Uncategorized « My pensieve

Category: Uncategorized

March 8, 2014

Issue with BucketList plugin of WordPress

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Leave a comment

This is the issue that I filed. Just uploading images here as support forum of WordPress doesnt support attaching images.

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/fetching-data-is-taking-too-long-time-and-page-keeps-loading?replies=1#post-5308802

The below image was on my localhost, it showed the data that I had entered but the page was ever-loading mentioning that it was transferring data from twitter.

This is the screenshot of my actual blog where the data never was shown and it kept loading for ever.

February 27, 2014

February 3, 2014

The structure of the society makes us fight and resent people close to us in the economic heirarchy

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Tags: auto, bus, conductor, social, transgender — Leave a comment

In the current hierarchical society based on the economic status, we are forced to fight those who are our neighbours in the structure. We crib and we hate those who are just below us or above us. We know that someday we will get outsmarted by those below us and hence we try unconsciously subjugate them. Similarly we want to outsmart those just above us and keep trying to attack them whenever given a chance.
I will try to share some experiences, trying to see why people totally strangers fight and resent each other just due to the social structure.

1) It is the last trip of the bus for the day, the time is around 9:30 pm and the bus is crowded with 50-60 people. The conductor is working tirelessly collecting ticket fare from passengers and give them tickets. All passengers look tired weary from their work and eager to reach their home early. Many of them dont give the conductor change and he has to frantically convince them that he doesnt have change and request them to search more in their pockets/wallets to find those hidden coins. The conductor is getting restless. Meantime there are few passengers from North India, who seem to be labourers who try to convey where exactly they want to go. Conductor completely restless keep shouting at them about giving him change in local language. The north indian passengers clueless of local language are not able to understand. Conductor just writes down something on the back of ticket and moves on. The north indian passengers are still wondering why they were not returned their remaining fare. In around 3 kms, the phase will change and before that the conductor is supposed to collect fares from all the passengers who have climbed in the previous phase. He asks the driver to stop for sometime as he has not finished collecting fare from everybody. After 2 mins, there is commotion from few passengers that they are simply being delayed. Conductor who is already restless shouts back at them saying that he is doing his work and if they want, they can take some other bus. The commotion grows with both the parties abusing each other. Few other passengers try to calm them down.

I standing on one side, start wondering.
“Naturally, none of them are interested in creating nuisance to others but still it is just that each one of them are so weary with their personal and work life that they vent out their anger easily on anybody. Conductor is doing his job, close to 12 hour shift, dealing with hundreds of different kind of passengers. Passengers tired from their work want to go back home as soon as possible. North Indian passengers are themselves thousands of kms away from their home and have their own anxiety in this place where they dont understand the language and are trying hard to make a living and send some money back home. Yet, none of them stop to wonder why they are fighting each other. Each one of them wants this one more day to pass, thanking God that they were able to earn something for their living and hopefully save a part of it for the future.”

2) I am sitting in a bus waiting at the traffic signal. From the window, I notice a Transgender lady demanding money from a girl sitting in an Auto. After few seconds, the girl in the auto takes our Rs. 10 and gives it to the transsexual lady while the Autowallah keeps waiting for the signal to become Green.

Again I wonder:
“Would that Autowallah have also asked extra Rs. 10 like the usual autowallahs in Bangalore. Did that girl sitting in the auto agreed to pay that extra amount? What would the Autowallah think about his way of earning that Rs. 10? Does the girl see this Rs. 10 which she gave to the Transgender lady differently than what she would give to this autowallah?
Without doubt, it is a sad part of our society that the only way we allow transgenders to live is either by begging or by being prostitutes. We have now people who argue frantically that now some of the men have started dressing as transgenders and hence we shouldnt give them alms. Ofcourse these people dont discuss why we have the society which forces men to become transgenders so that he can beg and earn his food/drink.
However coming back to the point, I wondered if the autowallah who would have probably asked for the extra Rs. 10 felt ashamed or pitied himself. He who is working hard and earning, requests for the same Rs. 10 and is denied and infact abused by people generally for disobeying the law which has fixed the fare rates, where as a transgender who begs for the money is given money.

December 29, 2013

Les Miserables

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Leave a comment

Two beautiful proses from Les Miserables:
Look Down Look Down

Look down and see the beggars at your feet
Look down and show some mercy if you can
Look down and see the sweepings of the street
Look down, look down,
Upon your fellow man!
….
There was a time we killed the king.
We tried to change the world too fast.
Now we have got another king,
he is no better than the last.
This is the land that fought for liberty-
now when we fight we fight for bread!
Here is the thing about equality-
everyone’s equal when they’re dead.

Do you hear the people sing?

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free!

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

Will you give all you can give
So that our banner may advance
Some will fall and some will live
Will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the martyrs
Will water the meadows of France!

Do you hear the people sing!
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

December 4, 2013

Big Democracy : Big Surveillance talk by Maria Xynou

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Tags: CIS, FOSS, FSMK, ICMS, NSA, snowden, surveillance, UID — Leave a comment

I attended this talk today at CIS-India office. Maria as part of her research was able to point out very well on how the Indian government is investing heavily in various kinds of surveillance and how all of this is getting centralized under one big umbrella project called ICMS(Indian Central Monitoring System). This along with the UID project is going to be totally catastrophic with respect to an individual’s privacy in our country. We already know with SnoopGate case at Gujarat how privacy of individuals are easily violated for petty reasons and how the whole state machinery is put in use without any checks and balances just on the will of few people at the top of the state machinery.
The talk also covered part of her research where she went through different private companies who have developed various products specializing in mass and targetted surveillance through Telecommunication, Internet and biometric data. What is scary is that the customers of majority of these companies are Law Enforcement Agencies(LEAs) and Telecommunications and Internet Service Providers which they actively brag about on their websites. Moreover, most of these companies are not even ISO:27001 complaint and hardly any of them follow any privacy policies.
Hence Surveillance is becoming a big profitable industry in india where most of the profits are coming from tax payers money.
I will be sharing the link to the recorded video of the talk which will definitely give you a much detailed idea of the various surveillance projects run by Indian government and various companies involved sharing the profit and benefitting from the same.

In the blog, I would like to mention two issues that mainly stuck me during the discussion after the talk.

1) Privacy of meta data is equally important if not more than the actual content data.
One of the most common excuse that we heard from various NSA agencies after the Snowden leaks were that they are mainly storing the MetaData and not the content data in itself and hence it is not as bad as it seems. However Maria during the discussion pointed out very well why we should be more concerned if this is actually the case. Content data may not always be true. Many times it can just be garbage information or totally false information being exchanged between people. Also just due to its enormity, it becomes very difficult to actually do data mining on the content data itself. However MetaData in itself is true and cannot be contested upon. Suppose you sent an email from a particular location to your friend, the content in the data itself can be false and can be something which is not much useful. However the very fact that you were at a particular location and used a particular IP Address and communicated to a particular person with a specific email ID itself cannot be contested and this metadata of your converstaion can be used against you. This gets worse as these metadata over a period of time can draw a picture of you which is completely different than your actual personality but since the information in metadata cannot be contested, it becomes very difficult to prove otherwise.

2) Privacy awareness an cultural issue in India
Often whenever we try to create awareness about the growing surveillance in India and across the world, there is a complete indifference amongst people about it. ‘Why should I worry when I have nothing to hide’ and ‘It is for our own safety’ are the most common reply. Maria attributed two main reasons behind this lack of concern with respect to privacy amongst people.
a) Asian culture is more collective and less of individualistic as compared to western culture. Privacy in itself is a very individualistic right and since the asian cultures are more about the society in general than individuals, we are often happy to give up our privacy for better of the society.
b) Since large part of the society in India still depends in various aspects on government support, they are ok to let government have a kind of parental surveillance over their privacy. However the fact that such a surveillance leads to control over the people is mainly ignored or unknown to people. One of the biggest reason given behind UID/Aadhar Project is that since there are so many different projects of the government, there needs to be some kind of centralized system which will ensure that the support from government reaches the right people. However with no one way of currently identifying people, there is lot of leakages in the projects and hence unique identification method will help. People have actually bought this argument for the project and have enrolled enthusiastically. However the implications of such a huge database of all the people across the country will only be known in time. We know how such databases of people were used in Germany under a dictatorial regime. There is also some information of how Voter’s list were used during the 1984 and 2002 riots to identify people.

Over all the picture of surveillance in India is very grim. Another point what Maria pointed out is that though surveillance in itself is very scary, what examplifies it is the acceptance of it by people as a normal state affiar. In a dictatorial authoratative regime, surveillance would have been contested as something being pushed from the top and hence infringing people’s right. However what we now see is that most successful surveillance states are some of the biggest democratic societies.

November 12, 2013

ByteStruck, a wonderfully organized Free Software event

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Tags: bytestruck, FOSS, mangalore, organize — Leave a comment

ByteStruck is an event conducted by PACE LUG Mangalore for the high school and pre university students. Being conducted for last 6 years, it has been able to attract the best of the students from in and around Mangalore and now the schools are competing with each other to prepare their students and win ByteStruck.
The philosophy of ByteStruck is to introduce students at a very young age to programming and Free Software ideology. On these lines, a competition using any basic programming language or prototyping environment like Scratch or Alice is used. Students are given a theme on the spot of competition and using the free software tool are supposed to present their ideas. Teams of two students compete against each other in two categories, one for high school students and another for pre-university students.
The event attracts school students to the campus of PACE College and this way, college is able to show case their infrastructure and facilities to the students and there by encouraging students to choose the college if they decide to do engineering. Schools and pre-university colleges are happy to compete against each other and show case the competency of students. Students themselves see the event as something different than the other competitions that they usually participate and hence are thrilled to come and take part in the competition. Thus in a beautiful culmination of interests of all the different parties involved in organizing the event, the PACE Linux User’s Group is able to spread the message of free software and encourage students to learn different aspects of computer programming at a very young age.
On the organizing part, the event involves hard work of hundreds of volunteers involved in various aspects of the event. Once the free software tool which will be used for the competition is finalized, some volunteers are involved in the preparing and collecting learning material for the students. This year Scratch and Alice were selected as the tools for competition for high school and pre-university students respectively. All this material is then packed into a CD/DVD and then hundreds of such CD/DVDs are written to be distributed to various schools. The volunteers this year visited close to 150 schools in and around Mangalore region and as far as schools in Kasaragod. This is one of the major activity involved in the organizing of the event and it is overwhelmingly supported by all the students of all semester of CSE/IS department in the college. Each school interested in participating in the event have to assign a school teacher as a guide for the students and the teacher is responsible for all the coordination with the participants along with registration and transportation activity. Registrations can be done usually over phone but this year, even online registrations were accepted on their website http://bytestruck.in Each school is allowed to send maximum of 5 teams for each category. Around 100 teams for high school category and 50 teams for pre-university students registered this year.
On the big day of ByteStruck, the transportation department of the organizers starts picking students from various pick up points around the city using the College Buses. The college itself being in the outskirts of the city, providing transportation helps the participants and also ensures that the students can reach the campus on time. A school teacher is expected to accompany students which helps in ensuring discipline amongst the participants. Once in campus, participants are expected to confirm their registrations at the registration desk and then served breakfast.
The teams are then sent to different labs. Due to the great response this year, 6 college labs had to be prepared for the event, 4 for high school students with all the systems having Scratch installed in them and 2 labs for pre-university students with Alice installed in all the computers. Unfortunately the platform used for organizing the event is currently Windows as the organizers did not get permission to install any GNU/Linux based distribution in some of the labs. Thus to maintain uniformity, the organizers decided to run the competition with Windows as the platform. Once assembled in the labs, students are given a theme for each category and in next two hours they are expected to come up with prototypes representing the themes using the free software tool. This year themes were “Newton’s Third Law” and “Two friends stuck in an island” for high school and pre-university students respectively. Once the stipulated time for the competition is over, judges go to each team judging on various factors on how well the prototypes matched the given theme and how well the same was presented.
Lunch is then served to participants while the judges and organizers finalize the results. Since many students come from far off schools early in the morning, it is important to provide lunch to all the participants as many of them wouldn’t get a chance to bring their lunch boxes. After Lunch, one hour of discussion on one or two free software topics beneficial to the students is planned. This year, Wikipedia and Stellarium were the two topics.
This is then followed by closing ceremony where the eagerly awaited results are announced. Apart from top 3 teams in each category, the best guide school teacher in each category is also recognized.
Over all, ByteStruck is one of its kind FOSS event organized across the country. It is able to attract best of the students in the region, get very good support from the college authorities and most importantly a very dedicated and passionate team to organize.

For more info on ByteStruck – http://bytestruck.in

September 9, 2013

Disrupting the market

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Tags: disrupt, electronic, item, nokia — Leave a comment

Recently when I visited a relative’s home, I noticed that I couldnt see the clear picture when sitting in an angle from the TV. It was a Sony LCD TV which he had bought 2 years ago for Rs. 36000. It seems the film of the screen had been damaged and the service agent guessed that it might have because someone rubbed the screen with wet cloth. He was told that it will cost Rs. 8000 to repair the screen and for some reason the warranty didnt cover it. My relative told me that he decided that instead of paying 8k, he would rather buy a new one after some time. He said, anyways we dont watch much TV nowadays so its ok.
This is a general phenomenon which I have lately noticed in many of the electronic items. None of them are durable and they hardly survive 2-3 years. My mom had brought a grinder which lasted just one year where as the old one she had bought around 18 years ago is still in use after minor repairs.
Remember the days when your dad used to spend the sunday trying to fix the Fan or Fridge? There used to be electricians who could fix these items. Current electronic items are irreparable.
However what is clear that the companies dont like when their products work fine for years as this upsets their market. If each family buys a TV just once in 10 or 15 years, then most of the electronics company would go into loss. Hence there seems to be a hidden mutual understanding between all the companies that the focus the products shouldnt be in durable. This is their market compulsion.
But overall this is a complete loss situation for the consumers. The market is supposed to be competitive in the sense to ensure that the quality of goods keeps increasing but clearly in case of durability factor it seems that market forces are working in opposite direction.
Use and Throw, Spend and Consume More is the mantra of the market.
One argument for such a market is that since the electronics market has been evolving so quickly, nobody wants to use a 3 year old electronic item. Even I changed my phone once in 2 years or less. However, it should be a choice of the consumer to decide if he/she wants to buy a new one instead of such kind of forceful methods.
So how can we disrupt it? How can you ensure that the consumers dont end up being the looser.
I think any company which can enter into the market with a brand or tag that its products are durable can disrupt this current loot. One important feature of making the products durable is to ensure that their designs are very modular and the parts can easily be replaced. Electronic items come in a form factor where opening it up by a normal layman and understanding the functioning is simply not possible. This is part of the slimmer the better philosophy. Some of the current smartphones have gone to an extent where even batteries or memory of the phone are in built forcing the user to change the phone if the memory slot or battery is spoilt.

Nokia is a good example where its product was known for its durability and hence they had gained large chunks of the market share. Ofcourse it is unfortunate that they were not able to retain it when the smartphone craze took over the mobile market.
Had Nokia opened up their BIOS also to allow user’s to play with different operating systems, I certainly think that the current smartphone market scenario would have been different. There was a half hearted approach with N900 where they opened the BIOS and user’s could install any operating system on the same. However it was discontinued too soon before the idea got any traction.
Google with its Nexus series has opened it BIOS but its other components are completely locked, they do not support external memory card slots, battery is in-built and also not the best.

August 15, 2013

Working men have no country

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Tags: state, worker — Leave a comment

“The working men have no country.” – Marx

Whenever I hear someone making noise about outside people coming and taking jobs, how life of people in the city has got impacted due to many immigrants from outside, it seems to be so ridiculous. In every aspect of my life, I have interacted with people from different states and with all the initial differences in our lifestyle and language, over a period of time, these differences have easily been overcome. Throughout my schooling, graduation and now my working life, I have had loads of people around me from different states. So much so that, I am much more comfortable talking in Hindi than talking in Konkani(my mother tongue) and Kannada(language of the state to which I belong to, state of domicile). As a working professional, this interaction has been extended now to workers from different countries.

This is very typical for any worker in IT industry also. Most of the time, he/she will be staying in a city far away from the state to which he belongs to. If he/she is without a family, there is a high probability of living in a PG or flat where he/she shares it with someone from a different state. Even if he/she stays with a family, there is a good chance that the neighbour is from a different state. Definitely he/she will be working in a team which will have good proportion of the people from other states.
Now what is so common amongst all the workers from various states in various industries. Workers do not have choice of a state, they go where their work takes them. They can have the notion of choosing the city but if work requires it, then they have to go to any state/country and live there.
Workers don’t have the luxury of choosing the lifestyle and environment they want to live in. It all depends on the place where you work. Again getting to choose your locality is just a notion which is by far very artificial and constrained with many restrictions making it virtually useless.
Workers also do not have the luxury of choosing with whom they will work with. “My team is not very good” is a statement which you often hear from workers in the IT industry and most often it can only be attributed to be because the worker is not comfortable working with people from different background and states.

A worker gets into terms with these realities as he/she has no other option. Again most of these decisions are not taken to make profit or to enjoy a luxury life. These decisions are forced on workers to simply make a living.

August 15, 2013

Humans are all connected to each other like the world wide web but….

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Tags: internet, spiritual, www — Leave a comment

“IP Addresses are eternal, they just change systems.”

Any spiritual person says that every being in this world is connected to each other and religious person will go on step ahead saying that they all are in turn connected to the almighty. However what is sad is that even with all those wonderful connections, we no longer feel for people suffering right in front of us. I have often talked to friends asking them to contribute to help someone go to school and help them for their education and the common response that I get is there are no people around me who needs such kind of help. Most often, they are kind enough to offer me money and say that they will gladly transfer the money whenever I ask for such cause but when it comes to actually spending sometime and helping the needy, they find it difficult. If all humans were supposedly connected to each other, why is it so difficult for us to see the stark difference in lives of thousands around us.

Now as per many spiritual and religious theories, everybody is connected either through their so called souls or some other way. To take this analogy to internet, these connections are probably the internet where every server having a public IP address is connected to each other through lot of meshes of cables, switches and routers. However as discussed above, people find it very difficult to connect to someone right in front of us. We have lot of criteria before we feel sorry for the person. Whether that person belongs to my state, whether the person belongs to my religion or my caste or my gender, whether he talks the same language or not, what is the economic condition of the person and if he belongs to the same class as mine. When many of these necessary conditions are fulfilled, our empathy for that person is developed so much so that we would cry for the person even if the person is actually on some reality show or a fictitious character in the soap that comes every night. This I consider as private networks. You can communicate and relate to each other very easily only if you are in the same private network on the LAN. Ofcourse as any LAN networks, some are fast with 100Gbps connection between their systems and some are slower. But nevertheless if you are in same private network, you can easily connect to each other. Just a little bit of handshake protocol is required and then you can easily share with each other.
However its not that you don’t relate to people from a different class, religion, language or caste. But there are certain restrictions on the same. Like on the internet, where whether you are allowed to talk to a computer on a different private network is mainly governed by your Gateway/Firewall/Proxy server and the Gateway/Firewall/Proxy server of the other computer. Now in real life I think, the religious gurus/pandits or texts or those language saving groups who come in forefront in the name to save the language are the gateway/proxy/Firewall servers. The texts or gurus decide outside your network, for whom you should have empathy for. If it is a black child in Africa dying of malnutrition, you are allowed to feel sorry for the same but a child killed due to bomb attacks in Iraq/Afghanistan is killed because of their misdeeds in the last birth. A farmer committing suicide is due to his foolishness and lack of education and financial understanding but a software professional committing suicide is due to bad working environment and huge mental pressure in companies. Children not going to school is bad and due to corruption in government but those coming through caste based reservation are the ones misusing the caste card and are the ones who are not allowing good students to come forward in life. All these are filters done by the Gateway/proxy/firewall servers.

Then you have some of the politicians and spiritual gurus who do not specifically belong to any particular group but they often use the divide and rule policy to corrupt you and your group based on language, caste, sects, religion. I think these are the viruses in the internet. Often, they are allowed into the private networks by Gateway/Firewall/Proxy Server like the nexus between various religious groups and the politicians. Once inside the network they do their best to corrupt the whole private network.

Now where do few people who want to empathize for people breaking those restrictions put by Gateway/Proxy/Firewall Servers come in the internet? I am not sure. But sooner they are plugged into the web, the better it will be.

March 24, 2013

What is the cost that we are ready to pay

by viggy — Categories: experience, social, Uncategorized — Tags: anti-incumbency, cost, fundamentalists, politics, power — Leave a comment

People have been talking about the development model in certain states and how it needs to be emulated across the nation. But apart from all the PR machinery involved, this development model was bought by cashing a costly paycheck. This cost is that of complete ignorance of minority. Such ignorance breeds in itself a sense of alienation amongst the people and the current silence is only an indication of the future revolution that is going to be fought for equality and freedom by the minority.
There is not doubt that to keep themselves relevant the fundamentalist forces once in power, will sooner or later take us to war. External war threat has been looming onto us. With US forces planning to leave Afghanistan and Pakistan government becoming more and more unstable, there is no doubt that activities along the border is going to increase and people in power in New Delhi might have to take some tough decisions. If there are fundamentalist forces in power, it will only give them too easy a reason to take the nation to war.
However my concern is not external wars. My concern is the internal civil war that loom over us if fundamentalist forces see the light of the day of power.
Our society is on edge while media like an uninterested babysitter, is just shying away from its responsibilities to report the truth and come with concrete studies of the on-the-ground situation. Small insignificant incidents spread like a fire across the nation where as real burning issues of the common people are just not getting any attention. The mob behavior growing across the nation can easily be fueled towards any direction.
Lying on such a hot volcano bed, the future with fundamentalists being in power can only be catastrophic. Our society is yet to understand and respect difference of opinion and faith. With the kind of diversity, India boasts of and with the strong personal interests of a few to keep the society divided, we just have not yet been able to learn to live in harmony. Especially with the educated middle class just too interested in enjoying their sudden financial growth, there has been just too little interest in real solving social issues that plague the society and such issues have only grown thanks to the conducive environment. As always, it is not that the society wants to get into communal war. It is just that the environment becomes such that everyone is engulfed into it.
Now having considered such speculative but still serious issues, we need to consider what is the cost that we are ready to pay for the perceived development. Hence I request to all the people filled with anti-incumbency to have a greater thought on other alternatives present than the fundamentalist forces.

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