Jeetu's shared memory

This 3 line script will play Hindi songs related to a keyword passed in as an argument from Phulki.com

url="http://www.phulki.com/search.php?st=1&q=$@"
url=`echo $url   sed 's/ /%20/g'`
mplayer `wget -q -O - $url  | grep "add_to_player" |
  sed "s/^.*add_to_player.*(http[^']*)'.*$/1/" |  tr "n" " "`

Say you put this into a script called play_by_keyword.sh, use the following command line to play songs for “Delhi 6″

$ sh play_by_keyword.sh Delhi 6

Requirement: You must have mplayer & wget installed

Didnt I say scraping should be a design pattern!
-Jeetu

Amazon Backs off Text-to-Speech Feature in Kindle

With a comic message on its website saying that the service has gone away to enter the 36 Shaolin Chambers of Software Kung Fu but will return stronger, music discovery application Songbeat lets its visitors know that it has received a first blow in court after Warner Music (and other music labels) sued the German startup for enabling users to stream and download music without permission.

Songbeat essentially allowed you to scour the web for MP3s using integrated search for Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK and more, stream tracks and even download them from a neat and fast desktop application.

This comes fresh off the heels of the news that Warner Music is suing Seeqpod and even a developer that was using the application’s API, which prompted us to write that they’ve reached a new low. It’s not getting any better today.

Warner Music succesfully sued the startup in a Hamburg court last week, so they have a court enactment which they also served last Friday. Songbeat says it will respond with a fast appeal but has taken the service offline for the time being just to make sure. The company believes it has a good chance of winning the appeal; I’m a bit less optimistic but I like the fact that the startup firmly believes they can make the labels start listening to them instead of chasing them around. One can always dream.

Either way, Songbeat says it will be back online soon. The company says it’s currently in talks with music labels and will continue to do so even if it loses the case for good. If the latter should happen, the startup plans to relocate and simply reboot the service anyway.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Orkut user, Ajith D is facing legal case over an anti Shiv sena community started by him.

“Petitioner Ajith D had started a community on Orkut against Shiv Sena. In this community, there were several posts and discussions by anonymous persons who alleged that Shiv Sena was trying to divide the country on region and caste basis.
Reacting to these posts, the Shiv Sena youth wing’s state secretary registered a criminal complaint at Thane police station in August 2008 based on which FIR was registered against Ajith under Sections 506 and 295A pertaining to hurting public sentiment.

After getting anticipatory bail from Kerala HC, Ajith moved the Supreme Court through counsel seeking quashing of the criminal complaint on the ground that the blog contents were restricted to communication within the community and did not have defamation value. He also pleaded that there was threat to his life if he appeared in a Maharashtra court.” (source)

Supreme court refused to quash the criminal proceedings

“We cannot quash criminal proceedings. You are a computer student and you know how many people access internet portals. Hence, if someone files a criminal action on the basis of the content, then you will have to face the case. You have to go before the court and explain your conduct.”

Who is the culprit?

In essence, SC approves suing of a community group owner whose community gets anonymous comments – extend this to bloggers and you will find everybody in jail.

There are loads of shivsena groups available on Orkut – so isn’t it important to regulate the platform than sue the community owner?

What about the platform that allows this discussion? i.e. Orkut? Orkut, time and again has taken anti-user stand (they happily shared IP address of users with police).

The question is pertinent to Orkut – why allow creating such groups, when you don’t have minimal tools to conduct checks and balances (e.g. profanity filters?).

As far as SC’s decision is concerned, it’s ‘just another’ blow to freedom of speech. While I agree that responsibility lies with bloggers as well, I am not sure whether criminal proceedings is justified.

IT Act 2008

This is what India’s IT Act 2008 has to say :

Any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communication device,—
(a) any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character; or

(b) any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will, persistently by making use of such computer resource or a communication device,

c) any electronic mail or electronic mail message for the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience or to deceive or to mislead the addressee or recipient about the origin of such messages,shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years and with fine.

If you are a blogger, do share your opinion on this case.

Also see: Google India in a legal case over a blogger’s post | Techie held for posting derogatory messages against Sonia Gandhi on Orkut

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Infingement. That’s what Blount called Amazon’s text-to-speech feature.

Roy Blount, Jr., president of the Authors Guild, wrote an op-ed in the NYT today about the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech feature. Heavens to Betsy – we’re still talking about this?

I’m a writer. I’m writing a book. I want lots of sales and money. But I understand that technology is moving far faster than Blount and his buddies care to accept. The text-to-speech function on the Kindle 2 is just one of the features that will be included in an ebook reader from now until the end of time – it will never make sense not to embed one in the future. It doesn’t infringe on audiobook sales unless you’re crazy and dedicated enough to record the Kindle reading an entire book and then copy that MP3 file onto an iPod. At that point you can theoretically say you’re creating a homebrew audio book.

Amazon.com changed the retail world. In the process the company built up so much surplus computing power that it started a dirt cheap “computing in the cloud” business that changed the computing world. This week the company’s newest project Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services began offering more than 1 Terabyte (1000 GB) of fascinating public data for developers to access on the fly through Amazon’s cloud computing service.

We’re talking about an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences, including the Human Genome, huge amounts of chemistry data, machine readable encyclopedic entries about millions of different topics and an entire dump of Wikipedia. US Census data, data from the US Department of Transportation and more. It’s all accessible by web applications in no time at all. What do you think this is going to change?

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The company made a blog post last night announcing the availability of four new public data sets.

This includes data from:

• The Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
• DBPedia Knowledge Base – which “currently describes more than 2.6 million things including 213,000 people, 328,000 places, 57,000 music albums, 36,000 films, and 20,000 companies.” All in handy semantic markup.
• The Freebase Data Dump – the giant collaboratively build semantic database on a wide variety of topics, data that high profile startup Metaweb has spent millions of dollars assembling.
• The entire English section of Wikipedia, dumped into a machine readable format.
• A number of large genetic and scientific databases.

We counted all the databases up and it passed 1 TB of available data. The company says that accessing this data is “trivial” for developers.

What are developers going to do with this data? We can’t wait to find out. The prospect of mashing up, cross referencing and user interfacing with this amount of data is nearly unfathomable. Really. This data will be leveraged by all kinds of different web applications, for a long time.

You’ve read, or can imagine, the impact that the first Public Libraries had on human culture. Now imagine the opening up of not just this, but other libraries of data, so huge that economies of scale blast the project off beyond any analogy that could be drawn with our everyday experience or historical memories. It won’t just be Amazon that offers up this kind of data – it will be relatively commonplace soon, we imagine.

It will be like a network of libraries – for robots. Robots that go to the library frequently, read very fast and make serious use of what they’ve learned.

Congratulations, Amazon, on passing 1 TB of public data made available. May all our robots of the future please live in peace.

Discuss

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Build Links and Make Money
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