Or should we say "Keep your heads down and code for freedom"? Yesterday Sun announced the Code for Freedom contest to commemorate 60 years of India's independence. The contest is open to students in Indian universities and colleges and will run till January 2008. Winners will get laptops and other electronic gizmos, and every contributor will receive a Sun T-Shirt! A contributor is a contestant whose contributed code is accepted back into one (or more) of the five contest areas: OpenSolaris, Project GlassFish, NetBeans, Apache Derby, and OpenPortal.

Details about the contest, how to enter, etc., can be found here .

From an email forwarded by a colleague

A quick blurb. 

As someone who wanted to be a particle physicist (before I switched to computer science), this is one of the most exciting customer win stories I've read as a Sun employee: Stanford Gets First BlackBox! If you're wondering what a BlackBox is, it's basically a full-fledged data center housed in a "standard" shipping container, or a mobile data center. The fact that it's housed in a shipping container means that a BlackBox can be deployed anywhere with power, water (for cooling) and network connections. More details about the BlackBox can be found here.

Here's hoping that SLAC's new BlackBox will help in the discovery of new physics and particles (Quarks were first discovered at SLAC)!

Today I received this very credible-looking email scam on one of my private email addresses - beware if you get a mail like this:

Dear Sir/Madam.

Best Regards,
Mrs,Emilo Sanchez.

I have on occasions used Guitar Pro 3 to perform solo gigs - create and playback the backing tracks with the software and play the lead guitar myself. I have played Joe Satriani's "Crushing Day", "Always With Me, Always With You" and "Summer Song" this way. To me the biggest limitation of Guitar Pro 3 was that its audio output was limited to MIDI, which can sometimes sound terrible on PC's and laptops. So when I learned about Guitar Pro 5's new feature called the "Realistic Sound Engine" (RSE) I couldn't wait to try it out. I purchased the new version, which set me back by 59 USD (about 2600 INR); not cheap, but still...

Here is a screen shot of Guitar Pro 5

So how good is the new version? I'd say it's pretty good. It has most of the features that a Joe Random Musician like me would require from such a software. The RSE can currently model Stratocaster (single coil) and Les Paul (humbuckers) type electric guitars, as well as the acoustic guitar. There are a large number of amp models and guitar effects to choose from. The bass guitar models are somewhat more limited, but who cares, right . The RSE is a major CPU and memory hog, though; so a high end PC is required. With about 10 tracks and the RSE turned on, I've seen my Centrino Duo CPU maxed out on occasions and that's with 1GB of RAM. And it sounds terrible when the RSE CPU usage is above 80%. I don't know if the RSE can effectively utilize multi-core CPUs. I have a nagging feeling that the engine is single-threaded, but I could be wrong.

Guitar Pro supports exporting the score in WAV format as well (would be nice to have a direct mp3 export capability), so you can burn your backing tracks on a CD and use a CD player in you gigs and avoid the hassle of lugging your laptop around. You can also export your score in Music XML format, but I haven't found a need for that yet.

I have not had any reason to call up Arobas Music's customer support, so I do not know about their quality of service. But the RSE FAQ has been saying "The RSE FAQ is now closed. It'll be available again in few days" for at least three months now. That doesn't impress me at all.

It has too many features to review here and I have only scratched the surface as far as exploring all the capabilities of the software. It's also a great learning tool, with its scale guide, speed trainer, etc. I'd recommend the software if you like to accompany your guitar playing with percussions and bass, whether you are a beginner or an advanced player.