Auto back up your data

Losing your computer data is a bad thing. One good habit is to regularly back up your data. But manually doing this is too cumbersome and so we need automated scripts to back up the data. Here is a small script that I use to back up my own desktop daily. It uses rsync protocol over ssh. You need to have ssh, rsync and ssh public-private key pairs for your back up machine. Setting up SSH key authentication is easy and here is one of the link http://www.ece.uci.edu/~chou/ssh-key.html

Add this script to your cron settings. For linux copy this file to /etc/cron.daily/ directory.

The benefit of using rsync is that only changes over the last week will be exported and it will save network bandwidth. SSH provides the encryption layer so that others cannot snoop on your data when you are backing up. This code is under Public Domain License. Customize it to your needs and auto back up your home directory from now onwards.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

RSYNC=rsync
SSH=ssh
KEY=/home/sushant/.ssh/id_rsa
RUSER=sushant
RHOST=mybackupmachine.com
RPATH=backup/daily/`date +%u`
LPATH=/home/sushant/

$RSYNC -avxz --exclude=".*" --force --delete --delete-excluded --ignore-errors -e "$SSH -i $KEY" $LPATH $RUSER@$RHOST:$RPATH

Is software patentable in India?

A number of computer developers assume that Computer Software is patentable in India similar to US. However, it is a good news that software cannot be patented in India. Section 4(k) in THE PATENTS (AMENDMENT) ACT specifically prohibits this.

This section becomes the Section 3(k) of the Indian Patent Act. It is interesting that the Government allowed software patents in India using an Ordinance in January 2005. Ordinance is a way for the Indian Government to promulgate a law without going through the Parliament. However, they need to be ratified by the Parliament with in 6 months failing which the Ordinance cease to exist.

However, Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) did not like it and forced government to withdraw software patents. CPI(M) replied harshly to the ordinance passed by the Government of India in January 2005 that allowed Software patents.

CPI(M) rejoiced in winning against the Govt proposal for software patents

Actually if you search software patent for www.cpim.org you will find more relevant articles

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=fcS&q=software+patent+site%3Awww.cpim.org&btnG=Search

Three cheers for the communist party!

Starting indiankanoon.org

India prides herself as the largest democracy in the world. There are three broad pillars of Indian democracy: the legislatures who make laws, the executives who enforce laws and the judiciary that interprets laws. The laws regulate a number of activities like criminal offense, civil cases, taxation, trade, social welfare, education and labor rights.

Even when laws empower citizens in a large number of ways, a significant fraction of the population is completely ignorant of their rights and privileges. As a result, common people are afraid of going to police and rarely go to court to seek justice. People continue to live under fear of unknown laws.

A number of attempts have been made to bring the knowledge of law to the common people. The Government of India took active efforts to present all laws along with their amendments at indiacode.nic.in and all court judgments at judis.nic.in.

While it is commendable to make law documents available to common people, it is still quite difficult for common people to easily find the required information. The first problem is that acts are very large and in most scenarios just a few section of laws are applicable. Finding most applicable sections from hundreds of pages of law documents is too daunting for common people. Secondly, laws are often vague and one needs to see how they have been interpreted by the judicial courts. Currently, the laws and judgments are separately maintained and to find judgments that interpret certain law clauses is difficult.

In order to remove the above two structural problems, Indian Kanoon is started. It achieves them by breaking law documents into smallest possible clause and by integrating law/statutes with court judgments. A tight integration of court judgments with laws allows automatic determination of the most relevant clauses and court judgments. Hope Indian Kanoon helps you in your search for Indian laws and their interpretations.

The Indian Kanoon main search page is here
The Indian Kanoon forum is here .