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Recently I got a MacBook Pro 2008 from my office. I love the machine but I was completely disappointed when I inserted Italian Job DVD. I was asked to change the region to 2/4 and I stay in region 5. I own the original copy of the DVD and unfortunately, there is no Region 5 copy available in India. It was never the issue for me because in Windows, VLC media player could easily bypass these region codes and ignore it conveniently.

DVD Regions Map

I own few more DVDs belonging to 2/3/4 regions. I own another DVD player (my PlayStation 3) and that is also region locked. Now I have two very expensive machines and lots of original DVD titles yet can't play any of them. I don't know who created this *stupid* protection system which prohibits user from playing legal copies!

I tried various things on my Mac -

• Using VLC media player for OS X
• Using utilities like MacTheRipper for decrypting the dvd
• RegionX for changing the region indefinite times

None of the above works. I have almost read thousand blog / forum posts related to DVD region issues with Mac but everything was completely failure. Apparently MacBooks have this "MATSHITA DVD-R   UJ-867" super drive which has no way of getting around the protection. I don't want to replace the firmware to region free as it will void my company laptop warranty which makes me crazy.

Now what reward I got by paying for the legal versions of the DVDs? In India any English movie DVD will cost you around Rs. 399-699 which is considerably expensive. You pay Rs. 800-1000 for 1 month of the internet connection. Why I will not be tempted to download nicely ripped DivX movie from torrent instead of buying freaking expensive DVDs which don't play at all?

Now can I demand my money back for these movies? Can I illegaly download the DivX rip of the movie and play it on my laptop and still it will be legal? I really don't know but I will never buy legal DVDs for sure!

At ThoughtWorks Pune office, we were observing a regular pattern in Stand-up. Everybody will start to speak with “Yesterday, I did this… I did that…” and whole team used to feel it more of a status update and not giving idea and sharing the context. To address this issue, one of our team-mate came with a suggestion to avoid using word “Yesterday” in the stand-up. Now you don’t have word yesterday with you, you will be automatically forced to give a update which involves not only yesterday’s work but more than that. This worked great until following conversation happened…
(Names of the team-members are changed)
Friday, 14 Sept, 9:30 IST
…
Ganpat: “Yesterday, I worked on …”
Keshubabu: “Ganpat, don’t use word 'yesterday' or at least avoid using that…”
Ganpat: “Ok. Day-before-today I worked on…”
Whole team: !!!!!!!!!!!

That was a funny incident but, we really experienced value coming out of avoiding using word ‘Yesterday’. This helped us to achieve sharing of context of the story and not just yesterday’s work.

Google researchers have published a paper (PDF) which was awarded as best paper in Euro Interactive Television Conference last week. The research says, with an audio clip recorded using simple computer microphone we can find relative web-content. They used this technique to demonstrate a simple audio clip from running conversion can find relevant web content. The ambient noise doesn’t hamper the search quality and accuracy. Amazing, I think, we are not very far when we could implement a voice / video & image search.
There are billions of phones which have capability to capture images, record sounds and video clips. Simplest use can be capture a photo of a person to whom you don’t know and send it to online search engines using web-services. Then the services will find the images which contain the person and you will have all the information about the person in seconds (provided he has public existence on web). Though this sounds like movie scene from Matrix or Mission Impossible but it’s very useful for guys like me who forgets people faces. (I have many incidents of talking to people to whom I don’t remember anymore and just pretend that I know them )

Another application is very important for me about audio search. I heard a music snippet from an online movie or some place and I don’t know what kind of music that is or any artist information. Now, how should I use search engines to find the song name, artist name etc. The online audio search may be very useful in this sense, send an audio clip and you will receive list of songs which contain that audio portion. Amazing… I am so much excited to see all these technologies in action.

Although there are couple of issues regarding media protection, online privacy and other things to be solved but compared to facilities gained by end user, those issues doesn’t seem big.