Morsels of life!

03:10 am - Harmandir Sahib

Harmandir Sahib (Popularly known as the Golden Temple).

Current Mood: sleepy

11:37 pm - Five fine movies

Five Six exceptional movies that I saw over the past few weeks:

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer: The rise and fall of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a genius perfume maker who scripts his own end.

The Illusionist: The story of a magician who returns after 15 years to do what his childhood sweetheart wants him to (make them disappear together).

The Black Dahlia: Based on James Ellroy's novel with the same name, the movie gives the unsolved-in-real-life mystery a plausible end.

The Lives of Others: Art moves, and changes people and every single action makes a difference. Stasi Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (HGW) was _fantabulos_.

Infamous: A beautifully made movie about Truman Capote and his life while he is researching for his book In Cold Blood.

The Kite Runner: In which Aamir redeems himself -- of his guilt of being a coward and not helping his childhood friend Hassan, when he is raped -- by saving Hassan's son from the Taliban.

Links to the corresponding Wikipedia articles are rather unimaginative, but I am in no mood for a lot of text.

Current Mood: sleepy

12:59 pm - Remembering the Jallianwala Bagh massacre

Remembering the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Exactly 89 years ago this day (the 13th of April 1919), people were shot at from here:

A group of 90 Indian British Indian Army soldiers marched to the park accompanied by two armoured cars. The vehicles were unable to enter the Bagh through the narrow entrance.

The Jallianwala Bagh, or garden, was bounded on all sides by houses and buildings and had few narrow entrances, most of which were kept permanently locked. Since there was only one open exit except for the one already blocked by the troops, people desperately tried to climb the walls of the park. Many jumped into a well inside the compound to escape from the bullets. A plaque in the monument says that 120 bodies were plucked out of the well.

As a result of the firing, hundreds of people were killed and thousands were injured. Official records put the figures at 379 killed (337 men, 41 boys and a six-week-old baby) and 200 injured, though the actual figure is hotly disputed to this day. The wounded could not be moved from where they had fallen, as a curfew had been declared.

Current Mood: enraged

06:09 pm - Gimme space!

You've always apt-get installed a whole lot of packages, used them once -- if at all, now want your hard disk space back. So which packages on your machine consume the most of disk space, and can be removed?

The following tell you just that:

$ /usr/bin/grep-status -FStatus -sInstalled-Size,Package -n "install ok installed" | paste -sd " \n" | sort -n
[snip...]
40796 gnome-applets-data
45924 valgrind
54148 linux-image-2.6.24-1-686
65380 sun-java5-bin

$ /usr/sbin/popcon-largest-unused
65376 sun-java5-bin
54148 linux-image-2.6.24-1-686
45924 valgrind
40796 gnome-applets-data
[snip...]
$

Now go ahead and aptitude / apt-get remove those that you don't want to keep around, and then repeatedly do ...

$ aptitude (or apt-get) remove `deborphan`

... till you see no more packages being removed.

PS: /usr/sbin/popcon-largest-unused is from the popularity-contest package which you should install and submit usage data (it is anonymous) if you want Debian to get better. /usr/bin/grep-status is from dctrl-tools, a very useful bunch of tools (despite their quirky syntax) if you are interested in Debian development.

Current Mood: apathetic

03:54 pm - First NMU

My first Non-maintainer upload (for reportbug. Thanks Thomas Viehmann for uploading the modified package), and the package hit the archive the other day.

On a related note, an excuse people often have when contributing to Debian (or for that matter any free software project) is that all the important stuff is being done by others already. This is not really true, there is a ton of things that need to be done and it is just a matter of going ahead and doing it. The reportbug package is important (Priority: standard) in Debian and it could do with some more love.

Current Mood: rushed

04:41 pm - ELinks packages in experimental

I uploaded ELinks packages to Debian experimental (based on upstream 0.12 GIT snapshot as on 2008-01-27) and sent out a call for testing. Please test the packages and report issues to the Debian BTS in case you find some bugs or if you don't like the way something works.

0.12 uses UTF-8 as terminal charset and has support for browsing SMB/CIFS shares via libsmbclient. I also enabled Javascript and support for a bunch of scripting languages in these builds. The packages have been compiled in debug mode (builtin assertions, extra sanity checks etc.).

Current Mood: blank

11:13 am - Night at the Harmandir Sahib

I happened to be in Amritsar on the night of Guru Nanak Dev Jayanthi. When I first realised that it was an important occasion, I thought to myself: "I am sooo dead, the Golden teample would be a sea of people". But I was pleasantly (and very much) surprised that everything was very calm and peaceful. Everybody behaved and seemed to do so very naturally. This is one place of worship that is truly amazing. Pictures from the night (I missed the annual display of fireworks by an hour or so).

Clock tower entrance (large)

Sanctum and watch tower (large)

Both the pictures are best viewed large but neither does justice to the real sight. Few more in the Harmandar Sahib - Guru Nanak Jayanthi set of pictures.

Current Mood: cheerful

07:12 pm - Life update -- Actually, a Debian update

The past many weeks were exciting and a lot of things kept me busy, work for one. Part of the excitement was about a trip to Punjab (pictures on their way). And after a long period of lurking on mailing lists, reading policy manuals and the once-in-a-while bug report with a patch, I decided to get a little more active in Debian.

Even though there wasn't a whole lot of software I was using regularly but not present in Debian (which is what a lot of people seem to look to package), there _is_ plenty of software that one uses and has Debian package maintainers, but could probably do with a few more hands at its maintenance.

I took the plunge when I stumbled upon a few orphaned packages and took up their maintenance. Here is what I did to them that I should say I am proud of as a beginner in Debian package maintenance.

• SPLint: There aren't many free static code checkers and splint does a decent job. I split splint to build the architecture independent parts as a separate package and also removed the DFSG non-free parts. The documentation is also built from the splint source package (The splint-doc source package has been removed). I convinced upstream author to release the documentation under a DFSG free license (it wasn't licensed at all earlier).
• ELinks: A sexy text mode browser and my favorite :-). Now there is a separate package for documentation (built from source rather than copying from the upstream tarball) and the architecture independent parts are in elinks-data. I picked up a fair amount of GIT, thanks to elinks. I am co-maintaining this package with Moritz Muehlenhoff (who advocated me for Debian NM) and we will upload ELinks 0.12 packages soon to experimental.
• Axel: I've been using axel for a few years but it had some annoying bugs like crashing on HTTP 404/401s. Not anymore, if you are using Axel 1.1. I am also doing the upstream maintenance now. Future development may be slow, but standby for some new features.

Update: Despite the above, I am not happy about an upload that I requested of xxdiff. But then that was my first upload and everybody is allowed mistakes to correct ;). The Debian xxdiff SVN is seeing fixes slowly but surely though, so standby for a much better package.

And a few others too. All these packages are maintained in Subversion (except ELinks, for which I am using GIT like upstream) and I will be very happy if I can get people to come forward as co-maintainers.

Hack away!

Current Mood: accomplished

01:21 pm - Orphaned Packages?

Since today's XKCD comic is about Debian, I couldn't resist re-posting it here :)



Now you know why the WNPP orphaned list is growing in size ;)

PS: XKCD is a cool geek comic. xkcd_rss if you want to follow it on Livejournal.

Current Mood: amused

04:08 pm - Chak de

What one really needs, to feel good after a week of terrible put-downing bout of sickness is a top-quality entertainer.

Chak de India is just that, and more.

Current Mood: anxious

07:08 pm - DFSG Freeness of The Open Group Test Suite License

I was trying to apply the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) to The Open Group Test Suite License and it looks like the license would be considered non-free. ( Here is why ) Comments on my analysis are welcome.

Update: Modified the original with the deletion and the Note after discussion with prahlad.

Current Mood: dorky

12:45 am - Potter on the move

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Apparenty people have been queuing up at the bookstores as early as 5:00 in the morning for a copy. Here is one of those Potter-book fans trying to finish reading the book, determined not to give his friends at school a chance to throw a spoiler at him.

04:08 pm - Music and Copyright

Talking to Hindustan Times, music composer A.R. Rahman says that has a new policy for composing music:

I just want to push for the financial rights of composers and lyricists, even producers. It's not as though I'm saying I want to be the sole proprietor of the songs I compose. But I want a share. There's nothing wrong with that. I can't run to music companies like T Series and Sa Re Ga Ma every time I need to use my own song.

Music companies must recognise the changing ground reality. Today the conventional outlets for music sales are drying up. Soon all music will be free while the performers and performances will be paid for.

Current Mood: sleepy

10:27 am - The search for a webhost

Mohit Jaggi, a senior of mine at university and I were debating whether we should be hosting the IITG alumni mailboxes with Google Apps. The free-of-cost offer from Google was quite attractive but I am still not very comfortable with the idea for various reasons:

• People have their own personal e-mail providers, and in most cases they would use a new e-mail ID only in forwarding mode, this makes the 2GB space not-so-attractive.


• Those who like the cool gmail interface or the generous space offered by gmail, would probably already be using it for their daily needs and they would be happy with a forwarding e-mail address.


• Alumnus already have an authenticated account on the alumni website but the Google Apps SAML based single sign-on is an expensive service (Comes with the Premier edition - $50 per person, per year).


• This reason, IMO, is very important: The data isn't ours and Google doesn't provide tools to export the data (It is a TBD for the Premier edition). Moving would be painful.


• Our future needs (like a good CMS, a private Jabber server, Planet for aggregating junta's blogs etc.) are not really fulfilled by Google Apps.

Current Mood: calm

04:47 pm - The Complete Bootleg Woodstock 69 - ID3v2 tags

A few weeks ago, I was searching for ID3v2 tags for The Complete Bootleg Woodstock 69 collection for a friend of mine. I was able to find them at FreeDB but:

• The Artist information was not always correct.
• All the music was marked as being of genre Rock.

Current Mood: busy

12:24 pm - Enforcing the GNU GPL

Eben Moglen on enforcing the GNU GPL and using the courts to do so:

But perhaps we have succeeded too well. If I had used the courts to enforce the GPL years ago, Microsoft's whispering would now be falling on deaf ears. Just this month I have been working on a couple of moderately sticky situations. ``Look,'' I say, ``at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?''

Someday someone will. But that someone's customers are going to go elsewhere, talented technologists who don't want their own reputations associated with such an enterprise will quit, and bad publicity will smother them. And that's all before we even walk into court. The first person who tries it will certainly wish he hadn't. Our way of doing law has been as unusual as our way of doing software, but that's just the point. Free software matters because it turns out that the different way is the right way after all.

Current Mood: happy

04:31 pm - Traffic signal tele-marketing

The best scene in the movie is the one in which Bhaai-jaan's men beat the shit outta the tele-marketing dudes.

Sweet, very! Bole to!

Current Mood: bitchy

10:05 am - Using your URL as your OpenID

Over at mannu's journal (2007: the year of OpenID?), there was a discussion about how OpenID works which was when I looked at it seriously for the first time.

The distributed identity system that OpenID provides is very convenient. If you run a blog at your own website but want a community of people to be able to comment and participate in discussions, you should run an OpenID consumer at your blog. There are consumer and server implementations in various languages.

If you want to use your own URL as your OpenID with consumer sites, but don't want to run your own server, you can use a third party server. Here is how:

1. Select a service provider (like Livejournal, MyOpenID, or one of the several OpenID providers) and signup with them.

2. Add the following lines (replace appaji with your own userid) to the HEAD section of the page serving the URL that you want to use as your OpenID.

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml"/>
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://appaji.livejournal.com/"/>

This example is specific to Livejournal. Check the FAQs/help of your OpenID service provider for the openid.server and openid.delegate information.

As with a other web-based authentication, users should watchout for phishing attacks while using OpenID consumer sites.

My OpenID is http://www.appaji.net/ and I delegate it to http://appaji.livejournal.com/.

Current Mood: lethargic

05:00 pm - Of memes.

ga_woo would be delighted to know that SUN's CEO Jonathan Schwartz not only does memes, but also tags people to keep the chain alive :-).

Current Mood: busy

11:06 am - Those things you wear!

I think pretty much anything you can find yourself wearing on your body is patented. Your underwear, vest, that sports shirt, trousers (and the zip fastner on it, probably patented more than once)!

And the next time you buy that imported Reebook "monkey bag" hanging from a road-side stall in Sultan Bazaar for your favorite nephew, don't bargain too much for a discount. Poor Reebook must be paying loads of money as royalties to Case Logic, Inc. for their amazing invention.

Current Mood: amused

11:52 am - My nude photoalbum?

I suppose arunshanbhag will not be too happy with google for this one ;)

Current Mood: awake

09:02 am - hsbc.co.in works with Iceweasel / the season is here

Here is some good news for all users of HSBC India net-banking on Firefox-derivatives. http://www.hsbc.co.in/ seems to work pretty well in its new avtar with Firefox and its derivatives (like Iceweasel on Debian).

Prior to their revamp, we would need the User Agent Switcher extension to masquerade as Internet Explorer 6. That stopped working after their recent re-design (which had plenty of JavaScript kludge that would just refuse to work with Firefox). And as of today, the HSBC India website seems to work fine without the user agent switcher (Their "verified by visa" and "mastercard securecode" still seem to require User-Agent spoofing though).

Update: This seems to work on Debian Sid/XFCE but not on Debian Etch/Gnome. I haven't investigated why, yet.

In other news, K, V and J are respectively taking the plunge, throwing in the towel and biting the bullet in the next few days. I am off to Hyderabad on the 24th to attend V's wedding. Tempting as it might be to travel to Delhi and meet J and a whole bunch of other junta, I am not too sure if I would be able to make it to his wedding ceremony early February. It is that time of the year, I guess :)

Current Mood: awake

09:41 am - Load, aim and shoot

At Tipu sultan's summer palace (Dariya Daulat Bagh) in Srirangapatnam:

Load the canon:



( Take a good aim )

Hope you all had a blast on the new years eve. And here is wishing you a good good year 2007.

Current Mood: contemplative

02:33 pm - Will the real president please stand up, stand up.

It confuses me to no end as to who people are talking about when they say president. However, I am eagerly waiting for rileen's election campaign if he decides to contest :)

Current Mood: severecold

05:06 pm - Life and times of U. M. Rao

This post originally started off by being about Umrao Jaan (hence the title) in which I would drift off and talk mostly about Abhishek Bachchan and the magnitude of his loser-ity (Those American Express ads -- one of these days, Farex will sign up Big-B to feed Can-Never-B for one of their commercials). And while we are at it, the new Don movie deserves more than the just-above-average ratings that the rigged reviews in Slimes of India seem to reluctantly hand it. The "Mai hoon don" song is a class act, really.

Anyway, I drifted off and started praising how much I liked Casino Royale because it wasn't like the rest of the Mithunkanth-style Bond-movies and all that blah. But I realised that I would be a hypocrite -- I actually like Rajiniborthy-style movies. The thing that really ticks me off is that a jump over the hill wearing a flashy bell-bottom or a lungi clad dude countering bullets with a pocket knife is less real and more-mockable than a fist fight in outer space in a Brioni suit / Tuxedo.

Anyway, Kabul Fiza Express is a very good movie, go watch it.

And I think I should stick to posting pictures, mostly. To create text my child, is tough.

Current Mood: cold