Shouldn't there be a class action suit agains't apple?

I was reading this about how Mozilla is not even developing a version of their popular Firefox browser for the iPhone because they are sure it will be turned down by Apple.

If I remember correctly, not so long ago there was a class action suit against another famous company who bundled their popular browser (it still is very popular - some 60% of the world accesses the internet on Internet Explorer) with their OS.

I hope and pray that someone will bring such a lawsuit against Apple, because they sure as hell need one. For the evil big brother, the kick in the ass from the court will send them to the same level as the other company everyone loves to hate. Not that they were ever any better, its just perception.

On the other hand, I won't say a word against Google, they know too much about me, my wife, my brother, my father and just about any one else who access the internet. So I will just shut my trap and hope that the real big brother keeps doing no evil.

Read until the end.....you'll laugh....

This two-letter word in English has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is 'UP.' It is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?


At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP, and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and fix UP the old car.

At other times this little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.
And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP !

To be knowledge able about the proper uses of UP, look UP the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it soaks UP the earth. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on & on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now ........my time is UP!

Oh...one more thing: What is the first thing you do in the morning & the last thing you do at night?
UP !

Now I'll shut UP!

Does this make any sense to you?

The sponsored result on Bing is Google?
So Google is paying Bing (Microsoft) to put its result on the top of its search results page?

App Stores

Another thing about Apps

Here are they 3 App stores:

Android:

Blackberry:

Anything different?
iPhone store is really colorful and informative, Android the least.
If Android hopes to catch up, they better do something about their app store.
People who would like to compare apps before they buy a phone, (read my earlier post as to why apps are so important), can do only from a website. Google - you need to do something!

Smartphone OS's

So I was looking around for a smartphone.

I think the time has come when there are about 5 main OS's in the market : Symbian, RIM, Apple, Android and Windows. (and perhaps the Palm OS). Symbian runs on the Nokia phones, RIM runs on the Blackberries, Apple OS on the iPhone, Android on a few phones like the G1, Samsung Moment, the Droid etc. Windows Mobile runs on some HTC phones.

The way I see it, there are a lot of Blackberries around and a lot of iPhones too. In many eastern countries, Nokia is king. According to this these will continue to be the important ones in 2012. This is not hard to see since each seems to have a good user base. Question is which will increase in the next few years.

If we look at the history of computing, Windows came out on top of Apple not because it was the first, nor because it was really good, but because it was cheaper and because there were more people writing apps for it.

Apple is a late entry (Windows, Symbian and RIM) have been in the market a long time. However, Apple, and then Android stressed on Apps. User / developer generated apps. This is critical, since only users have the creativity to come up with apps that solve their everyday problems. Developers employed by the company, while surely the best people to develop apps, simply dont have the time or the ideas to come up with new things every day.

So in the end, who is going to win depends on who can get the most Apps. Bizarrely, to write apps for iPhone, you need to BUY the SDK at $100! This, to me, is strange since if I was going to give it away for free, I should be able to get the SDK for free. However, the Windows PC OS platform was similarly built, but people still contributed just because they loved to code.

Apple OS, of course, has got a head start. Apple recently announced that there are now 100,000 apps for the iPhone, thought apparently only a handful are actually being used by anyone. Android is way behind with only 10,000 apps. The only possible way that Android can catch up is if every one of those developers take their app and port it to Android (which is not a bad idea).

Of the many S/W products that we use daily, many are free. All of Google is free, as are parts of Windows. Office is still not free and never will be, however a significant portion of the world wants to use Google docs or Open Office. The only problem is still the old problem of compatibility. Firefox is free and has slowly taken over market share from IE. There are other examples. The point I am trying to make is that in the Web 2.0 world, free seems to work. And this might mean Android has a good chance, because it is free.

Whether the prediction given in the link above will come out true, in 2012, only time will tell. I am putting my money on Android, simply because I trust Google to do the right thing. They seem to have the Midas touch, so it would seem like a good bet.

And you thought Microsoft was evil

I was reading this article about apple rejecting Google Voice. Man!! And to think that people think Microsoft is evil.

At least Microsoft does not stop you from installing what you want on your computer running Windows. Even their antithrust case was that they packaged IE with windows in such a way that the OS stopped working if you tried to uninstall it (I think that was the gist of it, though I can be wrong). Note that they had no problems if you installed Netscape and used it to surf the internet and just let IE be there.

Apple needs to let the consumer decide want they want. If someone comes out with a better product then they are going to win. Already Motorola and others have announced phones based on the Android OS. iPhone is great (I certainly would have gotten one if it had not been for AT&T's atrocious service and the fact that I was in a contract), but if they go on playing the big brother, soon we would have the same Orwellian Apple that they supposedly were up against in 1984. Geez.

More tiff learnings

First, the acknowledgements:

Joaquim Luis 's cvlib_mex
and
MATLAB's rtifc.c code (its a utility that uses tifflib to read tiff images)

The problem:

Read many tiff images at a time, while applying a filter on each frame.
It was taking for ever to do this in MATLAB. Essentially I was reading the images in the tiff file in a loop, and then applying a mean filter on each image. It was a real pain - there were 1 GB's worth of image data (about 5000 frames) in each file and using MATLAB's native code was impracticle.

The solution:

I hacked the rtifc.c code to write tiffread_filter.c This essentially reads a grayscale image, n images at a time and filters each.

I used tifflib and opencv for this project. To compile I used gnumex. What I wanted to share here is the compile file. This is inspired from Joaquim Luis make file. Here is my version

function compile2()
% complie the tiffread file
%
% Adjust for your own path
INCLUDE_CV = 'C:\progra~1\OpenCV\cv\include';
INCLUDE_CXCORE = 'C:\progra~1\OpenCV\cxcore\include';
LIB_CV = 'C:\progra~1\OpenCV\lib\cv.lib';
LIB_CXCORE = 'C:\progra~1\OpenCV\lib\cxcore.lib';
INCLUDE_TIFF = ['"' pwd '\tifflib\include' '"'];
LIB_TIFF = ['"' pwd '\tifflib\lib\libtiff.lib' '"'];

% -----------------------------------------------------
include_cv = ['-I' INCLUDE_CV ' -I' INCLUDE_CXCORE ' -I' INCLUDE_TIFF];
library_cv = [LIB_CV ' ' LIB_CXCORE ' ' LIB_TIFF ];

if (ispc)
    opt_cv = '-O -DWIN32 -DDLL_CV110 -DDLL_CXCORE110 -DDLL_LIBTIFF3';
else
    opt_cv = '-O';
end

cmd = ['mex -v tiffread_filter.c' ' ' include_cv ' ' library_cv ' ' opt_cv];
eval(cmd) 

ABC Of Bengali

A is for Awpheesh (as in Office). This is where the average Kolkakattan goes and spends a day hard at work. And if he works for the 'West Bengal Gawrment' he will arrive at 10, wipe his forehead till 11, have a tea break at 12, throw around a few files at 12.30, break for lunch at 1, smoke an unfiltered cigarette at 2, break for tea at 3, sleep sitting down at 4 and go home at 4:30. It's a hard life!


B is for Bhision. For some reason many Bengalis don't have good bhision. In fact in Kolkata most people are wearing spectacles all the time.


C is for Chappell (as in Greg). Currently, this is the Bengali word for the Devil, for the worst form of evil. In the night mothers put their kids to sleep saying, 'Na ghumaley Chappell eshey dhorey niye jabe.' (If you don't sleep, Chappel will come and take you away!!)

D is for Debashish or any other name starting with Deb. By an ancient law every fourth Bengali Child has to be named Debashish. So you have a Debashish everywhere and trying to get creative they are also called Deb, Debu, Deba with variations like Debanik, Deboprotim, Debojyoti, etc. thrown in at times.


E is for Eeesh. This is a very common Bengali exclamation made famous by Aishwarya Rai in the movie Devdas. It is estimated that on an average a Bengali, especially Bengali women, use eeesh 10,089 times every year. 'Ei Morechhey' is a close second to Eeesh.

F is for Feeesh. These are creatures that swim in rivers and seas and are a favourite food of the Bengalis. Despite the fact that a fish market has such strong smells, with one sniff a Bengali knows if a fish is all right. If not he will say 'eeesh what feeesh is theesh!'

G is for Good name. Every Bengali boy will have a good name like Debashish or Deboprotim and a pet name like Motka, Bhombol, Thobla, etc. While every Bengali girls will have pet names like Tia, Tuktuki, Mishti, Khuku, etc.

H is for Harmonium. This the Bengali equivalent of a rock guitar. Take four Bengalis and a Harmonium and you have the successors to The Bheatles!

I is for lleesh. This is a feeesh with 10,000 bones which would kill any ordinary person, but which the Bengalis eat with releeesh!

J is for Jhola. No self respecting Bengali is complete without his Jhola. It is a shapeless cloth bag where he keeps all his belongings and he fits an amazing number of things in. Even as you read this there are 2 million jholas bobbling around Kolkata- and they all look exactly the same! Note
that 'Jhol' as in Maachher Jhol is a close second

K is for Kee Kaando !. It used to be the favourite Bengali exclamation till eeesh took over because of Aishwarya Rai (now Kee Kando's agent is trying to hire Bipasha Basu).

L is for Lungi - the dress for all occasions. People in Kolkata manage to play football and cricket wearing it not to mention the daily trip in the morning to the local bajaar. Now there is talk of a lungi expedition to Mt. Everest .

M is for Minibus. These are dangerous half buses whose antics would effortlessly frighten the living daylights out of all James Bond stuntmen as well as Formula 1 race car drivers. M is also for Maunkey Cap and Muphler!!

N is for Nangto. This is the Bengali word for Naked. It is the most interesting naked word in any language!

O is for Oil. The Bengalis believe that a touch of mustard oil will cure anything from cold (oil in the nose), to earache (oil in the ear), to cough (oil on the throat) to piles (oil you know where!)

P is for Phootball. This is always a phavourite phassion of the Kolkattan. Every Bengali is born an expert in this game. The two biggest clubs there are Mohunbagan and East Bengal and when they play the city comes to a stop.

Q is for Queen. This really has nothing to do with the Bengalis or Kolkata, but it's the only Q word one can think of. There's also Quilt but they never use them in Kolkata.

R is for Robi Thakur. Many nany years ago Rabindranath got the Nobel Prize. This has given the right to all Bengalis no matter where they are to frame their acceptance speeches as if they were directly related to the great poet and walk with their head held high. This also gives Bengalis the
birthright to look down at Delhi and Mumbai and of course 'all non-Bengawlees' ! Note that 'Rawshogolla' comes a close second !

S is for Shourav. Now that they finally produced a genuine cricketer and a captain, Bengalis think that he should be allowed to play until he is 70 years old. Of course they will see to it that he stays in good form by doing a little bit of 'joggo' and 'maanot'.

T is for Trams. Hundred years later there are still trams in Kolkata. Of course if you are in a hurry it's faster to walk.

U is for Aambrela.. When a Bengali baby is born he is handed one.

V is for Bhaayolence. Bengalis are the most non-violent violent people around. When an accident happens they will fold up their sleeves, shout and scream and curse and abuse, 'Chherey De Bolchhi' but the last time someone actually hit someone was in 1947.

W is for Water. For three months of the year the city is underwater and every year for the last 200 years the authorities are taken by surprise by this!

X is for X'mas. It's very big in Kolkata, with ParkStreet fully lit up and all Bengalis agreeing that they must eat cake that day.

Y is for Yesshtaarday. Which is always better than today for a Bengali (see R for Robi Thakur).

Z is for Jebra, Joo, Jipper and Jylophone..