All your base are belong to us

I cannot imagine my blog without a post about an internet phenomenon during the early years of this decade. This was sometime during the year 2001 when a Japanese video game made by Sega was translated into English language (Zero Wing) , in a rather hasty manner. It led to several spoofs and parodies and still garners interest among quite a few internet users. This iconic cut-scene from the game is often regarded as the height of English language butchery.

The original cut scene from the game :



Transcript:
In A.D. 2101
War was beginning.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say !!
CATS: You have no chance to survive make your time.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha ....
Operator: Captain !! *
Captain: Take off every 'ZIG'!!
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move 'ZIG'.
Captain: For great justice.

If Sega had hired translators rather than make their Japanese geeks translate , the non-literal translation would've been so :

AD 2101―
A battle has begun.
Captain: Tell me what happened!
Engineer: It seems someone installed explosives unnoticed.
Communication operator: Captain! Receiving transmission!
Captain: What?
Communication operator: Visual incoming on the main screen.
Captain: Identify yourself!
CATS: (You) Look busy, gentlemen.
CATS: Assisted by the Federation Government forces, CATS have taken over your base completely.
CATS: Your ship is about to meet its doom as well.
Captain: This is absurd!
CATS: Thank you for your cooperation.
CATS: Cherish these few remaining moments of your lives.
CATS: Ha ha ha ha ha...
Communication operator: Captain....
Captain: (I) Order launching all ZIG units!!
Captain: Entrusting them is the only option left....
Captain: The hope of our future...
Captain: (We're) Counting on you, ZIG!!

And now , The parodies :)





Some more text spoofs :

AYBABTU in Invasion of Normandy

In A.D. 1944
War was ending.
Adolf Hitler: Vat happen ?
Heinrich Himmler: Somebody set up us the D-Day
Joseph Goebbels: Ve get allies.
Hitler: Vat !
Goebbels: Main screen turn on.
Hitler: It's you !!
Harry Truman: How are you nazis !!
Truman: All your Normandy are belong to U.S.
Truman: You are on the way to invasion.
Hitler: Vat you say !!
Truman: You have no chance to fight back make suicide.
Truman: Ha Ha Ha Ha ....
Goebbels: Fürher !!
Hitler: Take every cyanide pill.
Hitler: I know vat I döing.
Hitler: Svallow pill.
Hitler: Für great suicide.

AYB Are Belong to the Blair Witch

In A.D. 1994
Film was beginning.
Heather: What happen?
Michael: Somebody set up us the horror.
Joshua: We get chilling ritualistic figures.
Heather: What?
Joshua: Main camera start rolling.
Heather: It's you!
Blair Witch: How are you filmmakers.
Blair Witch: All your camera are belong to us.
Blair Witch: You are on the way to disappearing.
Heather: What you say!!
Blair Witch: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Blair Witch: Ha ha ha ha...
Joshua: Heather!
Heather: Take off every compass.
Heather: You know what you doing.
Heather: Move compass.
Heather: For great documentary.

Where has all the money gone?

Trillions in stock market value -- gone. Trillions in retirement savings -- gone. A huge chunk of the money you paid for your house, the money you're saving for college, the money your boss needs to make payroll -- gone, gone, gone.

Whether you're a stock broker or Joe Six-Pack, if you have a 401(k), a mutual fund or a college savings plan, tumbling stock markets and sagging home prices mean you've lost a whole lot of the money that was right there on your account statements just a few months ago.

But if you no longer have that money, who does? The fat cats on Wall Street? Some oil baron in Saudi Arabia? The government of China?

If you're looking to track down your missing money -- figure out who has it now, maybe ask to have it back -- you might be disappointed to learn that is was never really money in the first place.

Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, puts it bluntly: The notion that you lose a pile of money whenever the stock market tanks is a "fallacy." He says the price of a stock has never been the same thing as money -- it's simply the "best guess" of what the stock is worth.

"It's in people's minds," Shiller explains. "We're just recording a measure of what people think the stock market is worth. What the people who are willing to trade today -- who are very, very few people -- are actually trading at. So we're just extrapolating that and thinking, well, maybe that's what everyone thinks it's worth." Shiller uses the example of an appraiser who values a house at $350,000, a week after saying it was worth $400,000.

"In a sense, $50,000 just disappeared when he said that," he said. "But it's all in the mind." Though something, of course, is disappearing as markets and real estate values tumble. Even if a share of stock you own isn't a wad of bills in your wallet, even if the value of your home isn't something you can redeem at will, surely you can lose potential money -- that is, the money that would be yours to spend if you sold your house or emptied out your mutual funds right now.

And if you're a few months away from retirement, or hoping to sell your house and buy a smaller one to help pay for your kid's college tuition, this "potential money" is something you're counting on to get by. For people who need cash and need it now, this is as real as money gets, whether or not it meets the technical definition of the word.

Still, you run into trouble when you think of that potential money as being the same thing as the cash in your purse or your checking account.

"That's a big mistake," says Dale Jorgenson, an economics professor at Harvard.

There's a key distinction here: While the money in your pocket is unlikely to just vanish into thin air, the money you could have had, if only you'd sold your house or drained your stock-heavy mutual funds a year ago, most certainly can.

"You can't enjoy the benefits of your 401(k) if it's disappeared," Jorgenson explains. "If you had it all in financial stocks and they've all gone down by 80 percent -- sorry! That is a permanent loss because those folks aren't coming back. We're gonna have a huge shrinkage in the financial sector."

There was a time when nobody had to wonder what happened to the money they used to have. Until paper money was developed in China around the ninth century, money was something solid that had actual value -- like a gold coin that was worth whatever that amount of gold was worth, according to Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association's Money Museum in Denver.

Back then, if the money you once had was suddenly gone, there was a simple reason -- you spent it, someone stole it, you dropped it in a field somewhere, or maybe a tornado or some other disaster struck wherever you last put it down.

But these days, a lot of things that have monetary value can't be held in your hand.

If you choose, you can pour most of your money into stocks and track their value in real time on a computer screen, confident that you'll get good money for them when you decide to sell. And you won't be alone -- staring at millions of computer screens are other investors who share your confidence that the value of their portfolios will hold up.

But that collective confidence, Jorgenson says, is gone. And when confidence is drained out of a financial system, a lot of investors will decide to sell at any price, and a big chunk of that money you thought your investments were worth simply goes away.

If you once thought your investment portfolio was as good as a suitcase full of twenties, you might suddenly suspect that it's not.

In the process, of course, you're losing wealth. But does that mean someone else must be gaining it? Does the world have some fixed amount of wealth that shifts between people, nations and institutions with the ebb and flow of the economy?

Jorgenson says no -- the amount of wealth in the world "simply decreases in a situation like this." And he cautions against assuming that your investment losses mean a gain for someone else -- like wealthy stock speculators who try to make money by betting that the market will drop.

"Those folks in general have been losing their shirts at a prodigious rate," he said. "They took a big risk and now they're suffering from the consequences."

"Of course, they had a great life, as long as it lasted."

This article is from here.

Flowchart - How to Debate - Sarah Palin

mallu special : hotel keralafonia

On the road to Trivandrum
Coconut oil in my hair
Warm smell of avial
Rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance
I saw a pink tube-light
My tummy rumbled, I felt weak and thin
I had to stop for a bite
There he stood in the doorway
Flicked his mundu in style
And I was thinking to myself
I don't like the look of his smile
Then he lit up a petromax
Muttering "No power today"
More Mallus down the corridor
I thought I heard them say
Welcome to the Hotel Kerala-fonia
Such a lousy place,
Such a lousy place,
Such a sad disgrace,
Plenty of bugs at the Hotel Kerala-fonia
Any time of year
Any time of year (background)
It's infested here
It's infested here
His finger's stuck up his nostril
He's got a big, thick mustache
He makes an ugly noise - *ugly noise*
But that's just his laugh
Buxom girls clad in pavada
Eating banana chips
Some roll their eyes, and
Some roll their hips
I said to the manager
My room's full of mice
He said,
Don't worry, saar,I sending you
Meen karri, brandy and ice
And still those voices were crying from far away
Wake you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them pray
Save us from the Hotel Kerala-fonia
What a lousy place,
What a lousy place (background)
Such a sad disgrace
Trying to live at the Hotel Kerala-fonia
It is no surprise
It is no surprise
That it swarms with flies

The blind man was pouring
Stale sambar on rice
And he said
We are all just actors here
In Silk Smitha-disguise
And in the dining chamber
We gathered for the feast
We stab it with our steely knives
But we just can't cut that beef
Last thing I remember
I was writhing on the floor
That cockroach in my appam-stew was the culprit,
I am sure
Relax, said the watchman
Just this enema will make you well
And his friends laughed as they held me down
God's Own Country? Oh, Hell!

- the Yeagles

My Quote :D

"Test cricket is for Gentlemen , ODI is for Men and T20 is for Madmen." - Anand S , Circa 2008

Help the world.

This article is from here.

Project 10¹⁰⁰

Why this project?

Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big.

In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people.

In other words, helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike.

The question is: what would help? And help most?

At Google, we don't believe we have the answers, but we do believe the answers are out there. Maybe in a lab, or a company, or a university -- but maybe not.

Maybe the answer that helps somebody is in your head, in something you've observed, some notion that you've been fiddling with, some small connection you've noticed, some old thing you have seen with new eyes.

If you have an idea that you believe would help somebody, we want to hear about it. We're looking for ideas that help as many people as possible, in any way, and we're committing the funding to launch them. You can submit your ideas and help vote on ideas from others. Final idea selections will be made by an advisory board.

The categories :

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Submission Deadline:
October 20th, 2008

Good luck, and may those who help the most win.

Setting an example - "Hello World" , "99 bottles of beer" is here.

I've been terribly lazy , I've not posted anything o'er here in a long time and i badly want to write some crap :P , so.. here goes

"Hello World" , "99 bottles of beer" is here.

People who have been trained or have been training others in computer languages would definitely have come across this very famous sentence in the study material they use - the "Hello World" . A very simple sentence , but unmistakably the most popular example that is used to introduce people to a computer language.
As you read this... there might be several hundreds of budding programmers out there , typing this line and marking their foray into the world of programming. But how popular is this?

If the helloworld site is to be believed , there are 409 computer language versions ( actual code for all those is available on the site) of the most popular example program. Now , that is almost all the computer languages man has ever created.

A couple of them caught my attention :

1) the longest possible coding for a simple , single lined output

The RedCode Version (alias- the redneck version):

; Should work with any MARS >= ICWS-86
; with 128x64 gfx core
Start MOV 0,2455
MOV 0,2458
MOV 0,2459
MOV 0,2459
MOV 0,2459
MOV 0,2459
MOV 0,2459
MOV 0,2460
MOV 0,2465
MOV 0,2471
MOV 0,2471
MOV 0,2471
MOV 0,2479
MOV 0,2482
MOV 0,2484
MOV 0,2484
MOV 0,2484
MOV 0,2486
MOV 0,2486
MOV 0,2486
MOV 0,2486
MOV 0,2488
MOV 0,2493
MOV 0,2493
MOV 0,2493
MOV 0,2493
MOV 0,2497
MOV 0,2556
MOV 0,2559
MOV 0,2560
MOV 0,2565
MOV 0,2570
MOV 0,2575
MOV 0,2578
MOV 0,2585
MOV 0,2588
MOV 0,2589
MOV 0,2592
MOV 0,2593
MOV 0,2596
MOV 0,2597
MOV 0,2603
MOV 0,2605
MOV 0,2608
MOV 0,2667
MOV 0,2670
MOV 0,2671
MOV 0,2676
MOV 0,2681
MOV 0,2686
MOV 0,2689
MOV 0,2696
MOV 0,2699
MOV 0,2700
MOV 0,2703
MOV 0,2704
MOV 0,2707
MOV 0,2708
MOV 0,2714
MOV 0,2716
MOV 0,2719
MOV 0,2778
MOV 0,2778
MOV 0,2778
MOV 0,2778
MOV 0,2778
MOV 0,2779
MOV 0,2779
MOV 0,2779
MOV 0,2782
MOV 0,2787
MOV 0,2792
MOV 0,2795
MOV 0,2802
MOV 0,2805
MOV 0,2806
MOV 0,2809
MOV 0,2810
MOV 0,2810
MOV 0,2810
MOV 0,2810
MOV 0,2812
MOV 0,2818
MOV 0,2820
MOV 0,2823
MOV 0,2882
MOV 0,2885
MOV 0,2886
MOV 0,2891
MOV 0,2896
MOV 0,2901
MOV 0,2904
MOV 0,2911
MOV 0,2912
MOV 0,2913
MOV 0,2914
MOV 0,2917
MOV 0,2918
MOV 0,2919
MOV 0,2922
MOV 0,2928
MOV 0,2930
MOV 0,2933
MOV 0,2992
MOV 0,2995
MOV 0,2996
MOV 0,3001
MOV 0,3006
MOV 0,3011
MOV 0,3014
MOV 0,3021
MOV 0,3022
MOV 0,3023
MOV 0,3024
MOV 0,3027
MOV 0,3028
MOV 0,3030
MOV 0,3032
MOV 0,3038
MOV 0,3040
MOV 0,3103
MOV 0,3106
MOV 0,3107
MOV 0,3107
MOV 0,3107
MOV 0,3107
MOV 0,3107
MOV 0,3108
MOV 0,3108
MOV 0,3108
MOV 0,3108
MOV 0,3108
MOV 0,3109
MOV 0,3109
MOV 0,3109
MOV 0,3109
MOV 0,3109
MOV 0,3111
MOV 0,3111
MOV 0,3111
MOV 0,3120
MOV 0,3121
MOV 0,3124
MOV 0,3124
MOV 0,3124
MOV 0,3126
MOV 0,3129
MOV 0,3130
MOV 0,3130
MOV 0,3130
MOV 0,3130
MOV 0,3130
MOV 0,3131
MOV 0,3131
MOV 0,3131
MOV 0,3131
MOV 0,3135
JMP 0

(Imagine having to program with this assembly language . Guaranteed to give any sane geek the creeps. )

And 2) The shortest code :

The APL version (alias - the K.I.S.S version. All hail the APL) :

'Hello, world!'

//thats it folks , as simple as that!!

However , there seems to be another example .. which is a bit advanced than the "hello world". Its called "99 bottles of beer".

It happens to be a song that kids sing .

WTF?.... why in the world didnt i know about that song?

What might be the reasons I missed the song?

These might have been the reactions when the proposition to include the song in our computer syllabus at school had come up.

"BEER SONG FOR KIDS ?? :O Kids shouldnt sing about beer , definitely not my kid.. that is blasphemy, thats anti-social , thats totally unacceptable behavior. " - my parents.

"blah blah blah blah .. BEER is evil. It makes you the satan's slave and also blah blah blah" - my neighbor.

"Singing/Coding the song makes you feel like you want to drink beer. This is a scientific conclusion" - NCERT / CBSE / TN State Board.

Anyway .. I doubt whether that song wouldnt have made it to our text books. Here is the lyrics :

"99 bottles of beer on the wall, 99 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 98 bottles of beer on the wall.

98 bottles of beer on the wall, 98 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 97 bottles of beer on the wall.

97 bottles of beer on the wall, 97 bottles of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, 96 bottles of beer on the wall.

.
.
.

1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer.
Take one down and pass it around, no more bottles of beer on the wall.

No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer.
Go to the store and buy some more, 99 bottles of beer on the wall."

Now , why is this an advanced example? This example can be used to demonstrate the printing statement syntax, a loop control , a branching statement and the ill-effects of beer on your heads. Psychotic geeks-in-the-making can be identified if he/she makes the above output a continuous , infinite loop , virtually implying infinite beer .

Apparently , this example has more takers than the lame "Hello World". According to 99 bottles of beer dot net there are 1229 representations of the beer song in different languages and their variants.

My 4 line C program :P

main()
{
int i;
for (i=99;i>=2;printf("%d bottles of beer on the wall, %d bottles of beer.\n Take one down and pass it around,%d bottles of beer on the wall.\n",i,i,i-1),i--);
printf("1 bottle of beer on the wall, 1 bottle of beer.\n Take one down and pass it around,no more bottles of beer on the wall.\n");
printf("No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer.\n Go to the store and buy some more,99 bottles of beer on the wall.\n");
}

Got a better code for the problem above ? Post it on the comments.

When I went thro the lyrics.. I had two questions in my mind ..

1) Were the kids made to sing all the way from number 99 to 0 beer bottles? If the answer is "YES" , that answers my question " Why is that almost everyone in the West drink beer? "

2)What would be the RedCode version of this program ? :O :D (Am sure I'd go retarded if I tried coding the same in RedCode.)