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I normally don't write about politics on this blog. So this is not a political discourse or a book review (book review will follow at http://harishankar.org)

I began reading Jack Welch's book "Straight from the Gut" today and I can tell you that part of the story is literally true: it's absolute tripe. I couldn't even read half the book without feeling annoyed by this egomaniac's self-absorption.

Reading these kinds of books is enough to turn even an ardent fan of a capitalistic society towards communism.

Unlike Lee Iacocca, who comes across in his autobiography as a warm human being and a family man though a brash, arrogant businessman, Jack Welch simply comes across as having no humanity and no concern for human life. He is just a corporate machine (though a successful one) and his arrogance is of the "holier-than-thou" smug variety, not the down-to-earth brashness or plain-speaking of a Lee Iacocca.

This is just a rant though. Haven't had much to talk about lately, so I'm just letting off some steam here.

BiaMovE (pronounced by-a-movie) is an advanced mencoder GUI I've written in Python and Tkinter. Features include:

• Configuration for popularly used audio and video codecs (e.g. LAVC, x364, xvid, mp3lame, twolame etc.)
• Save/load profiles. You can create a specific profile for encoding different types of videos.
• A dialog box for common video filters - crop, scale, expand etc.
• Other advanced mencoder options not found in other video encoding GUIs.

What BiaMovE doesn't do:

• Detect mencoder/codecs installed on your system. You need mencoder installed with specific codecs you need for it to work.
• Advanced error checking. Be aware that Mencoder is a complex video encoding software and supports hundreds of options. Using certain combination of options/codecs might produce invalid, incompatible video formats. BiaMovE just passes your choices to the Mencoder command line and doesn't do much more than that.

Read more »

I know it's still early days for the IPL and I shouldn't judge it prematurely, but somehow, after months of hype and hoopla, I had a shrewd (well, not so shrewd) instinct that the actual matches would be something of a let down. Understandly, the first couple of matches haven't really captured my imagination.

In my view, the IPL has some big disadvantages compared to the ICL which really drew me in despite the lack of official recognition, big names and sponsorship. And many people I've spoken to have expressed the same feelings, which leads me to believe that I'm not alone in my assessment.

Some factors counting against the IPL:

• Smells too much of money power and arrogance (read: Sharad Pawar and the BCCI). I know a lot of cricket fans might disagree, but that alone has been a big turn-off for me.
• Has the "me-too" factor stamped all over it. In spite of the IPL being the "official" league, everything about it feels phoney and duplicate. All right, it has the big names, but the teams seem to have been put together in a hotch-potch manner and there just doesn't seem to be a sense of harmony among the teams (which was apparent in the ICL).
• Many of the foriegn players in the IPL will be leaving for international duty after a while. This will definitely take the sheen off the league. In contrast, the ICL, being shunned by the cricketing world at large, definitely has the advantage of keeping its contracted players playing for the league over a period of time.
• Believe it or not, I actually believe that local players should be given more importance than the foriegn players. And the ICL actually promoted the local boys and helped them gain recognition. Names like Ali Mortaza, Stuart Binny, Rajagopal Sathish, Tejinder Singh and Syed Mohammed come to mind. On the other hand, the IPL seems focussed only on the big names - the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguly, Mahendra Dhoni and so on.
• Last, but certainly not least, the media attention given to the IPL has made me sick of it already. That the ICL was widely ignored by most of the media has actually given it something of an advantage and allowed the promoters to focus exclusively on bringing out a quality product. On the other hand, I feel that the IPL promoters know that their product will sell anyway, so might not be too worried about the game itself.
• A minor gripe: the team names chosen by the promoters are horrible. Case in point: Mumbai Indians, Bangalore Royal Challengers, Kings XI Punjab?

I'm aware that all these are subjective issues, and I fully acknowledge that my opinions might be completely out of sync with reality, though.

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm still working on the Mencoder GUI, but it's now beginning to take shape. I've almost completed it (except for saving and loading profiles and the actual encoding part). All the codec specific/video filter configuration dialog boxes are complete as of now.

Here's a screenshot of the main window. More coming up later.