are inside God".