appaji

Dear life,

It has been a pretty crazy couple of months, had to stay away from most of the things that I would normally breeze through, including but not limited to a few aspects of my real life day job, Debian work, movies, the routine yearly Oct-Nov time vacation that I take etc. Obviously, hobbies took a big hit. Also had to let go of an opportunity to travel to one of my favorite places, IIT Guwahati; something that I don't usually pass up. Sigh! But such is life.

Been bouncing back slowly:

I finally moved a few domains that I run (including my personal domain) and their email to a linode and I am quite liking it so far (I would've been great if I had some more disk space at my disposal but 16GB isn't all that bad).

On the Debian front, finished attending to package sponsorship requests, I've been updating packages (there is one elinks RC bug that I'll fix next) and work is finally under progress for the clang ITP in the Debian GIT repository.

There are a ton of pictures in RAW format that I haven't yet had the time to convert to JPEG (I use UFRaw but the output that I got from Bibble Pro is fairly impressive -- perhaps I should consider getting myself a license) but that could wait.

Found a decent place to rent (I should be moving in about a month or so). I would've liked a place that isn't an apartment or at least in a smaller community, preferably something in-town but good places are difficult to come by.

I am back,

Giridhar

The 5 year old IBM Thinkpad T43 that I have been using at work was showing its age: overheating, poor response on disk operations (saving a small file in vi seems to be taking increasingly long times), it doesn't boot sometimes and I have to power cycle it. However, I was putting up with it because the newer T series laptops from Lenovo don't come anywhere close to the quality of the T43. But the final nail in the coffin was a crack in the LCD.

So I got myself a Lenovo X200 about a week ago and I am liking it so far. The weight, battery life, performance and the form factor are a big win. What I don't like about it is:

• The laptop is not evenly thick (it is fat near the batteries and somehow feels bulky to hold it there).
• The lock for the lid is in the base and not in the lid itself (which is a bit awkward when I try to open it).
• The docking station has a rather cheap piece of plastic near the 2nd battery charger (I won't be using it, so that isn't a problem).
• There is no DVI out in the X200 UltraBase docking station (my biggest pain point so far).
• The edge of the lid around the LCD panel is fairly thick and looks a bit ugly (but it is good to hold the laptop by).
• I would've liked it if the screen was a wee bit bigger with better resolution (the T43 was 14.0" @ 1400x1050 and this X200 is 12.1" @ 1280x800).

I guess these complaints are just a hangover from my T43 years and and I am nit-picking.

The machine has been running Debian testing since the day it fell into my hands. Installation and configuration have been a breeze. I hope it will serve me as well as the T43 did.

We are often just one attitude away from success

  -- Anonymous

Dear Friends,

When you go out to vote today, please remember that it is most likely not local issues that should dominate your choice. The fact that there is a perpetual ditch on your way to work, no bus shelter at the bus stop that you use, or a poor neighbourhood road that disappears each monsoon should not determine the choice of candidate. Your MP doesn't have much to do in these areas, at-best they can spend the Rs. 2 crore under the MPLAD scheme to try and keep you happy. Local issues should be your primary concern in the municipality elections or perhaps in the legislative assembly elections, not in the general elections.

The members of parliament decide policy, laws and future of the country at a national level. You should be worried about their participation in the law and policy making process (what issues did they bring up in the parliament, which laws do they support, what questions do they ask in the sessions etc.). Please do keep that in mind. Some of the candidates may even take up issues that are clearly not important for the city in which you live, that is OK (like I said before, these are not your local elections).

Also, don't hesitate to vote for an independent candidate or a candidate from a small party just because they don't belong to a popular national level or state level party. While you may feel that your vote isn't being "used" well, you would want to encourage good people to contest elections. Having them lose their deposit each time they get into the fray is not the way to do that.

Thank you.

Yay! one more big step towards being a universal operating system. Please welcome kfreebsd-i386 and kfreebsd-amd64 versions of GNU/kFreeBSD to be among the list of official architectures in Debian.

The GNU/kFreeBSD installer is based on FreeBSD sysinstall and is not the regular debian-installer, but efforts are underway to build a native Debian installer.

I just applied for an individual digital signature certificate at e-Mudhra CA. They have an inaugural offer price of Rs. 248 for a class 3 individual certificate with a validity of two years. The price is good! There is physical presence verification with official documentation at a registration authority (RA) of e-Mudhra, but that should be fairly straightforward. I am hoping that I would be able to file my income tax returns digitally this year.

Experience with the RA, CA and the IT department would be reported.

I have been looking for a free C library that supports common data structures (queues, trees, hashes etc.) and algorithms (sort, bulk search etc.) in external memory backed by regular files. One piece of software that I have been able to find as being closest to what I want was stxxl, a C+++ STL for extra large data sets. Please let me know if you happened to stumble upon something on these lines.

PS: I filed an RFP for libstxxl and I am willing to sponsor uploads in case somebody is interested in packaging and maintaining it.

Fellow countrymen, happy Republic day to you all. Any trip to Punjab is incomplete without atleast one visit to the daily tamasha at the Wagah-Attari border. This is probably one of the few places on earth where you would see the Pakistan flag right next to the Emblem of India.

( Trip to Wagah-Attari with pictures )
The retreat ceremony is so popular that it is difficult to allow in all the people that come in to watch. So a clone of the ceremony has been setup at the Hussainiwala border. However, Hussainiwala is popular not because of the flag retreat, much less because the 1971 war memorial still has a lot of marks of artillery firing, but because of Bhagat Singh's memorial. The memorial moves one to tears.


Few more pictures from the Hussainiwala memorials:

I went to watch Slumdog Millionaire this afternoon. The movie is good, but doesn't live up to the hype around it. However, the initial sequence where the kids are chased by the police through the slums of Dharawi was excellent. The movie is very Indian, but one thing that stands out is that Jamal Malik is accused of cheating because he is a boy from the slums, and IMO, India is country where people believe that anything is possible and if someone from a slum wins on a game show, it wouldn't surprise a lot of people let alone make them suspicious.

Pretty much everybody seems to describe SDM as the story of a boy from Mumbai's slums who answers all the questions on who wants to be a millionaire and is suspected of cheating. While that is how the plot goes, I don't know if that was how Danny Boyle intended people to know the movie as. I felt that SDM is the story of a young man who wants to be on the TV game show for as long as possible so that his love can watch him. Neither the money nor the intellectual challenge of being on the show matter to him at all.

I am watching The Mystic Masseur at home right now. Most movies from The Merchant Ivory 'period movie' collection are available at a discounted price in the stores these days :-).

Oh, I finally made myself a Hackergotchi

About 25KM from Amritsar is Tarn Taran. Tarn Taran was founded by the fifth Sikh Guru, Guru Arjun Dev who also built a Gurudwara there and named it after the town. The Gurudwara has the largest Sarovar (lake) among all the Sarovar's across all Gurudwaras. The place is calm, peaceful and a treat to the senses. I was there one winter morning and took some pictures.

The Sarovar:



And a few more pictures from the Gurudwara:

I have been listening to music from the Laya project since a few days. It is a set of CDs I picked up from an interesting hippie-ish place called Psybabas on Castle street. Actually, one rarely gets to listen to such sounds. Ideas of similar music can be found scattered in the movies from the early 90s; Hai la sa reminds me of ETilOni sEpalanTa from donga donga. My favorite track though is LA ilAha ill-Allah which sounds very fresh and different from how one would expect it to be.

On a related noted, ETilOni sEpalanTa was composed by A. R. Rahman. I have great respect for the gentleman and recently H pointed me to an article in Tehelka titled The Mystic Master. While a lot has been written about him recently, mostly in the backdrop of The Golden Globe that he won, this article dwells on the person unlike probably anybody did before. Must read.

When I was in Chandigarh, I visited the Nek Chand rock garden. The place has a lot of art (mostly sculpture) built out of a large amount of household and other waste. The park has sections of arrays of similar sculptures of all kind. This rock garden was the pet project of one Mr. Nek Chand which city authorities discovered a few years after he starting it.

While most of the park is very interesting and beautiful, it looks like the authorities also expanded the original creations with quite a few things that Mr. Nek Chand certainly did not build himself. A few pictures:

I am proud to be officially a part of what is quite possibly the largest free software project on the planet. To all the people (few of you don't even use Debian - you know who you are) who have been motivating and helping me, and some that actually spent time working in past few days/weeks towards making this happen: hazaar thanks!

My parents found it strange that I spend considerable time in the night doing "some Linux thing", so the other day I explained to them what Free software is and we talked about copyright and licensing. I was very happy that they were able to appreciate it. I also gave a Debian Installer demo.

While there are a bunch of Indian languages supported in the Debian Installer, తెలుగు (Telugu) isn't one of them. They noticed it and motivated me to work on te_IN translation for d-i and promised to help me. So the three of us have been discussing translation strings. I have been committing changes slowly and intend to complete this activity in a few months.

Lack of interest in translation meant that I never gave much thought to it but I see that translating software is rather difficult and it is an activity that would benefit a lot from two or three people doing it together. I found a glossary at swecha.org but there are a bunch of problems

• Computing terminology is context sensitive and one word doesn't fit all uses.
• A lot of words in the glossary are rather contrived.
• Most words can be understood only by the elite of the Telugu speaking world.

I am using these simple guidelines for translation:

• Use language that is used in the newspapers today. Most people who can read would be used to this and understand it best. e.g password would be రహస్యపదం rather than సంకేతపదము.
• Do not invent words. If a certain computing term or a word doesn't have an equivalent colloquial Telugu word, use the English word written in Telugu script. Include the English word in paranthesis next to it. e.g. Registering modules... would be మాడ్యూల్స్ (modules) నమోదు చేయబడుతున్నాయి...
• If a translated Telugu word sounds complex or ambiguous in the translation context, include the corresponding English word in Telugu as well as English in parentheses next to it. e.g Partitioning scheme: would be విభజన (పార్టీషనింగ్ [partitioning]) ప్రణాలిక:

A few resources that I have been using:

• lekhini - a browser based tool for transliteration based on RTS.
• en2te and uchicago.edu's Charles Philip Brown Telugu to English dictionaries.
• J. P. L. Gwynn's Telugu to English dictionary hosted by uchicago.edu

I will have to find a good quality comprehensive Telugu general knowledge book or an official A.P. govt. document to translate ISO 3166 codes etc. The Manorama yearbook would've been great, unfortunately Telugu is not one of the few languages it is published in. I will also bring my copy of Sankaranarayan's dictionary from my next month Hyderabad visit.

If you have suggestions on any of these (pointers to guidelines, resources that are DFSG free and I could copy from etc.) that would make doing this easy for me, please do let me know.

Naidu does good one-off Telugu string translations in Launchpad (so does praveenkumarg, btw), and Naidu has promised to do some of the work as well as review. If all goes well, I will try and create a debian-10n-telugu sometime in the future.

This one derives inspiration from revealing errors site that Benjamin Mako Hill runs.

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The kid in the picture was trying to use the Tata Indicom kiosk at Richmond Road (Bangalore) and suddenly a Windows start menu turned up on the screen. Sound and tested technology backing is what the kiosk reads in bold; well, if you insist!

I came across a news item in The Hindu business section written by a Corporate Reporter about BOSS GNU/Linux 3.0. The piece said that BOSS is a linux based operating system (OS) in 18 Indian languages, but the main features were described saying

The OS is endowed with Bluetooth for short range communications along with salient features such as RSS feed reader and PDF viewer to edit documents.

I would've expected better from The Hindu.

Then I hopped onto the BOSS Linux website, and even though it is a Debian derivative, Debian has not been acknowledged. The FAQs and a bunch of other documents have been copied directly from Debian without the copyright notices and the original authors have not been credited. Most changes were s/Debian/BOSS/g (with a few mistakes). What a shame, BOSS comes from CDAC and NRCFOSS, Govt. of India.

I suppose we could learn a thing or two from Bhutan.

Since the past few months I've been getting a lot of email at gmail.com not intended for me. Initially I thought it was spam but I realised that people have been inadvertently sending me mail thinking appaji is somebody else. So I get:

• Digitally signed (unencrypted) stock market contract notes
• Business emails like tender plans, press releases etc.
• Bank credit card and Mutual fund account statements
• Match Alerts and frequent updates from jeevansathi.com
• Invitations to web-casts, conferences etc.
• A bunch of personal email, possibly from friends and relatives

Obviously, I also get mail that sometimes says "I did not get your response". I've often tried responding explaining to the senders that I am not who they think I am, but there is no use. There is a LOT of personal or otherwise important information like addresses, phone numbers, financial transactions, passwords to some web-service accounts, domain transfer authorisation keys etc. in these emails. This makes me very uncomfortable.

I just got back from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a movie in which Steven Spielberg takes his obsession with the extra terrestrial to the next level.

Please watch it if you feel that times goes too fast, the two hours that you are watching the movie will seem like two years.

( spoiler )

Update: I should have kept the spoiler under lj-cut, but now that I think of it, that wouldn't help people aggregating the posts. I suppose I will avoid posting spoilers.

I knew better when I neither advertised nor used my IITG Alumni forwarding email address, and I suppose I'll not do that, ever.

For one, the ID given was ridiculous, connected to my name in a rather weird fashion with a number thrown into it and nobody bothered to reply when I asked if I could change it. And now the domain-name part of the email ID has been changed forcing people to tell all their contacts about the change, but this takes the cake -- the service has been moved to Hotmail with 2GB free space.

Huh! Thanks but no thanks.

I really disapprove of such widespread services (which should really not have a commercial angle to them) being taken over by the Googles, Ciscos and the Microsofts of the world.

For some reason, I was under the impression that uploading a new upstream release would place the package in the NEW queue. I was proved wrong because I was able to upload ELinks 0.12~20080527-1 to experimental yesterday and I am a DM who can't upload NEW packages.

To me, this did not make a whole lot of sense. NEW exists to keep the Debian archive legal and to prevent serious QA issues. Uploading a new upstream release of a package pushes a _new_ orig.tar.gz file to the archive and could contain potentially DFSG non-free material which is an issue if the package is being uploaded to main.

What is a bit ironic here is that a DM can't upload an updated package that is essentially the same except that it creates new debugging-symbols packages from the same source package. To a very large extent, these -dbg packages should neither be of questionable legality nor have serious QA issues. What I don't know is if it is necessary that these go to NEW because the FTP masters add overrides manually.