A JVM Lover

I have always wanted to publish what I learn in class on the web. Except for cases of very limited success, this wish has never been materialized. The major hurdle that I have faced is really to do with feeding the content into the computer. As a student of engineering, I believe the best way to convey the ideas is through a mix of sentences, illustrations and equations. Had it been only for sentences, it would not have been a problem at all - many of us can type in text faster than we can write with the pen. Unfortunately, bringing an illustrations or an equations in my mind to the computer using direct input, will take much much more time than, say, writing it down on paper and then scanning it in. (At this stage, I would like to gratefully remember all those authors on the web who had put in lot of their time and effort to bring out the millions of beautiful illustrations and equations that are already on the web.) This is where, I feel that the web has a long way to go. Hopefu...

The blackout was in protest of SOPA and PIPA - two bills being considered by the US legislation - which aims at addressing the problem of copyright infringement. My interest here is not about how effective the bills are at combating infringement, but, why Wikipedia is protesting against it. The words of Wikimedia Foundations chief, Sue Gardener, will set the background correct. She says: 'The message of the Wikipedia blackout, and the other responses to SOPA and PIPA, wasn't "Let's talk about how we can combat online copyright infringement." It was: "Don't hurt the Internet. It's too important. Let us do our work. Let us learn and create and share."' (see link at the end) If so, what is there in the bills that would "hurt the Internet" ? Let me try to explain. We are all users of the Internet. The internet is also a medium; but unlike other media, say the television or the newspaper, its users are simultaneously content generators...

While Wikipedia has announced a blackout for 24 hours against the recent US legislative actions, it has left adequate room for someone in desperate need of accessing the articles. The trick is to stop loading of the page before the redirection happens. As this article,  http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/18/wikipedia-blackout-workaround/ , points out the easiest way to do that would be to hit the escape key. The timing is important here though. Nevertheless you can always reload the page and give a second try. 

This technique is a potential answer to one or more of the situations that could arise while trying to work with sounds / music on a computer, but with limited resources. How to extract the audio from a video / movie ? How to record what I play on a windows PC ?  How to convert audio from one format to the other ? How to extract the audio from a Youtube movie ? The answer: * Windows provides for accessing the signal going from the soundcard to the speakers, through what it calls a 'Stereo Mix', you just have to point your recording software to use the 'Stereo Mix' instead of the microphone. Voila!, any sound that you can hear on the computer can also be recorded. Step by step procedure for doing this is below. The software that use for recording is the well known Audacity. If you don't have it yet, I recommend you download it. Its a great software. ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) Step 1: Add and enable 'Stereo Mix' to the group of Recording Devices....

http://www.easysw.com/~mike/serial/serial.html