This Place is Taken

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Kerala Film Awards - 2015

 

So the latest buzz in Kerala news is the announcement of Kerala State Film awards. You know, the usual annual opportunity where the art/parallel movie movement can have a shoutout, remind others of its presence. It is very rarely that mainstream movies win these awards, and time has shown that many art movies which win these awards get lot more publicity and more patrons as a result. Every year, the recipients of these awards are congratulated and recognized for their achievement.

This year however, the general 'public' is not happy. Two of the most prestigious awards , the best actor and actress, have been awarded to two relative new-comers for their roles in fully commercial & popular movies. There are already memes and posts all over media mocking the committee's decision to fall to commercial cinema's charms and give away awards to crowd pleasers. Never mind the fact that the winners actually did do a good job, the general consensus is that there were movies with veteran actors who 'deserved' to win.

As a chronic movie skipper myself, I don't care who wins each year. But this year, I feel the awards have gone to good performances. The characters they played were believable, likeable, and convincing. Maybe the roles were custom written for them, but so too have been many such roles in the history of cinema. And whoever said commercial movies cannot have good actors ? Why should only the roles which make us cry and think win awards ? Can't the awards go to funny, bubbly and positive roles ?

For the last few years, if you check the winners list, they have gone to younger and newer actors. Last year Fahadh Faasil and Ann Augustine won them. The year before that, 2012, Prithviraj and Rima Kallingal were the winners. This is a good trend, showing that the established clichés of the industry are being broken, people are accepting convincing portrayals from younger actors.  The winning movies of this year definitely clicked with the crowd. And a state level award like this is a recognition of their work and contribution to the industry.

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Airport Code For The Airport Closest To Oracle’s World Headquarters Is?

Airport Code For The Airport Closest To Oracle’s World Headquarters Is?



Answer: SQL

Among all of its tech accomplishments, the thing Oracle is best known for is their database management systems based on Structured Query Language (SQL). Given that the most famous acronym associated with Oracle is SQL, it has been a long standing belief that the airport closest to the Oracle world headquarters in the greater San Francisco region, the San Carlos Airport (FAA LID: SQL), was given the call sign it has because of Oracle’s presence in the area.

As fun of a little Easter Egg nod to the company as that would have been, the call sign wasn’t given to to the airport because of Oracle but was assigned to the airport in the 1960s when the FAA formalized airport identifiers. Both the airport and the call sign existed years before Oracle was incorporated as Software Development Laboratories in 1977 (they’d rebrand as Oracle in 1982).

Image courtesy of lkluft.

Saturday, August 8, 2015

Is There A Keyboard Shortcut That Can Be Used In Place Of The Context Menu Key?

 

 

When you get used to having access to an awesome (and often used) key on your keyboard, you are not going to be happy when a different keyboard is missing that particular key. So what do you do? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post helps a frustrated reader get satisfaction once again with a quick and easy keyboard shortcut.

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

Photo courtesy of Peter M (Flickr).

The Question

SuperUser reader ppittle wants to know if there is a keyboard shortcut that can be used in place of theContext Menu Key:

The Context Menu Key on Windows PCs is awesome! But on some keyboards, mainly laptops, they have stopped including a dedicated Context Menu Key. Is there a keyboard shortcut that will bring up the Context Menu?

a-keyboard-shortcut-that-can-be-used-in-place-of-the-context-menu-key-01

Is there a keyboard shortcut that can be used in place of the Context Menu Key?

The Answer

SuperUser contributors Adam Prescott, PTwr, and simbabque have the answer for us. First up, Adam Prescott:

Just hit Shift + F10! This is one of my favorite shortcuts!

Followed by the answer from PTwr:

This is awesome, but in some apps it does not work. For example, the Context Menu of web page elements in Google Chrome and Opera (a possible WebKit issue).

With our final answer from simbabque:

It also works on Ubuntu in some applications (i.e. Google Chrome).

Sunday, August 2, 2015

The long awaited death of Google plus

 

 

The buzz on the interwebs is that Google is in the process of shutting down its current social network Google Plus. This will be the newest addition to a quite a long list of Google Failures. But unlike previous cases of services shutdown, this time, no-one seems to be complaining. In fact, I would say people are delighted ! I certainly am.

When they were shutting down Google Reader, netizens put up protests and petitions to keep it alive.  But with Plus shutdown, people are actually happy.

I always had a loathing for any page on the internet where they asked for my date of birth and mother's maiden name. I understand they need this so I can recover my account, but can't they just let ME frame a question to which only I know the answer ? Anyway, social networks have scared me, because people end up putting their darkest secrets and precious moments there for anyone to see. And I liked the anonymity the internet provided me. I never joined Google plus, used to opt out on any service they needed my Google Plus profile. I never joined Facebook , for that matter. I am pretty happy being social in the real world where no one can poke me publicly or post things on my home wall. But Google's plus scared me. It was forced, unfriendly, and to put it simply, a cheap copy of Facebook.

The first thing they got wrong was to force people to use their real name on the network. It made sense to use real names for interaction, but other networks always provided the flexibility to change these. Then they forced Plus accounts for Youtube comments. But all their forced rules could not hide the fact that Plus did not have anything special about it. It was just like any other network.All this fanfare and then they developed something that in the end was quite ordinary.

So, I am now waiting for the the last nail on the coffin. Off to history for you, Google+. I just need a free service to check my e-mail, don't force me to create circles for that.

tmpC536

tmpE969

 

Here is a list of other Google failures.

 

infoGraphic_googleGraveyard500

Friday, July 31, 2015

Mr Robot. Or, the continuous goof-ups of Elliot Alderson, vigilante hacker.

 

There is a lot of buzz online about the new TV series Mr Robot, currently airing on USA network. Breaking away from the procedural and investigate formulaic shows, Mr Robot follows the story of Elliot, a young 20-something cyber security engineer in New York, and how moonlights as an 'ethical' hacker. He is, fortunately, on the good side of the world and the wrong side of the law as he uses this hacking skills to expose hidden criminals and save a few innocents in the process. He suffers from social anxiety, and chronic depression, and it is stated he occasionally suffers from schizophrenic delusions. He is brilliant on-line on any network, but sucks IRL (in real life). The show itself is getting accolades for depicting real life, plausible hacking. But for me, it also hammers home the idea that when it comes to real life situations, Elliot (and others like him) cannot handle themselves responsibly.


 

tmp6859

For instance until episode six, which aired yesterday, all that Elliot has done in this show is to screw up. Continuously. Repeatedly.

His first mistake  was definitely in the pilot episode, which got rave reviews and set expectations high for this series one month before it even started airing. After a brilliant depiction of DDoS style attack, and his counter hack to prevent further damage,  Elliot is presented with a choice. Up till that point in his life, Elliot had flown under the radar, without getting into trouble with any authorities. But now, he can either expose the hacker group f-society, or frame Terry Colby, his customer's CTO. And Elliot, reacting to how Angela was made to leave a meeting room, decides at the very last moment to frame Terry. Bad choice. We later come to know that framing Terry was just a first step for f-society, who recruit him for bigger and more dangerous things further up. If he had simply exposed f-society, he could have ended it all, and gone back to his hacker-vigilante life. Technically, this goofup was required, this is the action which starts the stage for the later events in the series. So Elliot HAS to make this mistake for the sake of the series.

Second mistake.  Getting Fernando Vera arrested. This happens in the second episode. Now this might not have been the first time Elliot is exposing a drug dealer, but he explains in his voice-over that he gets this drugs from Vera via Shayla. And he needs his drugs to stay in control. Shayla getting abused by Vera was occupational hazard. But he started caring for Shayla, and the only way he could protect her was to get Vera out of the equation. This will lead to two things later on. Without his drugs, Elliot goes through painful withdrawals, which could affect his life ,and could even jeopardise operation destroy-steel-mountain. The other thing, Shayla gets killed by Vera. That was painful.

Mistake numbre trios. Elliot gives in to his daemons. His childhood and back life was not explained till this point, but then it is made clear that his father death to cancer was caused by Evilcorp. And when this truth hits him, he puts aside logic and decides to take things personally, in an act of revenge. This will lead him to think of a way to bring down Evilcorp's servers in a 'humane' way with very little spare time. And for this, he decides to team up with f-society. Big mistake. But I think later the show will establish that Elliot was always part of the group. And we all know that Mr Robot is not real. He is simply an illusion, created by poor Elliot himself.

Fourth one was in the fourth episode. Elliot gets the Chinese hacker group, Dark Army, involved in his plan. He clearly knows that the DA hacks only for profit, and will understand his reason for targeting E-corp. But he gets their help. This gets Angela in danger, her personal life is destroyed, and it might also affect her work at allsafe. And.. the DA turns back at the last moment, leaving Elliot and his team on their own. And all this because he decides to go ahead with a poorly put together plan.

Five. Elliot goes in personally to steel-mountain to install his hack. He does not have the best social skills to talk to people without coming off as awkward. But he does it anyway. This way he runs into Tyler, his nemesis. He cooks up a story about some audit, but the truth is , he has lied. So he will have to back this up tomorrow in a later episode somehow. Which means more lying. Sending somebody else  he could have avoided the confrontation.

And his biggest mistake so far, coming up at number 6. He gets Vera freed from the jail. Once Vera got Shayla kidnapped, there was no plan in which Elliot and she could come out save forever. He should have handled that more diplomatically, could have flatly refused he knew her. But by playing to Vera's demands, he has endangered the two other girls in his life; Angela and Darlene. And with Shayla's death, he could again turn to revenge and do something stupid.

In the pilot episode, Elliot was able to balance his day job, and his nighttime hacktivism perfectly, neither coming in each other's way. But now the two sides have to dangeroulsy muddled up. It will take him a miracle to come out of this.

And some pretty neat hacks.

 

 

tmp3CC
Ratings of this show have declined over time.