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November 27, 2024

August 21, 2014

The Boat that rocked and the people who didnt stand up to it

by viggy — Categories: experience, FSMK, internet, social — Tags: , , , , — Leave a comment

The boat that rocked is a great movie and Philip Seymour Hoffman has acted wonderfully in the same. What got my interest mainly in the movie is how few politicians who were against the concept of Pop and Rock music were able to come up with legislation that made the boat illegal and yet people instead of standing against it, were just feeling sad and disgusted about the government. The movie at starting states how more than half of the population were interested in Pop and Rock Music and how the Pirate Radio helped to cater to their interest. If you go by market rules, it would mean that this was tremendous market and it would mean many companies would be competing for the same market. However it doesnt seem so. The Pirate Radio was the only one in the market to cater to such a large audience and more importantly it was due to some reason an underground activity. Listening to Pop and Rock music seemed to be something bad even though more than half of the population was doing it. Sounds absurd right?

What is more absurd is that all the politicians in the government decide that this should be stopped and they come up with some bad legislation to put an end to the Pirate Radio by making it illegal and announce the date since it will be applied. So what is the most logical thing to do when government comes up with absurd laws which you do not agree with? Stand up against it? In this movie, The Pirate Radio tries to escape from running away because they felt that there was some brilliant and easy way to do it. Not only that, people also keep crying in front of their radio, trying to justify to themselves that Pirate Radio very soon will be gone. Why didnt anybody go to street and fight against it? Well this was in around 1966.

Come to 2014, close to 50 years later. We are told about Mass Surveillance on Internet. We are told government is doing it. We are told there are absurd laws made by government to justify it. And yet people are not coming to streets? Almost everybody uses internet nowadays. Most of your intimate stuff is online, shared with others. Yet nobody seems to care that few politicians are coming up with absurd laws to govern internet and make things illegal just because they cant control it.

Take for example, the state of Karnataka in India. Our Legislators just passed an amendment to an Act which says that if you are a digital offender who causes public disorder, then you are liable for preventive detention under Goonda Act, a draconian act which our constitution allows to ensure public order. This is the definition of “digital offender” as per the amendment. “’Digital Offenders’ means “any person who knowingly or deliberately violates, for commercial purposes, any copyright law in relation to any book, music, film, software, artistic or scientific work and also includes any person who illegally enters through the identity of another user and illegally uses any computer or digital network for pecuniary gain for himself or any other person or commits any of the offences specified under sections 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 and 75 of the Information Technology Act, 2000.””

Right, so if you download a movie from torrent, ebook from internet or a photo from flickr and use it for your commercial purpose, you are the Goonda and hence you can be taken into custody. Not only that, you wont be able to fight a case for 90 days which can be extended upto 1 year. Icing on the cake is that Bangalore, which is the capital city of the state of Karnataka is called the IT Capital of India. With the growth of cheap smartphones in the market, almost everybody has phones which are used to listen to songs. Hearing to a bollywood song while moving in a BMTC bus which is being played loudly by a passenger’s phone is a very common thing. So everybody actually breaks copyright law, it is almost taken for granted and yet nobody seem to find it absurd to bring it under something as draconian as Goonda Act. We at FSMK along with other likeminded organizations like PUCL, ALF are planning some activities to sensitize public around this topic. Hopefuly unlike in the movie, our people will stand up against such absurd laws and force the government to revert it.

August 14, 2014

Feed of the blogs based on tags

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, linux — Tags: , , , , — Leave a comment

For the FSMK Planet, we are asking students to give us Feed links based on tag FSMK. I will use this blog to explain how to do the same in WordPress and Blogspot.

For WordPress:

If your blog in WordPress Platform is “http://ssrameez.wordpress.com” then the link for the ATOM feed for FSMK tag is

http://ssrameez.wordpress.com/feed/atom/?tag=fsmk

Please note that in WordPress, tag is case-insensitive, so FSMK, fsmk are both the same.

For Blogspot:

If your blog in Blogspot platform is “http://sneakpeakintomyworld.blogspot.se” then the link for the RSS feed for FSMK tag is

http://sneakpeakintomyworld.blogspot.se/feeds/posts/default/-/FSMK

Please note that in Blogspot, tag is case-sensitive, so FSMK, fsmk are different.
So ensure that you are using the right cases for the tag so that all the blogs are shown in the planet.

 

July 2, 2014

Adding custom application to Unity launcher

by viggy — Categories: FOSS — Tags: , , , , — Leave a comment

Recently I downloaded Tor Browser and I wanted to be able to search for it in Unity Launcher. Also I wanted to lock it to the launcher instead of my default Firefox. Found this good video on youtube explaining how to add a custom application to Unity Launcher, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSU9YuE_36w

The process is pretty simple.
1) I downloaded a logo of Tor of 128 by 128 size. Copied the same to /usr/share/icons/tor.png
2) In /usr/share/applications/, I created a file called tor-browser.desktop with following contents


[Desktop Entry]
Name=Tor-Browser
Comment=Tor enabled Firefox Browser
Exec=/home/viggy/Documents/tor-browser_en-US/start-tor-browser
Icon=/usr/share/icons/tor.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Developer;Utility;

Note that Exec needs to be given full path of the executable and Icon the full path of the icon.
Also note that Categories can be multiple but it has to end with a semicolon(;) even though there is a single Category

Once this is done, you can just search in your Unity Launcher and you will get the application and see the logo of the same.
Enjoy.

June 4, 2014

Let us become the nature

by viggy — Categories: experience, social — Tags: , , , , , , — Leave a comment

The game, 2048, is an awesome game. Its simple but yet very addictive. Even after you know what strategy to apply. While I have been immersed in playing it for last one week or so, I came across this article in Hacker News about a javascript library developed to show Richard Dawkins’ Biomorph example to explain evolution. It made me think that even the game 2048 is a good example of this where 2 or 4 can be considered as basic biomorphs and the 16 blocks become the environment and then your actions of combining the blocks becomes the act of preferential choosing to lead the biomorphs into a certain evolutionary path, the concept of natural selection.
But just in its true sense with numbers, it is not very interesting as you can then easily predict the future children. You know that the exact path you need to take to reach a certain evolved child. Also the final result itself is fixed as you cannot change the criteria for natural selection in the game.
What if we could do that? What if instead of numbers, we had some biomorph similar to the one in the javascript implementation and we as the nature could decide the criteria of natural selection and what goes to next level. Ofcourse the number of blocks also have to be increased, may be the shape of the environment also changed.
It will be interesting to see how biomorphs would evolve overtime.
But this is still uninteresting. The killer feature would be if all the environments were connected to each other? Say in game 2048, once you reached 2048, you could combine with 15 other people who have reached that level and then each one of you combine to form a new environment where 1024/2048 is the numbers which keeps popping up on every move. This can be called as new evolved species in the new environment. Just instead of numbers it will be biomorphs. After the biomorphs have modified by certain factor in your environment, you get to combine with environments of others who have also reached that level and then continue playing with the higher species. Imagine how interesting it will be to see various developed biomorphs coming up on the internet thanks to the various criteria put up by people and their movements. I am thrilled with the idea.
Few fundamental questions that remain to be answered:
1) What kind of biomorphs can we use? Should the inital biomorph be of only one type? Can we just use elements in periodic table as the basic biomorph and then start combining them to form different molecules?
2) How do you calculate the amount of evolution to judge when to go to the next level?
3) What should be our environment and what should be the various actions in the environment?
4) When many environments combine, very soon the universe will be filled with environments which have very basic biomorphs to some which are very advance? Should these environments co-exist or can we just eliminate all basic environments as advance environments are formed.

May 13, 2014

JavaScript browser code to invite all your friends to like facebook page

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, FSMK, programming, web — Tags: , , , , , — 1 Comment

We have recently announced the FSMK Summer Camp for the year 2014 and also have a facebook page for the same. We wanted to spread the word out about the page by inviting all our friends to ‘like’ the page. FB shows you a list of your friends  and gives an option to click ‘invite’ for each one of them separately. When you do this, the invited friend gets a notification about the invite and hence more chances of his liking the page.

However this is still cumbersome as it means to invite all your friends which may be around 1000+, you have to click invite so many times.

But you have java script to the rescue. All you need to do is open javascript console on your browser and then execute the following code:


//Note that there is a space after uiButton. This class is the class of the invite button.
var inputs =
document.getElementsByClassName('uiButton _1sm');

for( var i=0; i < inputs.length; i++)
{
inputs[i].click();
}


To find out how to run javascript code in Firefox, check the following link.

If sadly you are not using the best and fastest browser, Firefox, then you can of course find similar tutorials for other browsers or realize it is time to switch to Firefox as Firefox29 is just released and its AWESOME!!!

P.S. The code was shared to me by Karthik Nayak from BMSIT GLUG.

April 4, 2014

The interesting development of Mozilla CEO’s exit

by viggy — Categories: FOSS, FSMK, social — Tags: , , , , , — Leave a comment

I was recently talking to a friend who told me how even though the idea of Free Software is very radical, it has not been able to translate to social changes on the ground and hence cant be called as a revolution in itself. Free Software has led to completely new ideas of producing and distributing software which has again probably also led to a complete different dimension to sharing knowledge like through Wikipedia, sharing digital media like through Creative Commons license and something which is becoming very popular now, the idea of open hardware. There is also now this whole idea of community over Internet which has brought people together for very specific issues. Starting from Anonymous, to Wikileaks to Arab springs, all these are ideas where people came together with the idea of community over the Internet and then doing some changes on the ground on actual real social issues.
The latest news of recently appointed Mozilla CEO, Brendan Eich stepping down as he did not necessarily agree with homosexuality and had donated to support an anti-gay proposition is a very important development in free software evolution. The outrage it created within the mozilla community which actually led to this development is quite interesting. This states that Mozilla as one of the leading free software foundation has committed not only to equality in web and with respect to software but also equality amongst the people in real world. As a foundation mainly dealing with software and web, it has now stood for something that is involved in a social context of real world outside the realm of binary digits. This is important as it asserts the fact that freedom that we talk about in software also is equally important in real life if not much more important. Free Software, free Internet as an area of achieving freedom cannot be complete without changing things in actual society where people respect freedom of individuals in the society.
This also asserts a very different perspective of the community as a whole. Though in real world, opposition to gay marriages is very active and common, though the whole process of democracy in real world has not been able to change this in the actual society, in the virtual world, where the community is much more democratic it was able to change things for real. It leads interestingly to the idea that the real big world is not democratic enough or the virtual small world is very radical as against the actual real world. The voice of homosexual people which was not heard in real world was actually heard and echoed by the community in virtual world.
Ofcourse how this development will manifest itself in the real world inside the mozilla community, and also in other free software communities is up to be seen. Can it backfire on mozilla community where the real unequal society takes over and abandons mozilla for coming out of its stated realm of binary digits and taking part in real world issues? Will it alienate people, both users and developers who could appreciate the freedom in virtual world but cannot come to terms of such a freedom in real life?

March 18, 2014

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.

Wordpress BucketList Plugin issue

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

Wordpress BucketList Plugin issue

February 27, 2014

Online organizational activity dashboard

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

I just installed github client on my phone and was following news feed in it. It should how many of the students that I was following were doing loads of activities on various projects. Though as organization we were not doing it, all these were volunteers of fsmk and were contributing mainly to free software community. That made me think that as an organization we should have a dashboard where we could sum up all these activities. So this is the idea.
A drupal plugin which can connect to various other plugins to fetch aggregated data from different sources on how organization is doing in various online platforms. It could the fsmk fb group, fsmk’s mailing list, fsmk’s blog planet, its event calendar in the drupal website itself, or more specific things like github activity or other technical forum activity. Can we aggregate all this and show in a single dashboard. This page will be autogenerated by drupal plugin. May be initially it can be a single website in itself and then we can see how to integrate it with drupal. So now this is another time in my bucket list. :-)

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: , , , , — 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.