SearchCode is an amazing tool to find code snippets in existing projects and learn how others are using the particular code snippet. However this is the issue I found in its search. When I wanted to go to Second page of the search, it threw me “No results found” even though the first page did show that there are more results than that is displayed in first page. In my case, it told me that there are 38 results but showed only 14 in first page. Here are the screenshots. This is the link of the error.
देखो आज फ़िर नया साल आया!!
लाठि ले खडे
पुलिस के होते हुए
होर्न भजाते
बाईक पर गुंडा चिल्ला पाया!!
देखो आज फ़िर नया साल आया!!
कडाके कि ठंड में
पटाखों कि गुंज में
कबिर ने मां से पूछा
क्या कोई मंत्री कंबल ले के आया!!
देखो आज फ़िर नया साल आया!!
शोर के भडने पर
शबरि ने मां से पूछा
राम रहिम के नाम पर
क्या कोई राश्न कार्ड देने आया!!
देखो आज फ़िर नया साल आया!!
विकास के फ़्लॆओवर के नीचे
बच्चों को सुलाते हुए
मां ने कहा, ना बच्चों
अमिरों का नया साल आया!!
A dead person is as useless as a used tissue paper. Its existence has no consequence, and for the lack of proper word that I can think of, no respect. If you look at the way people treat a dead body in the name of the final rites, its shameful. A person who would have been a big bully would now be moved around like a sack of bag. Not only physically, even ideologically his/her ideas would be modified, distorted etc as wished and the dead person cant defend it.
How often have you heard this statement, “Aaj agar _____ Hote?”, “If he was alive, he would have …..?” Anyone would say this and there is no way the dead person can defend himself/herself.
We have two great examples for this. Gandhi and Che Guevara. With 100s of schemes tied to his name, lakhs of roads, auditoriums, etc Gandhi is used in this country by anyone and everyone. I am sure ‘If he was alive, he would have sat on Anshan in retaliation’. See I just did that. With Modi’s Cleanliness campaign to Congress’s MNREGA everybody has made use of him. On the ground, we have nationalists who hate him, call him names for supposedly being responsible for Partition. I do not have much idea about him but this seems to be an interesting debate about ‘Relevance of Gandhi in today’s world‘
Che’s picture is a very common picture to everyone, most seen in T Shirt prints. In a recent debate about Copyright, Copyleft and incentive to publishers, one of the speakers mentioned that ‘If copyright helped the original creators, Che would have been the richest person for his own image.’ It is appalling how his image is used/morphed/remixed into any design and again the poor revolutionary who went ahead and challenged some of the most powerful countries in his time is helpless and cannot defend himself now.
The Iron Man, Vallabhbhai Patel with the Statue of Unity also faces the same fate. Whether he himself would have agree to spend Rs. 2000 Crores on his statue in the name of Nation’s unity is an interesting question.
The more popular the person is, the more is the dilution and corruption of his/her ideology.
What is interesting is that Almighty GOD also faces the similar humiliation. Things that have been done and is being done in name of GOD is truly shameful? But the almighty not able to defend himself/herself, infact needing people to defend himself/herself makes one doubt his/her capabilities.
A member in ILugC had recently asked this question and I spent some time trying to put up these points as an answer.
1) Can we trust the government itself?
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” which translates to “Who will guard the
guards themselves?”
Government itself is made up of people, even though, we can proudly say
that we democratically elected the government, can we trust the
government completely? The various scams of state governments and
central governments give us a good reason why we cant trust those
running the government. Also, a government in itself is transient, you
never know what kind of future government can come.
2) Security of the data collected
Its a common knowledge that when any riot happens, the organizers easily
target people from specific communities thanks to data such as Voter’s
ID Card list etc available for that region. Hence even we can blindly
trust the government, the fact that such a collated data exists, itself
makes it a honeypot to attract bad elements in society to misuse the data.
3) Mass Surveillance vs targetted Surveillance
Though there may be some strong reasons for government to do
surveillance on specific individuals, there is very little rational to
do mass surveillance. The very notion that everything you do or say is
getting recorded will curtail freedom of expression. Everytime someone
wants to express something little off the beat, he/she might have to
take extreme caution and in many cases, people might not come forward at
all to express.
An analogy is imagine a light tower in central yard in a jail where
prisoners cant see who is watching from the light tower. Since they know
that there is 24 hours watch on it, the notion that someone there is
watching itself creates fear in them to try anything to escape.
Even in case of targetted surveillance, we know how Gujrat government
‘allegedly’ misused the state machinery to snoop on an individual. So
even having means to do targetted surveillance needs to have very
stringent checks and balances.
4) Eternity of the data collected
The idea that the data collected will exist years later is also
something to worry about. A simple example is what happened with Sec
377. When the high court declared it unconstitutional in 2009, many
people came forward expressing their true orientation. However when
Supreme Court overturned the HC decision, it left all the people who had
come forward openly to be sitting ducks for harassment by the authorities.
5) Option to opt-out
Like in case of Aadhar which looks like will stay in India now that the
new government also seem to be comfortable with it, there is little
option for those who value their privacy to opt-out of these schemes.
In India, since government does provide for lot of amenities, Maria
Xynou who is working on the Surveillance in India in CIS-India had
mentioned that there is a attitude amongst us to look at government like
a parent who takes care of us. Hence this attitude makes us put lot of
trust in the government which is dangerous.
You can watch her talk at CCC on Indian Surveillance State here,
Inspired by Redhat QR Code with Logo that I saw in Pycon, I decided to check if something similar can be developed for FSMK with FSMK site link as the QR code text. This link explains clearly the technical aspect of modifying a generated QR Code with some custom text/design.
Then using FSMK logo and a QR Code image generated through QR Code Image Generator Firefox Addon, I mashed up this modified QR Code using GIMP.
As the first activity of We The Goondas Campaign, we organized a public screening of Internet’s Own Boy, a biography of Aaron Swartz, a hacktivist in US who worked actively to promote internet freedom and in a true sense, the first martyr of Freedom of Internet/knowledge movement. We The Goondas campaign motive is to raise awareness amongst public about the recent amendment to Goonda’s Act which was passed by Karnataka Legislative Assembly and then when there are sufficient number of people mobilized, we will decide on how to take the campaign forward. The screening was organized in Institute of Agricultural Technologists, Queens Rd, Bangalore on 21st Sept 2014 at 2:00 pm. Over all close to 60 people attended the screening. The screening was followed by a discussion led by Lawrence Liang from Alternative Law Forum on the whole knowledge based movement that Aaron was a major part of and also his role that should be a major inspiration for all of us from the developing countries. Lawrence emphasized on the absurdity of various laws which are being passed across the world to regulate internet. Aaron was a martyr of such an absurd law. With respect to Goonda Act, he talked about how it is completely absurd because it tries to weigh in completely diverse range of people in the same pan, right from people involved in boot-legging, land-grabbers, drug offenders to copyright violators. He emphasized on the point that where else can you find such comparisons if not in absurd laws. Like a statement by Aaron in the movie, Lawrence also emphasized on the fact that books and other content is not just about a certain idea being represented, it is also a representation of the culture and tradition of the society which shouldnt be locked up. He mentioned a question that Suraj, a delhi based, working class boy had asked him, “माना ये किताब आपकि हॆ, इस किताब कि परछाई किसकी हॆ?”(“Even though I agree that the books is yours, who owns the shadow of the book?)”. He mentioned how he was pretty sure that Aaron would have put up all the content of JSTOR into torrent and that was the sole motivation for him to download it and how laws actually stopped him from doing such a generous thing. He mentioned that any law which doesnt allow us to be generous to each other, is not an law to follow. The discussion also led to interesting questions on how the campaign should be taken forward, what we can expect etc. As of now, we currently do not have a clear idea on how to take the campaign forward and hopefully with more and more groups and people joining us, we will be able to come up with the clarity on what realistically can be expected out of the campaign.
Over all, a very good start to the campaign. ALF was very generous to have contributed towards the cost of the hall which was close to Rs. 18,000/- We definitely were not able to mobilize as many people compared to the money put in and hopefully we will be able to do a much better participated event next time.
Photos of the event: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/124841002@N04/sets/72157647495245607/
How often do you screw your GNU/Linux based system such that you decide to reinstall your system? Are you the go-to person in your group for any issues with any GNU/Linux based OS? How often do you suggest to people who come to you that there is no other way to recover than re-installing?
I have been helping people to migrate to GNU/Linux based distribution, mainly Ubuntu. And its quite often that I come across people who while doing something or other have messed their system and need to help to fix it up. More than often, I used to give up quite quickly and ask them to take a backup using live-boot and reinstall the system. Many times, I would just search for first error I noticed and see if I could get solution online and if that didnt work give up and ask to reinstall. Though this is quick, it actually meant that I wasnt learning anything new. It also meant that many things in Ubuntu which might have been actual bugs might not be getting noticed due to this. And it also contradicted one of the popular examples I used to mention as to why Free Software is better than proprietary? Have you noticed the Blue Screen of Death, Can you fix it on Windows? Because Free Software allows you to study it and play with it, you can know why your system has actually crashed and try to understand how to fix it. Really? How often do we do that?
Hence I have decided to start this self-campaign and if possible motivate others to also follow it where in I put my maximum whenever I come across a messed up system to recover it without reinstall. The way the success of this campaign will be judged is by maximum number of systems I can avoid reinstall before coming across a system I am forced to reinstall as I cant find any other way around it. Hopefully as time goes on, the gap between every two systems forced to reinstall will increase which would mean I am improving/learning and avoiding many more systems from re-install.
I am already successful in doing it for 1 system. Hoorrrraaaayyyy!!!!! Hence #AvoidedReinstall 1 I spent 3 nights on it, close to 8-10 hours in all but finally it is recovered and system is now working without having to re-install Ubuntu. Hope to find sometime and blog about it also.
I do have loads of media files in my two external harddisks, one of 3TB and another of 1TB. And overtime the data is all over the place, in some cases, there are duplicates also and there is currently no way, I can easily remember if I have a particular data or not. Over all its a mess. Hence I need a good way to arrange all of this data and have a cache of its metadata in my laptop, so that it becomes very easy for me to search whether I have a particular media file available with me or not. Media can be anything from movies, documentaries, songs, iso images, series, etc.
So this are the requirements of such a software:
Do full scan of HDD connected and collect all data available in it.
User should be able to give a minimum/maximum size of interest(files less than say 1MB may not be of importance)
User should be able to give formats of interest(User may just want video files to be listed/searched)
Should be able to update an existing scan so that only new files are added to it again
Using the collected data, user should be able to search a particular file based on filename/filetype/size etc
I have recently migrated my primary email address to my own domain and started using it for all communication purposes. One of the main thing is to subscribe to various Google Groups which GNU/Linux User’s Groups under FSMK have. The straight forward way, you would think, would be to just search for the groups in groups.google.com website, then there should be a subscribe button where you would enter your email address and then you should receive a email to confirm that you want to subscribe. This is what most of the mailing lists software would do. However not Google Groups. If you want to subscribe to Google Groups, when you click to join the group, it asks you to sign in a Google Account, hence any non-google account wont be able to subscribe to a group.
The other way is to request the group admins to add your email address in the group, this will not work always as most of the times I wouldnt even know the admins of the group. Also it means that you now have to depend on the other person to find time to add you which will be slow. Idea of public mailing lists is that anyone interested should be able to subscribe. Unfortunately google does a reasonable job in ensuring it becomes very difficult for you unless you have a Google Account.
So I found out a more difficult way to subscribe/unsubscribe google groups and this is again borrowed from traditional mailing lists softwares.
If you know the google group’s mailing address, say
glugdsce@googlegroups.com
You can subscribe to the group, by sending a mail to
glugdsce+subscribe@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe, send a mail to
glugdsce+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
Similarly, to directly visit the page of the group in a browser, you can use the following link
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/glugdsce
In all above cases, just remove glugdsce with the name of the group that you are interested in.
Overall, I think Google Groups continue the evils of Google and if you are a well established group/community, it is always better to host your own mailing list and move out of Google Groups as soon as possible.
“I will do it again if I have to because fighting against a military government and dictatorship is still something I believe in” This was what Prof. Mulugeta Bekele answered to my question of whether he felt it was worth spending 7 years in jail. A well known physicists in Ethiopia, Prof. Mulugeta Bekele unlike our current Indian ‘scientific intellectuals’ had very clear idea political ideology. Being part of an underground political student organization against the military regime while in his 30s, he feels lucky to have survived after being imprisoned for 7 years. He recalls the fate of many of his colleagues and friends who were simply executed by the regime without any trial or reason given. While trying to imagine what 7 years in prison would be, when they had just been brought to prison and saw a senior colleague being released after 7 years in prison, a friend had remarked to him, it is 1 year of Mondays, 1 year of Tuesdays, and so on. Little did he know at that time that he would have to spend something similar in his lifetime also. Cramped in a room 4 by 4 meters with 50 others, he tells us one of the main pastime of prisoners was to read books smuggled in by previous and other senior prisoners. For close to one year after his arrest, he was tortured by the regime to extract information and then he was dumped into the central prison along with other political prisoners. During this time, he was taken care by senior prisoners who helped him get cured from all the injuries during the torture. After sometime, he himself learnt this and became a therapist himself to other prisoners. Now a well known physicists, he recalls how he was called the therapist inside the prison. As a physics teacher, he continued teaching students even in the prison, some of whom he proudly says, have become very well known figures in the country and abroad.
He told us about a popular true story of Ethiopian Political prisoner. Being in prison for a long time, the prisoner again a student was able to lay his hands on the book ‘Gone with the wind’ by Margaret Mitchell. After having read for more than 3-4 times the same book, he started working on translating the book in Amharic, one of the native tongue in Ethiopia. Since each prisoner got the book to read only for one hour per day after which it had to be passed on to others, after finishing up his time, he announced to other prisoners about his work and started reading out his translation to them. The other prisoners who were deprived of reading such books as they did not know the language were quite thrilled by this idea and started looking forward for more of his translation. Very soon, other prisoners started contributing their cigarette packs to him so that he could use the salvaged paper in it to write down his translations. A very long book in itself, the translations soon turned out to be lot of papers and became difficult to keep it unknown to the guards of the prison. Hence it was smuggled to other prisons through prisoners who were transferred to other prisons. This in turned helped to be spread the story to other prisons. The prisoner, being released after 10 years tried to collect all the translated scripts and papers and published the book. A full story on this can also be read here.
One of the last question that I asked him was whether he became religious and tried to seek God while spending such a long time in prison and being hopeless. He told me that he was never hopeless in prison. He knew very well the intentions behind his actions and he knew he had to do it and it was the right thing. He was very hopeful even while in prison.
With the current status of his country, he is disappointed. Though the military junta has gone and now the country is a democracy, he feels there is little choice still for people and the people in power have their own agendas to fulfil rather than serve the people. Yet he is very hopeful of the future to come.
