॥ स्वक्ष ॥

Announcing the Pandas Workshop Sprint

SVAKSHA — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 03:49:00 +0530

Positively thrilled to announce the one-day hands-on intensive Pandas workshop and sprint for new contributors with Chang She - a Pandas core-dev leading the sprint. Its 4 am'ish and I just finished spamming a few mailing lists, IRC channels and thought I'll write a blog-post if I must be energetically expensive.

You can find the workshop details on the wiki: https://github.com/svaksha/PyData-Workshop-Sprint/wiki/2012-NYC but here is a short "how did it happen in a week recap". Last month, I had attended a day-long "Introduction to JavaScript" by JohnResig, and I enjoyed it. Later, I met some PyLadies and on the train ride home, I felt that we needed to have a proper workshop, core-dev in attendance, leading us along the way.

Given that there was a PyData conference in NY a few weeks ago, this was the place to be at, so I pinged the diversity list for speakers, and of course IRC - The response was phenomenal and unbelievable - People went out of their way to make my wish come true - they tweeted, emailed, chatted on IRC, gave me advice, introduced me to core-devs, volunteered for the event, pinged friends for hosting space, encouraged me to write to the PSF/sprints funding, ... and on and on.

I have so many people to thank that there will be a longer blog post, post the event ...yeah, the list is long but maybe if I get started now (and my apologies if I have missed your name ... feel free to gently lart me, its 4AM and I am sleep deprived :)) ... Alphabetically-ordered XXXL THANK YOU'S to: Aahz, Asheesh, Brian, Carl, Chang, David, Diana, Jesse, Josh Knowles, Krissy, Meghan, Sheila, Steve, Wes.

Pycon Canada 2012 in Toronto

SVAKSHA — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 11:01:00 +0530

import pycon

from pycommunity import 
AwesomePeople



canada = pycon.path.abspath(pycon.path.dirname(__file__))

README = open(pycon.path.join(canada, 'README.rst')).read()

__version__ = '0.01'




requires = [

    'diana',

    'daniel',

    'david',

    'kay',

    'micheal',

    'nicola',

    'taavi',

    ]

Patches welcome!

Last weekend, at this moment, I was giving a technical talk at Pycon Canada, my first. Right now, I am still wallowing in the fun and warmth of friendships (some old, some new) that thawed the cold Canadian weather. It was the most mentally simulating, energy-packed experience I've had. Oh, wait...I say that about all the PyCon conferences I attend - Well, this is my second PyCon but the first speaking gig, and it has, as before, been about meeting some of the smartest people and having the most intellectually simulating discussions with them, learning from them and having a whale of a time. Wish all my weekends were this much fUn! The Python community is known for just that - their fabulously fantastic community, which attracted me to the language (no, I love the syntax too) and has kept me hooked.

Thanks to the change in climate (thanks Sandy!), I had a migrane that got worse on the plane ride on Friday morning and I was much happier landing in a slightly warmer and dry climate in Toronto. Enjoyed the shortest ferry ride of my life and reached the Metropolitan Hotel by 2pm to find the Google goodie-bags waiting for us at the hotel room - such a nice surprise, thanks Google! Went for a long walk in the afternoon - its a relief to be able to walk around and see the city and its inhabitants without men bumping into you, or tripping yourself over jutting stones on the sidewalk (erm...whenever Indian roads have a sidewalk), the calmness of being able to stop and click pictures without worrying about someone "accidentally" (it always is, isnt it?) feeling you up while you were just standing there admiring a monument ........ Oh, well... never mind, you get the picture!

Later that evening, there was a casual mixer event enabling attendees, speakers and some awesome sponsors (one of them being Google, whose Diversity grant made this conference a reality for me) to register, hang out, and chat before the conference, with food and drinks at the venue bar open to all... and oh, we ate some yummy cake. Mixers before your conference is a smart way to avoid the rush and long lines that will queue up to register on the morning of your conference, a nightmare if you are short on volunteers.

I managed to reach the venue thanks to Suzanne (who I randomly stopped on the road to ask for directions, instead she ended up dropping me off till the venue - its amazing how one meets kind souls), met Laura at the registration desk who saw that every attendee had their badges and tags. Nicola introduced me to Sheila, who suddenly morphed into a real person instead of an email address with a picture attached to it. In a global distributed space knit via bits and bytes, our identities are unequivocally tied to an email, twitter, G+/FB account now.

Met more interesting people and had the longest discussion with Mark Eichin and his friend Laura, on a range of technical topics, mobile technology, languages, and not excluding the mandatory talk about the DFSG and licenses in FOSS - talking legalese is the most important thing when you meet a DD (j/k). After the party, I returned to the room, met Laren, another diversity grant recipient room-sharing with me. By now, the pounding in my head was worse and the pain would not let me sleep, so I kept re-editing my slides till I was tired enough to sleep.

On Saturday morning - Day One of the conference, Laren and me walked over to the venue and I went of into the Green Room where all the speakers were pampered with food, some space to sit and work with you laptop, more food, chat with other speakers while having even more food, but I had no taste buds so I took three Advil's and gave my first technical talk. That done, I was free to go and watch talks but instead I went off to be a volunteer - this is the easiest way to make friends with some really cool people within the community who welcome and appreciate your contribution and efforts. Its also very humbling to see the PyConCA board members and speakers who volunteered to carry in the lunch boxes the caterer had dropped off.

Post lunch, I attended the "Numerical and Scientific Computing with Python" tutorial by David, listened some great speakers, spoke to more people, had interesting discussions on NLP and linguistics with Mike and DWF, and before I knew it, it was the end of the day, which means more food - snacks and drinks were available at the bar. Did I mention that Pycon-CA pampers you with food and drinks all through the day. At every break, there was something to munch on. Every where I looked there were food boxes, fruits / salad boxes, cookies, coffee, tea, drinks, water bottles, cakes, tacos, samosas (I noticed that those ran out really quickly as compared to the salads which is not surprising), strawberry and chocolate, juice, .... ummm..ok, you get the picture. You were very well-fed and taken care of. At one point I counted the number of laptops Vs. the food boxes on the table. Guess which was outnumbered!?

Sunday morning, being the second and final day of the conference, I attended talks on Graph databases in Python and Persona (identity/privacy, which is important to me) and later, Greg Wilson and a bunch of speakers in the green room had an interesting conversation on education and knowledge (or the lack thereof) in the current education system, what role do Universities and schools have to play within the system - are they redundant with their monolithic rigid structures, MOOC's, their pro's and cons, and how the internet and technology is changing the education system, whether sites like Udacity and Coursera (did you know that their business model allows them to sell your personal details to publishers like McGraw Hill and their ilk, who have apparently signed on the dotted line) are imparting knowledge to their users and learners at the risk of their privacy? Where exactly is creativity, mental development, critical thought, knowledge and learning today? That was more food for thought than the food around the table. Post lunch, I morphed into a Runner - yeah, its that person who runs behind speakers. Katie and me were deputed to the Main hall speakers and got to see ALL the talks, including lightning talks, ending with Fernando's (not-to-be-missed) closing keynote.

Videos:

No matter how hard you try, you cannot attend every fantastic talk out there. When Carl sent across the video link to me, I was stunned by the excellent production quality. The first thought that crossed my mind was "Wow, that is a second career right there" and sure enough it is - these excellent videos are brought to you by nextdayvideo.com :

* Taavi showing you how pandas get a workout
* Elizabeth Leddy rocking the Main Hall
* Did you Test today?
* No conference is complete without a talk on "BigData"
* Brandon Rhodes on why he thinks Python is beautiful (a must see if you are a beginner to Python)

Wow, this post has gotten too long. Among all the things, I admire the organizational abilities of the board the most. The conference had awesome sponsors too, one of them being Google, whose Diversity grant made it possible for me to attend the event. Initially, when my talk was accepted, I had planned book the bus tickets in advance so that I could stretch the grant money to enable me to attend both the days of the conference. When I mentioned this to Diana, she worked her magic, enabling me to cover my flight bookings and also the hotel stay within the grant. Amazing team! Kudos to the PyCon-Canada team.

Contributing to Libre software projects

SVAKSHA — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 23:56:00 +0530

"How do I start contributing to Libre Software?" is a very common question (I asked that too) one comes across on most FLOSS lists. Today, I posted the following on a private list and was asked for a public link, so here goes:

SWOT

There are so many Libre software projects to choose from, that choosing one can be quite confusing when you are starting out. Do yourself a favor and take a few moments to do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis before you decide to jump onto the Libre software bandwagon.

Its better to give yourself time to think (or write down) which technical area or field interests you: Which language do you want to program in? Is it frontend software or backend stuff? Web programming or something else? Do you like writing system software or application level software? Or, do you like libraries, prefer working with algorithms/statistical applications, etc..

Once you have figured out your field of interest, its easier to shortlist something and get started on finding a project to work on.

FINDING A PROJECT

As I mentioned above, there are so many Libre software projects that its overwhelming at the outset. Having figured out your field, dont randomly visiting a bugtracker and try to solve bugs, which is not a bad idea if you have only a few hours per week. However, if you want to wade a little deeper, try using Google to your advantage - read, Google Summer of Code. This recently concluded program, has a ready list of organisations to choose from and the 2012 list is available at: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2012 .

Besides these few hundred GSoC Orgs, Gnome runs its own outreach program for women: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2012 and then, there is the European Space Agency, which is (sadly) only open to EU students. However, if you are interested in working outside of the SoC span, projects are always interested in contributors and would welcome your efforts 24x7x365. That said, these SoC tasks require a longer commitment in terms of time, so you need to decide what you want to do.

FOUND A TASK, WHAT NEXT?

After you have searched Melange (or ESA) for keywords of your choice, visit each organisations Ideas page, where you will find a list of tasks ranked as per preference or difficulty level (This entirely depends on the Org). Remember to cross-check with the Melange page if the task has already been completed via GSoC, or not. If a task is still available, find out what is required to get started on it and prepare a short abstract. This will help you to..
- figure out the development stack vis-a-vis your skillset,
- realise how much time and effort is required to bridge the gap, if any ;
- prepare a timeline estimate. (Dont obsess over this as its just an estimate and it will vary if the Org changes any requirements.)

These done, talk to the Org - always, Always, ALWAYS talk to the Org _before_ you start work on anything. Just because a task is listed on the Ideas page does not mean its a part of their workflow (which can always change), nor is the opposite true. The best way to find out is to talk to them, first. Again, remember that these SoC tasks require a longer commitment in terms of time.

COMMUNICATING WITH LIBRE COMMUNITIES

Most Libre projects have their own communication channels. This could be via Mailing lists or Forums, including IRC channels on dedicated servers or on freenode. Its important to work with them via these public channels and that means learning to communicate and not worry about asking silly (psst..there are none) questions. Communicating with the core developer and/or mentors and community of users is crucial - they can be an invaluable source for ideas and helpful hints.

Many projects have separate lists (and IRC channels) for users and developers. Join them and introduce yourself (or lurk around to get a hang of how things work) and when you are ready, do talk about the task you want to work on. A development mailing list, where the core developers would be available, is distinguishable via the "*-devel" mailing address. Same is true for IRC channels - If you like CLI tools, try Irssi or Quassel if you want a GUI client. Pick your poison from this list of IRC clients.

EXPERIMENT WITH THE DEVELOPMENT STACK

Finally, and most importantly, you must be comfortable working with the software the project uses - that means, you should be able to clone and get the software to install and work on your local machine. Here, communicating with your Org helps - You can ask for help if you have hardware or software issues, clarify installation and dependency issues, etc... No software works flawlessly (else, people would be out of jobs :)) and Libre software is no exception - the only difference being "software development on a libre/public scale".

Another aspect of getting familiar with the development stack is familiarizing yourself with the projects internal system - Since, each project uses its own bug tracker, DVCS, Wiki for documentation, Email/Forum and IRC communication system ; take some time to get familiar with each of these. If you plan to stick around for any length of time, you would be using some, or, all the software stacks they use on a regular basis.

Your transition from newbie to active contributor is a lot faster when you are comfortable with the development stack. Doing your homework will give you the confidence required to grok it enough to start working on the code-base, suggest changes or solve bugs, etc..

I hope these suggestions help you find your niche learning shell to contribute to, and of course, welcome to the Libre software. Have fun!

Rest in peace Lawgon

SVAKSHA — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 18:03:00 +0530

Am breaking a long hiatus from blogging to report a really sad news :: Kenneth Gonsalves, (lawgon on IRC), a long time Free/Libre software (especially INPycon) contributor is no more. When I first saw this mail in my inbox, I could not believe it was true.

My first interaction with Lawgon was via the LinuxChix mailing lists. Back then, I was surprised to see posts from a "nilgiris" domain name and I assumed he was an USA-NRI actively posting on their lists. Later, the Mumbai-LUG list when I had tried to install his "avsap" accounting software ~ it would not work on my machine and I wrote him a mail with the gory error details. Finally, in 2007, I met "lawgon" on IRC, ##linux-india. I was never an IRC person but when he got banned from the channel, I had a long argument with Devdas (f3ew on IRC) about it - mostly because I felt that the rules were not clear, and even more importantly, felt that rules ought to be implemented uniformly, sans cronyism.

A few moons later, I met him IRL for the first time at the first formation meet for Fosscomm and sat next to him through the whole meeting. In my eyes, he was like a father-figure, a person you can talk to freely, someone who didnt see IT and FLOSS as the road to self-publicity, fame and riches. Rather, he saw Libre software as I did - of, for and by the people. It was nice talking to him and hear the stories via the work he had done at NRC-Foss/AU-KBC.

He was someone I respected because unlike some FOSS people, he actually wrote and released his code publicly: https://bitbucket.org/lawgon, and worked within the community, had no illusions or superiority complex about himself. Most of us in the FLOSS community were his kids age and in my interactions I didnt find him patronizing nor elitist in "demanding" we respect his age. Quite the opposite, he never hesitated to ask for technical help from people younger than him, quite ego less. His fiery rants on his blog (http://lawgon.livejournal.com/) always made me chuckle. There are very few blogs I follow and thusfar, I've read every post of his - strong opinions peppered with character. His own.

In his list communication, he could be quite blunt in his comments, and I've had my moments sparring with him on the lists, but if you take a moment to look behind the scenes, his honesty and sincerity towards Libre software showed. I remember his mail asking me not to leave the Mumbai LUG list and my response on the kind of Libre community (the lack thereof) we foster, which, to my surprise, found an echo with him. I remember his long email rant (about someone which I wont get into in public) where he mentioned "...and I'm scared of you" ~ yeah, I too scrubbed my eyes and smiled at his droll sense of humor, as I typed out an apology.

I remember his IRC comment that he wanted his daughter to meet me and my curiosity piqued ~ this was before I had met him in real life and going by the stereotypical Indian fathers attitude, I very much doubted if they would want their daughters to be like me. Or maybe it was his sense of humor - I'll never know!? Some moons later an email asking for some information on "legal rights of women in India" for her coursework, IRC discussions on virtualenvwrapper (he asked me why I wanted to use it and for a moment I thought he was testing me -- I could not imagine a longtime Python developer (atleast a lot longer than me) asking me that, unless he was pulling my leg or if it was an interview question), discussing a recent Python workshop he held at Kerala, and so many other interactions... {Edit1:: His recent mail on the open source business model has some excellent advice for wannabe entrepreneurs.}

I was hoping to meet him at InPycon this year but now the conference wont be the same without him. I hope and pray his family finds the strength to carry on without him and may his soul rest in peace! You will be missed Lawgon..and try not to kickstart a "GPL Vs. BSD" argument in heaven!

Programming with Julia

SVAKSHA — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 09:46:00 +0530

Using (or talking) about R makes me want to rant sometimes and if you've ever written a line of Fortran code, you would have certainly wanted to experiment with a new language stack for scientific programming. Yup, I am aware of scipy, numpy, sympy, sage, et al.. and despite their existence, when I came across this language for scientific programming in January this year, sheer curiosity** made me give it a spin.

Starting the year with a scientific language that has clean syntax and some nicer documentation made me feel warm and fuzzy, until, it refused to build due to a BLAS dependency. That problem didnt last for long though, as I was able to pull a fresh commit which had fixed this issue. Its nice to see an active team having interesting (read, sane) development discussions. A Matlab coder has opined thus about Julia while an R programmer has done a comparison between Julia and R.

After some trial-and-error, I managed to grok its syntax, enough to rewrite an old fortran code in JuliaLang [Julia is still pre-release and I ran Version 0.0.0+1331430882.r69af from Commit 69afb7032d (2012-03-11 07:39:42)]:

#!/usr/bin/env julia
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#*****************************************************************************
# COPYRIGHT (C) 2012 VidAyer <svaksha@gmail.com>
# LICENSE: GNU AGPLv3, http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
#*****************************************************************************
# http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_correlation#Geometric_interpretation
# Example, suppose 5 countries have gross national products
# of 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8 billion dollars, resp. Suppose these 5 countries
# (in the same order) are found to have 11%, 12%, 13%, 15%, and
# 18% poverty. Then let x and y be ordered 5-element vectors containing
# the above data: x = (1, 2, 3, 5, 8) and y = (0.11, 0.12, 0.13, 0.15, 0.18).
#*****************************************************************************

gnp = [1, 2, 3, 5, 8]
poverty = [0.11, 0.12, 0.13, 0.15, 0.18]
vectorgnpgnp = 0.0
vectorpovertypoverty = 0.0
vectorgnppoverty = 0.0
costheta = 0.0
n = 1.0

vectorgnpgnp = vectorgnpgnp + gnp[n]*gnp[n]
vectorpovertypoverty = vectorpovertypoverty + poverty[n]*poverty[n]
vectorgnppoverty = vectorgnppoverty + gnp[n]*poverty[n]
costheta = vectorgnppoverty / (sqrt(vectorgnpgnp)*sqrt(vectorpovertypoverty))

# Terminal Out
println("The Vector product value of Cos Theta is: ",costheta)   # correct value should be 0.9208
println("The Vector product of GNP and Poverty coordinates: ",vectorgnppoverty) # correct value should be 2.930
println("The Vector product of GNP is: ",vectorgnpgnp) # correct value should be 103.0
println("The Vector product of Poverty coordinates is: ",vectorpovertypoverty) # correct value should be 0.9830E-01

I was avoiding blogging this code snippet here - code belongs in a DVCS, not in a blog. But I've intentionally not uploaded this program to github because its not fully functional yet -- see my comments within the code. When I cross-check the results from the fortran code (or as mentioned in the WP page --Geometric_interpretation.) I find "sqrt" isnt working as it should -- I need to figure out the syntax a wee bit more, so I'll push this when it works perfectly.

** PS: That it was named after a woman (or atleast I like to think so) isnt what prompted my interest! No kidding!

E-filing IncomeTax returns in india

SVAKSHA — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 17:31:00 +0530

The Indian government agency that runs the Income-Tax portal "incometaxindiaefiling.gov.in" has very thoughtfully provided an electronic filing facility for its citizens which enables all tax-payers to file their Tax returns without a trip to the local Income Tax Office. However, their thoughtfulness only extends to Windows users as they have provided the e-forms only in the MSOffice .xls format which will not run any macros on a non-Windows platform. Now, I have not used Windows for many years now and having been forced to pay for a half-baked edition pre-installed on my laptop, I could not wait for my warranty to finish and free up that disk space.

Last week, I found two Open-Office hacks for the ITR forms 1 and 2 at:

However, the Open-Office supported ITR-2 form from KSEB is borked -- has locked cells which will not work nor retrieve macros in Open-Office and many fields and cells are protected, making it impossible to enter data so that the Tax macros work properly. The ITR-2 form (available from the above link) has some errors in the conversion for Open Office --In Part B - TI in Computation of total income. It does not allow you to enter any figures in the following fields:

1. Salaries (6 of Schedule S)
2. Income from house property (C of Schedule-HP) (Enter nil if loss)
3. Capital gains
4. Income from other sources
This prevents the macro from tabulating the Total (Example: A + B +Total of (I) for all fields), due to which its not possible to tabulate the final tax payable.

Does anyone know how to get locked cell macros to work in Open-Office? All help and pointers to get these hacks working on Open-Office would be a big help. TIA.

PS: FWIW, I had asked this question on the local LUG list, which was a waste as one list member, who didnt read the question, chose to focus his undivided attention on the terrible mistake I made -- used the word 'company'. Thereafter, it was a fun exercise in "I-am-the-loudest-jerk-and-bully-here" ad hominem and logical fallacies. Yeah, total WIN on the technical help scale. The smartz knocked my socks off!

TiddlyWiki

SVAKSHA — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 11:54:00 +0530

I've been using TiddlyWiki for some years as a personal wiki space and although the first version was a bit clumsy about saving and searching ; today, it is the most re-usable, portable, easily shared self-contained wiki that you can find to manage your local tasks and information.

Mainly, I use TiddlyWiki to maintain notes, store and manage links. While there are online sites like Delicious and Stumbleupon which facilitate users sharing weblinks, they dont have the highly customizable features that Tiddlywiki has ; namely, the freedom to customize, edit pages and add oodles of content (ex. store phone nos, or other personal data which you dont want to store on a public space). Sometimes, I want to add IRC conversation snippets or installation notes as a future reference for something I had tried previously and found useful and it makes it very easy to add new tiddlers instantly. This level of fine-grained user-level customization is not available in any online site.

I wanted to share this so that folks who like wikis for the ease of editing can use Tiddlywiki instead of struggling to maintain local wiki installations on their servers. Dont forget that Tiddlywiki is the only wiki that does not need a server-side implementation and runs entirely on your browser.

TiddlyWiki is built on a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and you can start by downloading an empty.html page to start using it. Here is the sourcecode if you want to contribute new features, and they also have a community space, some tutorials, a bug tracker, and many freely available themes to customize your local wikipage. In short, the uses are as (un)limited as your imagination is. Enjoy!

buying LIC Jeevan Dukh insurance policy from L&T Finance

SVAKSHA — Sat, 28 May 2011 09:59:00 +0530

L&T Finance, Bangalore, sells personalized financial solutions, like LIC's life insurance policies to retail customers and a very pushy marketing person managed to hound us since last year until we finally succumbed into buying a Jeevan Anand insurance policy. Little did we know that instead of 'Anand' (joy) it would be the beginning of a period of "Dukh" (sadness) -- after the INR 54,157/- cheque was encashed by them, the sales agent says there would be a medical test and their office would call us to schedule it. WTH?

Thereafter, S.I.L.E.N.C.E.

The silence lasted for two months as the sales agent at the Bangalore office would not take our calls nor did he call us back with details of when the medical test would be scheduled -- So why did the sales guy NOT mention an important detail like a "medical test" BEFORE taking the INR. 54,157/- cheque when he knew it was a senior citizen taking the policy, nor was this mentioned during the zillion phone calls when he wanted to sell the policy?

More S.I.L.E.N.C.E.

After some hassle, we got the Bangalore office number and it was our duty to keep calling them to find out the status of our policy. Finally, we heard that the sales agent had left their employment, talk to a manager --Err..what happened to the INR. 54,157/- cheque that L&T had encashed on 02-Feb-2011 --were they going to return the money to us or grant the Jeevan Anand policy? Nobody at the L&T Finance office in Bangalore knew who was handling the case, atleast that is what we were told upon repeatedly calling them, being shunted around to speak to different employees, and after many weeks of excuses and false assurances it took them only TWO months to schedule the first medical test.

Medical done, we still had no idea if they were actually going to issue a policy, or not. More silence followed and a week of calling them incessantly (the bane of mobile phones and people not picking your calls) were told that the medical test results would go to the L&T Hyderabad office which would make a decision. Upon more calls from us (the L&T Finance Bangalore employees just dont bother to inform us of the policy status) we were told that there would be another medical test....wait, did the Bangalore office realize this TWO months after the first medical test? That they would need to reschedule the second medical test and we were supposed to await a call (which would never come) informing us when to go for the test.

Days have passed, but there was no call, only S.I.L.E.N.C.E for company.

As usual, we called the local L&T Finance employee -- if they dont wish to schedule the second medical test and make a decision regarding the health eligibility, the least they could do was to return the money. Instead, we were given the excuse that it was the Hyderabad office making the decision and their local Bangalore office was just collecting documents and couriering it to Hyderabad for final decisions.

L&T Finance, if you dont intend to give the LIC Jeevan Anand policy, the least you can do is return the 54,157/- Rupees that you encashed FOUR months ago. Is this the way you treat senior citizens, by keeping their money in limbo, without interest for FOUR months while you take your own sweet time to make a decision? Is this is the "emphasis on systematic and planned investments" service L&T Finance provides? Why do the L&T Finance sales agent NOT mention important deal-breakers like a "medical tests" BEFORE encashing the INR.54,157/- cheque or during the zillion phone calls when they hound you to sell their insurance policies --or is that also a part of the "continuous monitoring and active re-balancing depending on changing needs and market dynamics" service that LT sales agents use to divest the senior citizens of their life-savings? I wonder how many other senior citizens have paid you their hard-earned money for which you dont pay any interest whatsoever, while taking half a year to make a simple decision.

I had always thought that L&T was a respectable brand name and enjoyed so much goodwill that I would have trusted them blindly BUT the L&T Finance employees have managed to destroy the enormous goodwill that the company enjoyed. Being a Finance company they would know that had this amount been invested in the simplest investment plan in any government bank's fixed deposit scheme, it would have earned around 10% interest for the last half year. Shame on you L&T Finance --do the math and return INR. 54,157/- with interest if you are not interested in allotting the Jeevan Anand policy immediately!

UPDATE [2011may28]:: Others personal experience and public opinions on LIC's Jeevan Anand policy:

[0] http://www.vinayahs.com/archives/2011/01/18/how-to-surrender-and-close-your-lic-jeevan-anand-life-insurance-policy/
[1] http://hubpages.com/hub/MY-VIEW-ON-LICS-JEEVAN-ANAND
[2] http://www.mouthshut.com/product-reviews/Jeevan-Anand-925037407
[3] http://ritusays.wordpress.com/2011/01/21/lic-life-insurance-corporation-of-india-jeevan-anand-endowment-assurance-and-life-insurance-policy/
[4] http://www.r2iclubforums.com/forums/showthread.php/20963-LIC-Jeevan-Anand-1

UPDATE [2011jun30]:: Soon after this blog was published, the L&T company representative contacted us and quickly arranged for the second test but a few days after that they were still unable to tell if LIC would issue the policy or not. The LIC agent also contacted us and they came up with a new scheme to enroll in (read, which entails us spending more on premiums with very little to show in terms of returns). In all it sounded like a terrible bargain and we insisted they return the 54,157/- Rupees without interest. There was some back-and-forth and we finally decided that if they didnt return the money (we were not even asking for the 6 months of interest at 10%), we would go the legal route where we would claim interest and harassment damages. LIC decided to return the money and we got the check this week. End of story.

Building packages from source tutorial by DebianWomen

SVAKSHA — Tue, 03 May 2011 09:45:00 +0530

DW is conducting a packaging tutorial. Do note, this is not a tutorial for upstream package building from source, but still, its worth listening to. Here is Marga's announcement::

Are you enthusiastic about Debian and thinking about contributing? We want to guide you with the basics.

We are convinced that there are a lot of people out there that want to get involved with Free Software but don't know where to start. For Debian, the most common task you'll do as a contributor is rebuilding a package.

The Debian Women project, in collaboration with the OpenHatch project, will be holding an IRC event to help people that want to compile their first Debian package from source, and apply their first patch.

The event

On Saturday May 7th, two tutorial sessions will be held on #debian-women on irc.debian.org to help people rebuild a package for the first time.
The earlier session, suggested for those that live in Oceania, Asia, Africa and Europe, will be held at 11:00 UTC.

The later session, suggested for those that live in the Americas, will be held at 22:00 UTC. You can find out the exact time in your timezone by using the timezone converter: http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc

There will be people available to answer questions and generally help out with any difficulties that might arise all along the day.

More info at http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWomen/BuildItEvent

Intended audience

This event is aimed to anyone who wants to rebuild a Debian package for the first time, it's a simple task that doesn't require any previous knowledge, only a working installation of Debian (or Ubuntu, or other Debian-derived system). We want to particularly encourage women who want to get involved, to take their first steps in
contributing to Free Software, but everybody is welcome.

More about IRC

IRC is a real-time chat system you can use to get in touch with members of the Debian community. You can connect to IRC through lots of different clients, including xchat, pidgin and konversation.

About Debian Women

The Debian Women project seeks to balance and diversify the Debian Project by actively engaging with interested women and encouraging them to become more involved with Debian. http://women.debian.org

About OpenHatch

OpenHatch is an open source community aiming to help newcomers find their way into free software projects. It works towards this goal through on-line and outreach events. This event is a reappropriation of the OpenHatch "Build it" events.

--
Besos,
Marga

Internet free speech meme-"Casteism can get you jailed but Sexism and Ageism are acceptable in Indian politics"

SVAKSHA — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:07:00 +0530

I avoid meme's but had to rethink my stance after the Information Technology Rules, 2011, (aka the Electronic Service Delivery) Act was quietly implemented last month. This Act states that any content that is "threatening to the unity, integrity, defense, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states or public order, including any content on the web that is blasphemous, scandalous, defames, or can be considered obscene", eligible for immediate removal by the hosting provider upon order from the Department of Information and Technology. Now, that was the long-winded legalese which is so darn vague but here is the short version: "you cannot criticize politicians publicly, ever."

Such draconian censorship rules have no place in a democracy that values free-speech and this calls for a free speech meme -- I'm reproducing content (with author credits) from other websites which criticizes politicians on my blog, making it harder for DIT/gov.in to implement censorship successfully. For starters, Antara Sen criticizing the Communists for encouraging Sexism and Ageism in Indian politics.

The politics of respect

By Antara Dev Sen , Created 30 Apr 2011 - 00:00

Which is worse — calling one of our finest politicians and a respected elder statesman a mummified corpse, a dead man who has no business opening his mouth? Or saying that the spirited woman leader and challenger to the Communist throne of Bengal ignores funds from Bengaluru to get money from the United States, much like bazaar women forget smaller clients when they get bigger patrons? Going by the collective shock and horror, the latter comment wins hands down.

What? He called her a prostitute? Do they stop at nothing? Veteran Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leader and member of Parliament Anil Basu was promptly pilloried by all concerned, including his own party members. West Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee apologised publicly, censured Mr Basu and pulled him out of campaigning. What he had said was uncivilised and unbecoming of a Communist, lamented the mortified chief minister. It was unpardonable.

True. Mr Basu had used shocking language and imagery, suggesting (thanks to the blinding hatred for the US that Communists have) that the US was Mamata Banerjee’s “bhaataar” (slang for a woman’s keeper) now, so she didn’t have to look at smaller homegrown patrons in Bengaluru, Chennai or Andhra Pradesh. Like the women of Sonagachhi (Kolkata’s red light district), she had dumped smaller babus for bigger ones.

Now, I hate to break this to our slanderous comrade and gentlefolk horrified by the insult, but moving from smaller to bigger clients is not the business strategy of prostitutes alone. It’s common sense. It happens in all professional and business dealings, in all societies and in all times. So Mr Basu’s sex-worker imagery was not about the logic of fund-raising — it was about using degrading stereotypes to insult a woman.

This jibe shows how regressively patriarchal even our Communist bastion is. Sex workers can be invoked as an insult in a state that came to power professing to fight for workers’ rights and dignity of labour and clung to power for more than three decades with the muscle provided by lowly workers of all kinds. Could the comrade have made similar derogatory allusions to low-caste tanners or to Doms who burn corpses? Perhaps not. But chastity is such a deep need of Indian patriarchy that even a seasoned Communist can snigger at sex workers. They aren’t really workers, just fallen women. More than Ms Banerjee, it is prostitutes who have been insulted here.

But the intent was to hit out at the deviant woman who dared to challenge the status quo. And this is not the first time that Ms Banerjee — herself adept at insult — has been attacked with sexist tools. During the Singur agitation, when she was busy taking our breath away with her astounding dramatics, this same Mr Basu had declared that if he had his way he would have dragged her by her hair and plonked her back home instead of allowing her to sit in dharnas. Clearly, for this little caveman in a dhoti, home is where the woman belongs. Not on the streets or in sit-ins. Not in politics.

In fact, the cunning Trinamul Congress chief has been called “brain dead” by the Communists — an accusation so far from the truth that it makes you wonder whether the Communists have completely lost their minds. And when Ms Banerjee first came up with her slogan “Ma, maati, maanush!” (mother, earth, people) some Left leaders had sniggered, “But she isn’t a mother — what does she know of motherhood?” In a patriarchal society, the good woman is domesticated and acceptable as a wife, a mother, a daughter-in-law. But if you are an unmarried politician woman — gosh, you have a problem, sister! You don’t fit in, you are hugely inadequate.

And it is not always men who point out this inadequacy. Some time ago, the feisty Renuka Chowdhury, then minister for women and child development, had hit out at Mayawati on the Aarushi Talwar murder case. She herself was thinking as a mother, she announced righteously, but Ms Mayawati was not a mother, she could only think as a chief minister. And was therefore wrong, of course. Shortly thereafter, Maneka Gandhi was not allowed to flout rules to meet her son Varun in a Uttar Pradesh jail. Ms Mayawati is not a mother, Ms Gandhi hit back, how could she understand a mother’s concerns?

Ages ago, a young Indira Gandhi was called a “goongi gudiya” (a dumb doll) by her respectable opponents. When she grew to become the most powerful Prime Minister India ever had, she was lauded as “the only man in her Cabinet”. Patriarchal symbolism plays a vital role in our perception of political leaders.

The wife, widow or daughter-in-law is very readily acceptable, and most of our women leaders play that role beautifully. And those who don’t — like the unmarried Ms Mayawati or Ms Banerjee — have many extra battles to fight. One way of sidestepping this is to become the universal mother, like “Amma” Jayalalithaa. But the “Behenji” or the “Didi” can only be stereotyped as a dry, heartless, careerist old maid.

But plugging into derogatory stereotypes has been part of the game of politics. What I find alarming is our refusal to see such insults when they are not included in the high-profile, politicised identity groups. Casteism in poll campaigns can get you jailed. Sexism is appalling and can get you in trouble. But ageism, however mean and hurtful, is acceptable.

Which is why I am shocked at the jibe of Bratya Basu, theatreperson and Trinamul Congress candidate in West Bengal, at Somnath Chatterjee. The former Lok Sabha Speaker, though expelled from the CPI(M) for putting the Indian Constitution before the party during the confidence vote, had generously agreed to canvass for CPI(M) minister Gautam Deb. Quick as a flash, Mr Bratya Basu — the challenger in the minister’s constituency, the “intellectual” and first-time politician — attacked the elder statesman, calling him a mummified corpse out of a coffin. Why should anyone listen to him?

An Egyptian mummy, he grimaced for effect, why is he talking in Bengali? He should talk in hieroglyphics!

Maybe civil campaigning is indeed the language of the dead. Maybe lumpenised politics does not need informed debate — either on the campaign trail or in Parliament, the highest seat of rowdy ruckus. Our democracy can just ride on vulgar name-calling and derogatory stereotypes. The vulgarisation of politics has bred a new language for a new age of ungracious, uncivil, illiberal politicians. And unless they are checked, this crude lot will breathe their own mean spirit into our wounded democracy.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com

Vidalia calling volunteers

SVAKSHA — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:09:00 +0530

Openhatch is holding a 'build it' initiative in collaboration with Vidalia which is the front-end for the proxy you installed on your system. Most importantly, for a change, has India-friendly timings instead of a graveyard shift(s) which make it hard for non-owls (like me) to attend meetings. So, if you have C/C++ skills, dont forget to join #vidalia on irc.oftc.net at 18:30 hrs, today and volunteer! Continue reading for more details from, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/vidalia-get-involved,

Hello everyone, for those who don't know me, I'm the one that's taking care of Vidalia these days.

The other day I was contacted by paulproteus in the #vidalia IRC channel about an initiative they (OpenHatch) are organizing called "Build It".

The idea

Open Source projects live and die depending on contributors and people that want to see the project evolve, but this isn't so easy sometimes. The guys behind the Build It initiative have a theory about this difficulty:

"...lots of users of free desktop software want to get involved in customizing or contributing to the project's development, but they haven't gotten to the first step of getting the program to compile."

Since I'm a Gentoo user for years now, the compilation part comes naturally to me and I haven't thought of this issue that way but it's an interesting approach.

The event

This week, people involved in Vidalia and other Open Source projects will be at a specific time online to help users (future developers, may be ) jump over this compilation wall. Particularly, Vidalia is scheduled for this Friday at 13:00 UTC in the same place as usual: #vidalia at OFTC.

While this event is taking place on a particular day and a particular time, I'm online all the time (even when I'm not in front of the computer). So if you want to contribute to Vidalia or any of the projects around Tor (or Tor itself), don't hesitate, just get online and start typing, but be patient and stick around. Also, you'd probably want to read this: https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en

If you want to know more about the Buld It initiative, you can ask in #openhatch at Freenode, or read here: https://openhatch.org/wiki/Build_it

b0rked Broadcom bcm43xx drivers

SVAKSHA — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 09:58:00 +0530

Dear Broadcom, Despite your late gesture of opensourcing the bcm43xx wireless drivers, I continue to have issues -- Last week a kernel upgrade from lucid not only broke the driver but managed to kill the nvidia drivers for good measure -- it was easier to take a data backup and do a clean re-installation of Lucid than waste a lot of time figuring out how your bcm43xx driver broke the nvidia drivers killing my graphics display totally.

However, I was mistaken about it being a kernel upgrade (to 2.6.35) issue as the peace lasted for hardly 3 days -- since I am blessed with having to start my monday morning troubleshooting your broken hardware drivers (on 2.6.32-21 generic kernel version) instead of getting actual work done.

lucid@ubuntu:~$ dpkg --list |grep b43

ii 
b43-fwcutter            
1:012-1build1          Utility for
extracting Broadcom 43xx firmwar

lucid@ubuntu:~$ dpkg --list |grep bcmwl

ii  bcmwl-modaliases      
5.60.48.36+bdcom-0ubuntu3       Modaliases for
the Broadcom 802.11 Linux STA

So the "b43-fwcutter" utility package exists on my system (as I had installed and activated the drivers) but something between each reboot was blocking the drivers as the link would suddenly be hard blocked. This despite me taking the trouble to NOT upgrade from the 2.6.32-21 generic kernel version.

Then, I checked the B43 blacklisted file:

lucid@ubuntu:~$ cat /etc/modprobe.d/* | egrep
'8180|acx|at76|ath|b43|bcm|CX|eth|ipw|irmware|isl|lbtf|orinoco|ndiswrapper|NPE|p54|prism|rtl|rt2|rt3|rt6|rt7|witch|wl'


# which ath5k cannot recover. To prevent this condition, stop

blacklist ath_pci

blacklist eth1394

# replaced by p54pci

blacklist prism54

# replaced by b43 and ssb.

blacklist bcm43xx

blacklist uart6850

blacklist twl4030_wdt

and sure enough, "bcm43xx" was indeed on the blacklist.....nice, girdle up for more yakshaving!

Next, I paid a visit to the "blacklist.conf" file and commented out the line "blacklist bcm43xx".

Rebooted for it to take effect. Nada, Zilch, still no wifi.

lucid@ubuntu:/lib/firmware/b43$ ls

a0g0bsinitvals5.fw  a0g1bsinitvals13.fw 
a0g1initvals5.fw     b0g0bsinitvals9.fw 
lp0bsinitvals13.fw  lp0initvals14.fw   
n0initvals11.fw  ucode14.fw

a0g0bsinitvals9.fw  a0g1bsinitvals5.fw  
a0g1initvals9.fw     b0g0initvals13.fw  
lp0bsinitvals14.fw  lp0initvals15.fw   
pcm5.fw          ucode15.fw

a0g0initvals5.fw    a0g1bsinitvals9.fw  
b0g0bsinitvals13.fw  b0g0initvals5.fw   
lp0bsinitvals15.fw  n0absinitvals11.fw 
ucode11.fw       ucode5.fw

a0g0initvals9.fw    a0g1initvals13.fw   
b0g0bsinitvals5.fw   b0g0initvals9.fw   
lp0initvals13.fw    n0bsinitvals11.fw  
ucode13.fw       ucode9.fw

lucid@ubuntu:~$ cd /lib/firmware/brcm

bash: cd: /lib/firmware/brcm: No such file or directory

Then, a sudo ln -s bcm43xx-0-610-809-0.fw bcm43xx-0.fw and sudo ln -s bcm43xx_hdr-0-610-809-0.fw bcm43xx_hdr-0.fw should have loaded and activated the drivers after a reboot. It did not, forcing me to switch to a wired connection on a laptop. WTF!

Broadcom, fiddling with "bcm43xx" is a sure-fire way to kill time. Thankyou very much for the Yak-shaving experience --it serves as a constant reminder to me, why I will never (unknowingly) buy another Broadcom driven product in future, ever! KTHXBAI.

UPDATE:: Its a "networking disabled on boot" bug in Ubuntu-Lucid and Maverick that has a fix (but not yet committed for Maverick):
[0] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1594577
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/524454
[2] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx#Installing%20b43%20drivers
[3] http://www.qc4blog.com/?p=857

I've tried everything mentioned in the above threads to no avail. Wifi is out cold!

mukta Aruna Ramchandra Shanbhag

SVAKSHA — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:09:00 +0530

Tomorrow the the world will celebrate the 100th International Women's Day, but today the Supreme Court verdict rejected the mercy-killing petition of Aruna Ramchandra Shanbhag, filed by Pinky Virani the author of "Aruna's Story". In a country like India, "mercy killing" (whether passive or not) will definitely be misused by parties with vested interests and while I welcome the court's judgement on passive euthanasia, I can't help but wonder if India has done enough since then. As Usha writes, "In the 60s , Jayakantan wrote a story called “Agnipravesam” where a college girl is raped in a car on a dark rainy evening . On seeing her state when she reaches home, her poor widowed mother immediately senses what has happened. She takes her in and simply pours water on the girls head; then she tells her to treat the water as fire and feel pure again and forget the incident."

Thinking about Aruna, I am in two minds --one part of me wants her suffering to stop and it was really hard to not cry for her, for "what may have been" when I saw her hospital video being aired on every news channel, or while writing this entry, or while reading for the first time all those years ago -- Aruna's tragedy still evokes the same emotional reaction today as when I first heard heard her story all those years ago -- A pretty nurse, brutally raped by her subordinate, Sohanlal Bharatha Valmiki, as an act of revenge ; who has since 1980 been a free man -- free to marry and have a family of his own ; whose first act upon being released from jail in 1980 was to visit Aruna's room at KEM hospital and remove the bed guards, leading to her falling from the hospital bed. He probably thought Aruna would fall and die. She didnt. Presumably security was raised after this second incident and her co-nurses and doctors are her only visitors. Later the rapist moved out of the city and was last heard working in a NewDelhi hospital under an assumed name.

I met a big learned pujari who said I had a sau mein ek patrika [a rare horoscope], that I’d be a success, will live long and would go abroad..... but even if he was talking rubbish it does not matter because I know that I will become known in my field -- That was the ambitious and dynamic 25-year-old Aruna, talking to her cousin about her career plans to pursue her dreams of studying abroad. Eerily, the soothsayer's predictions to her father did come true but I doubt if this was the kind of fame they would have wished for, nor expected. Aruna, born on 1948June01, was the youngest daughter of the Shanbhag family -- consisting of her parents and siblings, six brothers and two sisters, all of who were more interested in extracting an apartment in Mumbai and financial compensation out of her tragedy. When that didnt materialize, they abandoned her to her fate.

For a woman who went against her family and rejected the life of abject poverty in the village, she did well as a nurse in Mumbai, met and fell in love with Dr.Sundeep Sardesai, who upon realising that Aruna would never be normal again, deserted her to marry another woman on 1974May01 and settled down abroad. If you knew and loved someone so deeply would you not feel any guilt for deserting them? I cannot help but wonder if Dr.Sardesai, even once, over these 37 years, ever wondered how Aruna is doing. His rejection makes me wonder if he had ever cared or loved her at all!

Apparently everyone in Aruna's life has moved on and is living a normal human life. There is no doubt that Aruna's hellish experience has made her suffer for 37 long years but mercy-killing? Killing someone who cannot make that decision for themselves isnt mercy. However which way I argue, it seems terribly unfair that others get to decide when Aruna should die. How do we have the right to make decisions on behalf of a person who, unfortunately, cannot decide for herself!

Strange as it may sound, she seems like a fighter to me -- Didnt she overcome her comatose state after the rape, albeit declared "brain-dead"/'persistent vegetative state' thence. Her tremendous will to survive reflects in the fact that despite being brain-dead she has definitely shown a will to live, and most importantly, she can breathe on her own and isnt dependent on life-aids. The nurses at Mumbai's King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital claim, Aruna responds to them when they attend to her, albeit as 'screams' or 'smiles' and they cheered at the Supreme Court's verdict that Aruna should live. For once, I am glad that the tax-payers money is being put to good use by a handful of KEM nurses and doctors.

All the people in favor of killing (err..mercy-killing) Aruna, should take a moment to wonder at her indomitable spirit her body still holds on to -- She responds to stimuli, is on a liquid diet and loves listening to music and the staff nurses and doctors of KEM care more for Aruna than her family or ex-fiance ever did. She continues to live among strangers who care enough to care for her life. Why should we deny her the right to live?

On 2011June01, Aruna Shanbhag will not know she turned 63, as she has remained oblivious to all her birthdays since 1973November27, but that is not reason enough to permit euthanasia. Let us not kill someone who, despite two murder attempts on her life, has shown such tremendous will to live. She has survived despite the odds stacked against her and she should be allowed to die when her body chooses it, naturally. That, for me, is mercy!

If reading about Aruna was heart-wrenching, writing this blog entry was equally difficult, especially because I wanted an appropriate title in Marathi, one that could reflect Aruna Shanbhag's strong never-say-die spirit, choosing to outlive her tragedy by 37 long years (and probably many more to come), only to remind Indians (and the world?) that as a society, and as a nation, we conveniently choose to forget the silent, the inconvenient, the speechless and actively deny justice to women who are rape victims. Its ironic to be forgotten by the next generation you supposedly bring forth!

In Sanskrit, "Mukta"has various meanings: "finally set free", "liberated, delivered, emancipated (esp. from sin or worldly existence)" ; as also meaning "abandoned, relinquished, given up , laid aside" ; "the quarter or cardinal point just quitted by the sun" [ironically, her first name 'Aruna'; means "the red colour of the morning sun"] ; unchaste woman; "the spirit released from corporeal existence" (a noun form). How ironic!

For me, Aruna is already mukta -- she, whose ruddy spirit wills her to live, despite the cruel betrayals by those she loved, the society and the Indian legal system! I cant even begin to imagine the pain Aruna may have gone through but instead of killing her in the name of mercy, we should be fighting to update the ancient rape laws in India -- bring them on par to those followed in developed nations like USA, Europe, et al. Lets petition to change Indian laws and make it impossible for an Aruna Ramchandra Shanbhag redux, ever! That, for me, would be true mercy towards all Indian women and each day would be Indian Women's Day!

UPDATE: Tasting crystals of sugar fed by sister Sugandha Rokade in her mouth, nurse Aruna Shanbaug, 62, cried out, “Aaah!” when she was told about the Supreme Court judgment.

beware of spammers asking for your account password

SVAKSHA — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 12:00:00 +0530

If you've got a mail with the subject line "Account System Update", asking for your "Passvvord" (gee, atleast spell it right :/), because they are shutting down your account, .... Simply delete it.

Notice the headers, its not from Google or Gmail and you would be safer not responding to them. I'm not sure if google has a feedback system where I can submit this so I thought its better to blog and tell the whole world.

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GSoC-2011 invites small FLOSS projects

SVAKSHA — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 05:28:00 +0530

On the heels of GCI ending a few days ago, GSOC-2011 was announced at LCA. This year there is an important change, that of the participating organizations, as per Carol's mail (below), http://lists.p2pu.org/pipermail/p2pu-dev/2011-February/000288.html :

--
On Tue, 8 Feb 2011, Carol Smith wrote:

Hi all,

Per some feedback from the mentor summit last year, I've decided to
encourage and accept more small and new mentoring organizations this year.
In tandem with more organizations, I am also setting up a separate mailing
list for the newbie organizations to subscribe to to get advice on how to
successfully participate in the program for the summer.

I need your help with this effort. If you know of small/new projects who are
doing interesting work in the opensource space who might not otherwise
apply, please encourage them to do so. We're looking for all kinds of new
orgs - ones doing stuff on the bleeding edge, ones opensourcing stuff that
hasn't been before, ones who might get overlooked because they're otherwise
too small.

There will be two special questions on the mentoring organization
application this year: one for which a large or experienced organization can
vouch for a small, new organization and one for new or small organizations
to list their "references" in the form of veteran orgs or people. These two
questions will be looked at very specifically when we review organization
applications this year so please fill them in if they are applicable for
you.

To facilitate the mentor/mentee relationship between orgs I've set up a
mailing list for both veteran and newbie mentors to join [1]. Please sign up
if you feel comfortable offering advice to new organizations on how to
participate in a successful GSoC. I've made this list invite-only, so please
request membership if you're interested in joining and list the org you
mentor for. After we've announced accepted organizations for this year, the
mentors and org admins from the new projects will be automatically
subscribed to this list and encouraged to ask questions and get advice.
**This will be a chatty list.**

Thank you in advance for your help with this effort, and may this be the
most awesome summer yet!

[1] - http://groups.google.com/group/gsoc-veterans

Cheers,
Carol
--

As you can see, Google is inviting all fledgling free software projects to apply and there is a concerted effort to rope in smaller organizations doing nice things in Libre software this year. So if you know any organization or floss project that should be a part of gsoc, encourage them to join the mailing list and apply for 2011. [UPDATE,2011feb25: Here is a spreadsheet of the FLOSS organizations applying for GSOC-2011, but do remember that this is NOT a final list which is entirely upto Google.]

Like FLOSS projects, GSOC is perhaps the only technical event that is open to students in any stream (you could be studying for your B.A in literature and still participate in GSOC), does not have artificial barriers which perpetuate a myth that only Engineers or Computer Science students can use, decode and contribute to FLOSS. Any student can, provided they put in some effort to understanding the Libre software ecosystem.

So go ahead, download and use their presentations, logos and flyers to promote Gsoc in your college or university, spread the word and participate when the list of accepted projects is announced in March.

[UPDATE,2011feb28: Google has opened the application process for mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code 2011 which are being accepted at Melange for ALL Libre software organizations. Please note that the application period closes on 11 March at 23:00 UTC.]

Smartmontools load_cycle_count

SVAKSHA — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:21:00 +0530

Dear Lazyweb,

If you have installed "smartmontools" on your laptop on Ubuntu-Lucid, has it been behaving erratically after the last update about a week ago?

me@ubuntu:~$ sudo smartctl -s on -a /dev/sda

smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Seagate Momentus 5400.3 Device Model: ST9160821AS Serial Number: 5MA1LL40 Firmware Version: 3.BHD User Capacity: 160,041,885,696 bytes Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 7 ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated Local Time is: Fri Dec 17 11:09:46 2010 UTC SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF ENABLE/DISABLE COMMANDS SECTION === SMART Enabled. === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED See vendor-specific Attribute list for marginal Attributes. General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity was completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 21) The self-test routine was aborted by the host. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 426) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x53) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. No Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. No Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. No General Purpose Logging support. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 88) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x0001) SCT Status supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 105 096 006 Pre-fail Always - 9940165 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0002 099 098 000 Old_age Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0033 098 098 020 Pre-fail Always - 2683 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 072 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 17255855270 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 096 096 000 Old_age Always - 3998 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 034 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0033 098 098 020 Pre-fail Always - 2155 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 049 035 045 Old_age Always In_the_past 51 (15 36 54 47) 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1159 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 227684 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 051 065 000 Old_age Always - 51 (0 18 0 0) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 078 060 000 Old_age Always - 64509422 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 1 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0 202 TA_Increase_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Aborted by host 50% 2943 - # 2 Extended offline Aborted by host 70% 2699 - SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.As you can see here, there is no LCC for desktop server hard-disks and its especially meant for laptop HDD, where I'm interested in limiting the Load_Cycle_Count (LCC) to increment only with each boot cycle. Yeah, it has inherent risks, but...

193 Load_Cycle_Count       
0x0032   001   001   000   
Old_age   Always      
-       227825

However, since (the lucid update) last week, running 'smartctl' has not worked its magic since the count has incremented from 227684 to 227825 within an hour. I've been randomly checking it every other hour or so to find the LCC racing away.

Is this a sign that the HDD is dying? Is this a hardware issue or has the code-base changed to require a rebuild? What am I missing here?

Google Code-In 2010

SVAKSHA — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 23:23:00 +0530

Today Google announced the list of participating organizations for Google Code-in --earlier known as GHOP, is targeting school-going teens (upper age limit is 18 years) to contribute to Free/Libre software projects. The Code-in starts on 2010-Nov-22, so do read up on all the organization's task lists and encourage your family, friends, and colleagues to participate!

UPDATE: Carol had posted a longer mail to a private list, which is more informative than my two-line post

We’re pleased to announce the Google Code-in contest starting this 22-November-2010 and ending on 10-January-2011. This contest is modelled on the success of our pilot program, the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, that was run in 2007-08. We will again be giving 13-18 year old students around the world an opportunity to get involved with open source projects by doing tasks ranging from documentation to outreach to hands-on coding. We're hoping to get lots of women involved in this effort, so we're hoping you'll spread the word about it, or participate yourself if you are eligible.

The participating open source projects that will be serving as mentoring organizations have been chosen from past participants in Google Summer of Code for their commitment to working with younger students as well as their overall mentoring skills. The 20 organizations - twice as many as were in our pilot program - are listed on our site at http://www.google-melange.com/gci/program/accepted_orgs/google/gci2010.

The participants have a chance to earn prizes including cash and teeshirts, with 10 grand prize winners receiving a trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View, California for an awards ceremony. Grand Prize contest winners will be announced on 14, February, 2011.

We’re looking forward to a fun contest this year and hope you’ll consider participating yourself if you are eligible or spread the word to friends, family, and colleagues about the program.

We encourage you to join the Google Code-in contest discussion list: http://groups.google.com/group/gci-discuss and announcement list:
http://groups.google.com/group/gci-announce.

Please see our blog post: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/10/google-code-in-schools-out-codes-in.html for further details and feel free to contact me directly if you have specific questions that aren’t answered on the website: http://code.google.com/gci.

Cheers,
Carol Smith

Extract .msi archive format on Ubuntu

SVAKSHA — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 23:28:00 +0530

I was googling for some information which was only available in a .msi archive format which I could not extract directly on ubuntu. Since I didnt have windows on the machine, I could not extract it there and just copy the files over to linux.

On ubuntu, installing WINE (and trying to extract with msiexec) didnt work -- wine kept whining about it not being an executable (on linux? *g*), the source being from an untrusted source, etc...

Next, I tried p7zip -- install it with

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full

Then, change directories, and type:

7z x filename.msi

While this extracts all the files, it will still not be easily viewable nor is it usable -- windows executable dlls, bitmaps, windows installer package, microsoft cabinet archive, some icons, and other useless cruft compressed in the folder. Other than manually digging out text files for the information, there was no easy option.

The data was locked inside the database (hint, extract the cabinet archive) in the .mbd (MS Access) format. Google threw some perl modules to convert a .mbd file to .txt. BUT there was a gnome mbd-reader tool which you can easily install with

sudo apt-get install mdbtools

sudo apt-get install mdbtools-gmdb

Then, click on Applications>Office>MDB Viewer.

In Ubuntu, mdbtools includes command line tools such as mdb-export and mdb-schema and to export data from the MS Access .mdb files, extract contents from each table from each .mdb file through the shell --for which one needs to determine table names before using:

mdbtools <filename.mdb> <table name> <output_filename.txt>

mdb-export filename.mdb tblfoo

The compressed archice included among other things, files with .ocx and .tlb extensions. More googling (yay!)

TLB, a Visual Basic OLE Type Library, is a binary file containing all the type information for using procedures or classes in DLLs.

LINKS:

o. mdb-tools and postgresql script

Openhatch IRC meet

SVAKSHA — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 13:37:00 +0530

On the Ubuntu-Women list we get a number of women introducing themselves, listing their coding skills, wanting to contribute, etc.. Right now we simply re-direct them to the specific communities within Ubuntu -- to find a project to contribute they have to use keywords to search Launchpad.net for bugs.... search for "perl" / "python" packages, or search for a specific project of choice and squash the bugs listed there -- this does not seem like a terribly efficient way to track participation or contribute, besides being confusing and/or intimidating for someone who is new to the community and is completely un-aware of how floss communities work.

Before anyone says IRC, I should chime in that the infrastructure issues (power outages, poor bandwidth, poor tech support, etc...) in India make it that much harder to contribute. This is not true for other nations with superior basic (power, water, roads, etc..) infrastructure.

So how do we know if a contributor actually searches and finds what she wants to work on or is even comfortable working with? Does she leave because the information she came looking for was not available and/or was simply intimidated by the sheer size and vast technical scope within Ubuntu? These are unanswered questions which I have wondered about -- not knowing if we managed to retain a contributor is a grey area.

Existing members are volunteers themselves with responsibilities, making it harder to track if we are losing technical contributions because we dont know what happens after the initial guidance to a query on the list. I'd been wondering how we could narrow the scope and find technical areas where UW can collaborate with other Ubuntu teams needing help.

In essence that is the usecase: Suppose a woman lists "C/C++ and networking" or "python and AI" as her skillsets, how could we scrape information from LP and use it to channelize women to specific bugs that need squashing --the difficulty level, its upstream/downstream, etc... Could we use an API for data-mining LP for possible areas of interest and list these on our wiki-pages, or post mails to the mailing list or push them into an RSS/Atom news feed on planet.ubuntu-women.org, enabling interested folks to subscribe to the news feed.

After that I pinged Asheesh of openhatch which does something similar -- tags all the floss bug trackers for open bugs, small bite-sized bugs and the big ones too. The idea sounded interestin to him and he called for a meetup -- The meetup is on Monday, Oct11 at 9am IST on #openhatch (logged) on irc.freenode.net and its just meant to bounce off ideas iirc.

PyDojo-20101008

SVAKSHA — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 10:35:00 +0530

As per the schedule, we had the first dojo meet at CIS yesterday. Met Satish Kumar while searching for the CIS office and a helpful biker who cursed google-maps actually guided us there as we were both relying on the wrong geo-location plots on Google-maps (openstreetmap someone?)...as if the city's whimsical penchant for one-way roads was not irritating enough. There is an interesting anecdote --the biker who guided us there took us to the exact building and i asked him how he knew the place when 'CIS' didnt strike a memory chord. He promptly replied that there was a foreigner (he used the term 'white') who worked at CIS whom he has seen around town. Ah! There is something about finding your way around Indian roads, something to be said about the human touch that google-maps or other tech gadgets cannot compete with.

The CIS staff were very helpful and Royson immediately arranged refreshments and we both started off discussing what the dojo was all about -- many dojo participants around the world were nice enough to have a discussion on how they did things, what worked and didnt -- so it being the first day we had time to discuss how to structure it or not to have a structure at all, etc... In the middle of this discussion NigelB and Akshay Gandhi walked in and the discussion veered to the RHCE course he had joined. Later Nigel showed us the git graph he was working on. We had a longish discussion on git, bug trackers, communities and it was 8.45pm when we left, but not before planning to meet next week to work on nltk at 7pm same place. Join us!

I'm was multi-tasking --listening to a IE9 product pitch for html5/css3, while typing this entry, so any errors and missing information can be attributed to the much tortured greycells. </excuse>

The Sparsh BPO's Intelenet way to gyp BSNL

SVAKSHA — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:12:00 +0530

I've been having DNS issues since last weekend and since my ISP has been happily outsourcing its customer service obligations to Sparsh India, so whenever the DNS conks off (which is once a month at the very least), I get to have interesting conversations very often.

[after our initial conversation when I've tried explaining the DNS problem, in vain.]

ME: I've tried changing the DNS to point to 208.67.222.222, saved and rebooted the router, etc... , can ping "random" server, can use IRC, etc...BUT cannot connect to some websites like "www.zareason.com", which gets redirected to "http://searchportal.information.com/?a_id=92438&domainname=www.zareason.com". Please reboot your DNS server as it does not resolve some domains properly.
CSR: Click on 'start button', click on 'internet explorer', ...
ME: Excuse me ...Sir/M'am, I told you I dont have windows on this machine. I use a Linux-based operating system so if you tell me what information you require to troubleshoot, I can check for it locally.

At this point I'm put on hold, ...CSR returns after a few minutes to ask if I can connect to 'google.com'. I answer in the affirmative and he/she proceeds to say the problem is because I use Linux and there is nothing they can do about it. Simply stunning.

Asking to speak to another person who knows "linux+networking" or a team leader results in them disconnecting your call. That isnt surprising. A Business line article says "Sparsh BPO, which is the domestic arm of Intelenet Global Services, put in a bid at Rs 1.15 a call for providing contact centre services...." -- The higher the number of calls to the BSNL toll-free numbers will result in more income for Sparsh. I'm not aware of the finer points in their SLA but the pattern I have observed is very very common. Calls are always dropped, sometimes mid-way, etc...

Sparshindia is a subsidiary of Intelenetglobal, meant to handle the pan-India BPO business. I am curious to know if Intelenet provides similar poor service to their US clients. Would a CSR disconnect an overseas call mid-way without solving the customers problem? Will they get to bill clients simply on the basis of number of calls handled without actually solving the problem.

http://www.sparshindia.com/opration_quality.html, states they monitor calls and have a good QA process. I beg to differ. If I call back and go through the whole discussion for the N'th time and insist on speaking to a TL, I'll be put on hold, and the same person pretends to be another person. Oh well, it takes more than changing voices and giving a fake name -- the 'trying too hard to fake it' bit that gives them away. Nine out of ten times the conversation has gone downhill when the CSR insists that you are having a DNS issue because you are using Linux.

https://www.zareason.com/ was also unable to connect and dig @8.8.8.8 zareason.com returns the correct IP address. While I grok that every ISP out there uses a transparent proxy to save on bandwidth. Using an anonymous proxy gives me the zareason website but what if its a site you want to order something. How can the user know or trust the site if the ISP has borked DNS which just redirects you to a phishing site?

On multiple occasions I have requested to speak to any technical person who understands "linux + networking" as the DNS issue has a simple solution -- Probably the DNS server used by the proxy is broken and its is caching incorrect data. The backend technical team (whom i've spoken to just once in so many years) can reboot the server and clear the cache. This is all it takes, all of 5 minutes to reboot the appropriate server and solve the DNS issue. BUT its easier to do a shirsasana (head-stand) than get the sparshindia agents to reboot the darn dns server.

UPDATE: I called Sparsh India yet again. This time I refused all the request to give the mobile number so the outbound process would call me. Erm...I would hold on forever until the DNS problem was solved. As of writing this, its been 2 hours that i've been talking to a TL (he claimed so), who finally booked my complaint which I checked here: 'http://bangaloretelecom.com/' --it has no details of the problem. The excuse this guy gives me is 'BSNL must have blocked the site" ...hilarious, why would bsnl want to block one site peddling computers? If it were a p0rn site that argument might atleast make sense. We retraced the steps of changing the routers WAN settings and other tasks which didnt help.

Which part of the sentence "I can access websites and surf online, only some sites like zareason dont work, reboot your DNS server and solve the problem" does a person not grok? He even pretended to not know how to spell "cache" and i could hear his co-worker giggle in the background. So I politely told him that while he was busy 'pretending to not understand basic tech terms', he was not harassing me, rather, he came across as a dumb person with zero technical knowledge. That got his attention real quick and he didnt seem to enjoy harassing me anymore. Oh, the joys of being a sexist troll !!

At the moment it seems that Sparsh India is only interested in increasing their revenue by billing BSNL INR1.15 for each call that customers make --Not solving the problem in one phone call definitely helps Sparsh and Intelenet gain more revenue. Rebooting the server means the problem gets solved, hence less revenue.

Weekly Python-Dojo at Bangalore

SVAKSHA — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:35:00 +0530

In an IRC discussion this week, I suggested we kick-start a weekly python-dojo meet-up in Bangalore. Sunil Abraham of CIS was kind enough to donate their office space and even offered to sponsor the java (pun unintended). Thanks Sunil/CIS.

So here's the plan for weekly python-dojo sessions in Bangalore,

WHAT: Weekly python-dojo sessions in Bangalore which is inspired by dojorio (english translation) meetups in Brazil where they apply the "small acts manifesto". The idea is to create a friendly atmosphere which encourages "beginners" (...and experts and everyone in between) to share and learn with the community. Please bring your laptops/netbooks etc.. as the dojo will be hands-on where we will work on small problems that exist in FLOSS software which automatically helps us learn a lot more about our system. Folks that dont have laptops are also welcome -- atm, we cant provide machines to work on but you can watch others, ask questions, learn, and later try it out at home.

WHO can participate: ANYONE. Absolutely anyone can walk in and participate at the venue. There is no registration fee or cost (except your time and travel costs perhaps?). There is no agenda either -- please note that the environment would be similar to that of an unconference. There is no formal teaching involved. We are all learners here and you are free to ask any python-related question.

WHERE: The Centre for Internet and Society (google map link)
No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560 071

WHEN: 7pm-8pm every Friday. We start from next week, 08Oct2010.

So if you are interested in python, dont hesitate to join us for the weekly dojo sessions and do spread the word -- dent/tweet, blog and mail your friends about the weekly dojo meetups.

PS: If anyone (women in particular) feels the evening timings are rather late for traveling please feel free to suggest a more convenient day (sat/sun?) and time <-- its not set in stone and suggestions are welcome.

PyCon-IN-2010

SVAKSHA — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 21:10:00 +0530

Kinda sad to see all the effort put into a complete community volunteer-driven event almost come to a standstill under the shadow of local communal politics -- the Ayodhya verdict. Given that I missed last years even for personal reasons, it seemed the Ayodhya verdict would be the roadblock this year. Not.

Today, David Goodger kicked off the second Pycon-India 2010 in Bangalore with his keynote speech while briefly dwelling on his Indian 'adventure' -- no seat-belts in the autorickshaw!? The auditorium hall echoed with laughter! Then it was a series of talks on python 2to3, multicore programming, and many more talks .... The only irritating part during one talk was one audience member interrupting the speaker to discuss the topic/ask questions. Probably this resulted in the speaker not getting enough time to finish his talk and demo the code completely. In a 30-min talk it would be a lot nicer if the audience restricted their questions to the last few minutes *after* the speaker completes the talk.

Another interesting talk was the screen scraping talk but I'll return to my lazyshell under the pretext that the videos will probably be uploaded online in a few days. Else, you could just attend the second day of pycon coz the nicest part was good 'ol networking, old friends, meeting new ones and the barcamp style corridor chats with people. Considering that the attendees were almost 500+, the inpycon team really pulled off a community event quite successfully! Now I gotta get some sleep if I need to make it for tomorrows event!

CFP - PyCon 2011

SVAKSHA — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 08:26:00 +0530

Call for proposals -- PyCon 2011 -- http://us.pycon.org/2011/

Proposal Due date: November 1st, 2010

PyCon is back! With a rocking new website, a great location and more Python hackers and luminaries under one roof than you could possibly shake a stick at. We've also added an "Extreme" talk track this year - no introduction, no fluff - only the pure technical meat!

PyCon 2011 will be held March 9th through the 17th, 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Home of some of the best southern food you can possibly find on Earth!) The PyCon conference days will be March 11-13, preceded by two tutorial days (March 9-10), and followed by four days of development sprints (March 14-17).

PyCon 2011 is looking for proposals for the formal presentation tracks (this includes "extreme talks"). A request for proposals for poster sessions and tutorials will come separately.

Want to showcase your skills as a Python Hacker? Want to have hundreds of people see your talk on the subject of your choice? Have some hot button issue you think the community needs to address, or have some package, code or project you simply love talking about? Want to launch your master plan to take over the world with Python?

PyCon is your platform for getting the word out and teaching something new to hundreds of people, face to face.

In the past, PyCon has had a broad range of presentations, from reports on academic and commercial projects, tutorials on a broad range of subjects, and case studies. All conference speakers are volunteers and come from a myriad of backgrounds: some are new speakers, some have been speaking for years. Everyone is welcome, so bring your passion and your code! We've had some incredible past PyCons, and we're looking to you to help us top them!

Online proposal submission is open now! Proposals will be accepted through November 10th, with acceptance notifications coming out by January 20th. To get started, please see: <http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/>

For videos of talks from previous years - check out: <http://python.mirocommunity.org/category/conferences>

For more information on "Extreme Talks" see: <http://us.pycon.org/2011/speaker/extreme/>

We look forward to seeing you in Atlanta!

Please also note - registration for PyCon 2011 will also be capped at a maximum of 1,500 delegates, including speakers. When registration opens (soon), you're going to want to make sure you register early! Speakers with accepted talks will have a guaranteed slot.

Important Dates:
* November 1st, 2010: Talk proposals due.
* December 15th, 2010: Acceptance emails sent.
* January 19th, 2010: Early bird registration closes.
* March 9-10th, 2011: Tutorial days at PyCon.
* March 11-13th, 2011: PyCon main conference.
* March 14-17th, 2011: PyCon sprints days.

Contact Emails:
Van Lindberg (Conference Chair) - van@python.org
Jesse Noller (Co-Chair) - jnoller@python.org
PyCon Organizers list: pycon-organizers@python.org

Gnome outreach program for women - 2010 internships

SVAKSHA — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 11:04:00 +0530

The application process for the first round of internships sponsored by the GNOME Foundation are now officially open. The dates for these internships are 2010Dec15 to 2011Mar15.

Any woman who has relevant experience and is available for a full-time internship is welcome to apply. The application deadline is 2010Oct25. As part of the application process, they are asking women to take the time to learn about the participating projects and make a contribution to the one they are interested in. These projects include ones in programming, graphic design, documentation, and marketing. For more program details, visit: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2010

Do consider applying for the internship, signing up as a mentor, or helping spread the word by encouraging woman to apply - Blog, email, dent/tweet or download this flyer (designed by Máirín Duffy) to send the information about this internship program to your local school/college/university or hand it out at conferences. All the materials for spreading the word are here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram2010/SpreadTheWord

ILUG-Bangalore meetup today

SVAKSHA — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 10:44:00 +0530

Announcing the ILUG-Bengaluru Meetup on Saturday 2010Sep18

Time: 1800 - 1930 hrs

Venue: Jaaga, Rhenius Street (Off. Richmond Road) , Opposite Hockey Stadium, Shantinagar, Bangalore

Directions: http://jaaga.in/contact

Agenda:

Open house: Anything goes barcamp-ish session.

Regular Activities: GPG keysigning - http://www.debian.org/events/keysigning

Note: This is a back-to-back meetup with Ubuntu-IN . The Ubuntu-IN meetup is from 1630 to 1800hrs and is about Indian Language Localisation and all other things Ubuntu.

Postgresql packaging bug in Lucid

SVAKSHA — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:05:00 +0530

Postgresql-8.4 is the packaged version for Ubuntu 10.04 (aka lucid) but earlier today I purged and reinstalled it and found a packaging bug -- sudo aptitude purge postgresql does not cleanly remove the conf files from the filesystem if they had been edited. All the older edits I had made to /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf and /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_ident.conf files were intact after the reinstallation. So the new re-installation would throw weird errors.

Ideally aptitude/apt-get 'purge' is the cleanest way to uninstall software but if you have customized the configuration settings in a DB you would not like to lose those changes (especially because you may have installed the database a long time ago and may not remember each change for different apps that use the DB.

Sounds good but in theory a 'purge' littering your filesystem with edited files makes it hard for folks to hunt out which file was leftover and whether re-editing "foo.conf" would get "foo-application" running smoothly. For smaller single packages its probably easy to script a list of files from the original package and check the filesystem against that list but what if you had an installation that had 80+ odd installation steps for multiple packages that depend on each other ...that is a lot of retracing -- the installation and purging of 80+ installation steps is scriptable but a clean reinstallation of your OS is far less time-consuming, not to mention the resource savings.

KDE-Koffice seeks code contributors

SVAKSHA — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:55:00 +0530

This post makes it after a long latency period that I'm not proud of. Apologies Boudewijn!

Boudewijn Rempt, CTO of KO GmbH, a company that works on open source projects around KOffice, OpenDocument and Qt is looking for Indian university contacts for establishing project channels to increase volunteer contribution to Free/Libre software.

In Europe, he has been a mentor of a student who did his MA Thesis on writing brush engines and algorithms for Krita and had visited India in May to give a training to some university students who were going to do an internship with Nokia, working on KOffice. A large part of that training was about getting involved with a free software project and he would like the opportunity to do the same for other groups of students and would love to work together with people to set up similar projects at Indian colleges, universities and with companies because when students do their internship or thesis in cooperation with a free software project, they will learn a lot that is really valuable: working together with teams, producing software that has end users, working with large, real-life code bases and the projects might gain long term contributors.

According to Boudewijn, KOffice is C++ based, very few applications can be scripted in Python and they use some Python scripts for things like quality control, but the core apps and libraries are C++. You can read the detailed build instructions and if it interests you then directly contact Boudewijn Rempt at boud@valdyas.org (private) OR boud@kogmbh.com (company address).

PS: Feel free to circulate this widely to all Indian universities and colleges as Libre Software is meant for everyone/anyone interested in learning something new.

Patches and the Packaging toolchain

SVAKSHA — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:37:00 +0530

Background assumptions::
o. A clean ubuntu hardy installation.
o. Some familiarity with command-line basics.
o. Have installed pbuilder.

That done, we can continue...

What is PACKAGING?

If you have ever used the apt-get or aptitude {Aaron has a nice writeup on aptitude Vs. apt-get} command : "sudo aptitude install <packagenames>" on your Debian/Ubuntu system you used a tool that automatically installs a packaged software on your system. This would automatically pull all the dependencies for your Linux system to run smoothly. It saves you the pain of having to install software manually by pulling code in a tar.gz folder, extracting, etc...

Secondly, when you download a source package from a Debian/Ubuntu "deb-src" repo, its already a debian package.i.e the source files have been placed in a suitable directory tree, appropriate configuration files have been added, and the package contains scripts to help with the building and installation of the package. This is what allows you to just install from source with "apt-get -b source some-package-name" as mentioned before.

This post is different. As in, its not a path of least resistance (packaging an existing debianized package for Ubuntu). This is about creating a binary package from a source package, with customization, modification, or other tedious trouble. To do so, you do the following :

Wikipedia says,

The Debian build toolchain is a collection of software utilities used to create Debian source packages (.dsc) and Debian binary packages (.deb files) from upstream source tarballs.

These tools are used in the Debian project and also in Debian-based distributions such as Ubuntu.

One of the first steps was creating a .dsc as outlined at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide/Python

I had already pulled the stable source from LP [bzr branch lp:systers] but noticed that none of the files had copyright or license notices. I also had a number of questions on patching the current systers stable branch for releases and another part of the project as mentioned on the wiki was to work with the MM 3.0 port team. So I requested an upstream MM core-dev to comment on the following:

Q0. Currently systers runs only on Ubuntu-Hardy with python2.5 and systers has the habit of working only with ubuntu- LTS releases, hence Lucid could be the porting target. I feel the tasks involved are -- convert all .py programs compatible to python 2.6 or 2.7; carry out code changes if any on the 2.6 or 2.7 .py files to make them work on lucid or Hardy , make package and test the package.
Q1. Currently systers code uses python2.5 and I'd like to know if it has to run/port compatibly on Lucid would that involve converting code to python2.7 (or python2.6)? That seems like a large task so I'd like to hear your comments.
Q2. Would it involve making these python programs of systers which is currently compatible with 2.1.10 to be made compatible to mailman 3.0-- I'm not sure how different MM-2.1.10 is from MM-3.0 and assume this involves changes in code. So what does working with the MM 3.0 port team entail?
Q3. According to the debian manuals the existing stable branch should contain licences for all files, to be packaged since GNU-Mailman would require this. Currently none of the stable branches or code fixes pulled from the systers repo have any license files. Am I supposed to contact the individual authors (I dont know them all) or should I just ask Jennifer/Robin ?

The reply I got was lucid (could not resist a pun) and in sum, I'd heard some of the packaging stuff before (in Debian? or was it in Ubuntu?):

o. Core-devs dont usually work on maintaining non-mainline stuff unless it's their own. So if you want your "feature-changes-patch" included in upstream, you'd have to be willing to maintain them long-term and that would involve a large commitment. If its not in mainline upstream, there is nobody to coordinate packaging or patches. As the developer of your "feature-changes-patch", its your baby which you should be willing to test and maintain each time mainline changes.
o. Ubuntu packaging of Mailman 2.1 introduces some bugs -- best compiled from source. Bringing another package (mailman-systers?) for an existing upstream package within Ubuntu could be an issue.
o. Mailman 2.1 and Mailman 3.0 are *entirely* different code bases. That means these wonderful systers feature changes would have to be re-implemented, not ported. Porting (as I asked above in Q0, Q1,Q2) would involve moving between python versions and this changes so many things when you are moving between two OS releases (in this case, Ubuntu hardy and lucid). Besides MM3.0 (in alpha stage) was an entirely different code base compared to 2.1 which is in feature freeze.
o. While it would be better to contribute code directly to MM3.0 ...BUT... using the existing code raises the license issues in Q3 above. This is something I cant answer as "legalese" is beyond me. Technically, all GPL code (for a FLOSS project) requires authors be willing to assign their work to the free software foundation, as explained in the gnu-licenses page: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html. IIRC, Ubuntu and Debian would require the license.txt file for packaging too. There is a list of FSF approved software licenses.

Selenium RC and Python client

SVAKSHA — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:16:00 +0530

Selenium is quite a famous testing tool and has a lot of documentation so I wont bother to repeat stuff from there, rather just focus on the bits where I feel the documentation could improve.

STEP#0. After downloading selenium remote-control change to the directory where you extracted it. {Btw, to install selenium on your local machine, download selenium from here.}

~$ cd selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/ ~/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-server-1.0.3$ sudo java -jar selenium-server.jar 09:03:05.618 INFO - Java: Sun Microsystems Inc. 1.6.0_0-b11 09:03:05.638 INFO - OS: Linux 2.6.24-28-generic i386 09:03:05.722 INFO - v2.0 [a2], with Core v2.0 [a2] 09:03:06.304 INFO - RemoteWebDriver instances should connect to: http://192.168.1.5:4444/wd/hub 09:03:06.307 INFO - Version Jetty/5.1.x 09:03:06.311 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server/driver,/selenium-server/driver] 09:03:06.324 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server,/selenium-server] 09:03:06.324 INFO - Started HttpContext[/,/] 09:03:06.381 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler@12d15a9 09:03:06.382 INFO - Started HttpContext[/wd,/wd] 09:03:06.399 INFO - Started SocketListener on 0.0.0.0:4444 09:03:06.400 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.Server@228a02

I wanted to run the python script from the console and each time it would stop here and I'd be waiting and nothing would happen.....How do I run the script without a command prompt. So then, I'd interrupt it with 'ctrl C' to get a "09:03:17.439 INFO - Shutting down...12:39:08.573 INFO - Stopping Acceptor ServerSocket[addr=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0,port=0,localport=4444]

That "shutting down" message was odd -- how would you run a process if it was shutting down? What the logs above dont say is "The selenium server must be running so keep that process open. Open ANOTHER terminal window and run your python script there". The documentation didnt explicitly mention that localhost must keep the server running in the background-- Its one of the most basic client-server concepts but when you are running stuff on localhost, your client and server are one and the same. Being explicit with this trivia in the documentation would have helped me not waste hundreds of hours searching the selenium website and reading irrelevant blogs which google threw up, irc, emails, etc... So, in TerminalOne,

:~/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-server-1.0.3$ sudo java -jar selenium-server.jar 09:03:05.618 INFO - Java: Sun Microsystems Inc. 1.6.0_0-b11 09:03:05.638 INFO - OS: Linux 2.6.24-28-generic i386 09:03:05.722 INFO - v2.0 [a2], with Core v2.0 [a2] 09:03:06.304 INFO - RemoteWebDriver instances should connect to: http://192.168.1.5:4444/wd/hub 09:03:06.307 INFO - Version Jetty/5.1.x 09:03:06.311 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server/driver,/selenium-server/driver] 09:03:06.324 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server,/selenium-server] 09:03:06.324 INFO - Started HttpContext[/,/] 09:03:06.381 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler@12d15a9 09:03:06.382 INFO - Started HttpContext[/wd,/wd] 09:03:06.399 INFO - Started SocketListener on 0.0.0.0:4444 09:03:06.400 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.Server@228a02 09:03:17.439 INFO - Shutting down... mom@drga:~/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-server-1.0.3$ sudo java -jar selenium-server.jar 09:03:36.248 INFO - Java: Sun Microsystems Inc. 1.6.0_0-b11 09:03:36.252 INFO - OS: Linux 2.6.24-28-generic i386 09:03:36.270 INFO - v2.0 [a2], with Core v2.0 [a2] 09:03:36.486 INFO - RemoteWebDriver instances should connect to: http://192.168.1.5:4444/wd/hub 09:03:36.489 INFO - Version Jetty/5.1.x 09:03:36.491 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server/driver,/selenium-server/driver] 09:03:36.493 INFO - Started HttpContext[/selenium-server,/selenium-server] 09:03:36.493 INFO - Started HttpContext[/,/] 09:03:36.523 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler@12d15a9 09:03:36.523 INFO - Started HttpContext[/wd,/wd] 09:03:36.533 INFO - Started SocketListener on 0.0.0.0:4444 09:03:36.533 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.Server@228a02 09:04:30.236 INFO - Checking Resource aliases 09:04:30.260 INFO - Command request: getNewBrowserSession[*firefox, http://localhost:4444, ] on session null 09:04:30.283 INFO - creating new remote session 09:04:30.614 INFO - Allocated session 7cba6a7dadb243618c046ee7fb6c6bc9 for http://localhost:4444, launching... 09:04:30.778 INFO - Preparing Firefox profile... 09:04:34.676 INFO - Launching Firefox... 09:04:38.697 INFO - Got result: OK,7cba6a7dadb243618c046ee7fb6c6bc9 on session 7cba6a7dadb243618c046ee7fb6c6bc9 09:04:38.715 INFO - Command request: open[/selenium-server/tests/html/test_click_page1.html, ] on session 7cba6a7dadb243618c046ee7fb6c6bc9 09:04:38.854 INFO - Got result: XHR ERROR: URL = http://localhost:4444/selenium-server/tests/html/test_click_page1.html Response_Code = 404 Error_Message = Not+found on session 7cba6a7dadb243618c046ee7fb6c6bc9 09:04:38.863 INFO - Command request: testComplete[, ] on session 7cba6a7dadb243618c046ee7fb6c6bc9 09:04:38.863 INFO - Killing Firefox... 09:04:38.933 INFO - Got result: OK on session 7cba6a7dadb243618c046ee7fb6c6bc9 09:09:28.085 INFO - Command request: getNewBrowserSession[*firefox, http://www.irian.at, ] on session null 09:09:28.086 INFO - creating new remote session 09:09:28.088 INFO - Allocated session 97dec9f0b53545acbc9ca3624fc6cbd4 for http://www.irian.at, launching... 09:09:28.165 INFO - Preparing Firefox profile... 09:09:31.873 INFO - Launching Firefox... 09:09:35.599 INFO - Got result: OK,97dec9f0b53545acbc9ca3624fc6cbd4 on session 97dec9f0b53545acbc9ca3624fc6cbd4 09:09:35.604 INFO - Command request: open[http://www.irian.at/selenium-server/tests/html/ajax/ajax_autocompleter2_test.html, ] on session 97dec9f0b53545acbc9ca3624fc6cbd4 09:09:41.698 INFO - Got result: XHR ERROR: URL = http://www.irian.at/selenium-server/tests/html/ajax/ajax_autocompleter2_test.html Response_Code = 404 Error_Message = Not Found on session 97dec9f0b53545acbc9ca3624fc6cbd4 09:09:41.707 INFO - Command request: testComplete[, ] on session 97dec9f0b53545acbc9ca3624fc6cbd4 09:09:41.707 INFO - Killing Firefox... 09:09:41.740 INFO - Got result: OK on session 97dec9f0b53545acbc9ca3624fc6cbd4 10:18:38.252 INFO - Command request: getNewBrowserSession[*firefox, http://www.google.com/, ] on session null 10:18:38.253 INFO - creating new remote session 10:18:38.254 INFO - Allocated session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 for http://www.google.com/, launching... 10:18:38.322 INFO - Preparing Firefox profile... 10:18:41.921 INFO - Launching Firefox... 10:18:45.741 INFO - Got result: OK,c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:45.800 INFO - Command request: open[http://www.google.com/, ] on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:47.204 INFO - Got result: OK on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:47.211 INFO - Command request: type[q, hello world] on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:47.277 INFO - Got result: OK on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:47.282 INFO - Command request: click[btnG, ] on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:47.334 INFO - Got result: OK on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:47.340 INFO - Command request: waitForPageToLoad[5000, ] on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:48.359 INFO - Got result: OK on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:48.365 INFO - Command request: getTitle[, ] on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:48.411 INFO - Got result: OK,hello world - Google Search on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:48.416 INFO - Command request: testComplete[, ] on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2 10:18:48.417 INFO - Killing Firefox... 10:18:48.434 INFO - Got result: OK on session c4b9c7f35ea34d428b50f2f31a6181c2
ALL this happens on TerminalOne, so keep that window open to check for the above while you are doing steps below.

STEP#1. In TerminalTwo, Change directory to the 'python-client' to run your scripts. Lets test the selenium.py script first. Btw, note that your bash file must contain the PYTHONPATH for all the directories that you run .py scripts from.

:~/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3$ ls

README.txt  selenium-php-client-driver-1.0.1 
selenium-dotnet-client-driver-1.0.1 
selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1

selenium-java-client-driver-1.0.1  selenium-ruby-client-driver-1.0.1 
selenium-perl-client-driver-1.0.1    selenium-server-1.0.3



:~/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1$ python
selenium.py

If it returns silently (read, No errors), it means your selenium server is working.

STEP#2. Try testing another script, test_google.py or test_default_server.py



:~/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1$ ls

doc    test_ajax_jsf.py  test_google.py~   
selenium.py  test_ajax_jsf.pyc  test_google.pyc
selenium.pyc                    
test_default_server.py   test_i18n.py 
selenium_test_suite_headless.py  test_default_server.pyc 
test_i18n.pyc

selenium_test_suite.py  test_google.py



:~/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1$ python
test_default_server.py

Using selenium server at localhost:4444

E

======================================================================

ERROR: testLinks (__main__.TestDefaultServer)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "test_default_server.py", line 36, in testLinks

   
selenium.open("/selenium-server/tests/html/test_click_page1.html")

  File
"/home/me/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1/selenium.py",
line 764, in open

    self.do_command("open", [url,])

  File
"/home/me/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1/selenium.py",
line 215, in do_command

    raise Exception, data

Exception: XHR ERROR: URL =
http://localhost:4444/selenium-server/tests/html/test_click_page1.html
Response_Code = 404 Error_Message = Not+found



----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ran 1 test in 8.852s



FAILED (errors=1)



:~/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1$ python
test_ajax_jsf.py

Using selenium server at localhost:4444

E

======================================================================

ERROR: testKeyPress (__main__.TestAjaxJSF)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "test_ajax_jsf.py", line 39, in testKeyPress

   
selenium.open("http://www.irian.at/selenium-server/tests/html/ajax/ajax_autocompleter2_test.html")


  File
"/home/me/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1/selenium.py",
line 764, in open

    self.do_command("open", [url,])

  File
"/home/me/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1/selenium.py",
line 215, in do_command

    raise Exception, data

Exception: XHR ERROR: URL =
http://www.irian.at/selenium-server/tests/html/ajax/ajax_autocompleter2_test.html
Response_Code = 404 Error_Message = Not Found



----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ran 1 test in 13.663s



FAILED (errors=1)



:~/selenium-remote-control-1.0.3/selenium-python-client-driver-1.0.1$ python
test_google.py

.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ran 1 test in 10.190s



OK

When you are running the above scripts you would see Selenium throw a browser with messages but this is too fast and disappears. In the second terminal, run your scripts from the directory you've stored them in.

Installing Sahi on Ubuntu 8.04 hardy

SVAKSHA — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:06:00 +0530

I was referred to sahi by ex-selenium users, so I decided to try it out.

To install sahi on ubuntu 8.04 hardy::

STEP#0.

I downloaded sahi from http://sourceforge.net/projects/sahi/files/

STEP#1.

Extracted the zip folder and changed directory. Ran the start_sahi shell script.

:~/sahi/userdata/bin$ sudo ./start_sahi.sh (The ./ is necessary because its not in the PATH as yet)
-------- SAHI_HOME: ../.. SAHI_USERDATA_DIR: ../../userdata SAHI_EXT_CLASS_PATH: -------- ../../bin/sahi.sh: line 19: java: command not found

Since Sahi requires java installed on your ubuntu system, do "sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jd" and run the shell script again.

~/sahi/userdata/bin$ sudo ./start_sahi.sh [sudo] password for mom: -------- SAHI_HOME: ../.. SAHI_USERDATA_DIR: ../../userdata SAHI_EXT_CLASS_PATH: -------- Sahi properties file = /home/moi/sahi/config/sahi.properties Sahi user properties file = /home/moi/sahi/userdata/config/userdata.properties Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi0 Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi1 Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi2 Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi3 Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi4 Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi5 Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi6 Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi7 Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi8 Copying profile to /home/moi/sahi/userdata/browser/ff/profiles/sahi9 >>>> Sahi started. Listening on port: 9999 >>>> Configure your browser to use this server and port as its proxy >>>> Browse any page and CTRL-ALT-DblClick on the page to bring up the Sahi Controller

STEP2:
Now visit http://sahi.co.in/w/using-sahi for the "Configure the browser" section and follow those instructions.
For FF, its "Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Network > Settings" and then you can continue with the remaining instructions for Manual Proxy Configuration.

Since “No Proxy for..” should not have localhost in it I removed it but sahi controller was not being activated. I would get the message "the proxy server is refusing connections" which results in FF browsing failing completely. Not nice.

Apparently the installation is fine and proxy has started on 9999 -- this port number is not used for any other process so technically Sahi should run. It doesnt. The second reason I didnt venture further with this is because it lacks a python client driver. Even if ruby is easy to learn, selenium scores when it provides a language driver for all the scripting languages.

SoftwareHardware fails

SVAKSHA — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 23:43:00 +0530

Ever been in a situation where you are trying to solve one problem but have more hoops to jump than necessary!?
This rant has been building up this past week and it all started with

bzr: ERROR: Unknown branch format: 'Bazaar Branch Format 7 (needs bzr
1.6)\n'

Seems that bzr has to be upgraded on hardy {--And now this? --after I had purged and re-installed bzr because the earlier installation was giving weird errors and I didnt want to waste time going off on a tangent. argh, I was wrong about wasting time with bugs!

I was suggested a PPA but for that was not an optimal path for me. Besides, here I was trying to pull a MM revision from LP, but instead have to build bzr and then work on MM..... ~fun.

Alan (thanks :)) suggested I edit the sources.list and add "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bzr/ppa/ubuntu hardy main" and then do an apt-get update, then apt-get upgrade which would upgrade bzr to the version in the ppa without all the compiling and building hoop jumping.

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

The following packages have been kept back:

bzr

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.

What a killjoy !!

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
python-configobj
The following packages will be upgraded:
bzr
[.....................]
Setting up bzr (2.1.2-1~bazaar2~hardy1) ...
removing incorrectly installed bash example /etc/bash_completion.d/bzr

Finally.... I upgraded bzr which allowed me to pull the branch: $ sudo bzr branch lp:mailman/2.1. An hour later.......gee, where was I now? The download was still 'in progress' and was'nt all this supposed to be incidental to testing Mailman...!? That was the night before. The next morning after yet-another-regular-unscheduled-power-outage, it was LaunchPad going down for an hour or so --some twit was DDOSing their server. What an incredibly productive activity!

LP returns and the development machine decides to die with a "/dev/sda1 error : fsck died with exit status 4". Now I knew this was my lucky day!!

Dug out a liveCD and ran 'fsck -f /dev/sda1' manually, where:

-f = force fsck even if filesystem seems clean
-cc = run badblocks check with a non-destructive test
-k = write new list of badblocks to current list
-p = automatically repair errors if possible without requiring human input
-v = verbose output

It found 5 inodes containing multiply claimed blocks and repaired it but for a while everything was in slow-motion -- I panicked about it taking ages to check a mere 40 gb of inodes and blocks. Colourless did the math on why it will take ages "just consider the sustained transfer rate of the drive which will probably be in the low 10s of mb/s. lets say you are getting 20mb/s second transfer, that is still going to be 2000 seconds to scan the disk, or 33 minutes".

Ah, talk of collective agida!

Earlier today fsck.ext1: No such file or directory while trying to open /dev/hda1. The superblock could not be read or does not describe a correct ext2 filesystem -- the hdd would not be detected and system refused to boot, refused to detect partitions. I spoke too soon earlier. It was super lucky saturday, not lucky friday!! This time the LiveCD was an arm's length away after last night's use and I checked out "fsck", "e2fsck" ...zilch, No response.

There is a good utility called TestDisk, which is available as a package for both debian and ubuntu --

sudo apt-get install
testdisk

, and you can run it from liveCD if your disk ever fails. It goes without saying that TestDisk will be useful only if your disk is detected by BIOS and hence alive.

Now, the worst I could think was "bad sectors==dead disk" but before that I had to check for loose wiring and then see if the BIOS detected the drive. The disk was spinning as I could hear the 'whrr' sound. Unplugged and re-plugged the wires a few times ...Nada...Bios would not detect the hdd. Convinced that it was the worst "bad sectors==dead disk", I shut everything down. A few hours later I switch it it on and voila the disk was detected and grub was soon asking which OS I wanted to boot into. That means it was just a loose connection (HOPEFULLY :)).

A BIG 'thanks' to ALL the folks who helped out with suggestions and listened to my kvetch. Much appreciated :) If I'd ever have to calculate "productive time" sans all the idiocy around then its scary to note the amount of time that is wasted scheduling my day around a power outage, hardware issues and software bugs, and then there is this mundane thing called 'life'. I wish I had 10-days of silence instead.

meld it

SVAKSHA — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:56:00 +0530

All *nix machines have the feature allowing you to compare two files --often useful to do a quick 'cmp' or 'diff' on the cli for a file comparision --a good feature for a small script file or documents. However, if you want to compare chunks of code, between two versions, then the readability isnt optimal.

Meld to the rescue!

Meld is a visual diff and merge tool which allows you to compare two or three files located in different directory paths on your local machine and edit them. It allows comparison of upto three folders.

I love useful software written in Python using the PyGTK toolkit. Meld has been packaged for Ubuntu and "sudo apt-get-install meld" would install this small utility which can be accessed via: Application >Programming >Meld Diff Viewer.

Its that simple.

Trolling101

SVAKSHA — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 23:45:00 +0530

Its incredibly funny when some Indians suffering with illusions of "internet == anonymity" think that they can get away with online harassment. Trolling is an art so if a troll does a bad job of using the technology properly, its difficult to write this post with a straight face.

IP Information - 59.94.134.50 IP address: 59.94.134.50 Reverse DNS: [No reverse DNS entry per ns11.bsnl.in.] Reverse DNS authenticity: [Unknown] ASN: 9829 ASN Name: BSNL-NIB (National Internet Backbone) IP range connectivity: 1 Registrar (per ASN): APNIC Country (per IP registrar): IN [India] Country Currency: INR [India Rupees] Country IP Range: 59.88.0.0 to 59.95.255.255 Country fraud profile: Normal City (per outside source): Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh Country (per outside source): IN [India] Private (internal) IP? No IP address registrar: whois.apnic.net Known Proxy? No

Ajuonline, impersonating another person while revealing your identity is hardly 'chatur' online.

from Troll101 import CommonSense

UPDATE (20100913): It was pointed out to me that the person impersonating lut4rp to leave the "die bitch" comment on my blog does not deserve the privacy as it paints an innocent person (lut4rp) evil. This is to clarify that Ajay Kumar (ajuonline) (blog, http://ajuonline.net and http://mindtakers.net), left the "die bitch" comment on my blog.

Raga::Kalyani

SVAKSHA — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 01:03:00 -0400

Kalyani, meaning "auspicious one" in Sanskrit, belongs to the 65th melakarta raga, is a very prominently played raga at concerts (and weddings?). At a concert very few artists will pass over this raga.

It is the 65^th melakarta rāga under the Katapayadi sankhya, also called Mechakalyani. The notes for Kalyani are S R₂ G₃ M₂ P D₂ N₃. A sawf article has a rather long and intricate analysis of this raga for each singer with audio samples in .ram format, which inspires me to rant about having had to install non-free codecs for gstreamer from the ugly set. Damn, why cant people use free formats on websites which wont force me to install restricted codecs...arghh, i digress.

Shri Purandara Dasa composed piLLangOviya cheluva in kalyANi raga (see Edit and comments below) and one of my favorite singers, Sri.Aruna Sairam renders Pillangoviya in kalyani, set to triputa tala.

Composer: Shri Purandara Dasa || Tala: Triputa || Language: Kannada

Arohanam : S R1 M1 P N2 S || Avarohan : S N2 P M1 R1 S

P : piLLangOviya celuva krSNana elli nODidiri || rangana elli nODidiri ||
A: elli nODidaralli tAnilla dillavendu balla jANare ||
C1: nandagOpana mandiragaLa sandugondinali || canda candada gOpa bAlara vrndA vrunadadali ||
sundarAngada sundariyara hindu mundinali || andadAkaLa kanda karugaLa manda mandeyali ||
C2: shrI gurUkta sadA sumangaLa yOga yOgadali || AgamArtadoLage mADuva yAga yAgadali ||
shrIge bhagyanAgi vartipa bhOga bhOgadali || bhAgavataru sadA bAgi pADuva rAga rAgadali ||
C3: I caracaradoLage janangaLa Ace Iceyali || kEcarendrana sutana rathada cauka pIThadali ||
nachade madhava keshava emba vacha kangalali l| pichukondada purandara vittalana lochanagradali ll

[EDIT-20100913]: It was pointed out to me that the person impersonating lut4rp to leave the "die bitch" comment on my blog does not deserve the privacy as it paints an innocent person (lut4rp) evil. As mentioned in my next blog entry (http://svaksha.com/post/2010/trolling-101), Ajay Kumar (ajuonline) (blog, http://ajuonline.net and http://mindtakers.net), left the "die bitch" comment on my blog.

[EDIT-20101230]: "piLLangOviya" is set to the Raga "MohanakalyAni" and not "kalyAni". (Thanks Ajit). It is a janya raga from the 65th melakarta scale due to the lack of all the seven svaras.

funkload builder load testing

SVAKSHA — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:05:00 +0530

After installing funkload on hardy, it was time for testing a few web-sites with it. I downloaded the build script and tested it. It worked like a charm but would only store results for google.com. All other sites, including blogs drew a blank which is strange. You can see the errors in the steps3 and 4, listed below:

Step0:

Test your funkload installation as below. It should run and give an OK result.

i@ubu804:~/funkload-demo/simple$ fl-run-test -v test_Simple.py

test_simple (test_Simple.Simple) ... Ok



----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ran 1 test in 36.425s



OK

Step0.1: Test the sample file.

i@ubu804:~/funkload-demo/simple$ fl-run-test -l 4 -n 100
test_Simple.py

End of loop: 100 pages rendered in 246.905s, avg of 2.469s per page, 0.405 SPPS
without concurrency.

.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Ran 1 test in 477.608s



OK

The log files for this test are located in "simple-test.log"

Step0.2: Bench it

i@ubu804:~/funkload-demo/simple$ fl-monitor-ctl monitor.conf start

Starting monitor server at http://localhost:8008/ as daemon.

Step1:

Next, download funkload Builder v0.2 - funkloadBuilder02.tar.gz.
Extract it into your home folder directory. Then just follow the installation instructions on that page which I did as below:

i@ubu804:~$ tar -xzvf funkloadBuilder02.tar.gz



funkload/

funkload/tmp/

funkload/tmp/wget/

funkload/builder/

funkload/builder/ResourceBundle.py

funkload/builder/build.py

funkload/builder/builder.conf

funkload/builder/util.py

funkload/builder/default/

funkload/builder/default/monitor.conf

funkload/builder/default/test-results/

funkload/builder/default/test_Load.py

funkload/builder/default/Load.conf



i@ubu804:~$ cd funkload/builder



i@ubu804:~/funkload/builder$ vi builder.conf

Here, you must edit the following lines in builder.conf:

wsb_root=/home/esw/funkload-results/ {hint: set your directory path
correctly}

test_repository=/home/esw/funkload/ {hint: set your directory path
correctly}

test_sites=[www.test1.co.uk, www.test2.co.uk] {hint: add the URI of sites you
want to test}



and if required, setup parameters for wget {Ex. your
/home/i/funkload/tmp/wget/www.google.co.in/index.html is the folder which will
store the .html files for viewing}.

Save and exit builder.conf file.

Step2:

Next, we will run the build file.

i@ubu804:~/funkload/builder$ python build.py -b 50

{'-b': '50'}

Performing sampling of site login.launchpad.net, this may take a while!

Sampling complete

Performing sampling of site svaksha.com, this may take a while!

Sampling complete

Performing sampling of site google.com, this may take a while!

Sampling complete

find: /home/i/funkload/tmp/wget/google.com: No such file or directory

If you change directory to the funkload folder, you will see three new folders for each of the sites you ran the tests on: "login.launchpad.net", "

svaksha.com", and
"google.com"

Step3:

Now we are running the load tests:



i@ubu804:~/funkload/builder$ python build.py --run

{'--run': ''}

/home/i/funkload/builder/.. login.launchpad.net

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "/usr/bin/fl-run-bench", line 8, in <module>

load_entry_point('funkload==1.12.0', 'console_scripts', 'fl-run-bench')()

File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/funkload/BenchRunner.py", line 606, in
main

File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/funkload/BenchRunner.py", line 220, in
__init__

File "build/bdist.linux-x86_64/egg/funkload/BenchRunner.py", line 123, in
load_unittest

File "/home/i/funkload/login.launchpad.net/test_Load.py", line 9, in
<module>

from MembersTestCase import MembersTestCase

ImportError: No module named MembersTestCase

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "build.py", line 271, in <module>

main(sys.argv[1:])

File "build.py", line 261, in main

funkloadBuilder.runLoadTesting()

File "build.py", line 240, in runLoadTesting

shutil.copyfile("%s/%s"%(copyDir,FunkloadBuilder.LOAD_TESTING_RESULTS_FILE),"%s/%s/%s"%(copyDir,FunkloadBuilder.LOAD_TESTING_RESULTS_FOLDER,FunkloadBuilder.LOAD_TESTING_RESULTS_FILE))


File "/usr/lib/python2.5/shutil.py", line 46, in copyfile

fsrc = open(src, 'rb')

IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory:
'/home/i/funkload/login.launchpad.net/load-bench.xml'

This is where the test fails because it only stores results for google.com in the folder /home/i/funkload/tmp/wget/www.google.co.in/index.html , where I can reproduce the google.in website as is. The other two domains that were tested, login.launchpad.net and svaksha.com dont have any results. Strange. The error above shows that /usr/bin/fl-run-bench, is not being called from the funkload==1.12.0 folder which is where the build fails.

Step4:

Next, we will have to generate HTML reports for each tested website but before giving the following command, create a funkload-results directory in your home folder, then :



i@ubu804:~/funkload/builder$ python build.py -s output-report-name

{'-s': 'output-report-name'}

load-bench.xml not found in:
/home/i/funkload/login.launchpad.net/test-results/

load-bench.xml not found in: /home/i/funkload/svaksha.com/test-results/

load-bench.xml not found in: /home/i/funkload/google.com/test-results/

The above command only creates a directory "output-report-name" within the funkload-results directory but cd'ing into one of them, like /funkload-results/output-report-name/svaksha.com, shows an empty directory. Test #fail.

howto install funkload on ubuntu8.04 hardy

SVAKSHA — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 22:53:00 +0530

In between my earlier attempts and patchy internet for almost a week and google searches yielding this:

#0.http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200810/funkload_ftw.html
#0.http://blog.jbglenn.net/search/label/Funkload and
#0.http://pydanny.blogspot.com/2008/02/funkload-charting-woes.html

It seemed like a challenge to get funkload working on Hardy but Ben had emailed and commented (thanks Ben :-)) that Funkload and TCPWatch package has to be installed manually for all Ubuntu releases below ver8.10 and its packaged for Debian-lenny.

On a clean Hardy/8.04 system, I tried installing funkload, yet again. So I suppose a proper listing of the steps will be useful to others.

Step0:

Installing the package dependencies.

i@ubu804:~$ sudo aptitude install python-dev python-xml python-setuptools
python-docutils gnuplot

Step1:

Downloading TCPWatch, extracting and building from source.

i@ubu804:~$ wget http://hathawaymix.org/Software/TCPWatch/tcpwatch-1.3.tar.gz --13:23:27--; http://hathawaymix.org/Software/TCPWatch/tcpwatch-1.3.tar.gz ; => `tcpwatch-1.3.tar.gz' Resolving hathawaymix.org... 67.161.215.12 Connecting to hathawaymix.org|67.161.215.12|:80... failed: Connection timed out. Retrying. --13:26:37--; http://hathawaymix.org/Software/TCPWatch/tcpwatch-1.3.tar.gz ; (try: 2) => `tcpwatch-1.3.tar.gz' Connecting to hathawaymix.org|67.161.215.12|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 13,065 (13K) [application/x-tar] 100%[===================================================================] 13,065; 11.43K/s; 13:26:39 (11.42 KB/s) - `tcpwatch-1.3.tar.gz' saved [13065/13065]
i@ubu804:~$ tar xzvf tcpwatch-1.3.tar.gz tcpwatch/ tcpwatch/tcpwatch.py tcpwatch/setup.py tcpwatch/CHANGES.txt i@ubu804:~$ cd tcpwatch/

i@ubu804:~/tcpwatch$ ls CHANGES.txt; setup.py; tcpwatch.py i@ubu804:~/tcpwatch$ python setup.py build running build running build_scripts creating build creating build/scripts-2.5 copying and adjusting tcpwatch.py -> build/scripts-2.5 changing mode of build/scripts-2.5/tcpwatch.py from 644 to 755 i@ubu804:~/tcpwatch$ sudo python setup.py install running install running build running build_scripts running install_scripts copying build/scripts-2.5/tcpwatch.py -> /usr/bin changing mode of /usr/bin/tcpwatch.py to 755 running install_egg_info Writing /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/tcpwatch-1.2.1.egg-info i@ubu804:~/tcpwatch$ cd

Step2:

Installing funkload version 1.12.0.

i@ubu804:~/tcpwatch$ sudo easy_install -U funkload Searching for funkload Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/funkload/ Reading http://funkload.nuxeo.org/ Best match: funkload 1.12.0 Processing funkload-1.12.0-py2.5.egg funkload 1.12.0 is already the active version in easy-install.pth Installing fl-credential-ctl script to /usr/bin Installing fl-monitor-ctl script to /usr/bin Installing fl-install-demo script to /usr/bin Installing fl-run-test script to /usr/bin Installing fl-record script to /usr/bin Installing fl-build-report script to /usr/bin Installing fl-run-bench script to /usr/bin Installing fl-credential-ctl script to /usr/bin Installing fl-run-test script to /usr/bin Installing fl-record script to /usr/bin Installing fl-run-bench script to /usr/bin Installing fl-monitor-ctl script to /usr/bin Installing fl-install-demo script to /usr/bin Installing fl-build-report script to /usr/bin Using /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.5.egg Processing dependencies for funkload Finished processing dependencies for funkload

Step3:

Installing python-gdchart and python-gdchart2

i@ubu804:~$ sudo aptitude install python-gdchart2 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done Building tag database... Done The following NEW packages will be automatically installed: libgdchart-gd2-noxpm The following NEW packages will be installed: libgdchart-gd2-noxpm python-gdchart2 0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 87.0kB of archives. After unpacking 352kB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Writing extended state information... Done Get:1 http://np.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe libgdchart-gd2-noxpm 0.11.5-4 [46.7kB] Get:2 http://np.archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe python-gdchart2 0.beta1-3.4 [40.3kB] Fetched 87.0kB in 24s (3608B/s) Selecting previously deselected package libgdchart-gd2-noxpm. (Reading database ... 151343 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking libgdchart-gd2-noxpm (from .../libgdchart-gd2-noxpm_0.11.5-4_amd64.deb) ... Selecting previously deselected package python-gdchart2. Unpacking python-gdchart2 (from .../python-gdchart2_0.beta1-3.4_amd64.deb) ... Setting up libgdchart-gd2-noxpm (0.11.5-4) ... Setting up python-gdchart2 (0.beta1-3.4) ... Processing triggers for libc6 ... ldconfig deferred processing now taking place Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done Writing extended state information... Done Building tag database... Done

Step4:

Now follow the demo testing steps given here

i@ubu804:~$ fl-install-demo Extract FunkLoad examples into ./funkload-demo : ... done. i@ubu804:~$ cd funkload-demo/xmlrpc/ i@ubu804:~/funkload-demo/xmlrpc$ make test fl-credential-ctl cred.conf restart Starting file_credential server at http://localhost:44401/ as daemon. fl-run-test test_Credential.py -v test_credential (test_Credential.Credential) ... Ok ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Ran 1 test in 0.038s OK fl-credential-ctl cred.conf stop Server http://localhost:44401/ is stopped. i@ubu804:~/funkload-demo/xmlrpc$

Step5:

Make bench

i@ubu804:~/funkload-demo/xmlrpc$ make bench Starting file_credential server at http://localhost:44401/ as daemon. Starting monitor server at http://localhost:44402/ as daemon. fl-run-bench -c 1:20:40:60:80:100 -D 10 test_Credential.py Credential.test_credential ======================================================================== Benching Credential.test_credential ======================================================================== Check all credentiald methods ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Configuration ============= * Current time: 2010-06-17T14:54:09.755672 * Configuration file: /home/i/funkload-demo/xmlrpc/Credential.conf * Log xml: /home/i/funkload-demo/xmlrpc/credential-bench.xml * Server: http://localhost:44401/ * Cycles: [1, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100] * Cycle duration: 10s * Sleeptime between request: from 0.1s to 0.2s * Sleeptime between test case: 0.5s * Startup delay between thread: 0.05s Benching ========

Cycle #0 with 1 virtual users ----------------------------- * Start monitoring localhost: ... done. * Current time: 2010-06-17T14:54:09.773675 * Starting threads: . done. * Logging for 10s (until 2010-06-17T14:54:19.830918): ........ done. * Waiting end of threads: . done. * Waiting cycle sleeptime 1s: ... done. * Stop monitoring localhost: done. * End of cycle, 12.62s elapsed. * Cycle result: **SUCCESSFUL**, 8 success, 0 failure, 0 errors. Cycle #1 with 20 virtual users ------------------------------ * Start monitoring localhost: ... done. * Current time: 2010-06-17T14:54:22.385506 * Starting threads: .................... done. * Logging for 10s (until 2010-06-17T14:54:33.519986): .............................................................................................................................................................................. done. * Waiting end of threads: .................... done. * Waiting cycle sleeptime 1s: ... done. * Stop monitoring localhost: done. * End of cycle, 14.33s elapsed. * Cycle result: **SUCCESSFUL**, 174 success, 0 failure, 0 errors. Cycle #2 with 40 virtual users ------------------------------ * Start monitoring localhost: ... done. * Current time: 2010-06-17T14:54:36.716379 * Starting threads: ........................................ done. * Logging for 10s (until 2010-06-17T14:54:49.032317): ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ done. * Waiting end of threads: ........................................ done. * Waiting cycle sleeptime 1s: ... done. * Stop monitoring localhost: done. * End of cycle, 14.59s elapsed. * Cycle result: **SUCCESSFUL**, 316 success, 0 failure, 0 errors.

Cycle #3 with 60 virtual users ------------------------------ * Start monitoring localhost: ... done. * Current time: 2010-06-17T14:54:51.301751 * Starting threads: ............................................................ done. * Logging for 10s (until 2010-06-17T14:55:04.779492): ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ done. * Waiting end of threads: ............................................................ done. * Waiting cycle sleeptime 1s: ... done. * Stop monitoring localhost: done. * End of cycle, 15.76s elapsed. * Cycle result: **SUCCESSFUL**, 464 success, 0 failure, 0 errors. Cycle #4 with 80 virtual users ------------------------------ * Start monitoring localhost: ... done. * Current time: 2010-06-17T14:55:07.066691 * Starting threads: ................................................................................ done. * Logging for 10s (until 2010-06-17T14:55:21.814678): ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ done. * Waiting end of threads: ................................................................................ done. * Waiting cycle sleeptime 1s: ... done. * Stop monitoring localhost: done. * End of cycle, 20.69s elapsed. * Cycle result: **SUCCESSFUL**, 672 success, 0 failure, 0 errors.

Cycle #5 with 100 virtual users ------------------------------- * Start monitoring localhost: ... done. * Current time: 2010-06-17T14:55:27.761091 * Starting threads: .................................................................................................... done. * Logging for 10s (until 2010-06-17T14:55:43.883081): .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. done. * Waiting end of threads: .................................................................................................... done. * Waiting cycle sleeptime 1s: ... done. * Stop monitoring localhost: done. * End of cycle, 20.43s elapsed. * Cycle result: **SUCCESSFUL**, 686 success, 0 failure, 0 errors. Result ====== * Success: 2320 * Failures: 0 * Errors: 0 Bench status: **SUCCESSFUL** fl-build-report credential-bench.xml --html Creating html report: ...done: /home/i/funkload-demo/xmlrpc/test_credential-20100617T145409/index.html Server http://localhost:44402/ is stopped. Server http://localhost:44401/ is stopped. i@ubu804:~/funkload-demo/xmlrpc$

Step6: Install Zope (installation instructions) and create a sandbox.

i@ubu804:~/funkload-demo/simple$ cat README.txt ==================== FunkLoad demo/simple ==================== $Id: README.txt 53544 2009-03-09 16:28:58Z tlazar $ This is a simple FunkLoadTestCase demonstration. It requires an web test server (configuration is done for an apache2 default install) WARNING: You should *not* run this script against a server that is not under your responsablity as it can result a DOS in bench mode. 1/ Modify the Simple.conf file Set the [main] url and pages keys 2/ Test it verbose mode:: fl-run-test -v test_Simple.py debug mode:: fl-run-test -d test_Simple.py view the downloaded page in real time using firefox:: fl-run-test -V test_Simple.py check performance of a single page:: fl-run-test -l 4 -n 100 test_Simple.py

PS:

I have yet to finish testing so I'll update this entry later as its almost midnight and as usual google threw more to-read stuff for laters... yum !
0. funkload-modules
0. funkload-test-in-few-minutes
0. funkloadtests/INSTALL.txt
0. plone-collective.recipe.funkload
0. set up funkload to do functional tests on a SOAP web service
0. funkload build script
0. collective funkload tests, thread on a plone list
0. plone sprint report
0. functional load testing notes

A nice-to-have feature would be a screen key recording feature in funkload

PyCon-India-2010 CFP

SVAKSHA — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 18:19:00 +0530

After much debate on the list, it was decided some months ago to hold Pycon-India 2010 in Bangalore....Yay !!

Its scheduled to be held at MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology on the weekend of 25th and 26th of September 2010. The call for proposals has been announced on the PyCon blog site at http://pycon.blogspot.com/2010/06/pycon-india-2010-call-for-proposals.html.

You can tweet, dent and blog to spread the word around and as the event draws near there will be calls for volunteers on the mailing list, so do pitch in. Usually I keep away from some of the Indian communities which are riddled with a handful of rude jerks (whose favorite pass-time is flaming another person), or arrogant control freaks and even cyber-stalkers !

I've never understood how a silent majority can allow a loud-mouthed minority to overshadow all the good work they do. Beats comprehension!!

Well, thusfar, pycon-IN is one space I find different -- The event is community driven and run by volunteers, mailing list discussions can get hot and yet its open and transparent. The part I liked the most-- almost everything, including finances are open and available to mailing list members -- now THAT is very much unlike _some_ Indian event(s) with sekrit cabals pulling the financial strings behind a "community" veneer. Its such a welcome change that I try to pitch in when I can.

funkload installation on ubuntu lucid and hardy

SVAKSHA — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 22:25:00 +0530

Crediting my earlier failed installation attempt to the owl-like-shift for most of last week, yesterday, I started afresh on Ubuntu Hardy.

Ubuntu Hardy

I tried the installation on Ubuntu Hardy, which is the environment in which funkload will be installed for use. Installing tcpwatch-httpproxy removes procmail and sendmail.

Not good. Those packages are required by other parts of the system. Strangely this does not happen on Ubuntu 10.04, for which I repeated the installation to test separately. Earlier Ben had left a comment offering his help so I've emailed him the logs and am hoping to solve this problem and post another entry about that.

$sudo aptitude install tcpwatch-httpproxy --without-recommends Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done Writing extended state information... Done Building tag database... Done Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "tcpwatch-httpproxy" Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "tcpwatch-httpproxy" The following packages are unused and will be REMOVED: procmail sendmail-base sendmail-cf sensible-mda 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 3191kB will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Writing extended state information... Done (Reading database ... 151156 files and directories currently installed.) Removing sensible-mda ... Removing procmail ... Removing sendmail-base ... Cleaning up the queues...find: /var/spool/mqueue: No such file or directory done. Removing sendmail-cf ... Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Reading extended state information Initializing package states... Done Writing extended state information... Done Building tag database... Done

Ubuntu Lucid (10.04)

The experience of installing funkload on Lucid was a little better than Hardy, which was a small step ahead. Even if the installation failed, I tried the test-runner but the tests failed and I wanted to try it again with virtualenv. Likewise, the modules was not loading in TestRunner

(funkload)me@ubuntu10.04:~$ fl-run-test -v myFile.py Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/me/.virtualenvs/funkload/bin/fl-run-test", line 8, in <module> load_entry_point('funkload==1.12.0', 'console_scripts', 'fl-run-test')() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg/funkload/TestRunner.py", line 483, in main TestProgram(testLoader=test_loader) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg/funkload/TestRunner.py", line 342, in __init__ self.loadTests() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg/funkload/TestRunner.py", line 352, in loadTests module_relative=False) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/doctest.py", line 2419, in DocFileSuite suite.addTest(DocFileTest(path, **kw)) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/doctest.py", line 2338, in DocFileTest doc, path = _load_testfile(path, package, module_relative) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/doctest.py", line 219, in _load_testfile return open(filename).read(), filename IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/me/myFile'

Next it was 'make bench' which failed. So too with BenchRunner.

(funkload)me@ubuntu10.04:~$ fl-run-bench -u http://localhost:8080 -c 10:20 -D 30 myFile.py MyTestCase.testSomething Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/me/.virtualenvs/funkload/bin/fl-run-bench", line 8, in <module> load_entry_point('funkload==1.12.0', 'console_scripts', 'fl-run-bench')() File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg/funkload/BenchRunner.py", line 606, in main bench = BenchRunner(args[0], klass, method, options) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg/funkload/BenchRunner.py", line 220, in __init__ mmn_encode(method_name, 0, 0, 0), options) File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg/funkload/BenchRunner.py", line 123, in load_unittest module = __import__(test_module) ImportError: No module named myFile

Raga Darbari Kanada

SVAKSHA — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:58:00 +0530

"Devan ke pati Indra", composed in raga Darbari Kanada - Deshadi is a Hindustani raga composed by Svati Tirunal in HINDI language set to chowtaal. Pandit Ganapathi Bhatt, whose rendition is in two parts: Part one is around 8 minutes and part two is under 6 minutes, lends soul to one of the most beautiful Hindi bhajans that I have heard of Svati Tirunal, ala, Maharaja Svati Tirunal Rama Varma, a king from Travancore, now erstwhile Kerala.

Svati Tirunal's karnatic compositions were the first I learnt and it is not surprising that he was a prolific linguist, having composed music in 5 Indian languages. Most people can only learn multiple languages but imagine composing music in languages like Hindi, Malayalam, Manipravalam, Sanskrit and Telugu -- they have different scripts, a different vocabulary and grammatical structure. That needs abnormally high intelligence.

Had he been alive today, he would certainly put all the current narrow-minded egoists who play language-politics against Hindi to shame. I have never understood how politicians/people who cry hoarse against Hindi can readily accept English which is afterall a language we adopted after we were enslaved. But, i digress.

I noted the lyrics and all the scribblings (in brackets) are my notes made while listening to the song. These would not make much sense outside of a student wanting to learn this raga. I still prefer good old pen and paper as its easier to put small notations at each gamaka or niraval which is harder to do on a blog or a text file.

Pallavi:

देवन के पति इंद्रा ॥ तारा के पति चंद्रा ॥ 1 ॥ {repeat, देवन के....}
विद्या के पति गणेशा ॥ दुख भर हरी ॥ 2 ॥ {repeat pallavi: देवन के पति इंद्रा..}

Charanam ONE:

रागपति कानडा ॥ बजन के पति बिन ॥ 1 ॥|
रितुपति है बसंता (small aalap) ॥ रतिपति सुखकारी ॥ 2 ॥
{repeat pallavi: devan ke pati indra}

Charanam TWO:

मुनिजन पति व्यास (small aalap) ॥ पंछी पति हंसा (ट्वाइस, प्लस नीरावाल) ॥ 3 ॥
नर पति रामा (twice, small niraval+swaralapana) ॥ अवध विहारी ॥ 4 ॥
{repeat pallavi: devan ke pati indra}

Charanam THREE:

गिरीपती हिमाचल ॥ भूटान के पति महेशा ॥ 5 ॥
तीन लोकपति श्री (ट्वाइस, नीरावाल) ॥ पद्मनाभ गिरिधारी ॥ 6 ॥
{repeat pallavi: devan ke pati indra}

There is another wonderful Darbari bandish by Ustad Ghulam Hassan Shaggan (My guess is they are Pakistani singers as i've never seen them on the Hindustani classical circuit nor are their CD's available in any shops), and listening to him gives me goosebumps. Those aalaps at that age...wow, just wow!! This is my main grouse with karnatic music -- most karnatic music teachers dont want to teach aalaps. Their excuse being, students dont like to learn the hard stuff, or listeners dont like wasting time listening to boring aalaps. Doh! For me neither is true. I like mental challenges and certainly dont intend performing on stage. I'd hardly care if there is another listener around, rather I'd prefer to be alone with music, something that i can create and enjoy for myself. A very famous instrument artist had once said that he does not like to talk after a public performance and dislikes people asking for autographs, asking questions, smile and pose for pics, because he was lost in the trance that he just created through music and wanted to remain there, but he could not as he was a public figure. All he wants to do is sit in a corner thinking about a raga and I *totally* grok that feeling.

Well, now I want to check out the differences between a Darbari and the Darbari Kanada ragas. Some years ago I had created a webpage comparing Hindustani and Karnatic ragas and a listing of Ragas which are supposed to be sung only in the morning, evening and night ragas. I cant seem to find this page now. I'd declare it lost but plan to search all my backups before I give up searching.

searching mailing lists

SVAKSHA — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 00:44:00 +0530

If you are a Mailman user please take a minute to help improve the Archives by answering this short survey. The survey asks you to name which list you searched and I had asked Terri why this should matter at all as I am subscribed as a user to hundreds of Linux-related mailing lists which are a mix of public archives, private archives and no archives or those that are archived via gmane, etc.... This makes it harder to answer for each list as the search mechanism is different for each. She replied that answering this survey question was not compulsary, type "I don't know.", but its kept there because it tells them if people are using a standard, default mailman setup or something different like gmane.

Yaniv has blogged about searching mailing list archives offline mode. If you are using a mobile connection in India, it would involve downloading chunks of data and then searching your directory offline using keywords. As I mentioned earlier the search mechanism varies for online mailing lists using mailman. If you use google you can specify the "site" + the keywords. But what if you dont know whether the list has that information of which month and year its archived under. What if your list has private archives? --This search is a wee bit harder than open mailing lists as you need to be subscribed to the list to be able to access the archives. If its a secure 'https' server, you cannot open multiple tab instances to search, and so on...

Searching mailing list archives is not impossible. Every one of us uses google and we all know how easy and/or hard it is to find what we are looking for -- finding relevant information which is also correct and fulfills your needs is a lot harder than we think. If I am looking for a particular "device driver" that does not allow wi-fi to work on my laptop, google might bring out a relevant page (including mailing list discussions) which may be too old, in that, they may ask me to manually doanload and install the "device driver" but the latest distro version I use may have solved the problem with a downloadable installer.

Probably the engine might search and list the pages by the Date and UTC timings but my point was that small things like these can make a big difference in the amount of time we spend looking for information. Machines or should I say the algorithms powering them can only do what we tell them to do. They are intelligent but not there yet.

funkload installation fail

SVAKSHA — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 22:35:00 +0530

I was analysing various tools for web-testing and tried out funkload - a functional, load web tester in Python.

$sudo easy_install -f http://funkload.nuxeo.org/snapshots/ -U funkload
(and "sudo easy_install -U funkload" results are below:)

/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/setuptools/package_index.py:156:

UserWarning: Unbuilt egg for setuptools [unknown version]

(/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages)

Environment.__init__(self,*args,**kw)/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/setuptools/command/easy_install.py:216:


UserWarning: Unbuilt egg for setuptools [unknown version]

(/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages)

self.local_index = Environment(self.shadow_path+sys.path)

Searching for funkload

Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/funkload/

Reading http://funkload.nuxeo.org/

Best match: funkload 1.12.0

Processing funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg

funkload 1.12.0 is already the active version in easy-install.pth

Installing fl-credential-ctl script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-monitor-ctl script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-build-report script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-run-test script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-record script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-install-demo script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-run-bench script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-credential-ctl script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-run-test script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-record script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-run-bench script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-monitor-ctl script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-install-demo script to /usr/local/bin

Installing fl-build-report script to /usr/local/bin

Using
/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg


Processing dependencies for funkload

Finished processing dependencies for funkload

$ fl-install-demo

Extract FunkLoad examples into ./funkload-demo : ... done.

Googling showed that Debian packages were 1.6.0 but easy_install pulls 1.12.0, hmm... continued with installing the dependencies:

$sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-xml python-dev gnuplot (if you want the graphs)

$ cd funkload-demo/xmlrpc/ ~/funkload-demo/xmlrpc$ make test

fl-credential-ctl cred.conf restart

Starting file_credential server at http://localhost:44401/ as daemon.

fl-run-test test_Credential.py -v

test_credential (test_Credential.Credential) ... FAIL

======================================================================


FAIL: test_credential (test_Credential.Credential)

----------------------------------------------------------------------


Traceback (most recent call last):

 File
"/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg/funkload/FunkLoadTestCase.py",


line 868, in __call__

testMethod()

File "/home/mom/funkload-demo/xmlrpc/test_Credential.py", line 21,

in test_credential

description="Check getStatus")

File
"/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/funkload-1.12.0-py2.6.egg/funkload/FunkLoadTestCase.py",


line 417, in xmlrpc

raise SocketError("Can't access %s." % url)

error: Can't access http://localhost:44401/.

----------------------------------------------------------------------


Ran 1 test in 0.007s

FAILED (failures=1)

make: *** [credential_test] Error 1

Apparently the version checked out via " sudo apt-get install -f http://funkload.nuxeo.org/snapshots/ -U funkloadinstall" is messed up -- the port number is weird.

Tried the same installation as blogged here and then I repeated the whole process with virtualenvwrapper for good measure. Virtualenv was a nicer place to try testing if each *.py file worked or not. Atleast some of the .py files ran and errors reduced but the one consistent error was the high port number. Strange that the Install file (or was it the Readme file?) lists localhost on port "http://localhost:33301/".

So although both installation methods failed spectacularly i wanted to document all the stuff that i tried for my reference. After an 18-hour day, blogging is the last thing on my mind but very often when I do some stuff, am tired after these marathon days, move on as i'm tired and dont document it. The next time I want to replicate the _exact_ method i followed earlier, I waste more time digging out stuff. This is especially true with eggs which break easily and i'm a vegetarian who dislikes omelette

Pbuilder installation on UbuntuHardy

SVAKSHA — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 22:07:00 +0530

Pbuilder, constructs a chroot system and builds a package inside the chroot. It is an ideal system to use to check that a package has correct build dependencies and to build clean packages to be tested and distributed. Debian uses pbuilder for packaging and they have lotsa manuals...

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/

http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkgtools.en.html

http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/ch-start.en.html

Pbuilder manual - Junichi Uekawa

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BasicChroot

Ubuntu also uses Pbuilder for all their packaging work. Ubuntu has a Packaging Guide but i was following the instruction on the Ubuntu wiki page while trying to install it on hardy. Installed the dependencies and tried to create it.

$sudo pbuilder create --distribution hardy --othermirror "deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hardy main restricted universe multiverse"

Error!! "Command line parameter [.dsc] is not a valid .dsc file name"

The .pbuilderrc file was supposed to be created automagically but it wasnt.

Grr...stuff.

But it was nigelb and geser to the rescue and its the real-time responses that makes me addicted to IRC but I find it amusing that we use cryptic and terse mode of communication on irc as compared to complete sentences in email/forums. hmmm...not sure if this is good or bad in the long runbut switching modes suddenly makes it kinda weird.

$sudo pbuilder create

$sudo pbuilder update --override-config

Upgrading for distribution hardy Building the build Environment extracting base tarball [/var/cache/pbuilder/base.tgz] creating local configuration copying local configuration Installing apt-lines mounting /proc filesystem mounting /dev/pts filesystem policy-rc.d already exists Refreshing the base.tgz upgrading packages Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy Release.gpg Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy Release Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/main Packages Reading package lists... Done dpkg - warning: ignoring request to remove lilo which isn't installed. Obtaining the cached apt archive contents Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done build-essential is already the newest version. dpkg-dev is already the newest version. apt is already the newest version. aptitude is already the newest version. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Copying back the cached apt archive contents unmounting dev/pts filesystem unmounting proc filesystem creating base tarball [/var/cache/pbuilder/base.tgz] cleaning the build env removing directory /var/cache/pbuilder/build//15479 and its subdirectories

...and pbuilder was ready to be used.

$sudo apt-get update

Next it was pulling a package to build and source it via wget, apt-get, or dget for the .dsc file from packages.ubuntu.com -- only for packages in the ubuntu repo. If your code sits as a branch on your cvs, it wont be pulled from packages.ubuntu.com.

The 'Packaging from Scratch' section asks you to create a directory before using wget but its a different method when you are using a cvs. If its hosted on LP, use bzr to pull it::

$sudo bzr export -r73 /dest/dir lp:~systers/systers/stable

and make sure you dont create the "/dest/dir" by hand as bzr will protest that the file exists in the target directory but the target dir will be empty. Bzr export needs a non-existing destination as it will create the directory owned to root. Somewhere in the middle of changing the ownership it simply locked me out ...wtf? and the next steps failed quite obviously. Then I had to waste a lot of time deleteing each file and folder.

In between this, Bescom decided to be the royal pita that they usually are, conked off power for half the day-- they had some work being done at the supplying station and the engineer was even kind enough to warn the residents of our area that an electric pole was going to be replaced in the street this week so be prepared for power outages at intermittent intervals of 10-15 minutes outage all day as they would be testing. WTF? Telling him that electrical appliances dont tolerate this well got the stock reply "install an UPS". How kind of him to enlighten us. Dont I just love the way our government servants treat the tax-paying citizens.

Adding to the annoyance, nothing worked after that. dh_make, used to create a template for packaging would not be invoked and I recall reading somewhere that dh_make was supposed to be done right the first time, else it would not work.

$dpkg-source -x *.dsc

dpkg-source: error: cannot open .dsc file ./*.dsc: No such file or
directory

Oh ok, now I need to find out a solution for that as well as how to create a .dsc file for the source pulled from LP.

zen of computerisation

SVAKSHA — Mon, 17 May 2010 03:03:00 +0530

Only we can introduce computers at banks and at the same time increase the paperwork by making the customer fill out one form to open an account, a second form to get a debit ATM card, a third form to get a cheque book and so on..... Sans pushing paper around it would seem the government babu's dont do any work...No can do, one has to look busy atleast!

Only we can create an online reservation system to book rail tickets whose website after 11:30 pm will show the following notice when you try to book tickets:

Booking (I-ticket and E-ticket ) is allowed from 5.00 to 23.30 Hours (Indian Standard Time) on all days including Sundays.
Greenwich Mean Time 23.30 and 18.00 Hours
Cancellation of E-ticket is allowed from 5.00 to 23.30 Hours (Indian Standard Time) on all days including Sundays (before chart preparation of the train).
Greenwich Mean Time 23.30 and 18.00 Hours

24x7? eh, what? do IT the Indian way!

a commercial opportunity

SVAKSHA — Sun, 16 May 2010 23:55:00 +0530

A visiting professor wrote about a commercial opportunity available at their college which is looking for folks who can set up a bulletin board and forum to answer questions from students. Here is a brief write up of the job:

a) Are you the one who can answer all the following questions without flipping / blowing your top off :
1) How can I use the vi editor to edit my file? What is Couchdb?
2) How can I compile my program better than typing javac myProgram.java / How can I use the Facebook OpenGraph API?

b) Are you someone who is willing to be surrounded by young minds willing to learn and open to learning new stuff? Are you willing to try new stuff that can help improve the spread of knowledge

c) Do you feel stifled by your job and are willing to try out the new technologies before settling on a steady corporate job? Have you wanted to improve the quality of learning? Have you yearned for infrastructure to try your ideas but did not find it. For example do you want to try a cluster ? Do you want to play around with Clojure and want a couple of interns / bright minds who can help you try Proof Of Concept ideas ?

d) Are you good in setting up forums / moderating online technical forums

e) Are you in Bangalore?

If all the above excites you and you want to contribute to the making of the next generation education institution this is your choice. Send a mail to nextgenerationbangalore@gmail.com with your resume and a short write up on why you fit the bill and we can start talking.

chaturanga

SVAKSHA — Sat, 08 May 2010 19:07:00 +0530

Sexual assaults involving ministers mixed with never-ending power-cuts make a heady summer mix. Its not surprising that the frequency of water cuts and power cuts has spiked the moment local Municipal elections voting got over. People have filed PIL's but KPTC/BESCOM cant seem to curb the power theft that occurs right under its nose, which is self-evident when you take a walk around any main street with shops and direct your gaze skyward to see the criss-crossing wires from each electricity pole situated on the roadside--all illegal but under the benign gaze of the officials. The shopkeeper will tell you why you could not get away with it without the connivance of the employees of inefficient BESCOM whose palms they regularly grease, lest its converted into "commercial rates" which is four times higher than the residential rates....and thus residential power theft continues. The powers that be are aware of the irregularities and yet dont care. What would it take to turn things around?

If that is the local state of affairs, the national level is no better. Nope, Sonia Gandhi, a woman at the helm has not changed things for the better. Its not uncommon for women to bear the brunt and pay the price when it comes to law-making policies. India has always had women politicians and yet the scams continue to tumble out of the closet catching the players on a sticky wicket, and we continue to live with corruption, lobbying for power while the money-making games continue, resulting in tacit compromises instead of clean governance. If anything politicians lack the will to root out corruption and a citizen has no choice when it comes to choosing a clean political party to represent them. Today, corruption and crimes are committed by politicians from just about every party and ideological frame of mind --Quid pro quo.

Unsubscribing from threads in Mailman

SVAKSHA — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:18:00 +0530

If you have ever subscribed to a mailing list that uses MM you would know about the concept of threads-- keeps ensuing replies woven in a threaded fashion making it easy to keep track of communication in a single flow. G has implemented the same concept as "conversations" for gmail users.

However, on most lists there comes a point in time when not every mail that is sent to the list is of interest. On some lists the threads run into hundreds of replies (err...flames if you must) and sometimes after the first email the ensuing "+1" and "yeah, I agree" top-posts will have you clicking the delete key.

Another alternative that many people use right now is the "digest mode", which just lumps all threads and mails it out to you each day. This is not without problems: It creates a different subject line that mucks up a reply in the archives, if you didnt take care to insert the "Re: " before the existing subject line with proper spacing. Even then it can sometimes break the thread in the archives and if you want to search the archives its yet another nightmare. Another problem is with archives which are stored in a monthly archive format but your conversation that started in January may continue into March. If its public mailing list then gmane or google comes to your rescue, else tough luck.

You dont have much choice when a default MM installation will not let you unsubscribe from a thread. Even gmail does not let you do this on google groups (that is another can of worms for another day) but currently in MM you only have the option of deleting the uninteresting emails, digest or unsubscribing from the list alltogether if there is too much OT chatter.

But what if you had the option to mute by unsubscribing to an individual thread without leaving the mailing list alltogether? Dlist has a feature whereby the user can choose a particular thread or conversation that is interesting to participate, To continue an existing conversation you would continue with your reply by using the email "listname+SampleSubject@domain.tld" and to unsubscribe from a single thread use, "listname+SampleSubject+unsubscribe@domain.tld". To start a new conversation, you would type 'listname+new@domain.tld' as opposed to the old method of emailing the list 'listname@domain.tld'.

Not so Lucid

SVAKSHA — Wed, 05 May 2010 08:13:00 +0530

Last weekend I upgraded to Lucid (Ubuntu 10.04) and these changes dont bother me at all, albeit the GUI changes were shocking at first-- buttons to close/maximize/minimize your application window are now on the left hand side and each new tab you open pushes the first ones to your right-- but being a forced right handed person has its advantages..... moi does adapt quickly...to the extent that 2-3 days into it, I like this quirky change.

I've always secretly wished a left-alignment over the years, especially when the gui window or browser overshot the screen visibility limits with no way to close the application. The left hand side of the frame is fixed. Its left me wondering why the UI was not developed with left-uppermost in mind --its the way we read and its just seems natural to let the left take over. Pun (un)intended. I might even be tempted to buy a left-handed mouse if the scroll buttons moved over to the left YMMV.

However, my personal break point from lucid was for divergent reasons. Its twofold- One, ssh. Although the server I tunnel into had issues with the ISP, the strange weirdness occurs after I tunnel in. Any key I type (even space bar or page down) after ssh'ing into the server throws gibberish :

debug3: Wrote 48 bytes for a total of 61063

debug3: Wrote 48 bytes for a total of 61111

debug3: Wrote 48 bytes for a total of 61159

debug3: Wrote 48 bytes for a total of 61207

debug3: Wrote 48 bytes for a total of 61255

debug3: Wrote 48 bytes for a total of 61303

These debug errors are not much fun when I cant see anything that I type on screen and since the screen scrolls, I am forced to copy paste from a text editor. Ssh just sucks atm. Other server users dont have the same issue so I am wondering if this is lucid not handling ssh properly. I am not sure and dont have the time to experiment as I need stability ATM, which is tied to the second reason for not using lucid-- development takes place on 8.04 LTS, and I can safely revert to 9.10 for personal use and not miss much.

UPDATE: No solutions came forth on IRC, except for a 'hald' suggestion which I need to read. Meanwhile, to cross check I tried logging in via another partition that runs 8.04LTS with the same -v (that is the verbose debug option) option that I used on 9.10 and on 10.04. It works like a charm everywhere except on the ubuntu 10.04 partition. On the face of it, it seems like a lucid bug but since I dont have much to go on, i cant file a bug. Arghh..

methi-onion thalipith

SVAKSHA — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 21:31:00 -0400

While I feel that Thalipith is a healthier option to Parathas, some people like like the latter's softness than thalipith which is not very tasty when it turns cold and hard but the former does have more ground pulses than the latter, which may atmost have one vegetable--Talking of which, I can never forget the best parathas we had, at Mussourie --a small eatery on Camel Back Road, meters before the Gurudwara, run by a Sikh couple. The scary part was the wild monkeys which would not hesitate to accost you and violently snatch the packed food...phew! I digress.

Returning to the bhajani which consists of different pulses that are dry-roasted before being ground into flour. I experimented with a combination of wheat, jowar, bajra, chana dal, rice, urad and moong dal(s). Ofcourse, there are multiple methods to make the bhajani for thalipith and you can experiment depending on the desired chemistry, thence outcome.

BHAJANI
* Jowar: 1 kg.
* Bajra: 1 kg. (if you cant find bajra, substitute it with rajgira OR ragi --only 200 gms else the final product will break)
* Wheat: 1 kg
* Moong dal: 1/2 kg (OR urad dal: 1/2 kg)
* Chana dal: 1/4 kg
* Rice: 1/4 kg (increasing this quantity will result in the pancake turning stiff and crack whilst cooking)

METHOD:

1. Dry roast each of the above ingredients separately till the grains turn crispy brown. Do not add oil to the kadai while roasting.
2. Cool them and mix it well and grind together all the roasted ingredients in flour mill for a very fine powder consistency (not coarse like flour for parathas).

This is 'bhajani' flour, can be used for thalipith and also for chakli and even as a base for instant dosa. Although I dislike cooking I like the experiments that $A and me try in the kitchen. Most of the times I am just astounded at the chemistry created with various ingredients though. If the bhajani is stored in a clean, dry and airtight container, it can last a few months (even a year?) without any bugs BUT I would not vouch for the taste of product made with flour that is so stale

THALIPITH

* 4 cups Bhajani flour (see above, for bhajani mix)
* 1 small chopped Onion
* 2 tbsp Chopped coriander
* 1/2 tbsp Shveta Till (white sesame seeds)
* 1/4 tsp Ajwain seeds
* 1 tbsp Coriander seed (dry roasted) powder
* 1 tsp Red chilli powder
* 1 tsp Thecha (green chillies paste)
* 1 tsp ginger paste
* Black peppercorns (depending on your spice level)
* 1 tbsp Jeera/cumin seeds
* 2-3 tbsp Oil
* Salt, to taste.

Preparation Method of Thalipith

1. Take four cups Bhajani flour and finely diced onions, black pepper powder, turmeric, coriander, ginger and thecha paste, jeera, chopped coriander, Till, Ajwain seeds, Coriander seed (dhania) powder, and red chilli powder.
2. Knead with water to make firm dough. [Hint: While making dough you can add 1 tablespoon of curd and reduce the water. This is only if you intend to consume on the same day.]
3. Roll into rotis and make 2-3 holes with a spoon.
4. Cook over a hot tava (griddle), smearing oil on the holes. Cover the tava and cook for two minutes. Turn and cook both sides till crisply cooked.
5. Enjoy hot with pudina chutney or dahi raita (curd) or plain unsalted butter.

This time while mixing I added ragi for a darker color and had taken pictures of the methi-onion thalipith but I am feeling lazy to upload them. The next on my to-learn list is the yummy Vegetarian-Ma-Po-Tofu from a Chinese restaurant but I dont know where to find silken tofu in India.

mailman installation - language selection

SVAKSHA — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 12:45:00 +0530

While installing Mailman, in Ubuntu/Debian based systems, $ sudo aptitude install mailman, will throw a prompt asking you to choose one language out of a long list.

Choosing English and hitting "enter" only displays the GUI box. Moving the cursor down, pressing shift (Ctrl/alt) with a combination of every alphabet and character key on the keyboard, would not let me select any language. The 'Esc' key and 'ctl-c' didnt allow me to close the window or proceed with my installation so the obvious choice was to terminate the terminal window. Installation incomplete. Frustrating.

Google and irc didnt offer me any solutions to what was, in my mind, a tiny tiny "something" that was missing somewhere, but what?

To select a language, use 'space bar' on your keyboard and press the 'tab' key to enter and select the language of your choice. This will complete the installation process. Its that simple but not very intutive, huh?! I wrote a tiny note on the MM wiki as others had reported the same problem and left it at that, except for $AP nagging me to blog as it would benefit folks while I felt its too simple and that probably makes me a lazy and irregular blogger which means I should have been able to convince him to start using the blog I have created for him! Not?!

On an unrelated note, I found a wonderful course on sendmail basics.

python in scientific computing workshop

SVAKSHA — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:24:00 +0530

Fossee is conducting a "Python in Scientific Computing" workshop from April30 to May01,2010.

VENUE

Sir M Visvesvaraya Institute of Technology,
Krishnadeveraya Nagar, Hunasamranhalli, NH-7,
Via- Yelahanka, Bangalore-562157, Karnataka, India

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=sir+mvit&ie=UTF8&hq=sir+mvit&hnear=&ll=13.153958,77.605104&spn=0.056917,0.077162&z=14

ATTENDANCE/REGISTRATION

Free, python beginners are welcome. However, registration is required and you can register at mvit [dot] eventbrite [dot] com. NOTE: Please register only if you are SURE you'll be able to attend on both the days.

They have a limitation on the number of computers, so you should bring your laptop if you can. For more information please email them at workshops [dot] mvit [at] gmail [dot] com.

python lug meetup on 20100425

SVAKSHA — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:10:00 +0530

UPDATED UPDATE: This meet was CANCELLED.

Bangpypers, aka Bengaluru/Bangalore Python meetup is scheduled for Sunday, 2010apr25.

Time: 1500 Hrs onwards.

UPDATED Venue:
TenXperts office in Koramangala. On Hosur Main Road opposite Star Bazaar there is a small cross road (attached to Robert Bosch's compound). TenXperts office is on that road above Innovative Cars shop on the first floor.

Here is the map<http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=robert+bosch+koramangala&sll=12.936987,77.612818&sspn=0.004298,0.009645&ie=UTF8&hq=robert+bosch&hnear=Koramangala,+Bengaluru,+Karnataka,+India&ll=12.939067,77.612658&spn=0.016145,0.038581&z=15>

Agenda: This meet will be focussed on taking an existing floss project and working on it. Current suggestions are Pygments and a Python standard library module for unit tests, but feel free to suggest and/or work on your own choice of any floss'y python project. If you are new to Python, you are most welcome to come and learn. The idea is to get a local community along the lines of dojorio.org [English translation].

virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader error

SVAKSHA — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 15:22:00 +0530

Eversince upgrading and installing virtualenvwrapper which now has support for all bash shells, I get the following error when the terminal is invoked:

virtualenvwrapper.sh: Could not find Python module virtualenvwrapper.hook_loader using VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_PYTHON=/usr/bin/python. Is the PATH set properly?

I have not seen this error in the older virtualenvwrappers, and I am wondering if it has anything to do with the way python is packaged in Ubuntu? or something else?

Doug writes about extending wrappers, BUT ...But...but, I have not defined a source hook for it and nor am I extending it. Its vanilla, invoked with "mkvirtualenv projectname", "workon" or should that change too? Yeah, Virtualenvwrapper works but I dont like seeing this error message each time the shell is invoked. Its annoying.

UPDATE:

Doug left a comment and I had mailed him that by cloning his repo, I was "doing it wrong". And, what went wrong? This:
0. Cloning doug's repo with hg clone http://bitbucket.org/dhellmann/virtualenvwrapper --which downloaded it to the users home directory. Ex. /home/me.
1. Downloading http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/virtualenvwrapper/ -- it puts the tar.gz file in the directory that one specified in the Firefox settings.

The correct method:

$ sudo easy_install pip

$ sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper which installed a copy of the script in /usr/local/bin and the support libraries are placed in /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages.

There is a command reference too and during my search I found a wontfix bug which explains why users will have to set a path themselves.

Todi::TayeYashoda

SVAKSHA — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:34:00 -0400

Todi is a perennial favorite, especially the kriti "taye yashoda" composed by uthukadu venkatasubbaiyer in Tamil. We were learning this when I had stopped attending class. That rankled me enough to spend the better part of the weekend dissecting the kalpanasvarams from this fusion version in the movie Morning Raga.

While I love the ragam-taanam-pallavi style, we dont learn that too much. The reason being people, or should I say listeners, like short performances for each song sans kalpanaswarams, long aalaps and niravals. In the movie, Sudha Raghunathan renders the playback but I have more admiration for Shabana Azmi who has to lip sync to render the kalpanaswarams perfectly.

Watch the video of Morning Raga and you will realise why she is so awesome as an artiste. Not only has Shabana learnt the swarakalpanas by rote (classical indian music is not as easy as it seems) but she has rendered the swara jugalbandi perfectly. Even for a music student like me, its far easier to write down the notations and learn them as I am familiar with the intricacies. However, it would not have been easy for her. In an interview, I recall her husband mentioning that before the shooting of the movie he was subjected to this song 24x7 for six whole months. Observe the charanam part where she sings the swara jugalbandi like she were to the manor born. Tres bien!

taayE yashOdaa(lyrics from, http://www.karnatik.com/ragast.shtml)

ragam: tODi

8 hanumatodi mela
Aa: S R1 G2 M1 P D1 N2 S
Av: S N2 D1 P M1 G2 R1 S

Talam: Adi
Composer: Uthukadu VenkaTasubbaiyer
Language: Tamil

pallavi

tAyE yashOdE undan Ayarkulattuditta mAyan
gOpAlakriSNan seyyum jAlattai kELaDI (tAyE)

anupallavi

tayalE kELaDi undan paiyannai pOlavE inda
vayyagattil oru piLLai ammamma nAn kaNDadillai (tAyE)

caraNam 1

kAlinil shilambu konjak-kaivaLai kulunga muttu mAlaigaL asaiyat-teru vAsalil vandaan
kAlashaiyum kaiyashaiyum tALAmODisaindu vara nIlavaNNak kaNNanivan narttanamaaDinaan
bAlanenru tAvi aNaittEn aNaitta ennai mAlaiyiTTavan pOl vAyil muttamiTTaaNDi
bAlanallaDi un maghan jAlam migha seyyum kriSNan nAlu pErgal kETka colla nANamigha lAgudaDi
(tAyE)

caraNam 2

anroru nAL inda vazhi vanda virundivarum ayarndu paDutturangum pOdinilE-kaNNan
tinradu pOgak kaiyyil irunda vaNNaiyai anda virundinar vAyil niraittu maraindananE anda
nindai mighu pazhi ingE pAvamangE enrapaDi cintai migha nondiDavum seyya taghumO
nanda gOparkkinda vidam anda mighu piLLai pera nalla tavam seidAraDi enna sheivOmaDi
(tAyE)

caraNam 3

veNNai veNNai tarum enrAn veNNai tandAl tinruviTTu peNNai tArum enru kETTu kaNNaDikkirAn
vaNamAi niruttam Adi maNNinaip padattAl Etrik kaNNIlE iraittu viTTu kaLavADinAn
paNNIshaiyum kuzhalUdinAn kETTU ninra paNBilE arugil vandu vambungaL sheidAn
peNNinattukkenru vanda puNNiyangaL kOTIi kOTi eNNI unakkAghumaDi kaNNImaiyAip pOgudaDi
(tAyE)

caraNam 4

mundAnAL andi nErattil sondamuDan kittE vandu vindalgaL palavum sheidu viLaiyADinAn
pandaLavAgilum veNNai tandAl viDuvEnenru mundukilai toTTizhuttup pOrADinAn
anda vAsudEvan ivan tAn aDi yashOdE maindanenat toTTizhuttu maDimEl vaittEn vaittAl
sundara mukhattai kaNDu cintai mayangunEram antara vaikuNTHamODu ellAm kATTinAn
(tAyE)

caraNam 4

ThottililE piLLai kiLLi vittathum avai alaRa
Vitta kaariyam agala veNNai thinRaan!
Kattina kanRai avizhththu ettiyum oLiththu vittu
Mattilaath thumbai kazhuththil maattik koNdaan!
Vittu vittu ammE enRaan kanRinaip pOlE
Attiyillaadha maadum ammaa enRathE!
Kittina kuvaLaiyOdum ettinaal un selva magan!
Pattiyil kaRavaiyidam paalai ootturaan adee! (thaayE)

caraNam 5

ChuRRi chuRRi ennai vanthu aththai veettu vazhi kEttaan
Siththaththukku ettum varaiyil solli ninREn
Aththudan vittaanO paarum aaththankarai vazhi kEttaan
Aththanaiyum sollivittu ninREn
Viththagamaai onRu kEttaan - naaNamaaguthE!
Muththaththukku vazhi kEttu saththam ittaaNdee
Aththanai idam koduththu meththavum vaLarththu vittaai!
Iththanai avanaich chollak kuththam illaiyeyadee! (thaayE)

caraNam 6

VeNNai veNNai thaarum enRaan! VeNNai thanthaal thinRu vittu
PeNNaith thaarum enRu kaNNadikkiraan!
VaNNamai niruththamaadi maNNinaip paathaththaal eRRik
KaNNilE iraiththu vittuk kaLavaadinaan!
PaNN isaiyum kuzhal oothinaan- kEttu ninRa
PaNbilE arugil vanthu vambugaL seithaan!
PeNNinaththukku enRu vantha puNNIyangaL kOdi kOdi
ENNi unakku aagumadi- kaNNIyaamaaip pOguthadee! (thaayE)

caraNam 7

MunthaanaL anthi nEraththil sontham udan kittE vanthu
VinthaigaL anEgam seithu viLaiyaadinaan- oru
PanthaLavaagilum veNNai thanthaal viduvEn enRu
Munthugilaith thottizhuththup pOraadinaan
Antha vaasudhEvan ivan thaan adi yasOdhE!
Mainthan enRu thottu izhuththu madi mEl vaiththEn vaiththaal
Sundara mugaththaik kaNdu sinthai mayangum nEram
Anthara vaigunthamOdu ellaam kaattinaan adee ! (thaayE)

pip-virtualenv(wrapper)

SVAKSHA — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:22:00 +0530

Sometime last week my virtualenvwrapper installation broke the bashrc file. On irc, Theju pointed out why -- support for other shells besides bash was added in the dhellmann repo.

Here are some more useful links:

Ian's repo: http://bitbucket.org/ianb/virtualenv/

http://blog.ianbicking.org/2007/10/10/workingenv-is-dead-long-live-virtualenv/

http://www.doughellmann.com/articles/pythonmagazine/completely-different/2008-05-virtualenvwrapper/index.html

http://clemesha.org/blog/2009/jul/05/modern-python-hacker-tools-virtualenv-fabric-pip/

http://www.arthurkoziel.com/2008/10/22/working-virtualenv/

http://iamzed.com/2009/05/07/a-primer-on-virtualenv/

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pip

http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide

If you want to use different python installations without breaking your system, read up and try any of these tools. What environment to use is always a personal choice --some use "virtualenvwrapper" but some use " virtualenv + pip". Experiment --if it helps, i broke my system twice within this week!!

After virtualenvwrapper, I decided to try pip+virtualenv and fired up a terminal :

$ sudo aptitude install python-setuptools
$ sudo easy_install virtualenv

Searching for virtualenv
Reading http://pypi.python.org/simple/virtualenv/
Reading http://virtualenv.openplans.org
Best match: virtualenv 1.4.6
Downloading http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-1.4.6.tar.gz#md5=f576969d591a054132fe8c9165c2b3c3
Processing virtualenv-1.4.6.tar.gz
Running virtualenv-1.4.6/setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir /tmp/easy_install-cpu9vj/virtualenv-1.4.6/egg-dist-tmp-nPmcHn
warning: no previously-included files matching '*.*' found under directory 'docs/_templates'
Adding virtualenv 1.4.6 to easy-install.pth file
Installing virtualenv script to /usr/local/bin
Installed /usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/virtualenv-1.4.6-py2.6.egg
Processing dependencies for virtualenv
Finished processing dependencies for virtualenv

Its that easy!!

flightnetwork.com

SVAKSHA — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 10:53:00 +0530

Last week, I had to urgently fly back to North America on a personal emergency and given the urgency of the situation, at around 08:10 hrs IST on Mar17, I logged onto flightnetwork.com to book two tickets, one departing from Chennai in the wee early hours of Mar18 and planned to do the BLR-MAA route by car.

IME, the e-tickets are usually emailed within an hour but when both credit cards were debited multiple times, with no sign of the e-ticket until noon, I tweeted and dented and also filled out a customer service form with dimming hope on the Flightnetwork website.

The easier option was to call the airline before leaving Bangalore, so I called up JetAirways to confirm that I _was_ booked and confirmed to fly out within 12 hours. I didnt want to reach Chennai and learn that I didnt have a confirmed ticket. But, as I suspected, Jet said that flightnetwork.com had not sent them the booking details --This despite my credit card being debited in Dollars by flightnetwork.com, within one hour after booking via their search engine/travel portal for both tickets actually.

The Jet Airways staff understood the emergency and were kind enough to issue me a PNR despite the flightnetwork.com not sending them the booking details on time. I explained that I could not call the portal office as it was outside of their office hours and left BLR for MAA hoping that it was just a software glitch and the email would arrive en-route.

Nothing of that sort happened.

We reached Chennai at 7:30pm, my flight a mere four hours away from departure and the portal had still not sent me the e-ticket. Jetair kept insisting that even though they had issued me a PNR, the portal had to send them the details. In desperation, I called the Flightnetwork.com help desk from Chennai only to be connected to Ms.AM after 3-4 multiple attempts. I gave her the reservation code and when asked why my bookings were not confirmed after 12 hours had passed, she yells back "do you want to argue or let me book it now?". Err...what was she and flightnetwork.com doing for 12+ hours then?

Ms.AM was rude, belligerent and argumentative, despite the emergency situation being explained to her, after much prodding gave me the wrong e-ticket booking number, blamed the delay on "quality checks", etc ... and disconnected the line when I asked to speak to the manager.

Pft$@^$... puhleze, a quality check when my flight was leaving in around 4 hours and I didnt have a ticket? Kidding me? Strangely, the flightnetwork.com software system was prompt enough to issue instructions to debited both credit cards as soon as the tickets were booked (more than 12 hours earlier) but failed to issue tickets--especially since their TOS clearly states 'no refunds' for missed flights. What a scam!

To cut a long story short, I managed to travel that day because the Jet Airways staff were polite, understood what customer service was about in an emergency, were prompt enough to issue my tickets (against just a PNR) after taking the portal name and booking reservation numbers.

Flightnetwork.com's CTO had seen my tweets, emailed me and apologised, I had replied, and that was that. I thought it sums up my stressful 12-hour experience with flightnetwork.com and I travelled on. Wrong....there was more ...read on.

However, later that day, an employee from the sales team sends me this email:

Thank you for sending us your email. In regards to your concern that you had not received your electronic tickets, kindly note our office hours are between 9:00am EST to 10:00pm EST, so we were unable to send you your electronic ticket until we were open. When emails are sent to sales there is also a message generated to advise we will answer within 24 to 48 business hours as they do take time to distribute.

Please note we have sent your ticket this morning however I have just resent it to you in case you did not receive it. The ticket was issued last night, which means if you were to cancel there would be a cancellation fee of $200.00 CAD and then you would receive a refund to your credit card.

If you would still like to cancel please call us at 1-800-671-5032 as our agents would be happy to assist you. We are open until 9:30pm EST tonight.

24 to 48 business hours? WTF? seriously, what if I am in an emergency and my flight leaves within 12 hours of booking? What is the traveller supposed to do? ... wait for your operational 24 to 48 business hours to travel?

Its the "I dont care a damn about you" attitude reflecting in his email and scant regard for the paying traveller that prompted me to blog about my lousy experience doing business with flightnetwork.com.

I'd rather stick to cheaptickets.com or my local travel agent --the latter, besides getting me the same route for 100 dollars less, would never use weasel words like 'quality checks', non-office hours and TOS. He just delivers sans the marketing jargon and crappy excuses. Period.

PyCon2010@Atlanta-II

SVAKSHA — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:17:00 -0500

It r0cked....an amazing experience that got over even before it started (or so it seems) when time flew past so quickly that each day at Atlanta now seems like a blurry dream. Each day (moment?), there was an overflow of so many interesting things to learn and absorb, before and after b'fast we had there were lightning talks and at the end of the day too just before the keynote speech you have 5 minutes on stage with your slides -- less likely that you get to lull the audience into slumber in five minutes ;).

Besides, there were open spaces, sprints (Sunday evening onwards), and poster sessions -- which was very interesting as it allows the participants to talk to the presenter and exchange ideas, ask questions, clarify or even suggest a new line of thought. Carl had put up a poster session on Indic languages and there he was drawing huge crowds in an already overcrowded hall. I met a professor and another news broadcaster who were interested and shared their woes with devanagari script and the poor unicode handling by free software in general.

There was tons of swag flowing around and the mandatory single negative incident at the conference which Van handled very professionally. Onstage, he apologised on behalf of the PSF to everyone present in the hall. I had attended the keynotes and talks on Saturday and Sunday, attended the Chairmans party and met a lot of folks but personally speaking, the closing keynote presentation on 20100221 by Antonio Rodriguez kicked ass. He spoke about giving commit access to everyone and he meant EVERYONE -- even folks from the marketing and sales team in his startup got commit access. Wow, just WOW...HUGE amount of trust that

Ofcourse I did the usual tourist-y stuff: walked around the Olympic park ; visited the Coke museum and tasted 64 flavors of coke ; Thomas, Yarko (who won the community service award. Yay, congrats :)) and me (i even cracked my knee for good measure) dined at Vegan soulfood, a chain of US restaurants run by African Hebrews -- HIGHLY recommended!!

BUT the most memorable and fun time was spent in the Georgia Aquarium-- its the world's largest aquarium. The Beluga whales had just arrived and were acclimatising. However, I got to touch sting-ray's and sharks (yeah i really did), clicked tons of pics but the sea-otters...gosh, they stole my heart We didnt know that they put on a show and honestly I could have stood there all my life and fallen in love all over again at their antics. Here is a video of those cute animals high-fiving. I miss them

I am thrilled that I got to meet a lot of people I knew online and met even more interestingly intelligent people too. The wonderful community that surrounds and makes Pycon such a memorable experience deserves full marks. Words are inadequate to describe an experience that is best experienced live :) It simply r0cked.

Gesellschaft

SVAKSHA — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:40:00 +0530

At the recently concluded PyCon-2010, there were some discussions about diversity, women, etc... I suppose, much of my energy would have been saved if I had published this mail earlier or even blogged about individual sexist behaviors i've experienced within the Indian floss community. Na, its not fear, rather why would I want to think about evil creepy stuff on a personal space like my blog!? However, during various discussions, I realized that many folks dont know what you experience on an individual level on $random-foolist (or off-line harassment) within the floss community, unless you talk about it...Talking is the first step....

Hi $PersonsName,

As I write this mail the words "Out the creeps publicly" uttered by a devel (who shall go nameless) comes to my mind and hence i'd prefer to not be anon and back my words under the pseudonym 'svaksha'. Do feel free to trim my long train of thoughts and I wont be offended if it does'nt make it to your article as /self is too late in all probability -- my mental resources are wound up around a lexical parser atm.

Initially when i used to hear all the women speak about their experiences i took comfort in the fact that i am not alone in hoping for change. But i had not factored in the possibility that change is tougher when "clueless new idiots" follow in the steps of "sexist old timers". Over the years the attitudes towards diversity still remains sexist, especially within the Indian community where cronyism is normal.

My observations are largely India-centric salted with some experiences on international lists and sans a timeline ...

The usual personal mails asking for personal details under the guise of "i want to volunteer" or guised as a personal interview (since when did marital status become relevant to floss contribution?). Another peculiar one was a guy writing emails in different scripts despite my requests that i didnt understand them. It was when i requested a friend to translate them that i realised why -- personal questions in a non-english script meant fewer people would know he was asking personal questions.

Then there was this instance of a jerk trying to crack into my server when he became aware of my gender. I was happy with the anonymity --- Very very few folks (i trusted) knew my location and real name but that changed when I founded the Ubuntu-Women project, was termed a "militant feminist" (a pejorative term for Feminazi?).

This pejorative was echoed in the Indichix (LC-India) mailing lists in 2008 to avoid answering the question of 'controlling a woman's group by proxy' - hmm...cronyism and elitism is gender-neutral These personal attacks descended into personal life queries (hint:: the coffee, splenda thread) by one Indian male who subscribed to a grrls-only mailing list by pretending to be a woman. So much for the "cultured_Indian"!

Other experiences include, an smtp header spoof of my mail id to send a sex-related email to Ubuntu lists ; an indian gentoo devel in his interview wanted to be stuck in a lift with me even while he admits to never having met me. Another was the death threats from "mikeeeeusa" on DW which went off-list ~~ IIRC around 5 women were the initial targets but Clytie (an AU contributor) had threats sent to her teenage daughter too.

http://eaves.ca/2009/07/06/structurelessness-feminism-and-open/ has a point I could relate to viz.elites and cronyism -- both of which are true as far as the local Indian floss community is concerned. I've heard past incidents of getting cronies to use social engineering (a bully's crony will pretend to be your friend and find out where you work, etc..) and use pressure tactics (complaining to your superiors/boss@work --the easiest way to bully an individual who fears losing his/her livelihood) to silence disagreeing voices -- This may probably not be sexist as it happened to an indian male (who shall remain anonymous) floss volunteer, but i'm writing this to highlight a deeper and more serious problem within the fragmented Indian floss community.

Pretending to support women racks up the good_publicity_karma (hence commercially lucrative via corporate sponsorship for privately controlled commercial conferences pretending to be a community event) while one can continue to be being elitist and deny decision making power via "cronyism" (the elites will use red herrings and out-shout newbies or anyone who disagrees with them with cries of "show me the code") on the side -- a very subtle game that is hard to decipher on a superficial level.

However, when subtle aggressiveness is reserved for the local community members only very few folks outside that circle are aware of it. This small subset of highly aggressive Indian men will never exhibit this negative attitude on the international project lists and irc channels where they _do_ participate, because it will permanently damage their reputation. This is never good for business or landing a job in future. Also, international lists and irc channels have lesser bystanders[0] taking care of SEP[1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem]

If readers are thinking its a malaise with the whole Indian community or a cultural baggage, its not. There is a lot of positive stuff happening thanks to many individuals who are polite and respectful and dont feel threatened by (wo)men. There are many men and women who continue their good work on an individual basis but unfortunately they are relegated to the back-burner by pompous self-promoting jerks. I'm personally hoping to see a truly open community initiative like LCA or debconf (and others like it) happen in India.

Regarding including links and threads, i am undecided. The marketing gimmick "bad publicity is still free publicity" is another reason why I prefer to avoid blogging too much about negative behavior as it can acquire a cult-like halo and an easy way to fame for other men or newbies, especially when they see peers getting away with it. While technical misdemeanors (like a ddos attack,...) are punished quickly i've not yet heard an a$$hat being ostracized or boycotted from the community and this despite there being discussion and more discussion and protests about the said negative behavior.

Besides, the online world is so small that there is the danger of forming a mental picture of an individual and getting over-familiar via blogs, twitter, irc, lists, etc... Its possible that judging folks during real life meetings based on these preconceived assumptions is another cause of social behaviour problems.

I dont have any magic answers and have always believed that community action is the best way to solve the problem. Yet, getting women to speak-up openly against the negative attitude is a lot harder, especially when they feel they will not get any support as the lone voice, statistically speaking. Few folks will want to waste their time tackling a regular barrage of red-herrings and logical fallacies. Example: Using the term "we" is purposely misinterpreted as taking over control and using "I" is interpreted as "the problem is singular in nature" and since _one_ person is statistically too small to figure in change, the status quo continues --This tactic works very well in situations when no change is desired.

Y'all probably are aware of all this so i'll stop as i've got to leave now.

ciao,
-vid

As you've probably guessed, the above was my mail sent to a private un-archived women-only list. I'm also reproducing (with permission) an exchange with another floss contributor who wrote after he read the above e-mail:

Devel: And you cant have a community of human beings and donkeys right? That's why I refuse to believe most of the Indian FLOSS communities are communities at all. I dont care and I dont bother.

Me: That is the scary bit...everybody stops caring. When I stop caring its just downhill then. Somewhere we have to make an effort to build the community, sustain it and grow.

Devel: You have to make sure the community is worth it. [emphasis mine]

Wow, that last line really hit me hard and brought me to my senses. His thoughts were echoed by another person, "dont beat your head against a wall, it will bleed".
Both said words that I cannot forget.

Do some people behave differently in public and in private? Yes, my (Indian) floss experience proves this is true. Pretense is an individual's negative attitude and India is not exactly famous for the way it treats its women-folk. That these negative social attitudes magnify themselves on the internet is not at all surprising because evils minds will learn to use tools like tor and fake email id's/online profiles to stalk women online. They dont have the courage to do it in the open with their real identity and face the ensuing repercussions.

Why expect women to say *Stop harassing, stop stalking* ? Given the low female participation, women are an even smaller percentage in the existing scheme of things and the lack of space to speak up within projects is another crucial point that gets overlooked. Instead of telling women how to adjust to sexist bullying, men within a project must learn to speak up if they wish to see change. Most times that action is taken against those who manage to offend those in power, else in floss communities sometimes one can get away with any negative behaviour with zero repercussions.

In my years within most Libre software projects, the common thought that surfaces is the expectation that "change is slow" because positive results with respect to reducing sexist behaviour takes time. I disagree. Is it that women have to be offended with negative attitudes or sexism for action to be taken? Why cant a lone individual (irrespective of gender, nationality or any other criteria) say "stop being a jerk" and get tons of community support. If there is a lack of community support, its due to apathy and a lack of firmness and strong action with low tolerance to negative behaviour by every person involved in the floss community. This is not as easy as typing this blog entry was, since it needs impartial and strong leadership qualities.

If we dont want a gesellschaft instead of a community where people care for others, then attitudinal change on an individual level is the need of the hour. FOSS Communities are mostly made up of individual people who use the same technology they create and although women (add foo-group of choice) are a subset, they should not be the diversity tokenism card for spin doctors trying to prevent a PR disaster!

PyCon-2010-Atlanta

SVAKSHA — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:36:00 -0500

Note to all readers: Its been weeks since I blogged and having started this entry roughly two weeks ago (20100219 21:43, precisely) but thanks to Broadcomm's proprietary bcm43x drivers meant wifi issues and I wasted a lot of time jumping hoops, and later downgraded the kernel version, time that could have been used to listen to more talks or even blog and tweet about how much fun pycon was! Broadcomm, dont be evil. I am less inclined to modify the older writing so here are some "as is" thought bits about my first pycon experience!!

I reached Atlanta after 4pm on thursday afternoon and Sylvia and me went straight to the Chicago room to volunteer for bag-stuffing and there I was rushing a guy ahead in line, little realising that it was CarlT who recognized me but I was so fixated on the task at hand that I didnt notice whom i was talking to. Yikes, assigning nicks to faces is not my strength! My nick generated some curiosity and left many people wondering how to read it --i had entered it in devanagari script but the glyphs didnt render it as it should " स्वक्ष " which triggered a mini discussion of sorts on python and unicode handling.

Next, it was onto the swag T-Shirts and since Greg had just 2 PP templates we had only two teams taking a go at it. Sylvia, me and Wei (and later various volunteers) had a simple humanized-robo process to maximize folded shirts output per minute. This drew tons of pycon gawkers and many onlookers wanted to pitch in and have a go at folding t-shirts. Greg's wife and daughter came to watch too. Our efforts were rewarded with yummy pizzas (yeah they had vegan pizza too) and drinks. It was a lot of fun for my first day and its really heart-warming to see icons who should be UP there, stand and work with you. The simplicity and lack of pride is endearing.

Python is for Girls

20100219, Friday, (the first day of) the conference, was kicked off by Van Lindberg and Steve Holden introducing the PSF and its objectives and stressing on the PSF's focus on diversity. This was echoed by GvR who started off his keynote for Pycon2010 wearing a t-shirt that had the python logo and "python is for girls", sent to him at Google by an anonymous person. Hmm...I am curious to know who is the $AnonPerson@Google !!

GvR is one speaker that I enjoyed listening to, for the casual twitter-feed keynote and yet informative speaking style sans slides. And no, GvR didnt wax eloquent on the "state of CPython" although that was what was listed on the guide. For someone of his stature, the lack of vanity in his community interactions is endearing and if you are not already a part of this space, you'd be inspired to want to chip in and do something. Another noteworthy aspect, the organizers make no bones about pycon being a commercial event. Unlike "some" private and commercial Indian events, there is no BS about claiming to be a "floss" event with shady financial(s) that are not privy to the community that makes the event, and neither is there a cabal that controls and pulls strings from behind the scenes. Their honest and transparent process is admirable, akin to other community conferences.

A round of snacks later it was over to many luminary speakers from the Python community and the first talk I attended was "The Mighty Dictionary" by Brandon Craig Rhodes and then I attended, Managing the world's oldest Django project by James Bennett who explained why it was such a bad idea to have different branches for each of your clients which will lead to an unwieldy and incompatible codebase over a period of time. Deployment headaches with each server-client network running its own software instance. Their solution was "hosted service". He spoke about unit testing, its importance and how they used spidering tools to test sites for all hosted apps. Saying "No" to customizations and instead creating re-usable customized apps from some requests. IIRC, his parting shot was "FLOSS, Internal code becomes external dependency. Floss jettisons legacy code."

The vegan lunch was fabulous but more about the post-lunch sessions. They were, Python 3: The Next Generation by Mr. Wesley j. chun ; Maximize your program's laziness by Dr. David Q Mertz ; The Ring of Python - Holger Krekel. The latter was a talk I simply loved so go and watch the videos which are online and linked via the pycon website. This is another aspect of pycon that I love --Sharing videos with those that could not attend pycon. They dont assume the worst about people, as in, people will not attend the event if talks are made available online (and hence the organizers wont make money when attendance drops), not including other arrogant (if not) silly excuses that I have heard from certain Indian events.

In 2010, attendance topped previous pycon's. It was announced that this year diversity was at its peak with 113.3 women attendees. No, I am not sure how 0.3% women attended pycon :). Danny blogged and Guido tweeted, and wrote to the list endorsing his support and thoughts on "diversity, people representing other countries and minority groups". I did make it a point to thank him and all the PSF member/organizers that I could remember for the PSF sponsorship, enabling me to attend. GloriaW deserves a special mention and a BIG thankyou for handling hyatt reservations for a bunch of women who were room sharing.

I also met Noufal and Satya (who was our room-share partner), who were also sponsored by the PSF this year. Satya was telling us about her horrid experience with the legendary US B1-visa process in India and the running around she had to endure. Hmmm, why am i not surprised at the horrid experience she had?! It was incredibly funny to hear that the officer asked her to speak in python....doh!! My immigration officer was a hulk at 6'4" and the only intimidating question he asked me was "So, is python like C language?" and before I could speak he cuts in with "Never mind, I'd never understand what you'd say. You are good to go."

LOL, more later.

Ghargey Puri

SVAKSHA — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 12:34:00 +0530

Yesterday I made "Ghargey", a sweet puri made out of the very common red pumpkin or "lal bhopla" -- the same one that is used in sambhar and kootu or curry. Its very simple and easy to make. This is a typical Maharashtrian dish.

Ingredients for Ghargey :

1 cup (cleaned & grated) lal bhopla/red pumpkin
1/2 cup gura/jaggery. [If you dont have jaggery use brown sugar]
1 cup wheat flour (dont use maida)
1 tsp ghee
2 tsp oil
salt (to taste)
1/4 tsp elaichi powder
Oil for deep frying the puri.

Preparation :

0. Warm the ghee in a pan and add the grated bhopla and stir well.
1. After a minute or so, add the jaggery and mix well. Remove all lumps. You can also smash banana (the elchi or the kerala variety) and add it to this.
2. Cook them till the water leaves the sides of the pan. [TIP: do not overcook it into a hard lump.]
3. Turn off the gas and add the cardamom powder and mix well.
4. Cool the pumpkin mixture and transfer to a second vessel. To this, add 2 tsp oil and a pinch of salt. Slowly add the wheat flour and knead the dough. Avoid adding water. Cover and let the dough rest for a few minutes.
5. Divide the dough into small portions and roll them out into round puris with a rolling pin.
6. Deep-fry them in medium hot oil until they puff-up and turn golden brown.
7. Enjoy hot. With shrikhand, its just yum!!

I know that folks expect pictures but the problem is the pooris got over very quickly

Crochet a winter scarf in 48 hours

SVAKSHA — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:10:00 -0500

Winter demands a thick handmade neck-warmer and I needed one in a hurry to avoid freezing. There was no time to go shopping for black wollen yarn (my defacto safe colour match mantra) and out of 4 colours, only two (hideous) colours were available in the same 4-ply in sufficient quantities at home -- copious bundles of electric blue and baby pink wollen yarn, leftovers from an earlier knitting project. Being pressed for time (48 hours from start to finish) I had no choice but to use them for my neck-warmer. When I see unused yarn, it is like a blank sheet of paper and I always want to own yarns of all shades and dimensions. *sigh*.

Stoles and scarves are my favorites (unlike socks) as I could let my imagination go wild and dont have to depend on a written pattern. Earlier I had crocheted two stoles out of cotton thread and this time I would be faster as I knew what mistakes to avoid. Earlier, I had to unravel both stoles measuring 2.5 meters by 12 inches, as I was not happy with the outcome. The funny thing about unravelling a finished craft pattern is that onlookers tend to gasp and murmur over the lost labour of love. I tend to be less emotional and more concerned with the perfect product. I'd be more annoyed if I knew where the mistake in the pattern lay and would probably quibble about it every time I wore it. Ho hum, I digress!

So I had managed to find sufficient quantities of wool but a new problem arose. I had lost the larger aluminium hooks for wollen yarn and without a larger hook for proper tension, (as I planned on combining both blue and pink yarns around) my end product would not look good. Desperate, I grabbed the largest steel hook for threads -- a size zero hook (see this picture) and started out with a basic chain, returned with a double crochet (hdc also looks good) and a treble and slowly crocheted this scarf out of two contrasting colours. Keeping the tension was still a challenge, especially when you are using the wrong hook type, the guage gets all wrong whilst juggling with two 4-ply wollen yarns with no dimensions to compare with.

Yet, I managed and was warmly surprised that the colors didnt look as gaudy as I thought it would. Here is the finished scarf with tassels, which is 2.75 meters long (including the fringe) by 12 inches. Usually fringe/tassels are long strips of cut yarn knotted together, but I was worried that the edges of the 4-ply yarn would unravel after two washes. That looks ugly, so I decided to use crochet a fringe with a knitting stitch for longer durability. The next project is a head warmer ...yeah, a hat!!

january meetup

SVAKSHA — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:07:00 -0500

Bangpypers Bengaluru Meetup

DATE+TIME:: 20100123 (Saturday) at 1530 Hrs.

VENUE:: ThoughtWorks Technologies ; 2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block, Diamond District, Old Airport Road, Bangalore.

AGENDA::

1. BaijuM will give a demo about using collective.buildbot for setting up buildbot (Continuous integration server)

2. Noufal will give a short intro talk about setting up a buildbot at his workplace for CI using py.test, being customised to run the tests.

Raga::Janasammodini

SVAKSHA — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 00:58:00 +0530

Last week I was terribly homesick for music class. Each time I get a chat message I am curious to know what new songs my friends have learnt as I miss the silly banter, the fun and ruckus we caused, including breaking light bulbs...all accidentally ofcourse.

I am not sure how I will catch-up and learn all the songs I missed this past year. So after two back-back reruns of listening to our old recordings, I could not rid the strong feeling and went for an hour long walk singing raga Janasammodhini [Govinda Ninna Namave Chanda] whose lyrics are below.

Sri Purandara Dasa composed this 28 harikaambhoji janya in the Kannada language and set it to Adi Tala with Arohana :: S R2 G3 P D2 N2 S and Avarohana : S N2 D2 P G3 R2 S

Pallavi : govindaa ninna naamave chanda

Anupallavi : anu renu trina kashtha paripoorna govinda || nirmalathmakanaagi iruvude aananda || (Govinda)

Charanam : srishti sthithi laya karana govinda || ee pari mahimeya thiluvude aananda || paramapurusha namma purandara vittala || hingana dasara (ninnaya karana**) sahaluve aananda || (GovinDa)

The composer, Sri Purandara Dasa used the signature "purandara vittala" in his songs which is the second-last line of the charanam (last part of the song).

** In the Charanam, the last line was taught as "ninnaya karana sahaluve aananda" (everything in this world is joyful because of you) but as a non-kannada speaker I am not sure which version is correct as I dont know what "hingana dasara" means and I assume neither does the listener.... and frankly at -16 deg C, it was just moi lonely soul on the road, as compared to the time we sang it on stage infront of an audience.

UPDATE 20100813: Jaga left a comment for the charanam lyrics "mangalamahima purandaravittala hingade bhakutara salahode ananda". Thanks Jaga.

For more musical entries, read http://svaksha.com/category/ART/Music

bengaluru lug january meet

SVAKSHA — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:07:00 -0500

Here is an update on the Bengaluru LUG meetup tomorrow:

From, http://groups.google.com/group/ilug-bengaluru/browse_thread/thread/e276d78bb443394f

ILUG Bengaluru Meetup - Saturday 9th January 2010

Time: 1630 Hrs onwards.

Venue:
ThoughtWorks Technologies
2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block,
Diamond District, Old Airport Road

Agenda:

Neo Freerunner

- state of neo freerunner/ open hardware
- state of the software/firmwares openmoko/android etc.
- personal experiences of various users

Anything goes session

Will be an unstructured/open format meetup.

Regular Activities:

GPG keysigning - http://www.debian.org/events/keysigning

For newcomers

The meet itself will last ~1-2hrs, but usually a smaller group tends to move
to other locations for extended discussions which can potentially last until
way past dinner

Kingsly.

The Neuroscience of screwing up

SVAKSHA — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:36:00 -0500

I usually avoid reproducing articles from publications but this was a well-written piece that I wanted to etch it in my memory.

From, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_accept_defeat/all/1

Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
By Jonah Lehrer | December 21, 2009 | 10:00 am | Wired Jan 2010

It all started with the sound of static. In May 1964, two astronomers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were using a radio telescope in suburban New Jersey to search the far reaches of space. Their aim was to make a detailed survey of radiation in the Milky Way, which would allow them to map those vast tracts of the universe devoid of bright stars. This meant that Penzias and Wilson needed a receiver that was exquisitely sensitive, able to eavesdrop on all the emptiness. And so they had retrofitted an old radio telescope, installing amplifiers and a calibration system to make the signals coming from space just a little bit louder.

But they made the scope too sensitive. Whenever Penzias and Wilson aimed their dish at the sky, they picked up a persistent background noise, a static that interfered with all of their observations. It was an incredibly annoying technical problem, like listening to a radio station that keeps cutting out.

At first, they assumed the noise was man-made, an emanation from nearby New York City. But when they pointed their telescope straight at Manhattan, the static didn’t increase. Another possibility was that the sound was due to fallout from recent nuclear bomb tests in the upper atmosphere. But that didn’t make sense either, since the level of interference remained constant, even as the fallout dissipated. And then there were the pigeons: A pair of birds were roosting in the narrow part of the receiver, leaving a trail of what they later described as “white dielectric material.” The scientists evicted the pigeons and scrubbed away their mess, but the static remained, as loud as ever.

For the next year, Penzias and Wilson tried to ignore the noise, concentrating on observations that didn’t require cosmic silence or perfect precision. They put aluminum tape over the metal joints, kept the receiver as clean as possible, and hoped that a shift in the weather might clear up the interference. They waited for the seasons to change, and then change again, but the noise always remained, making it impossible to find the faint radio echoes they were looking for. Their telescope was a failure.

Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things — how they fail and succeed. In the early 1990s, he began an unprecedented research project: observing four biochemistry labs at Stanford University. Philosophers have long theorized about how science happens, but Dunbar wanted to get beyond theory. He wasn’t satisfied with abstract models of the scientific method — that seven-step process we teach schoolkids before the science fair — or the dogmatic faith scientists place in logic and objectivity. Dunbar knew that scientists often don’t think the way the textbooks say they are supposed to. He suspected that all those philosophers of science — from Aristotle to Karl Popper — had missed something important about what goes on in the lab. (As Richard Feynman famously quipped, “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”) So Dunbar decided to launch an “in vivo” investigation, attempting to learn from the messiness of real experiments.

He ended up spending the next year staring at postdocs and test tubes: The researchers were his flock, and he was the ornithologist. Dunbar brought tape recorders into meeting rooms and loitered in the hallway; he read grant proposals and the rough drafts of papers; he peeked at notebooks, attended lab meetings, and videotaped interview after interview. He spent four years analyzing the data. “I’m not sure I appreciated what I was getting myself into,” Dunbar says. “I asked for complete access, and I got it. But there was just so much to keep track of.”

Dunbar came away from his in vivo studies with an unsettling insight: Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.

Dunbar was fascinated by these statistics. The scientific process, after all, is supposed to be an orderly pursuit of the truth, full of elegant hypotheses and control variables. (Twentieth-century science philosopher Thomas Kuhn, for instance, defined normal science as the kind of research in which “everything but the most esoteric detail of the result is known in advance.”) However, when experiments were observed up close — and Dunbar interviewed the scientists about even the most trifling details — this idealized version of the lab fell apart, replaced by an endless supply of disappointing surprises. There were models that didn’t work and data that couldn’t be replicated and simple studies riddled with anomalies. “These weren’t sloppy people,” Dunbar says. “They were working in some of the finest labs in the world. But experiments rarely tell us what we think they’re going to tell us. That’s the dirty secret of science.”

How did the researchers cope with all this unexpected data? How did they deal with so much failure? Dunbar realized that the vast majority of people in the lab followed the same basic strategy. First, they would blame the method. The surprising finding was classified as a mere mistake; perhaps a machine malfunctioned or an enzyme had gone stale. “The scientists were trying to explain away what they didn’t understand,” Dunbar says. “It’s as if they didn’t want to believe it.”

The experiment would then be carefully repeated. Sometimes, the weird blip would disappear, in which case the problem was solved. But the weirdness usually remained, an anomaly that wouldn’t go away. This is when things get interesting. According to Dunbar, even after scientists had generated their “error” multiple times — it was a consistent inconsistency — they might fail to follow it up. “Given the amount of unexpected data in science, it’s just not feasible to pursue everything,” Dunbar says. “People have to pick and choose what’s interesting and what’s not, but they often choose badly.” And so the result was tossed aside, filed in a quickly forgotten notebook. The scientists had discovered a new fact, but they called it a failure.

The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored. As he tried to further understand how people deal with dissonant data, Dunbar conducted some experiments of his own. In one 2003 study, he had undergraduates at Dartmouth College watch a couple of short videos of two different-size balls falling. The first clip showed the two balls falling at the same rate. The second clip showed the larger ball falling at a faster rate. The footage was a reconstruction of the famous (and probably apocryphal) experiment performed by Galileo, in which he dropped cannonballs of different sizes from the Tower of Pisa. Galileo’s metal balls all landed at the exact same time — a refutation of Aristotle, who claimed that heavier objects fell faster.

While the students were watching the footage, Dunbar asked them to select the more accurate representation of gravity. Not surprisingly, undergraduates without a physics background disagreed with Galileo. (Intuitively, we’re all Aristotelians.) They found the two balls falling at the same rate to be deeply unrealistic, despite the fact that it’s how objects actually behave. Furthermore, when Dunbar monitored the subjects in an fMRI machine, he found that showing non-physics majors the correct video triggered a particular pattern of brain activation: There was a squirt of blood to the anterior cingulate cortex, a collar of tissue located in the center of the brain. The ACC is typically associated with the perception of errors and contradictions — neuroscientists often refer to it as part of the “Oh shit!” circuit — so it makes sense that it would be turned on when we watch a video of something that seems wrong.

So far, so obvious: Most undergrads are scientifically illiterate. But Dunbar also conducted the experiment with physics majors. As expected, their education enabled them to see the error, and for them it was the inaccurate video that triggered the ACC. But there’s another region of the brain that can be activated as we go about editing reality. It’s called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC. It’s located just behind the forehead and is one of the last brain areas to develop in young adults. It plays a crucial role in suppressing so-called unwanted representations, getting rid of those thoughts that don’t square with our preconceptions. For scientists, it’s a problem.

When physics students saw the Aristotelian video with the aberrant balls, their DLPFCs kicked into gear and they quickly deleted the image from their consciousness. In most contexts, this act of editing is an essential cognitive skill. (When the DLPFC is damaged, people often struggle to pay attention, since they can’t filter out irrelevant stimuli.) However, when it comes to noticing anomalies, an efficient prefrontal cortex can actually be a serious liability. The DLPFC is constantly censoring the world, erasing facts from our experience. If the ACC is the “Oh shit!” circuit, the DLPFC is the Delete key. When the ACC and DLPFC “turn on together, people aren’t just noticing that something doesn’t look right,” Dunbar says. “They’re also inhibiting that information.”

The lesson is that not all data is created equal in our mind’s eye: When it comes to interpreting our experiments, we see what we want to
see and disregard the rest. The physics students, for instance, didn’t watch the video and wonder whether Galileo might be wrong. Instead, they put their trust in theory, tuning out whatever it couldn’t explain. Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.

How to Learn From Failure

Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them.—J.L.

1. Check Your Assumptions : Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

2. Seek Out the Ignorant: Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

3. Encourage Diversity: If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

4. Beware of Failure-Blindness: It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

But this research raises an obvious question: If humans — scientists included — are apt to cling to their beliefs, why is science so successful? How do our theories ever change? How do we learn to reinterpret a failure so we can see the answer?

This was the challenge facing Penzias and Wilson as they tinkered with their radio telescope. Their background noise was still inexplicable, but it was getting harder to ignore, if only because it was always there. After a year of trying to erase the static, after assuming it was just a mechanical malfunction, an irrelevant artifact, or pigeon guano, Penzias and Wilson began exploring the possibility that it was real. Perhaps it was everywhere for a reason.

In 1918, sociologist Thorstein Veblen was commissioned by a popular magazine devoted to American Jewry to write an essay on how Jewish “intellectual productivity” would be changed if Jews were given a homeland. At the time, Zionism was becoming a potent political movement, and the magazine editor assumed that Veblen would make the obvious argument: A Jewish state would lead to an intellectual boom, as Jews would no longer be held back by institutional anti-Semitism. But Veblen, always the provocateur, turned the premise on its head. He argued instead that the scientific achievements of Jews — at the time, Albert Einstein was about to win the Nobel Prize and Sigmund Freud was a best-selling author — were due largely to their marginal status. In other words, persecution wasn’t holding the Jewish community back — it was pushing it forward.

The reason, according to Veblen, was that Jews were perpetual outsiders, which filled them with a “skeptical animus.” Because they had no vested interest in “the alien lines of gentile inquiry,” they were able to question everything, even the most cherished of assumptions. Just look at Einstein, who did much of his most radical work as a lowly patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland. According to Veblen’s logic, if Einstein had gotten tenure at an elite German university, he would have become just another physics professor with a vested interest in the space-time status quo. He would never have noticed the anomalies that led him to develop the theory of relativity.

Predictably, Veblen’s essay was potentially controversial, and not just because he was a Lutheran from Wisconsin. The magazine editor evidently was not pleased; Veblen could be seen as an apologist for anti-Semitism. But his larger point is crucial: There are advantages to thinking on the margin. When we look at a problem from the outside, we’re more likely to notice what doesn’t work. Instead of suppressing the unexpected, shunting it aside with our “Oh shit!” circuit and Delete key, we can take the mistake seriously. A new theory emerges from the ashes of our surprise.

Modern science is populated by expert insiders, schooled in narrow disciplines. Researchers have all studied the same thick textbooks, which make the world of fact seem settled. This led Kuhn, the philosopher of science, to argue that the only scientists capable of acknowledging the anomalies — and thus shifting paradigms and starting revolutions — are “either very young or very new to the field.” In other words, they are classic outsiders, naive and untenured. They aren’t inhibited from noticing the failures that point toward new possibilities.

But Dunbar, who had spent all those years watching Stanford scientists struggle and fail, realized that the romantic narrative of the brilliant and perceptive newcomer left something out. After all, most scientific change isn’t abrupt and dramatic; revolutions are rare. Instead, the epiphanies of modern science tend to be subtle and obscure and often come from researchers safely ensconced on the inside. “These aren’t Einstein figures, working from the outside,” Dunbar says. “These are the guys with big NIH grants.” How do they overcome failure-blindness?

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit — researchers solve problems by themselves — Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

But not every lab meeting was equally effective. Dunbar tells the story of two labs that both ran into the same experimental problem: The proteins they were trying to measure were sticking to a filter, making it impossible to analyze the data. “One of the labs was full of people from different backgrounds,” Dunbar says. “They had biochemists and molecular biologists and geneticists and students in medical school.” The other lab, in contrast, was made up of E. coli experts. “They knew more about E. coli than anyone else, but that was what they knew,” he says. Dunbar watched how each of these labs dealt with their protein problem. The E. coli group took a brute-force approach, spending several weeks methodically testing various fixes. “It was extremely inefficient,” Dunbar says. “They eventually solved it, but they wasted a lot of valuable time.”

The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first, the conversation seemed rather useless. But then, as the chemists traded ideas with the biologists and the biologists bounced ideas off the med students, potential answers began to emerge. “After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved,” Dunbar says. “They made it look easy.”

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.” What turned out to be so important, of course, was the unexpected result, the experimental error that felt like a failure. The answer had been there all along — it was just obscured by the imperfect theory, rendered invisible by our small-minded brain. It’s not until we talk to a colleague or translate our idea into an analogy that we glimpse the meaning in our mistake. Bob Dylan, in other words, was right: There’s no success quite like failure.

For the radio astronomers, the breakthrough was the result of a casual conversation with an outsider. Penzias had been referred by a colleague to Robert Dicke, a Princeton scientist whose training had been not in astrophysics but nuclear physics. He was best known for his work on radar systems during World War II. Dicke had since become interested in applying his radar technology to astronomy; he was especially drawn to a then-strange theory called the big bang, which postulated that the cosmos had started with a primordial explosion. Such a blast would have been so massive, Dicke argued, that it would have littered the entire universe with cosmic shrapnel, the radioactive residue of genesis. (This proposal was first made in 1948 by physicists George Gamow, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman, although it had been largely forgotten by the astronomical community.) The problem for Dicke was that he couldn’t find this residue using standard telescopes, so he was planning to build his own dish less than an hour’s drive south of the Bell Labs one.

Then, in early 1965, Penzias picked up the phone and called Dicke. He wanted to know if the renowned radar and radio telescope expert could help explain the persistent noise bedeviling them. Perhaps he knew where it was coming from? Dicke’s reaction was instantaneous: “Boys, we’ve been scooped!” he said. Someone else had found what he’d been searching for: the radiation left over from the beginning of the universe. It had been an incredibly frustrating process for Penzias and Wilson. They’d been consumed by the technical problem and had spent way too much time cleaning up pigeon shit — but they had finally found an explanation for the static. Their failure was the answer to a different question.

And all that frustration paid off: In 1978, they received the Nobel Prize for physics.

Contributing editor Jonah Lehrer (jonah.lehrer@gmail.com) wrote about how our friends affect our health in issue 17.10

key signing party with DD Sean Finney

SVAKSHA — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:00:00 -0500

http://groups.google.com/group/ilug-bengaluru/browse_thread/thread/d99f63e1a9f8090f?hl=en

There is a meet today evening for key signing, followed by a dinner. Debian Developer Sean Finney will be there.

People interested for key signing or attending the meet, please feel free to join us.

Venue: Koshy's Restaurant
Time: 18:30 hrs IST
Guide:
http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=4568273450830720944&q=Koshy%27s%2BRestaurant,%2BBangalore

http://tinyurl.com/yz8ej7n

PS: Please carry a copy of your ID (preferably Passport or Driving License) for the Key Signing.

Regards,
Ritesh

Teach kids Linux and Science via games

SVAKSHA — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 02:28:00 +0530

Some weeks ago, I had asked a women-only list how to engage a bunch of 5-12 y.o kids with science and math via linux in a fun, engaging way. Telling kids to learn foo-programming language is not my idea of a fun learning experience. My dislike for multimedia learning tools in pirated CD's with propreitary software extends to gizmos like playstations and Wii (no offense).

I'd love to see floss tools that teach algebra and geometry in a fun way without the scary "math" word, but existing floss tools are highly limited in quantity and mostly target the pre-teen and teen's for Science learning. Think alice.org, which is at the other end of the spectrum expecting some user/learner contribution, a wee bit much for a 5-7 y.o to grasp.

When I saw a similar post by Adam, who is looking for kids games, the thought of sharing the interesting responses these women gave came up but I cant post their experiences sans permission, so I'll just post the links and names of the games they responded with.

#0. Squeak or Scratch.

#1. MIT also has the physics simulations gallery on their Scratch site.

#2. A TED talk by Alan Kay about teaching kids

#3. TUX racer game.

#4. Yahtzee game.

#5. Mahjongg. [I think this is a good pattern matching and visual game]

#6. A hello world programming book for teens and maybe even pre-teens.

#7. World of Goo : http://2dboy.com/games.php [physics based puzzle construction game for kids]

#8. Blender.

#9. Pingus, available in the Ubuntu repository.

#10. Picocricket (basic microcontroller programming, sensors, actuators): http://www.picocricket.com/picoboard.html

Some links from Adams blog need internet access while others dont.

#10. http://www.neave.com/games/

#11. http://gcompris.net/ [apt-get the recent GCompris version from Thomas Petazzoni's Unofficial debian repo]

#12. http://www.neopets.com

Returning to games that you can install on your linux machine, there is a whole range of games available in the debian/ubuntu repos and your default Ubuntu installation categorizes the logic games under Applications>Games>Logic, and the ones which I like are Klotski, Five or more, Same Gnome and Sudoku. Some kids (under 10 yrs) love Mahjongg, but then some games are suitable for anyone interested enough to try it.
Having said that, I still feel that a machine cannot (and should not) replace the human touch. The natural curiosity of a kid's mind is something a machine can never replicate, currently atleast. That is where atleast one parent or relative or friend or teacher who makes science interesting will help a kid assimilate and relate to science a lot more than schools dumping linux or science on them in grade 5, or whenever it is that schools introduce computers to kids. For example, Just spin a yarn around the Chinese postman problem, and the kids wont even realise they solved a wee bit of graph theory. This may perhaps be my cognitive bias speaking so i'll just echo Stephen's thoughts : http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2009/09/operating-system-for-mind.html (a must read).

neo freerunner meetup in bangalore

SVAKSHA — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 21:41:00 +0530

There is a Neo Freerunner meetup scheduled on Saturday, 2010Jan09 in Bangalore. Since the timing for the meet was not mentioned, mail Manish Chakravarty [manishchaks at gmail d0t c0m], if you are interested in attending this meet at TW.

TW's address :
ThoughtWorks Technologies India Pvt Ltd ;
2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block ;
Diamond District ;
150 Old Airport Road ;
Bangalore - 560008

Red Wine and White Xmas

SVAKSHA — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 20:02:00 +0530

Rain kinda killed my hope for a white christmas but after catching up on 2012, good food and dancing with friends over this holiday season, I ain't complaining. The flurries flew in last night and today, so after the lake trip, which turned me into a five year old fishing for smooth pebbles in icy waters, our weekend turned red - literally, with merlot, cabernet, and dolcetto flowing around.

I found the dolcetto quite acidic [a detailed listing for acid/alkaline forming foods] as compared to the cabernet, although technically its the other way around. But am told that this also depends on many other factors like the soil, the fermentation process, region it was produced, etc. That I agree with, as it rewinds me to the experience of drinking wines produced within India, to put it politely - now imagine me scrunching my face in disgust at the horrid taste. Besides, the humid Mumbai weather makes it a pain to store wines properly and I only have so much space in my Fridge. Mom, in all probability, must've thrown the last bottle of red wine which I'd preserved for some years, as an experiment.

The whites (Chardonnay and its ilk) dont work their magic for me. I prefer the dry and semi-sweet (scale of 0 to 7 and mood permitting may even push a 10) and the most tempting surprise was Eiswein, but it tipping the scale at 24 was a definite no go.

Maybe I'll be more adventurous the next time! 2009 had forgettable recovering surgical moments and I so look forward to 2010.

Happy holidays / Merry X'mas (belated) / Happy 2010 !!

LAN on Ubuntu

SVAKSHA — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:14:00 +0530

Thanks to Broadcom not supporting libre software, wifi with bcm43xx drivers used to be an issue ...see http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ and http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43. Earlier, ubuntu 8.10 brought out networking issues on my laptop which worked flawlessly in one city (Bangalore) but suddenly even a wired connection failed. Kinda odd to have no Lan but no jumping loops for wi-fi drivers because in recent versions of Ubuntu (8.10 onwards) the device driver hardware was detected automagically. After loading Ubuntu (a clean install once in 2 years is better than an upgrade), the user has the option to activate a non-free drivers for Broadcom wi-fi cards so device drivers dont have to be manually loaded now. I cant recall if its from the ugly set of plug-ins and hence less supported. Anyway, the The ethernet cable would detect a direct connection in Vista but not in my Debian and Ubuntu installations. Time to wade through a list of "lan not working in Ubuntu" bugs for every other laptop model and there was another kernel bug filed but that was an issue I faced in ver 8.10 and before. A few minutes of experimenting and wading through help forums didnt help the LAN detection problem. Then I checked /etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf

[main] plugins=ifupdown,keyfile [ifupdown] managed=false

and changed the above value to "true" and then "sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart" solved the lan problem.

fossjobs.in

SVAKSHA — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:02:00 +0530

Narendra started and maintains fossjobs.in, an new India-centric job-board for all those Libre software jobs. Its a welcome change to see the clean interface sans any Advertisements with a readable font size, an important part of usability which many sites seem to ignore.

Another "nice"feature is the non-requirement to create-yet-another-account-to-post...yay!! Click on "post a new job" and voila! The job-type has just 5 listings (Full-time, Part-time, Freelance, Volunteer, Work from home,) but it would be nice to have "contract/job-work"or even "temporary work" for those short-term assignments that folks may be interested in working on. There is RSS and a twitter stream for all jobs posted. C00L work this

Manga-Inji

SVAKSHA — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:18:00 +0530

Pickles are an integral part of Indian cuisine but when one is sick the spicy ones like mango, etc.. are taboo, even if your palate demands it. Well food is incomplete without without a peck at some form of pickle, of which there is a whole variety even for folks who are sick.

Nartankai is one such yummy pickle that is made out of the humble lime-fruit but then I had a whole batch of mangai-inji/mango ginger that suddenly grew from the mud that i had purchased from the nursery. I had no clue what to do with the white coloured inji-manga which smells like mangoes when cut and a chutney would be nice but with a short shelf life, so I chose to pickle it instead...

Ingredients:

5 inches of mangai-inji (cleaned, peeled and cut into small pieces)
2 inches of haldi root (cleaned, peeled and cut into small pieces)
5 limes (washed and cut into cubes)
10 thin green chillies (finely chopped)
Salt to taste.

Preparation: Mix all the ingredients in a large bowl and marinate for a few hours and your pickle is ready to eat. Its a very good digestive agent.

bangpypers lug meetup

SVAKSHA — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:30:00 +0530

Date and Time : At 16:00 hrs on 2009Nov22 (Sunday).

Venue : ThoughtWorks Technologies ; 2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block ; Diamond District, Old Airport Road ; Bengaluru

Proposed agenda: R.Mahadevan's talk on python bindings for llvm.

Raga::Revati

SVAKSHA — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:53:00 +0530

Revati can be:: the name of a person ; the wife of Balarama (elder brother of Krishna) ; or a Pisces nakshatra/lunar star ; but for me its Revati ragam in Karnatic music, which is the second ratnangi janya (argh, that is YAB entry sitting as a "draft" since months).

Tala: Adi | Composer: Dayananda Saraswati | Language: Sanskrit.

Arohanam : S R1 M1 P N2 S || Avarohan : S N2 P M1 R1 S

where, R1==shuddha rishabham, M1==shuddha madhyamam, and N2==kaishiki nishadham.

Pallavi: bho shambho shiva shambho svayambho
Anupallavi: gangadhara shankara karunakara mamava bhavasagara taraka
Charanam1: nirguna parabrahma svarupa gamagama bhuta prapanca rahita | nija guhanihita nitanta ananta ananda atishaya akshayalinga ||
Charanam2: dhimita dhimita dhimi dhimikita kitatom tom | tom tarikita tarikitakita tom | matanga munivara vandita isha | sarva digambara veshtitha vesha | Isha sabhesha sarvesha||

So what is it about some ragas that have an attractive quality to them? Apparently listening (and performing?) this raga always evokes deep emotions and feelings. Hmm.... I've heard the same of raga Bhairavi but BHO SHAMBHO in Revati has a very important place for me. I had learnt this raga all by myself more than a decade ago...gee, i wonder how annoyed folks around me would been as i insisted on ghissa'oing the tape 24/7. Nothing else, just one raga months on end and a few months later when I heard CB render it with a plastic bucket as his modified tabla....absolutely mesmerising!! I had to ask him for a jam session and he helped me iron out my rough edges -- He had demoed some swara bhedams and I had no clue that I was making those errors in my niravals. See, now that is the difference between DIY effort and a propah guru to guide ya. Some years later, when I formally learnt it again from a guru, I was able to appreciate the raga more deeply.

Lastly a word on the composer, Dayananda Saraswati. He is the founder of Arya Samaj whose writings, rather commentary on the Vedic/Upanishad texts is very interesting. It has a lot of similarities to Gaudapada's karika on the Mandukya upanishad which inspired the sunyata nyaya. Yet another check in my pending ToReadList.

Mining for money and power

SVAKSHA — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:44:00 +0530

This entry is an ode to our shining political servants (pun intended).

#0#. After 17 days of hardcore bargaining, Mumbai finally hosted the swearing-in of a government for Maharashtra state.

#0#.Down South, Karnataka's politicians are busy playing with the tax-payers money, while the US thinks its getting Bangalored with competition.

President Barack Obama has exhorted schools in the US to develop globally competitive standards to help students take on `folks in Beijing and Bangalore'..........engage in intrigues, mud-slinging, backstabbing and witch-hunting. They throw ideologies to the winds, ditch friends and join hands with foes. They use money and muscle power to bulldoze their way to the seat of power....

#0#. A Ranchi resident files a PIL on Koda and Co. who had de-frauded 3.6 crore rupees per day for 3 years to bid for South African mines while his wife sacrifices goats for his well-being as the ED is hot on his tail with an imminent arrest.

#0#. China sees RED when the Dalai Lama visits an Indian state while many Indian states have Naxals and Maoists on a killing spree and our national song, Vande Mataram, has been issued a fatwa by Muslim clerics.

Mera Bharat Mahan - Indians are ironically a blessed lot!

Online banking and browser neutral accessibility standards

SVAKSHA — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:54:00 +0530

Online Internet banking and financial transactions on most Indian bank websites is jinxed because every bank out there (atleast the ones I use) insist on paying their IT vendors to develop software that does not run properly on a Linux platform.

Their websites will display webpages on FF but verification of online transactions and shares trading will be supported only on IE. For the last few days, I've been trying to access the BOB site to change the password for netbanking but it keeps throwing a "JavaScript Disabled in Browser" error.

Nope, this problem is not restricted to yet another "government bank", private banks are no better.

The HDFC website is also FF friendly and renders well but try verifying credit cards for online purchase. Earlier the Netsafe/Verified by Visa/ MasterCard SecureCode pop-up screen used to return a "your browser is not IE....." message but now it gleefully crashes FF in a very customer friendly way!

After a whole week of running around between branches and complaining online and talking to divisional heads... the status quo remains. Frustrated, I used IE and voila, everything just works. Ughh!!

Supporting transactions for non-IE browsers is almost non-existent and talking about standards with the bank staff will get the standard response "yahan sab log Windows use karte hain (here everyone uses Windows)". That is the managers cue to me : "Yo customer, I dont care about your problem so end this Linux conversation". Asking to speak to the technical folks will not materialise --see they would not speak to lesser denizens like me, their customers.

Yet another private bank, ICICI does not think a second layer of security verification for credit card transactions online is important. Simply using a https server is not good enough. A second layer of security for each transaction should be mandatory. Ideally before approving an online transaction the merchant website should redirect to a Visa or Mastercard verification page (via your bank) which will ask you to verify with the CCV pin#, email id, password, etc... (exact procedure differs slightly from bank to bank) for EACH transaction. Currently ICICI simply approves the transaction which is a security lapse on the banks part because someone can memorize the card number, the expiry date, $name and simply flip over your card to read the 3-digit CCV overleaf and voila, you just gave a stranger access to your money!

While we were in Delhi, a restaurant printed the name, the 16-digit CC number (in all its glory) with expiry date on the POS receipt. So sans the second layer verification from Visa/MC, anyone with access to the merchants copy of the CC payment receipt can misuse the card online. All s/he has to do is memorize the 3-digit CCV number on the back of your card. _That_ is a BIG security hole. I didnt bring this to the merchants attention as I didnt want to alert them to a possible route to a financial fraud.

Now, if ICICI had a II-layer verification, for the online transaction to be approved the fraudster would need to know your email id, password, answer to your security question, etc.. before they can (mis)use your card online. This II-layer verification (besides the IP verification, etc)) will help to narrow down the culprit(s) to: 1) an internal source who has access to your bank records, OR 2) social engineering, where you gave the details to your confidant/relative/friend/family and it was (mis)used sans your permission.

I suspect that the second layer verification is provided by Visa/Mastercard only to those banks that pay them for this service and I've experimented with multiple cards for the _same merchant_ and ICICI is still approving the online transaction sans the second verification layer. Now, if a second layer security feature service provided by VISA and MasterCard is being withheld by not informing and not providing the service to the customer, then it is a security lapse on the banks part.

The other scary bit with online banking with some Indian merchants is the practice of auto-debiting your Credit Card for annual subscriptions. If I want to re-sub to your service, I will. I would prefer the merchant sending me a email notice instead of directly debiting my card without my approval or request. This tells me that the merchant is storing my Card details, without my knowledge and permission, which is not good security practice and most likely I will not use their service again.

Another problem area is the live trading on BSE. Currently this data is available deferred live if you use a non-IE browser. The merchants I spoke to are un-willing to support live trading on a Linux platform, partly because the share traders and banks are so used to IE that they dont support any neutral standards or system platforms.

The European Union's Internet accessibility laws are pretty strongly enforced and India should also have such laws. RBI, http://www.rbi.org.in, has a list of all the circulars sent to all Indian banks under its jurisdiction, including small branches which as per law are required to publicly display rules and regulations in B&W on a notice board within their offices. Maybe a PIL on behalf of the Persons With Disabilities Act will get browser neutral compatibility standards enforced across the board in India.

UPDATE: Now the Reserve Bank of India has made it mandatory to have an extra level of authentication called VBV (Verified by Visa) or MSC (Master Card Secure Code) password. This password is required to use while you are making an online transaction. All customers are requested to visit your respective card issuing bank’s website or VISA/MASTER sites and register your card for Verified by Visa or Master Card Secure Code to get your password.

For VISA Credit Card registration process, click on the following link
http://www.visa-asia.com/ap/sea/cardholders/security/activate.jsp

For MASTER Credit Card registration process, click on the following link
http://www.mastercard.com/us/personal/en/cardholderservices/securecode/sign_up.html

Karanjia

SVAKSHA — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:45:00 +0530

This entry has been dedicated to this awesomeness.

Over the dipavali weekend I made some Karanji, a traditional maharashtrian delicacy--you'll know why if you've ever gone through the rigorous process of cooking it from scratch, especially the poli making part.

Ingredients for Puran/saran/inner filling :

1 cup powdered cashew nuts
2 tsp poppy seeds
2 tsp charoli
1 cup mixed dry fruit/nuts (unsalted almond, cashew nut, pistachios)
Half cup rava
1.5 cups sugar (this depends on the level of sweetness one desires)
1 pinch nutmeg powder
4 elaichi pods crushed

Puran Preparation :
0. Powder the sugar till it does not have a grainy texture. Its easier to buy ready-to-use powered sugar but the proportions given above will vary slightly.
1. Dry roast the rava (and poppy seeds separately) to a golden color and keep aside to cool.
2. Roast the nuts in a tablespoon of ghee and keep to cool.
3. Take a large bowl and mix the roasted nuts, with one cup powdered cashew nuts, powedered sugar, poppy seeds, charuli, rava, nutmeg and elaichi powder. This is a dry powder filling which will stay for a few days. Also when deepfried it will automatically get cooked.

Note : The filling for this sweet dumpling can also include grated copra (dessicated dry coconut) but since copra has an irritating trait --it can smell rancid within 2-3 days reducing the storage shelf-life, I dont use it.

Ingredients for external dough cover:

1 cup maida
1 tsp ghee (butter)
salt (one pinch)
water and 20ml warm milk for mixing the dough
2 tbsp cornflour and half cup ghee

External dough cover Preparation :
The dough will have to be prepared atleast an hour before use.
0. Add 1 tbsp HOT ghee to 1 cup maida and mix well. This will make the karanji cover crisp.
1. Add little warm milk while kneading the dough with required water so the dough will be soft and rise well.
2. Then add a pinch of salt and knead well for 5 minutes. Cover well and set aside.
Additional Notes : In a small cup mix 2 tbsp cornflour in half cup ghee for later use.

Karanji Preparation:
0. Cut some dough and roll-out three polis.
1. Take the first poli and apply the cornflour+ghee mixture all over this poli and lay the second poli on top and apply cornflour+ghee on it and cover it with the third poli.
2. Now roll all three poli's tightly but with a light hand, taking care that they dont break during the process.
3. Cut them into small oval pieces.
4. Take one oval and roll out the poli again, taking care that its not too thin in the middle. Place the prepared stuffing in the middle of your poli.
5. Fold it in half and roll the corners of the puri inwards. It should be sealed properly, else the stuffing will become burnt sediment while frying.
6. Deep fry it till it becomes golden-brown or you can bake it in a pre-heated oven for 10 minutes at 100 degrees Celcius. Serve it hot or cold.
7. The karanji can last for 7-8 days if stored in an air tight container.

A silent Dipavali

SVAKSHA — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 10:54:00 +0530

High decibel levels have always resulted in a migrane and since childhood I've always cringed silently at noisy pubs/discos, honking while speeding, loud music and other public noise pollutants. So what is it about Indians being noisy in any celebration? --whether its a marriage or ganesh chaturthi or divali or holi or just about any event ; most Indians think its their public birthright to keep a loudspeaker facing your home because they are the truest custodians of your religion. Gee, isnt a festival supposed to spread cheer, kindness and generosity instead of noise ?!

The maximum pollution is reserved for dipavali -- the firecrackers noise and pollution from chemicals fumes that one is subjected to, whether its the horrid sutli-lakshmi bombs (that was what it was called when i was a kid and i detested the chemical fumes and noise) intended to awaken the neighborhood at 3:30 am or pre-pubescent boys thinking its oh-so-funny to burst fire crackers as women walk past or train a rocket at someone's home as a prank -- Ever heard of a fire hazard !?!

Its strange how people can become a public nuisance under the guise of celebration and indulge in public displays of wealth. In grade4 I had read a news report on small children in sivakasi being exploited to make crackers and seeing pictures of their hands with boils made me resolve that I'd never touch a phuljadi or buy firecrackers (I had also resolved to not wear silk or use leather objects but was forced to give these two up after I outgrew my teenage years) which didnt go down well with my family and especially with school friends who thought peer pressure and jeering would make me change my mind. Didnt happen, this one made it

Over the years I used to wonder if we will ever learn to celebrate in silence and despite not foisting my beliefs/thoughts about chemical pollution on others, when I read about school kids being more aware of their environment a few days ago, life came to a full circle -- Eight-year old Mitul Mehta is my favorite!

more PyCon-IN-2009 moments

SVAKSHA — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:49:00 +0530

Finally both the key organisers decided to blog and its always nice to read detailed posts.

Shyamshankar : "......The next session, was mine...... on “Idiomatic Python”.......The focus of the talk was ........ Python 3.x. .....there should have been more core language talks......."

Kenneth writes : "....my first experience of interacting with with a non-foss group,...... I stayed cool ........ During the testing period, there were a lot of suggestions, comments and criticism, by and large constructive and helpful, although some of them were totally inane...."

My tiny (almost zero) contributions were testing his app online, so i hope any comments / suggestions didnt sound inane ^_^

Noufal modestly opines : ".......and I don’t think I’m being immodest if I said that I did a decent job. The credit for the whole event though belongs to the entire community since everyone pitched in at the right time to keep the whole thing running smoothtly. Give yourselves a hand..........."

Although I couldnt make it, all the attendees who blogged about the conference had only good things to say about pycon india 09. That, in my view, is the best credit any event organiser can get.

another new theme

SVAKSHA — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:06:00 +0530

For over a year, getting a new theme has been on my mind because S hated the black theme. Pffft, out went the "depressing" black screen and for a few days I tried living with the white background, rewrote the CSS with bigger fonts, added some colour, and tried keeping images to the minimum. No can do. I hated the white background. A middle ground compromise had to be gray and even though pastel shades are dreary on webpages i'll live with it for now.

Other important stuff like the linguistics blog that I started has been sitting on the back burner these past few days, partly because i've been having a more interesting time talking to people with similar interests. Also I daresay its the back-to-back chaturthi + navratri season and a sudden writers block but what about the other love of my life : Music !? Its been months since I attended music class and I have no clue how a one month break stretched out this long. As the initial frequency of practicing at home dipped the disapproving murmurs grew louder and louder and I've never managed to get away with "mood nahi hai". Traveling, surgery, lost my notation book, were some excuses that aided moi not wanting to practice -- for me music is something that i've got to feel from within me, not because my neighbour loves to hear me belt out a revati or todi. When that mood strikes its usually midnight and the whole world around me is sleeping or i'm among a huge crowd of people -- imagine belting out Tukaram's abang while walking on the road...heh, people would wonder if i'm crazy!

PyCon India 2009

SVAKSHA — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 13:35:00 +0530

Last weekend, when I got calls asking which talk I was attending at Pycon-India, I kicked myself for not being in Bangalore and missing the event which we started planning in Feb'09.

Parthan opines : "........When the first discussions happened, everybody doubted it might become just another conference discussion that will never happen. It has taken the support and sheer determination of quite a number of people to make it happen. We just wanted to try it once, to at least see how the Python community responds to such initiatives and it has ended up being more than encouraging to make this a yearly event......."

This shows that a true-blue COMMUNITY event can be pulled off and flawlessly executed in around six months, where all the planning was online via lists and irc, with 3-4 ground meets. Cool ! The folks who deserve to be congratulated are Kenneth, Noufal, Anand. Kamal Govindraj, Ramdas, Anand, Senthil, Indudhar, JANASTU, and many other people whose names I have missed (and didnt mean to) here. Do holler if you helped out.

Here are some more blogger opinions.

Shailesh Kumar : "....It was first Python Conference in India and I felt inclined enough to go all over to Bangalore from my home place Noida and attend the conference....."

Jaganadh : "...talk by Anand B Pillai on "Python tools for Network Security". ...The next talk was by Senthil Kumaran on "Algorithms in Python".....Really his presentation style was rocking one!...."

Baiju shares some pyctoral moments by Ponnusamy.

Raji : "....my first experience ...proud to be the only female to give a talk in Pycon India 09....my friend Shrini who encouraged me...."

PYCON.Blog : " ....Over 350 delegates and 30+ speakers attended the event.... A notable instance is the participation of 75 students from the Rajalakshmi Engg College in the neighboring city of Chennai, who just hopped on a train to Bangalore en-masse....."

Abhishekh Mishra : ".........Idiomatic Python and other language features - What an excellent talk on the language by Sykora. Like, did you know a try... except block could be faster than an if.. else in a loop. This has been tested by Sykora. Differences between upcoming Python 3.x and 2.x were clearly highlighted,.............."

Arun : ".........This was my first lightning talk.......creating a simple casual game using Pyglet called ‘FruitCatch’..........."

Pavan : " .......I spotted a snake in the green lawns of IISc,......I thought IISc would have a good infrastructure, but when I went there all I saw was smelly loos, broken benches, ....connectivity was very good, the WiFi was also pretty good...."

Chandan : "......Hall L4. This session was given by Senthil....the implementation of Sieve of Eratosthenes....brief overview of various sorting techniques...bisection sort , tim sort of python, sorted function and timer function. This session was very informative...."

Harish : "....The fifth talk was on ‘Automated Testing of Web Applications’ by Sai Venkatakrishnan. The talk focused on the popular web application testing tools available in Python......"

Lakshman :" ......There was a talk on design patterns that explained various design patters: Singleton, Iterator, Factory Method, Strategy, observer, decorator. Creating a singleton using decorators is a nice little thing I got out of this talk....."

Three months to go for 2010, and among other things, I look forward to SCIPY from 12--17Dec2009, comprising of a conference, tutorials and Sprints which I hope to attend for 2-3 days atleast.

Python wants diversity and INpycon

SVAKSHA — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:43:00 +0530

Some months ago Aahz started the diversity list which has had discussions on a diversity statement which will be put forth to the PSF for approval (or did GvR ack it already? I am too lazy to wade through the emails now) which would be incorporated on the main python.org site. The diversity wiki page has a bunch of reading links already -- a lot more exhaustive than the UW wiki page. Way nicer page to point as 101 lessons for cluless humans!

The py-world is large space and while it may not be possible to jet halfway across the globe to attend a pyconf in the US or EU, we have a better way to communicate seamlessly via blogs -- planets aggregating blogs have always been an easy way to showcase and increase the voices within any community. Yeah, planet.python.org it is, but not all the folks around the world are there and what about folks who dont want to have the overhead of maintaining a blog --yeah, ask this lazy blogger about that feeling ...pfft !

Presenting "python-open-mike" -- your chance to be heard. So all ye python users having anything pythonic to say can simply email their thoughts to : <post@python-open-mike.posterous.com> to be heard. Its that simple. Btw, there was a call for moderators for open-mike so if you are reading this and want to volunteer, shoot a mail to diversity AT python.org

Now onto the next big event this month :: INpycon ! Gee, september is here already !?Its the first conf that i'm helping organise simply because i like the chilled out +ve attitude -- a scarcity if you know what i mean

Well, the sponsors team was lucky to bag Zeomega and Thoughtworks, which have already pitched in generously as sponsors. However we are still open to the idea of more corporate sponsors that are into Python. So if your company uses Python extensively and you would like to pitch in financially, here are some open sponsorship slots :

Premium Sponsors: (INR.50k+) - you are welcome to contribute more

What you get :
- Name, Blurb on our website
- Link back to company from our website
- Dedicated Banners at venue
- Mentions on our main banner under 'Sponsors'
- Stall at venue
- Access to contact information of delegates
- Company brochures in swag kits

Associate Sponsor: (INR.25k)
- Name on our site with a link back to their site
- Name on our main banner under 'associate sponsor'

Associate: (INR.10k) [Mostly for individual donations]
- Name on our site (no link back)

So if you want to become a part of the local Python community and sponsor this event, please mail me " vid AT svaksha d-o--t c-o-m " or leave a comment on this blog. (PS. I check emails more often than blog comments so the former will gt you a faster response from me.)

Btw, online registrations for the first Indian Pycon scheduled to take place from 26-27September 2009 at IISc, Bangalore has not yet closed. If you have not registered as a delegate log on to the pycon-india website to register online. Now!!

UPDATE : http://python-open-mike.posterous.com/my-post-on-python-wants-diversity-and-inpycon

linuxchix-india moves to india.linuxchix.org

SVAKSHA — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:31:00 +0530

Its been some months since LCIN got a new home on Ketan's server and moved to a wiki at :

LC India Chapter website : http://india.linuxchix.org/
Planet : http://india.linuxchix.org/planet
Mailing list : http://mailman.linuxchix.org/mailman/listinfo/indichix
IRC : #indichix on the server irc.linuxchix.org

Well, Terri updated the official chapter page for India, so its high time Radha (i need your blog uri please !?) and Kadambari who completed the move and admin the server with Ram and Ketan helping them all along, got due credit. Thanks a ton folks - y'all r0ck

Lazy /me should have blogged about it earlier but i've been preoccupied with stuff. After wrestling with it for ages I finally started putting down my thoughts on all the linguistics stuff on a second blog earlier -- gee, i hardly have the patience to scribble on this blog and here i am creating another maintenance blackhole. *sigh* what was i thinking !!

Atm, in all probability it will remain a private space for me to distill my thoughts from the pen and paper khichidi which was turning me scatter-brained each time i ask someone for their opinions and thoughts. Last week, MM and me were out and over-enthusiastic 'me' spent all my cash on some books (not that there are many great publications by Indian authors, but...duh !!), instead of that dress i wanted.

I was planning to attend the fosscomm meet in delhi, mainly as an excuse to meet Hassath, an LC'er with whom i've only corresponded online in the last 5 years. Maybe on Sunday, which gives me a day to extract my money's worth from the dead-tree versions before the trip.

fosscomm delhi meetup

SVAKSHA — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 09:13:00 +0530

The Fosscomm.in coalition of like-minded volunteers, NGO's and individuals is planning a meeting of the FOSS COMMunity of India in Delhi, to discuss key issues facing the community and strategies for dealing with them. All are welcome. Details below :

Date and Time : On Saturday 2009July04, the meetup will start at 10.00 AM and is planned for the whole day.

Venue : JNU, South Delhi. (exact venue within JNU is awaited)

Proposed agenda:

1. Reporting on the Bengaluru FOSSCOMM first meeting and follow up. Here is an update.

2. “Open Standards” Follow up on the Department of IT's draft policy on open standards
(http://www.mit.gov.in/download/Policyonopensandards.pdf).

3. FOSS in Education What the FOSS community can do in : a) School Education ,b) Higher Education

4. Open formats and open standards

5. Legal issues

6. Building political consensus around FOSS as India's best bet for development.

The travel costs as well as the cost of stay will have to be borne by the participants.

Outstation folks who require accommodation should contact Prof. Andrew Lynn <lynn.andrew at gmail.com> and "rajesh kalithody" <myidrajesh at gmail.com>. Lunch will be provided at the venue.

[/Updated : 20090703]

Aid for SriLanka

SVAKSHA — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:16:00 +0530

Reproducing a mail from another list calling for aid for Srilankan victims :

A call for Aid: Collecting items to distribute among Refugees in Sri Lanka

This is a call from individuals concerned about the state of refugees in SriLanka at the end of this military conflict, the brunt of which, many refugees, dead and alive have faced. Its is expected that around 313,000 IDPs refugees are in various camps in Sri Lanka. It is important to remember that a large number of these refugees are women. Please keep this in mind while making your contribution.

Who are we: we are a group of individuals who have been involved in a range of work related to the conflict in Sri Lanka over the past few years in Sri Lanka and India. For further details on our work please contact us and we will be more than willing to furnish any information you may need in this regard.

Distribution: We have made arrangements with organizations in Colombo to duly distribute any amount of items we may collect. It suffices to say that these organizations have been involved in work around conflict and human rights in Sri Lanka since its very inception. For further details on these organizations please contact us and we will be more than willing to furnish any information you may need in this regard.

What is needed:

Medicines: Any basic medicines such as tablets, band aids, cotton etc although it might be preferable to give money for the acquiring of medicine there locally as it might be easier to transport within the country rather than from outside, although any contributions in a large enough scale of medicines themselves would be very welcome.

Clothes: All kinds of clothes for men, women and children are welcome. Also, bed sheets and towels are also needed. Please refrain from sending any clothes that are not useable. Books, notebooks, pens, crayons, sketch pens, colour pencils: all of these items would be very welcome to distribute among children in the camps.

Money: Money is needed for buying of basic items such as sanitary pads, medicine and food and of course drinking water, which is of enormous scarcity in the camps as of now. All those who wish to contribute money, kindly contact Ponni Arasu at mailponni@gmail.com or Priya Thangarajah at ipriyat@gmail.com for further information.

Collection Points:

Chennai: Corporate Accountability Desk, 42a, First Floor, 5th avenue, Besant Nagar, Chennai - 90 Phone : 044 - 24463763 and 9840398852 - Jeny

Mumbai: Women's Centre, 104/b, Sunrise Apts, Above Canara Bank, Vakola, Santa Cruz (East), Mumbai, Maharashtra 400055. Ph: 9987398629; 022-26680403

Bangalore: Alternative Law forum, 122/4, Infantry Road, Opposite infantry wedding hall, Bangalore -1 Ph:080- 22868757

Delhi: Nirantar, B-64 (2nd Floor), Sarvodaya Enclave, New Delhi 110 017 India.

Phone: 91-11-26966334, 91-11-26517726 (telefax), The drop in time is from 10 - 5 monday to friday and 1st and 3rd saturdays.

Kindly contribute generously and at the earliest so we can begin to provide the bare minimum for the people in Sri Lanka who are now in the midst of one of the largest humanitarian crises in recent history.

summer hell

SVAKSHA — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 09:24:00 +0530

I hate (indian) summers for its heat (and the heatstroke and conjunctivitis I am recovering from), the humid and sweaty conditions, the water cuts and worse the electricity cuts.

The sane bits in this horrid summer are my family + friends + good food :) Belated Gudi Padwa and (advance) wishes for a happy Baisakhi/Vishu.

Summer still sucks bigtime though !!!!!

Sexual assaults in public spaces

SVAKSHA — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:35:00 +0530

I've changed the title of this post thrice because I refuse to dilute sexual harassment and assaults by calling it eve-teasing -- sounds frivolous and trivialises crimes against women.

India in the 21'st century is definitely unsafe for women, even if she is accompanied by a man and nobody seems to care enough about public sexual harassment to act on it. I've had to warn many female (and male) friends visiting India to NOT travel alone or even in groups of 4-5 women as they dont know the local language and without men in their group its inviting trouble. Saying that about your country sucks big time.

On Monday after a protest was held outside the police commissioner's office, Shankar Bidari, the police commissioner of Bangalore said :

"Bangalore people are so cultured people they will never tolerate any indignity, harassment or assault on women. Even without police and without government, the dignity of women in Bangalore city is perfectly safe and protected,"

I wish !! One of the women who was attacked describes her ordeal and after reading this article, its deeply disturbing that the PC who is responsible for the safety of the city's citizens has trivialized the issue with insensitive press statements but didnt the Home Minister Dr V S Acharya and District In-Charge Minister J Krishna Palemar called the pub attack and MLA’s daughter’s abduction as ‘small and common’ incidents and scream at the media reporter to "not waste his time with silly incidents" ?! There was a photograph of the Police Commissioner (check out "After hrs" last page of Bangalore edition of DNA newspaper dated 2009mar05) calmly enjoying the Mysore Maharaja's birthday bash on Tuesday at Palace Grounds Palace because : None of the women noted the assailants bike numbers, hence NOTHING can be done.

WRONG, Mr. Bidari, Bengaluru is not safe...... INDIA is not safe for women. I can narrate my experiences too BUT do you even want to listen to women like Archana and others who were attacked ?!

Join us :

Women in Bangalore are facing serious violence and attacks - for wearing jeans, going out in the streets, fighting back the moral police etc and we need to stop these attacks. This is a letter to the police commissioner/home minister/press release regarding the recent attacks on women in bangalore,

Endorse the petition at : http://www.petitiononline.com/petition.html

FRI, Mar06 :
Please come to ALF [Phone : 080-2286 5757] on Friday anytime between 2-6pm to make posters for the protest at the DGP'S office on saturday.. Charts and colours will be provided but feel free to bring your own and you can bring money you would like to contribute. Alternative Law Forum, 122/4 Infantry Road, (opposite Infantry Wedding House), Bangalore 560001, (nearest bus stop- Shivajinagar Depot)

SAT, March07:
1. Gather at Nrupathunga Road at 15:30. (Parking available at YMCA, DG's office compound, etc.) Stand on either side of the road, outside DG-IG's office, holding placards, silently.
2. Either the DG-IG comes out at 16:30 collects the memorandum and addresses the audience, or a small representative group goes in to his office when called and present the memorandum.
3. If the latter, then the representatives will address the gathering, when they come out.
4. Gathering shall disperse at 17:30.

SUN, March08:
0. On Sunday 2009March08, International Women's Day,members of the group and other citizens will walk down various prominent roads of the city. Its called "Take Back the Night Walk" and is being held by women to reclaim our lawful right to be safe at night across India. It starts at Indiranagar, Ulsoor and the other two places where the women were attacked
1. At 18:00, people will gather at the five locations as designated by the area coordinators. They will interact with the audience (in as many languages as possible), and spread awareness about the various goals of the Fearless Karnataka campaign. This will involve spreading of information flyers and testimonials, conducting bystander polls, and other such forms of interaction with the people on the streets. This can go on till 20:00. (Volunteers for poster-sticking will do so around this time.)
2. At 21:00, people gather at the designated spot in Majestic, bringing along with them necessities such as food, water, and community spirit. There will be further performances, video projections (if possible), songs, and other such activities there.
3. This will go on till 23:00, when people will disperse in their vehicles (pooling as much as possible), in public transport, tempos (which are currently being investigated), etc.

[updated, from FKNK]

UbuntuWomen meetup and BarcampBengaluru

SVAKSHA — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:32:00 +0530

Living in different countries means syncing oneself across the timezone span and after the fever and sinus torture of last weekend I was not sure if I'd have it in me to stay awake till midnight staring at the screen or making any coherent statements in the current heat wave. I hate Indian summers but I digress ...

Technology makes it easier to sit at home and meet various folks online in real-time so we (read Ubuntu-Women) did just that and had an IRC meetup last night as a kind of stock taking on the project founded (by yours truly :)) three years ago. Gosh 3 years already !! Everyone agreed that UW was doing well and that we love it in its present form We would like to do more but given that each of us is handling more than we can as is, its stretching things to take on additional responsibilities. Mamarok volunteered to do a series of interviews for Ubuntu's Full Circle mag so that is something to look forward to.

On saturday, someone asked me if I was attending BCB8 this time too and i remembered that Jose's talk (now postponed) was scheduled on the same day...darn !! Since Ram's office was hosting us it was imperative that we release the space for others. Jose was in great demand from a lot of groups who wanted him for a talk at their college/lug meetup so I will need to see when he is free next.

Talking of Barcamp bangalore, there was a lot of angst (on the list) over the undue focus on technology to the exclusion of non-techie technology enthusiast. The wiki has been replaced and one has to register an account now for bcb8. I completely understand why the blogger or general technical enthusiast would feel excluded but in retrospect I also realise why there is a tech-focus (even if it is forced on us, the unwilling junta). I have attended only 2 barcamps thus far, loved BCB6 the most, with BCB7 lacking the magical spell that I had so come to take for granted at a barcamp.

I dont really want to see a sales pitch, even if it is a startup and they have done something cool or got VC funded and hence the listener must endure a monologue, one-way conversation. Whoever wants to be talked down to? How boring. I want to be able to interact and talk to people and share ideas. For me a barcamp would mean seeing someone talk about linux and not really about sessions on astrology and Kamasutra/dating. Even if they had maximum participants and maximum laughter was heard from the rooms where these sessions were being conducted, I didnt plan on attending the dating/KS session and Tania and me sat through the astrology session at bcb7 because that was the only room where we could charge our laptops Gah, so much for attendees. Travelling 32 kms on a weekend suddenly seemed a waste of time

I hope bcb8 @ Y! changes into an upswing with the magic of bcb6.

Raga::Bhairavi

SVAKSHA — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:09:00 +0530

"Bhairavi" is another name for the goddess Shakti and is one of the forms of Kali. In Sanskrit, Bhairavi means "fierce" and frankly I've been trying hard to find those elements in the Bhairavi raga :)

arohaṇa: S R2 G2 M1 P D2 N2 S
avarohaṇa: S N2 D1 P M1 G2 R2 S

The notes used are chathusruthi rishabham, sadharana gandharam, shuddha madhyamam, chathusruthi dhaivatham & shuddha dhaivatham and kakali nishadham. Notice that the two daivathams are used in the Arohana : chathusruthi (D2) and Avarohana uses the shuddha (D1) daivatham.

Considered to be an ancient raga its 15 centuries old and a hot favourite with all performers and teachers too. Heh, my teacher started out with this after my break and I desperately try to search for the fierce emotions whilst listening/performing this raga. Since summer has already started I do get hot under the collar but daresay that we cause more heat for others than anything else.

Older composers have numerous compositions in this raga which is a janya of the 20th Melakarta of Nataibhairavi. Surprisingly this fierce raga is well loved and widely used in both Hindustani and Karnatic padhattis and the Hindustani Bhairavi is, as usual, vastly different from the Karnatic Bhairavi, where the latter is a Sampoorna raga (scale of 7 notes) with two different dhaivatham's in its scale. That pushes it out of the Melakarta ragam classification, which is another blog entry sitting in the drafts folder ....sheesh !!

A'cappella

SVAKSHA — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:41:00 +0530

mmm... so I have not blogged about music for such a loooooooong time and resuming class after a very loooooong time was funtastic. Guess what the teacher started with ?

No prizes to guess that it was a Bhairavi, no less *grin*

So what is the juice with bhairavi and revati ? Both are ragas that I like (well, they did grow on me over a period of time), are tough in terms of scale, definitely not less than a todi but a todi is a todi is a todi :D and it would be utterly unfair (and even stupid) to compare these ragas in terms of laya and shruti and term any one as superior to the other.

Masti is a mild term to describe the storm we generate at music class week after week. That we are a loud, boisterous bunch is an understatement in itself. That our 'a cappella' renditions can be heard till the end of the street has brought many a new student wanting to join and start performing like us. Talk of tall expectations

Thus far we have only broken a tube-light, sung (in a group ofcourse) special notes for special people, who just dont `get` it which dissolves the kids into bouts of giggles. Gah... really kids, you dont have to make things so obvious. Hmpf !!

VS, non, I have still NOT forgiven you for the group attack and those lousy pictures. /meh plots..............

Cell-help

SVAKSHA — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 16:09:00 +0530

This week had more newspaper reports that gangs of fundamentalist men are attacking women in Bangalore for wearing jeans. The DeccanHerald and Express buzz also carried the news and local groups in Bangalore sprang forward to support women but this brouhaha subsides after a few days. Frankly I dont expect passers by to do anything, much less help a stranger and I say this with prior experience in multiple situations in the past.

Well, as a mark of protest against the jean-hating facists, I am contemplating wearing jeans to the next hindu wedding I attend. So there! But before that I thought of blogging the whole specification that I had discussed with Ashwin Mahesh (of Mapunity). At the last barcamp (BCB7) I heard that they have implemented my idea so I'm blogging about it publicly, partly in the hope that cellular service providers encourage more such applications.

Ideally facilities like these should be available akin to the '911' service that North America has, but well, we live in a country where life and safety has lost meaning so I hope someone can take the idea and convert it into a social instrument of change and safety for Indian women, instead of the greedy entities that one gets to see always -- There is only so much value to caller tunes and ringtones and its my assumption that women (and children too) would be willing to pay for a safety service app. Millions of people dont use smartphones/GPS enabled devices in India and I wanted them to be able to utilize this tool and get help in an emergency too. Here is the spec :

APPLICATION #1

Pressing a combination of One or two buttons to initiate and send a distress/alert message to more than one person together with information like 'his/her location' and 'how to reach that location'.

PROPOSAL-1

Present day phone sets offer only single button (speed dial) feature to initiate a call to one single receiver/destination. In a situation where the person finds herself in danger/helpless, it may not be possible to use the instrument for dialing or typing out an SMS. Hence the need for an emergency button feature. Besides, the emergency button when pressed can dial single numbers only which can be introduced by the handset provider. It is therefore necessary to introduce another emergency "2 button press" feature to initiate sending an SMS text message containing one or more telephone numbers to the Mobile service provider software running at the base station.

[ The SMS text along with the list of Cell# (max10) will be provided and stored during normal times. ]

Delivery mechanism to be built in base station software.

The software at the base station should be able to recognise this 'distress SMS', scan the message and read, select and dial mobile numbers, get the dialers location, decide destination from/to route , pass the parameters to 'XYZ software, get the route details for person in distress and send the SMS/call to all the listed receipients in the users data file.

PROPOSAL-2

Current feature set in the mobile instrument hardware allows a single key to be associated with one single number store in the phone-book.

Change needed in software :-- Instead a new feature of storing and attatching a list of member (say max 10 numbers) is made and on pressing the 'hotkey' like # or * along with the 'call' key, the mobile can dial and send SMS (as explained in the XYZ paragraph above) one-by-one automatically till all the numbers stored in the list are exhausted.

Features :

- ease of navigation
- does not need gps phone
- user creates the config say, "*key + 99"

USECASES:

The new feature can alert upto 10 people, including maybe the police, and help can be provided in emergency cases. The feature is extremely useful in unexpected situations like accidents, hijacking or kidnapping, rioting, dacoity, rape/assault cases, etc...

APPLICATION #2

[A] MOBILE user (requester) seeking route information to reach a destination

1] Mobile user to send SMS to '999' typing the text message containing parameters like :

+ names of destination,
+ landmark,
+ street name, etc...

Mobile service provider software with 'XYZ feature' to :

- Analysis of the senders GPS location (starting point)
- analyse the destination parameter (by searching the database)
- decide their geo-spatial location on the city map,
- identifies the road name, junction name, etc... along with the route from starting point to destination.
- links traffic congestion details generated by 'transport information API' to select alternate route.
- and finally list out road names, junction names to be passed through to reach the destination.
- generate a 'reply SMS' containing the above details and transmits to requester.

SMS charge can be recovered from user and shared between Service provider and others.

USECASES:

0] local hospitals/shops/companies can advertise if the person passes through a locality.
1] The 'XYZ feature' can in normal situation be availed to obtain route details to reach a new destination or call/invite/give directions to a new place.

PRIVACY:

Privacy is a huge factor in both the Applications mentioned above, but since these are opt-in models, i.e. the user will have to subscribe or activate the features as they are not default services provided with a cell phone, its expected that the subscriber will know what they sign-up for.

The cellular operators would need to ensure that they dont bundle or sell these services to unscruplous advertising agencies which spam cellular service users with unwanted calls and sms -- since the approximate location of the user will be known to the operator, steps to avoid misuse must be taken.

Three months later

SVAKSHA — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 05:04:00 +0530

... Its been three months since the first terror attacks on Mumbai on Nov26 last year which was a haute topic of debate for the media ; certainly not a day easily forgotten. It should'nt be forgotten until justice is done either. By the time our Republic day dawned two months later, the heat reduced to glowing embers and it seemed that we would have to live with a failed police and judicial system, yet again.

Even though the Indian prosecutors managed to get their act together yesterday, with the Mumbai police filing a 11,280-page charge-sheet in the 26/11 attacks case, naming 35 Pakistanis as wanted suspects out of the 47 chargesheeted for terrorism ; I wont be alone holding my breath (literally) on this one, despite the public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam's promise of justice in 3-6 months.

The 284 VOIP calls the terrorists made have been traced to a serving Pakistani colonel but there are also news reports of an Italian link while the Japanese were into nuclear business with Pakistan which is intent on being as uncooperative as possible by raising polemic questions :

Pakistan has sought an explanation, for example, why the terrorists’ maritime movements did not come to the attention of the Gujarat and Maharashtra governments and how their ship escaped the attention of India’s costal radar defences.

Given that Pakistan’s investigators are well aware that the terrorists reached Mumbai in a hijacked Indian fishing boat — a fact India’s dossier of evidence makes clear — the question is mystifying.

Its no secret that the US army is training Pakistan with a number of US military advisors but the USA has virtually no control on how the Pakistanis use the training against them (like the 26/11 attacks) a fact acknowledged for many years now. Even the FBI is going to find it hard to get Pakistan to unravel its terror networks, especially when terrorists are intent on razing their home.

National coalition for Libre software

SVAKSHA — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:56:00 +0530

Nah, I didnt have a free weekend nor did I go out as planned, the crick in my neck and painful shoulder not withstanding. Rather, I spent this weekend attending two Libre software events. I use the term "Libre" to denote "free software" simply because the latter confuses many people into the "i-dont-need-to-pay-money" mode which is very misleading and erroneous description. Hmm... who does not like free stuff but the English word, "Free" != "phukat/muft" and the term "libre" is more close to the Indian translation of philosophical "liberation".

LUG meet

It was a meet i was gonna miss but things got sorted and I walked in at 6:30 pm to find the meet was still going on. Err.. imagine listening to Manish for 2+ hours....poor attendees :P ! A coffee break later (which I'm sure the listeners craved by now) Ritesh spoke about DM and we wound up at 9 pm. Yeah, its inconvenient for a lot of folks. Completely agree with kingsly that we need a bouncer to pull speakers off the stage. Any volunteers :-D? I saw a number of new faces, so we are definitely growing. Yippieeeee !

National Coalition for Free software

Initiated by IT for change, CIS-India hosted a meetup in Bangalore on Sunday where the objective was to get feedback from different groups working and volunteering in Freesoftware communities. Leaving my friends at MG Road with a promise to return in an hour, I walked out at 7pm :). When I walked in there was a pre-meeting going on and later the room filled to around 35-40 people. Currently many individuals and organizations are acting in isolation and that dilutes the effort so this meet was to find out how we can collaborate and help each other out. COOL !!

Met Kenneth, Radha dropped by, as did Sriram and Kingsly, besides many other folks I had met at different time spans including Prashant from AltLaw forum and 2 more lawyers. Vinay who was taking minutes of the meeting has a complete picture captured in words. I am waiting for Vinays synopsis of Sunday's confabulations to hit the list:).

Introductions started and Abhas was perhaps the only company there with the rest of the motley crowd comprising of volunteers and NGO representatives. Each of us spoke about our contributions to Libre software, discussed the challenges we faced and the common recurring theme was lack of support on the ground level. Kenneth spoke about the work NRC-Foss was doing in smaller 2/3- tier cities and how they promote learning and sharing via wiki's, which received a sum total of 3 lines worth of content contribution in the last 2 years of its existence, if i remember his words correctly. Kingsly suggested we should have smaller events all around the year to increase the participation and reach. I had spoken about the lack of women contributors/volunteers in libre software, where I do draw a distinction between people paid to work in Free software and those that do it in their spare time. Both are important but there is a significantly less amount of spare time the non-paid female volunteer gets and that is where the "be nice, be polite" LC philosophy helps in making the transition easy. While there are many female Linux users, the contributors are definitely a smaller subset of this set.

While encouraging more people to adopt Linux is important, Sebastian and Yann echoed others with "Increase contributors, not just consumers of Linux". They summed this up towards the end but I highlight this here because the first thing a volunteer/contributor encounters is the community which is largely via the mailing lists/IRC and forums. If she encounters a hostile atmosphere where aggressive flaming and posturing is indulged in by a handful of vocal flamers, it is bound to turn this person to be a passive observer, lurk quietly and most people (including men) usually leave quietly, all of which are a loss. Yeah, feel free to disagree that you are immune to nastiness and that assholes should be ignored. Umm...naa, I dont have to tolerate assholes to use Linux/Libre software, much less while contributing my time for free. No one should have to tolerate assholes. Period !! For a change, stand-up to bullies around you and say "Stop being an Asshole". It works.

License issues arose but by and large the most common and recurrent theme in the discussion was the lack of support, with almost everyone agreeing that Linux support sucks, commercial and community alike. They are right, there is no local framework where people can communicate face-to-face. IMHO, a local lug is perfect space to plug this gap. I touched upon why its important to have more local meets and more sessions, install fests aimed at newbies where they can have face-to-face community interactions and participation and this was in the "what do we plan to do" section. There are probably lakhs of people who dont know how to use a mailing list and/or IRC. Hey, I certainly dont expect my family members to log onto IRC to ask for help and would rather help them out. Nah, I dont think they should not have to RTFM, google or any other bull-shit that one gets to hear from nerdy geeks. Well these are the folks that would solve a Linux problem for their own kith and kin so why not others? What of those folks who would still be open to trying out Linux but dont have kids to help them out. Suparna was explaining how hard it was for her to make this switch to Linux and she ploughs on because she has nice people around her willing to help her out.

Libre software in Education was discussed and related an incident of ICSE schools treating computer education as a money-spinner. Heck, education has become a "get-rich-quick" scheme instead of the original goal, that of imparting knowledge. Somewhere in the rat race we seem to have allowed education to be overtaken with money and greed. *sigh* !! There were many good ideas and a number of people signed up to various tasks. Another suggestion I had was regarding the the government encouraging small and medium scale entrepreneurs in Libre software (not just the large software export houses). If the manufacturing industry can gets tons of sops for women entrepreneurs why not replicate the same model for women in Libre/Free software which is a great start-up enabler. Besides Tax-incentives, this would also solve the problem of women leaving the work pool after marriage/kids. It will also allow the creation of more jobs and increase the employment rate since Libre software needs a learning attitude more than fancy expensive degrees. The benefits are many but this needs a detailed analysis, so I'll pen those in a separate blog entry.

When it came to a coalition, most opined that it would be better to have and independent NGO for this purpose and many organisations would not be comfortable to go under any existing banner. For example, FSF-India has a limited agenda and would not be interested in local meet-ups and such like. When the question of signatories was thrown up, I mentioned that since LC and UW are not registered entities, I am not an elected representative holding any office of power so I cannot represent the project legally or aim to speak on its behalf unless authorized to do so. I was just a volunteer donating my valuable time. This was true for many individual contributors who are now welcome into the coalition. It was also suggested that atleast one such meeting be held in Chennai (which KG agreed to do), Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkatta. Sunil was the most gracious host with pastries, samosas, patties, and coffee being served to each guest and we wound up by 7pm, with the post-meeting discussions being very interesting too.

But right now I need to go pen a rant on why I hate this city's one-way roads. No really they suck big time... starting with a nice kick for that idiot auto driver for giving me directions to Frazer town from Cunningham road, instead of MG Road. Neither do I have that bad an accent and nor does MG road sound like Frazer town. Sheesh, can someone start a "NO Oneway roads" campaign please !!

moral policing and hooliganism in Bangalore

SVAKSHA — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:46:00 +0530

There is more to Bengaluru than the "Indian silicon valley" tag and there is no dearth of self-styled criminals and goons masquerading as culture-vultures.

From, http://vishshanker.sulekha.com/blog/post/2009/02/this-happened-in-bangalore-bengaluru-shocking.htm

A few of my friends and I were just paying our bills and coming out of our regular Friday night watering hole and dinner place in Rest House Road, just off Brigade Road, and most of the women in the company were already standing outside. Some of us outside were smoking, people were happy, there was laughter and jokes, as there were many other people in the street, all coming out, satiated, in the closing hour of the various pubs and restaurants around.

Suddenly from up the street a massive SUV comes revving and speeding, hurtling down, and stops in a scream of brakes and swirling dust, millimeters away from this group of 4 women, barely missing one of their legs. A white Audi, imported, still under transfer, with the registration plate of KA-51 TR-2767. Some millionaire's toy thing, that in the wrong hands can kill.

Naturally the women are in shock. And quickly following the shock comes indignation. These are self made women running their own businesses, managing state responsibilities for global NGO firms, successful doctors. They are not used to being bullied. So they turn around, instead of shrinking back in fear. They protest.

And as soon as they turn around in protest, the car doors are flung open, and a stream of 4-5 rabid men run out towards these women, screaming obscenities in Hindi and Kannada against women in general, fists flailing. Some of us who came in running at the sound of the screaming brakes now stand in the middle in defense of our women, and then blows start raining down. One of the goons make a couple of calls over the cellphone, and in seconds a stream of other equally rabid goondas land up. They gun straight for the women, and everyone – a few well-meaning bystanders, acquaintances who know us from the
restaurant, basically everyone who tries to help the women – starts getting thoroughly beaten up.

Women are kicked in the groin, punched in the stomach, slapped across the face, grabbed everywhere, abused constantly. Men are smashed up professionally, blows aimed at livers, groins, kidneys and nose. A friend is hit repeatedly on the head by a stone until he passes out in a flood of blood.

A plain-clothes policeman (Vittal Kumar) who saunters in late stands by watching and urging people to stop, but doing absolutely nothing else. A 'cheetah' biker cop comes in, with our women pleading him to stop this madness, but he refuses action, saying a police van will come in soon and he cannot do anything. Everyone keeps getting hammered. Relentlessly.

The carnage continues for over 20 minutes.

Finally when the police van does come in it is this vandals who are raging and ranting, claiming to be true "sons of the Kannadiga soil", and we are positioned to be the villainous outsiders, bleeding, outraged. How do the cops believe them, especially seeing the bloody faces of our men and the violated rage of our women, while they carry nary a scratch on their bodies? Don't ask me! Yet, it is us who these goondas urge the newly arrived law-keepers to arrest, and the police promptly comply, and we are bundled into the van, some still being beaten as we are pushed in. Some blessed relief from pain inside the police van at least, even if we are inside and the real goons outside, driving alongside in their spanking white Audi. The guy who was hit by the stone is taken separately by the women to Mallya hospital.

Inside the police station at Cubbon Park it becomes clear that these goons and the police know each other by their first names. The policeman in charge (Thimmappa) initially refuses to even register any complaint from me, on the purported grounds that I am not fluent in Kannada and I have taken a few drinks (3 Kingfisher pints, to be precise) over the evening. No, it doesn't matter that I didn't have my car and was not driving, and no, it doesn't mater that the complaint will be written in English. We watch them and the goons exchange smiles and nods with our our bloodied and swelling eyes and realize in our pain-clouded still-in-shock brains the extent of truth in the claim of one of the main goons when he claimed earlier in the evening in virulent aggression: we own this town, this car belongs to an MLA, we will see how you return to this street!!

This was the turning point of the saga, I guess. For we refused to lie down quietly and be victims.

One of our girls, a vintage and proud Bangalorean who is running one of the town's most successful organic farming initiatives, took upon herself to write the complaint, when I was not allowed to write the same. Another Bangalore girl, a state director of a global NGO firm, wrote the other molestation complaint separately on behalf of all the girls. Some of us called our friends in the media and corporate world. Everyone stepped up. And even when the odds were down and we were out, we did not give up, and as a singular body of violated citizens we spoke in one voice of courage and indomitable spirit. That voice had
no limitation of language, not Kannada, nor English, or Hindi. It was the voice of human spirit that cannot be broken.

And in the face of that spirit, for the first time, we saw the ugly visage of vandalism, hiding behind the thin and inadequate veil of political corrupt power, narrow-vision regionalism and self-serving morality, start to wilt.

We spent 6 hours next day in the police station. The sub-inspector of police who filed our FIR, Ajay R M, seemed a breath of fresh air inasmuch that he did not appear a-priori biased like others, even though the hand of corruption and politico-criminal power backing these goons was still manifest in many ways: a starched, white-linen power-broker walked in handing over his card to the sub-inspector in support of the goons; the goons got an audience with the Inspector because of this intervention, while we had to interact one level lower down in the hierarchy; the plains cloth policeman of last night, even though he had arrived far too late in the crime scene, gave a warped statement, passing it off as a "neutral" point of view, repeatedly stressing that we came out of a pub and hence were drinking, positioning this as a 'drunken brawl', while completely forgetting to mention the unprovoked attack against the women and the one-sided vandalism and violence that ensued. I guess one cannot blame the low ranked police officer – the criminal connections of these goons must be pervasive enough for him to be careful.

Thanks however to the impartial handling of the situation by Ajay, soon the goons were all identified. The lead actor was one Ravi Mallaya (38), a real estate honcho and owner of a small property off Brigade Road which he has converted into a "gaming" (you know what that means, don't you?) adda. The others identified are Mohan Basava (22) of Chamarajapet 12th Cross, R. Vijay Kumar Ramalingaraju (25) and Shivu Rajashekar (20). All are residents of 12th & 13th Cross in Vyalikaval. Their bravado and machismo were by that time evaporated. It was good to see their faces then.

Of course nothing much happened to them, nor did we expect it. They were supposed to be in lock up for at least the weekend till they were produced in court, but we understand that they were quickly released on (anticipatory?) bail. The car, purportedly belonging to an MLA, also does not figure in the FIR, apparently for reasons of "irrelevance to the case".The media also have given us fantastic coverage and support so far, strengthening the cause.

The goons meanwhile, as an after thought, also filed the customary reverse complaint on the morning after we filed our own complaint: the women have apparently scratched the car! (Why did they not file the complaint the same night, considering they came to the Police Station in the same car? Why was the car allowed to be taken off police custody? Why is the car still irrelevant to the case and not in the FIR? Questions.. questions..).

Is this the end of this saga? Probably not. Are these women, more precious to us as friends and wives than most things in our lives, safe to walk or drive down Brigade Road from now on or are the goonda elements, slighted by this arrest and disgrace, are lying in ambush, waiting, biding their time to cause some of us more grievous harm? We don't know. Is there reason for us to remain apprehensive of future attacks and victimization? Perhaps.

But here is the point.

We stood up.

We believed in the power of individual citizens even in the face of hooliganism, intolerance, corruption and power mongering. Even though many of us have the option of leveraging political or government connections, we deliberately chose to fight this battle as individuals. Sure, these connections have been activated and they have been kept informed, should the worst case scenario unfold tomorrow. But we have chosen to not leverage them. And in every small win we
register as a group of individual outraged citizens of Bangalore and India, however insignificant these milestones may be in the larger scheme of things, there is one small notch adding up in favor of what is right, one small notch against what is wrong. And we believe that every such small notch counts, each such mark is absolutely invaluable.

It is the people who make this city, this country, this world. It is you and I, as much as the terrorists inside and outside. And in our small insignificant little ways, it is my responsibility and yours to not shirk from investing effort – not just lip service or any token attempt, but real effort – in backing up what we ourselves believe in. It is so easy to logically argue that everything is corrupt, nothing is worth it, there are so many risks involved. We must not fall trap to this escapist trend. We must not fail to try.

Next time you feel outraged, violated, abused, don't let it go by and add up to your list of litanies and complaints. Stand up and take it to the limit - at least your own limit. Not in the same way as they wrong you, but in the way that every citizen, at least in theory, is entitled to complain and protest. Do not let the hooligans power rant scare you or prompt you into submission. Do not allow the corrupt cop make you give up trying. Carry the flame forward. Try harder.

If are up to it, start right now.

Forward this note to everyone you want to be made aware of this. Post it in your own blogs. Talk about it amongst your circles. And if anyone of you should like to step forward with a word of empathy or advise, talk to me. Comment.

It is not Bangalore that is going to the dogs. It is us. We have far too long become accustomed to let everything go. And the more we let things go without any protest or fight, the dormant criminal and dark elements of the society get that much more encouraged. Every time we turn the other way, the hooligan next street gets incentivized to push the boundary a little further, provoke a little more, try something a little more atrocious. It is time for us to refuse to let this go on. We are responsible for making ourselves proud. Lets believe in ourselves. We can do this.

My name is Saugata Chatterjee. And I am standing up.I refuse to let Bangalore go to the hooligan slumdogs, even if some of them are pets of corrupt power millionaires.

Bengaluru LUG meet on Feb21

SVAKSHA — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:18:00 +0530

From : http://groups.google.com/group/ilug-bengaluru/msg/25b35d77e6514b9d

ILUG Bengaluru Meetup - Saturday 21st February 2009

Time: 1630 Hrs onwards.

Venue:
ThoughtWorks Technologies
2nd Floor, Tower C, Corporate Block,
Diamond District, Old Airport Road

Agenda:

Introduction to the Android Platform - Manish Chakravarty

- Introduction to Architecture Components/Subsystems
- State of the Android Platform
- Developing for the Android Platform
- Demo of the current state of the platform

Device Mapper - How it works and why you should be using it - Ritesh Raj Sarraf

- Design of the DM Framework
- Advantages/Disadvantages
- Using Device Mapper

Regular Activities:

GPG keysigning - http://www.debian.org/events/keysigning
Open house where participants can interact / discuss other topics.

RSVP at http://ilug-bengaluru.wikia.com/wiki/Meetings

Pink

SVAKSHA — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 18:20:00 +0530

I've always had an intense dislike for pink, "red" being a favourite but this post is not about my colour preferences. My last blog post on women being assaulted and the Sita Sene, elicted a response on irc from HBD that a women's gang already exists. Calling themselves the Gulabi Gang, these women form a co-operative of sorts to help suppressed women like themselves in UttarPradesh. Back home, our local chakkiwala is from UP so I must ask his wife about the GulabiGang. Gosh, the video with lathi-wielding lessons are cool but someone should teach these women better self-defence techniques, especially sans weapons. Women can but its inconvenient to walk around with a lathi always.... but I digress. If the lathi delivers results for them, it stays

Moving south, as if the assault on the MLA's daughter was not enough, now the RamaSene plans to send hooligans to spy on Bangaloreans on 14feb. These thugs will be armed with turmeric (yeah in their excitement the culture-vultures forgot the difference between kumkum and turmeric) and anyone found celebrating Valentine's day, would be forced to marry each other. Huh?....right there on the road? So what will the sene-thug do if they find : two men are holding hands, a brother and sister are holding hands, two women are holding hands or an already married couple are holding hands? ...Erm... Will they be forced to apply ~~kumkum~~ turmeric and marry each other? On a pedantic note, between two men holding hands, which man gets to be the man(?), since its usual practice for a man to apply the kumkum on the woman's forehead. Now the Taliban-Sene has to use this body part (instead of brawn) to realise that the religion they (mis)use does not discriminate .... Nature is cruel, but ..wait, isnt nature feminine...?... so its all the loose woman's fault. Yeah, right !!

Renuka Chowdhary's threat to send roses to Muthalik on a day which very few celebrate was too simple so Nisha thinks he needs pink chaddis and if you are reading this, spread this message, by blogging, tweeting, etc.. and do your bit.

<Update> Since the Alternate Law Forum office in Bangalore was flooded they have requested that contributions be sent directly to the Taliban-Sene addressed to : Pramod Muthalik, Sri Rama Sene Chief, #11, Behind New Bus Stand, Gokhul Road, Near Lakshmi Park, HUBLI - Karnataka. </Update>

I'd rather see the police and judiciary react with more spine and keep these criminals behind bars but heck that seems like a remote possibility in India. These goons have never been to temples or noticed the idols of Durga and Kali, each of who carries multiple weapons and are especially known for their war-like ferocious nature. Someone should enroll these jokers for literature and history lessons and parcel them a copy of the Kamasutra with tickets to Khajuraho in MadhyaPradesh so they can get better acquainted with the real Indian culture. On the other hand, the truth about Vatsyayana being an A(ryan)merican Westerner out to corrupt the pure bharatiya nari (indian woman) might be revealed now.

Sita in an ice cube

SVAKSHA — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 23:58:00 +0530

Indian women are indeed blessed !! We now have a convict of the 1993 Bombay blasts contesting elections for a parliament membership, who opines that every Indian woman should give up her identity and take her husbands name after marriage. Pearl's of wisdom indeed ... from a man who has had multiple adulterous relationships whilst being married (thrice if you must know), an ex-drug addict who never bothered to care for his young daughter Trishala or wife Richa Sharma, both of whom were conveniently abandoned although he knew for years that Richa suffered from cancer. Morally inspiring for all those women in his life who hanker for dutt (pun intended) lastname, provided they manage to stick around dutt long.

Dutt may have munnabhai'ed the media and even ruffled Renuka Chowdhary's feather's, but it was definitely not enough masala for the media spotlight to dwell on him for long. The confused-plastic-faced-ac(h)tor-wannabe-politician was quickly upstarted by the street-thugs "Shri Rama Sene" in Karnataka. India now has its very own homegrown wannabe "Taliban-Sene" who orchestrated and videotaped the molestation and attack of women in Mangalore in the name of god. Apparently physical violence and a public molestation of women is the easiest way to be in the news. Tsk-Tsk ...dutt's what happens if you wash Pri(vate)ya Dutt(y) linen in public, Sanju baba. Politics is gonna be a steep learning curve for you. If the Muthalik-meets-Dutt scenario had occurred some years ago, how many times would Dutt have been married off on Valentine's day ??

All in a Go(o)d days work, given that Indian politicians have certainly run out of issues to solve in the run up to elections, where the mastermind of the Mangalore attacks is known but yet is allowed to abscond. Targeting 49% of your population is good enough to get eye-balls, never mind that politicians dont have the balls to address important issues like eradicating corruption, ensuring proper supply of electricity, proper public infrastructure, good primary education, water and so many other social issues which jostle for attention...but none of these silly issues are as important as women visiting a pub.

Any woman who visits a pub instead of making rotis at home, feeding her husband and pressing his tired legs at night, is fit to be called a prostitute according to the Rama Sene while enlightened souls (in the NCW too) went a bit further to justify the attacks in the name of stemming immoral activity in the Mangalore pub. Since the police and judiciary have outsourced their work to local thugs and hooligans its high time the government stopped wasting the tax-payee's money on maintaining a police force and judiciary, both of who cannot ensure law and order nor keep justice. Well if India can be the outsourcing manna for the world why cant we outsource the police's work to these self-appointed custodians of Indian culture ?!? Think of the Tax benefits!!

Fundamentalist Hindu bigots == fanatical Islamic radicals ?! If there is a logic to the methodical madness being unleashed across each state one has to give credit to their inspirational idol, the Taliban. Nothing less will do. If the ShivSena and MNS in Maharashtra can rail and rant against the South Indians and then drive away the North Indians, then why should the wannabe-power-grabbing-southern-politician be left behind. He can jump onto the "lets control the corrupt Indian woman" bandwagon which is a problem that has taken on global hues today, with gullible Indian woman being lured by the foreign hand... what sacrilege!!

Mytholog(icall)y

Not to be left behind, some women feel they should form a Sita Sene to counter the increasing attacks on women and the debate on "Indian culture" is ferociously raging on the idiot box and in the print media. Every person I have met thus far, has an opinion (or two or three) by which time my grey cells stop parsing the string "indian culture" correctly. The word "culture" tickles my phunny bone (and I've been told I have f3w of those) enough to delve into some mythology since religion is the thread that binds retrograde chauvinists across the world masking their selfish desire for control and power.

Kalpana Sharma summarized it more eloquently :

The Sri Rama Sene is a fringe element. But lurking under the skin of many men, irrespective of caste or community, is a similar view of what women should and should not do. Men fear women’s autonomy, for, it challenges their power. And they fear women’s sexuality even more. Hence, the desire of fundamentalists of all types to control women’s sexuality.

Is that why every river has a feminine name and Earth is called MotherEarth and the country is called motherland and not FatherEarth and Fatherland respectively !? Culture-vultures never miss an opportunity to letch on mytholog(ical)y to explain that women should be frozen into this ice cube of patriarchy, certainly fit to be seen and admired, but she can never stir or voice herself.

Were the women of yore beautiful icy figurines trapped in an ice cube?

Not Sita, Rama's wife, who left her husband when he asked her for an "agnipariksha" (trial by fire) to prove her chastity. She epitomises the courage (that many Indian women lack) of leaving her twin sons with her husband Rama and returning to her mother's (Earth) after around 20+ years of marriage.

Draupadi practised polyandry, perhaps the only woman with 5 husbands at a time when it was more common for men to practise polygamy. She is the only woman in mythology over whom a war, the Mahabharata, was fought to avenge an insult to her. In that epic, she refused to tie her hair until her insult was avenged.

Mirabai had no compunctions about leaving her husband for Krishna and would the brainless religious fundamentalist idiot dare to brek the idols in the Radha-Krishna temples(?), since Radha was never married to Krishna and left her husband for Krishna. Its called adultery in English, but for millions of Indians the name Radha-Krishna is synonymous with love, bhakti and devotion.

Wendy surmises the position of women in Vedic literature, especially the Chandayoga Upanishad where Jabala asks her son to take her name so he calls himself "Satyakama Jabala (the son of Jabala)". Interestingly, dutt (pun intended) may have been completely missed instances in Indian mythology where the children take on the mothers name and not that of the father (who was sometimes unknown, or got just a passing reference....).

Gowriputra (son of Gowri, an epithet for Parvati, Ganesha's mother who is supposed to have sprang from the scurf of her body) ;

Krishna was called "Devakiputra" (son of Devaki) ;

Skanda, one born of 6 mothers ;

Pandavas were called Kuntiputra's ; ... so on...

The Sene has surely not seen this aspect of Hinduism. Moving on to the men who are commonly addressed with the prefix Sri/Shri which is the feminine subjunctive in Sanskrit. It is also an epithet for Lakshmi whose husband (Vishnu) is commonly referred to as "Lakshmipati/Shripati" (the husband of Lakshmi) as is Sitapati (Husband of Sita).

Shiva's epithet is "Umapati", the husband of Parvati or Shakti (the female energy) without whom he is considered to be a shava (corpse). Are there instances of Parvati/Shakti being addressed as "Shivapatni"? Not that I know of.

There may be more but I am not inclined to dig out lores of yore when I can blithely snore away the night, sans the pita-pati (pun wholly intended).

Do you LUG?

SVAKSHA — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:51:00 +0530

Theodore asks if your local LUG is active at all? A very pertinent question, given that information, documentation and bandwidth access is freely available today. Today collaboration across the world is a lot easier with better communication, easier and cheaper access, more Linux toys, including an excessive overflow of data and irrelevant information. It makes is harder for the average human to sort and pick out bits and bytes relevant and useful to her.

However, I would extend that bar a bit higher and ask "what did you do?". Yeah, I could have asked "what does your LUG do?" but isnt the LUG made up of its people and if YOU are waiting for someone else to invite you for a meet or get things going, its going to be a long 'n cold wait Umm, lets see...Bengaluru definitely did not have any LUG community activity. Local LUG's are an easier entry point for women and getting the local LC chapter to sync itself within other user groups in their respective cities is something that I've seen LC'0rs around the world do. Collaborating and assimilating within the community is the best way forward.

In 2008, Bangalore had one Linuxchix meetup, interspersed with FSUG meets but does'nt the silicon valley of India need more !?! When a new bengaluru-LUG was started in October it reignited things but not enough. I've always wanted regular meets which are technical in nature so when Ritesh came up with the idea of themed discussions for LUG meets, we did just that.

We had a LUG meet today which was kindly hosted by Thoughtworks (thanks :-)) and attended by 10 people, which started off late and went on till around 5pm. If ever there is a competition for long LUG meets I'm sure this group will be good contenders :-D. We didnt have a dearth of topics to discuss and after some ranting on "handling a$$holes" and "making LUGs work", ... we moved on to some stimulated technical discussions on server side configuration using ldap and pam integration, puppet, opensshd-server (and how to compresses your ssh connection). Ketan spoke about git and how he runs a daemon for ssh in git and pushing code upstream, hardware based encryption, port forwarding with ssh. openVPN, some rants on Indian ISP's blocking ports and the eternal nerd complaint : blocking all sip/voip traffic in India.

Ritesh spoke about BACKUPS (dont we all know why :-P), device mappers to take snapshots and he clued us in on rsnapshot a file based system, rdiff-backup, zfs (solaris), rsync which takes diffs of a block. He was not entirely happy with the current tool state and wanted to take diffs between blocks that could sync over different sized disks, etc. Now he is the "bakra" for the next meetup :: to do a live demo on backups in Linux. We ended with the PGP key-signing and dispersed for lunch at 5pm that is also a reminder that should probably reschedule the bi-weekly Saturday meets to a post-lunch session, given that most folks have personal engagements during evenings.

Even if a lot of information on Linux is available online, with some excellent documentation and lists/irc help, its definitely lots more fun to meet and chat live with people who share a common interest. The connect is easier and a lot nicer than I can describe five hours worth of discussions on a blog.

republic@60

SVAKSHA — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:38:00 +0530

As the Indian republic turns 60, it also ironically marks the second month-versary of the Mumbai attacks on 26 Nov last year. There was the initial outrage, brouhaha, etc.. for about a month ; then the dust began settling on the terrorism issue. Not surprising at all since the Indian media had jucier bytes to beam like the Satyam financial fraud issue, the Obama's oath ceremony and who can forget the desi stylists falling over themselves to comment on Ms.Obama's fashion sense.

When the attack occured 2 months ago, our politicians went into a tizzy in the ensuing media frenzy and gleefully gave media sound bytes bordering on hyperbole. The ex-CM of the Mahanarashtra state and his actor son took a film producer/director to the Taj hotel so he could get a first hand look at the terrorist's killing and carnage and faithfully reproduce an exaggerated over-hyped masala film with some sexy dance/item numbers thrown in for the masses.

Even the Dalai Lama called a spade a spade instead of pussy-footing like most others or hiding behind diplomasque. With politicians like the minister Antulay, who in Paliament indirectly suggested that the terrorists may not be from Pakistan but may be Hindus, India does'nt need enemies. Despite Ajmal Amir (he also has a wikipedia page *eye-roll*) revealing that they attacked Mumbai to avenge the Mid-East/Israel gridlock, David Milliband manages to put his foot in his mouth with some faulty logic. Since access to the USA is harder for Al-quaida, the ocean not withstanding, it makes strategic sense for Islamic jihadists to kill/strike at US citizens outside the USA in other countries like Mumbai and other parts of India, the probability of which is scarily plausible in the face of the ISI training women in terrorism tactics and not just poor Ajmal Amir's who want to become famous for all the wrong reason. Besides the geographical advantage, India is has amazingly high levels of corruption and scores of idiots who are inefficient and inept when it comes to delivering justice and clamping down on criminal activities. No really, you can get away with murder in India, literally !

Is Pakistan a terrorist state?? Not according to ex-Gen.Mussharraf who has a good sense of humor when he berates the USA (Obama government ?) thus :

"If you compare what you spent in Afghanistan, I believe I read an article where roughly 143 billion dollars have been spent in Afghanistan. What have you spent in Iraq? Maybe over a trillion dollars?"

Now that sounds like a subtle blackmail toned as whining for economic aid. Hmpf, so Pakistan is essentially telling the US and the world to "pony up the $$$ and then FO". Indirectly he just showed USA the middle finger as the $$$ will be used to create Al-queda sancturies.

Obama did not take kindly to being shown the middle finger but its too early in the game as Pakistan has always been good with international diplomacy while the Indian governtment fails abjectly on that front. They even managed to get China, (a communist country with abject human rights situation...Tibet anyone?) on their side by giving them carte blanche power to “sort out” this diplomatic tangle. Duh, now how did that happen ??

Pakistan managed to steal the limelight thanks to the jingoism our politicians indulged in, the sound bytes about how India reserves all right to wage war. A heir-in-waiting, Rahul Gandhi, is busy scoring brownie points with a morality spiel on how Indians only respect people who have money, authority and positions...err, how about giving up that Z+ security and Lyuten's bungalow for starters, Mr.Gandhi !?

Other ministers, including the Prime minister, did nothing beyond condemning the act vehemently as "outrageous" and engaged in empty rhetoric's. Although India had all the evidence in the form of : records of telephone conversation that took place between terrorist at Mumbai and coordinators in Pakistan ; written statements from the arrested terrorist ; his parents admission and identification that he is their son ; confirmation by international intelligence agencies (including US, UK, etc) ; captured weapons used by the terrorists with markings of ordinance factories located in Pakistan ; etc..... it appears that our external affairs ministry as usual failed to present the available evidence effectively ; to Pakistan Government as well as to international community. It is indeed pathetic to note that we are still sloppy in preparing our case sheet and are struggling to ensure 'to fix the offence committed on the offender without leaving any loophole'.

Amidst all this media drama, Pakistan was smart enough to deflect attention and play the victim while our government babus patted themselves on the back for the perfect media pitch, empty threats and sabre rattling, which only annoyed a lot of countries (including China the epitome of democracy). Red-herring's like "joint probes" and tangential unrelated issues like the Malegaon blasts and other diversionary tactics helped them subvert and play the innocent victim to good effect, leaving India foaming at the mouth. By the time the police and other criminal investigation agencies compile evidence to prepare the FIR, years would pass affecting the resolve and anger of the International community to punish Pakistan for promoting terrorism on its soil.

That is the crossroads India stands at on this 60th Republic day and its ironic that Netaji was choosen the youth icon on the occassion of his birthday last week. with politicians gleefully going the whole media hog over his janmashtami BUT yet every successive Indian government has always maintained a mysterious and deafening silence on Bose's death. Even his daughter thought we didnt do enough to remember her father. Hmm... maybe Dhar's book reveal the unknown mystery behind the PMO office destroying documents. India may be a democratic state turning 60 which is a second coming of sorts, but frankly unless we pull up our socks and develop zero-tolerance to *corruption* we will not reach our full potential.

Kili

SVAKSHA — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 18:30:00 +0530

I laughed so hard while reading about Barney who likes to boss around dogs and by the time I finished reading and discussing about the second Barney behaving like a foul-mouthed flipping bird I was in tears. Parrots are more fun than a lovable dog and way better than a scratching cat. Both Barney's have company in K who has an equally colourful and mischievious personality to match, maybe even a devlish streak at times.

Just watching K taking great pleasure in pestering C (a German Shepherd) to come a play with him right after C has gobbled a heavy lunch was a treat. C would flop down for siesta but that was when K wanted to play. As I replay the picture of K nudging the dog's nose, who'd quickly cover the exposed sensitive area, and in frustration K would aim for the eye, it always makes me smile. Then C would quietly turn or move away to change the position and this is when things get interesting. Not having made any headway with diplomatic means K would waddle over to the sleeping dog and sharply nip at the dogs tail and immediately flap his wings and start screeching loudly, tricking us mortals into scurrying into the room thinking he was in danger of becoming the dogs lunch. Doh...hardly, all we found was the dog rolled into a ball with his tail tucked under him and face tucked under both his paws for safety, peacefully sleeping and watching K waddle across the room, muttering under his breath (very loudly), his indignation at being rebuffed and ignored by a mere dog was side-splitting. *grin*.

Hmpf, now that the secret (that parrots are great exhibitionists and usually behave like a 2-3 year old human child) is out, lets see why its so destructive for them to be left alone at home. Being social they like people, attention and lots and lots of attention or talking, etc... In terms of mischief they are at the forefront and K came up with some really annoying tricks. His favorite was to imitate the phone ring. No, not just any phone ring, he knew which tune would summon which member of the house. The ISD call and the cell ring would get the master of the house on his toes and an STD the mistress of the house and the kids for locals calls.... he had got that down pat and boy oh boy, was he good or what :-) Each time he was at our place he would do the same whenever he was left alone in the room. Yup he hates being ignored and will do anything to get our attention.

When in the room, he'd better not be ignored by us humans, else he would be muttering something loudly under his breath interspersed with "kJ, baaabyy" (the emphasis on the vowel was particularly strong) which is supposed to be a reminder (or reprimand?) that we are ignoring the baby (him). He takes great pleasure in pulling a fast one on people around him by imitating the lift doors closing/opening sound and he's been trying to pass his skills on to another companion with not much success. I'd like to see if he still retains that smart touch since KJ was very sensitive and like Barney reacted differently to different people. He could tell the difference between an Alphonso mango and the rest and used to waddle closer if we enter the room with an "Aapus", which means "gimme some aapus".

Once we had a 2 year old kid visiting us and never having seen a bird this close, the scared KID would cry loudly upon glancing in K's direction. Strangely that affected K a lot and whenever KID was around he would go silent and not mutter even under his breath. He could obviously sense the feelings from the crying and stress reactions. Amazing !! After a few days, he'd managed to win KID over who got to the level of being ready to share fruits with K, but he still played safe and kept his mischief to a minimum so as to not overwhelm KID into tears. That was so touching and unexpected from a bird. Nobody had taught him that and he does not have other clan birds for company to learn such skills from the wild either.

Many times my friend, who wanted to record his voice would keep a small portable recorder a few feet away from him but 'NO'. He simply refused to give her the sound samples and IIRC, we had spent the whole weekend trying to figure out how to get those sound bytes out of him. No luck... and trying to teach K to appreciate the nuances of Carnatic music was another failure. He loved it but maybe it was too much too soon...but the next time I visit DEL or MUM I plan to experiment again. That should be some fun

Another interaction I recall is with a neighbours long-tailed parrot as kid of 8 years. He was KK and around 5-6 years old but by gosh he just hated kids. Friday was the most awaited day of the week as I could hop over to the neighbours and say hi to KK, even if he hated the sight of kids and would start screeching very loudly to express his disapproval. But I was besotted with watching him for hours and was not going to give up. So after a whole year (52 weeks + 3 hours each Fri, Sat and Sunday) he grudgingly stopped the noise and drama over my visits. I'm so in love with each birds quirky personalities :P

Register a non-profit in India

SVAKSHA — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 01:18:00 +0530

Many many many moons ago I got a low down on registering non-profits in India (thanks Kallol :)) but I took a few months to blog about it so thanks for the strong poke :)

NON-PROFIT ORGANISATIONS in India

There are 3 kinds of Non-Profit organizations that can be setup : a trust, a society or a section 25 company.

1. Trusts:

A trust can take donations and is meant for charitable purposes. Validity extends only in original state it was registered in. Example: If the NPO was registered in Karnataka state it is exempt from I-Tax only there and 80G is applicable.

TAX : Donations and any other form of income (membership, registration fees, sponsorships) in trusts are exempt from income taxes.

REG Cost (as of 2008) : Around INR.5000 to register and in Bangalore, the registrar of societies office is on Church street.

2. Society (or association):

Not very different from a Trust but a Society (or association as it is sometimes called) has a little more scope with a slightly open organisational structure. A society cannot have chapters (branches) outside Karnataka, although members could be from anywhere in India.

If it is registered in Karnataka state it is exempt from ITax there. It needs 7 members including 4 office bearers (chairman, vc, treasurer, secretary) and all of them must be from the state where the society is registered. Annual meetings : treasurer prepares all the accounts year ending and get them signed by the secretary and the chairman and vice chairman and the secretary files them.

TAX : Service tax on sponsorships. Membership income is tax free (including service tax). 80G again requires the accountant. Donations and any other form of income (membership, registration fees, sponsorships) in trusts are exempt from income taxes.

REG Cost (as of 2008) : Takes 14 days to register and costs around INR5000 to register the same. In Bangalore the registrar of societies office is on Church Street.

3. A section 25 company :

Sec25 companies are different from a Trust and Society in every way. Some salient features ::

Sec25 can be registerd as a private or public limited company and the difference is in the number of minimum directors the company needs to have.
If the sec 25 company is private limited, then 2 directors are required, otherwise, 3 or 5 are required.
Directors can be from anywhere in india
Its different from normal companies, as in, that they can not distribute dividend to promoters/founders.
Exempt from ITax.
One time Pan-India registration.
The difference between a Society and Sec 25 is that the latter can enter into contract with any national or international institution. For example : a Sec25 NPO can sign a MoU with another organisation/firm/company
It need not be registered in every state and like a society its recognised all over the country, but for it to enter into a contract with another organisation that is outside the state it is registered, it need needs to be registered in that state as well.
It can have branches anywhere in India and have people working part / full time as regular employees.
Annual meetings : Regular AGM (annual general meeting) like all corporates do But the AGM requires quorum (members to be present or be represented by proxies) and annual returns and IT returns are filed by the accountants/company secretary. This depends on the MoA (memorandum of association) which will contain these details.
Donations and any other form of income (membership, registration fees, sponsorships) for sec 25 companies needs a separate application to the IT dept to get tax exemption. Sponsorship income attracts service tax everywhere. {HINT: Add service tax to sponsorship fee and invoice sponsors including taxes.}

REG Cost (as of 2008) : INR.15,000 + small expenses. Requires 2 months to register including a visit to the Regional Director's office in Chennai (if you are in South India).

GENERAL NOTES :

Although Trusts, Societies and Sec 25 companies are pan-India NP bodies, only a sec25 company can sign contracts with bodies outside the state. Societies and Trusts have limitations in this regard.
Members of a non-profit are not assessable or liable for taxes for income raising out of the organisation's activities. It applies to trusts, societies and sec 25 companies.
Even if the not-profit does not have any annual income, it WILL need to file a IT-return. The return will simply put income as 'zero'. For activities in the adhoc period of operation, one can lump it as 'pre-operative expenses' and include it in the books when the not-profit is formed.

Below is a comparison chart for the main differences between a trust, a society and a section 25 company

	Public Trust	Society	Section 25 Company
Statute/ Legislation	Public Trust Act like Bombay Public Trusts Act of 1950	Societies Registration Act of 1860	Companies Act of 1956
Jurisdiction of the Act	Concerned State where registered	Concerned State where registered	Concerned State where registered
Authority	Charity Commissioner	Registrar of Societies	Registrar of Companies
Registration	As Trust	As society (and by default also as Trust in Maharashtra & Gujarat)	As Section - 25 company
Main Document	Trust deed	Memorandum of Associations and Rules & Regulations	Memorandum and Articles of Association
Stamp Duty	Trust deed to be executed on non-judicial stamp paper of prescribed value	No stamp paper required for Memorandum of Associations and Rules & Regulations	No stamp paper required for Memorandum and Articles of Association
Number of persons needed to register	Minimum two trustees; no upper limit	Minimum seven; no upper limit	Minimum seven; no upper limit
Board of Management	Trustees	Governing body or council/managing or executive committee	Board of Directors/Managing Committee
Mode of succession on board of management	Usually by appointment	Usually election by members of the general body	Usually election by members of the general body

Source: Mathew Cherian, Director CAF India, New Delhi (Source : Internet)

Relationships

SVAKSHA — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 12:58:00 +0530

While chatting the other day I was reminded that the common thread we share in this Planet is "relationships". Our capability to refine, understand and maintain a variety of relationships makes us superior to animals who also share this human-like trait.

However we have created an institutional art-form (or business as I was told) called marriage which for better or worse is here to stay and everyone wants to taste it once.

Hmpf... so in all this whether its getting married or staying married, hardly any attention is paid to the whole process of where the relationship is going, or not.

Quoting from Jacinta Richardson's message :

I think such a group (in fact, I think schools should also do this) should teach about relationships. About what things make a good and successful relationship; vs what things should be considered warning signs of a bad relationship. I know this would be controversial, but I think it's important to tell young people all of this stuff. Not all of them will have had good examples of adult relationships to learn from. Once you've been in a few relationships, you generally have a good idea of what works for you. I think the following are important:

* Your partner makes you laugh
* Your partner can make you smile even when you're really grumpy or upset (even if the smile is only for a few moments)
* You look forward to seeing your partner at the end of the day
* You feel confident sharing bad news with your partner
* You feel safe when (gently) criticising your partner's behaviour (nobody is perfect, sometimes they will mess up)
* You feel safe when being criticised by your partner
* Your partner stands up for you against negative comments from their friends or family and asks the offending party to refrain from such.
* Your partner never insults you, and never criticises you in front anyone else, and neither you, them.
* Violence of any form is not part of the relationship.
* You are never afraid *of* your partner.

All of these should be true most of the time. Most of these should be true all of the time. Even in a bad week, you don't want more than 2 of these to be false at any one time.

Wow...... That kind of sums it up right there with respect, love and trust forming the foundation for the best relationship ever!

Does religion ask you to be violent?

SVAKSHA — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:27:00 +0530

The one thing that refuses to go away from my mind .... reading reports of the Jewish hostages being tied up and tortured before being killed. That they were killed painfully is extremely disturbing and for personal reasons. Around 195 died and included Hindus, Christians, Muslims, who who were killed in the attack but the terrorists didnt ask any of them the religion before they killed them except the Jews, who they decided to torture and then slaughter. That sounds so much like Aurangazeb torturing the last Maratha Peshwa alive, slowly skinning him whilst hanging him by his legs, for refusing to convert. That the last Peshwa chose to die a slow painful death on the 21'st day of torture, instead of converting to Islam, was something never taught in our history textbooks.

That lack of tolerance for another is similar in this singling out of the Jews. It irks me because I've lived for years in close proximity, shared innumerable laughs, tears, jokes, Sabbath's and Puja's with one such family who treated me as they would their own child. They were more Indian than most Indians - think long hair, sari, bindi .... and you know what I mean. I still remember the disapproving look I got for cutting my waist-length hair.

And that is why, it is disturbing and scary to even imagine that people you have known as a child and have grown-up with could be tortured and cruelly killed because they follow a different religion than you do.I am yet to overcome the fact that for some people religion is all about intolerance and fanaticism. Its a harsh truth, but it is.

Julio Riberio says his ancestors were Hindus from India and they never had an issue with getting along with other religions. I cant argue with that fact but its scary to think what India is degenerating into. We Indians are selfish, as after walking at a protest rally or blogging (like this), we will return to our excitingly mundane daily life until the next incident occurs and its time to repeat the circus all over again. Not to forget all the publicity-hungry stars who will hog the media bytes with inane comments about the spirit and tolerance of the the great Indian (re)public !! Talk of collective amnesia !! Easier to hold hands, have a candlelight vigil, and just impossible to control who gets voted from our constituency. THAT and Corruption would be two root causes of our misery. Our apathy is just icing on the cake for a public servant.

For a change the US got tough talking with Pakistan who acknowledge the terrorists were its nationals trained by the army and LeT. This has significance for both USA and other countries. Now that the LeT has tasted success it can strike at will anywhere in India, target all foreigners who come to India whether for business or pleasure. Since the LeT wants to take Jihad all over India and Jammu&Kashmir is their entry point in India they can almost succeed because there is not a single state in India without a sizable Muslim population which Indian politicians love to play around with. Its their vote-bank politics of divide and rule. If nothing else we have something to learn from the Americans who after 9/11 changed the way the world looks at terrorism. Yeah individual freedom and liberty was curbed but who wants a democracy where one can get away with murder, just like that!! Almost impossible in India due to vote-bank politics and public servants (read politicians) who will equate slain martyrs with dogs, whilst claiming the tag of 'world's largest democracy' ... but that exists only for them with the Z+ security, government bungalows and other perks that they enjoy at the expense of the tax-payers money. They need to learn a thing or two from TATA's generosity.

This slaughter would not have been possible without local traitors to help them in planning and logistics. Do we have the courage to kill the enemy within our midst? Isnt the quintessential chalta hai (take it easy!!) attitude responsible for the current mess? We talk of corruption, corrupt politicians, but are unable to do anything because it needs collective action. One individual cannot do it. It has to be a mass movement and should start with the public servant's accountability to the Indian tax-payer and voter(s). Each voter has a right to petition for a "Reject Candidate Vote" which was lost when the electronic voting was bought in. Earlier one could stamp on two candidate and nullify one's vote as a form of rejection. With electronic votes that is impossible. So I am forced to vote for a candidate I dont like (or choose the lesser evil) or Not vote at all (which is not even an option imho). So do we really have it in us to stop corruption once and for all or are we going to turn the other way because it didnt happen to us. Why are we waiting instead of being proactive? It should be mandatory for every 18 year old person (including women) to serve in the military for a period of 10 years. That would give people a real life perspective and force them to be more patriotic and live *equally* as common citizens which is not the case now.

In all this I feel sad for Moshe, the 2-year old orphan ...i wonder if he will ever overcome the trauma of his parents brutal murder just two days before his birthday. That will be a horrific fact he will have to relive all his life just days before his birthday each year. How cruel - What kind of religion asks you to be cruel, terrorize and indulge in mindless violence?

living your dream

SVAKSHA — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:58:00 +0530

I must've read Randy's Last lecture a zillion times, for moving me personally and yet kept postponing this blog entry. My take-away .......

And as you get older, you may find that “enabling the dreams of others” thing is even more fun.

Is that when you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care.

Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted

Loyalty is a two way street.

...now I wonder if I will ever muster the courage needed to send that email !!!

the taj of terror

SVAKSHA — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 15:10:00 +0530

Now that the 60-hour Taj seige by terrorists in downtown Mumbai is finally over its time to take stock of the past present and future events.

PAST

Terrorism has never been new to India and although lakhs of Indians have been killed in terrorist attacks in India ever since the Kashmir problem escalated in the 1980's, India has never got the world's attention or sympathy when it came to acknowledging across the border state-sponsored-terrorism. Besides the fact that our governments dont give a damn about Indian citizens, the US, UK and every other developed nation always ignored us screaming that Pakistan was a petri-dish for mushrooming terrorism. The US always had a soft (blind) spot for Pakistan because of the latter's support during the Cold War and showed their gratitude with billions of dollars in Financial aid and the decades old green-card lottery system, whereby 50,000 visas each year would be doled out to Pakistani men who could later bring their spouses and family members on a dependent visa whilst educated Indians had to make do with a cap on the H1 visas annually. I came across a former Intelligence chief Vikram Sood's blog entry on Terrorism which makes an interesting read.

PRESENT

The Pakistani terrorists were able to strike at will as they had complete terrain knowledge especially the Taj Hotel and it was only when the terrorists singled out Americans and Britishers and Jews that the world smelt the coffee. 'Kashmir is just an excuse to kill at will in the name of religion'.

The Jews came to India more than 2000 years ago and one of my neighbour(s) in Mumbai was a Jewish family, which was my second home and I can never forget that they would never eat non-veg in my presence out of respect for my beliefs. Even my non-veg eating Hindu friends have never respected my beliefs as much as they did !!

One captured terrorist admits that they thought they would return to Pakistan alive and didnt know it was a suicidal mission. Duh.... anyone with half a brain would know that the moment you pick up a gun you become a terrorist, and for someone who has no qualms about killing other human beings, he wants the mercy of life for himself. The suicidal mission was well-planned some months ago when they had visited Mumbai pretending to be Malaysian students. By breaking it up into small modules with each unit having 'need to know basis' information, the Pakistani bosses had ensured that brainwashed souls would be remote-controlled at every stage and re-create an Indian 9/11.

FUTURE

Terrorists do not believe in the philosophy of any religion ...they are just selfish in action and motives, either professional or political. India has never been good at politics and has always been bad at selling itself, the lack of spy intelligence notwithstanding. Our political parties will never take a stand and reach a consensus on tackling terrorism firmly. Rather they will indulge in debates about terrorism which will turn into a debate about Muslims being a minority in India, which directly benefits the terrorists. When will our so called secular politicians come out of this false cocoon and face terrorism with conviction without worrying about vote-bank politics ?!

While the politicians will have to bury their hatchets and work for a national agenda, we also need a neutral media which has the guts to focus on the truth and not just sensationalism and regional appeasement tactics to get maximum viewer ratings. The likes of Shabana Azmi, Arundhati Roy, Teesta Setelvad and Barkha Dutt could do well and stop insulting our intelligence with their biased babble. Do they have the courage to live the life of a military commando or that of good officer(s) who get killed due to poor quality bullet-proof jackets in the line of duty ? Ofcourse not... instead we are bombarded with their brainless chatter from those cosy news-rooms 24/7. For a change the media could focus on facts instead of sensationalism and minute-by-minute analysis. Why do we forget history in the form of the unforgettable hijack of Indian Airlines IC184 where we were unfortunately negotiating with terrorists and who can forget the time V.P.Singh released a dreaded terrorist Masood Azhar for securing the release of Rubbaiya Sayyed in Kashmir who went on to setup the LeT.

Today we are glued to the moving images on TV but tomorrow as a nation we just move on, certainly not any wiser or more unified on the issue of weeding out terrorism. We conveniently forget about it till the next episode. That is our history and unfortunately this horrific incident is no less tragic than the gazillion terrorist attacks all over India but our esteemed politicians will grab media bytes to lob accusations and counter-accusations on who is more serious about fighting terrorism than actually doing something about it. Will we ever learn from history ?!

Atleast let's not forget to pay our tributes to the military martyrs and their counterparts - the civilian heroes.

UPDATE : Wanted by Interpol, sheltered by Pakistan and Dubai, Dawood Ibrahim, provided logistics to the terrorists. From the ET : "Instructions were passed on to the jihadis outside using satellite phones. Also, some terrorists were tracking the movements of ATS officers on TV and accordingly instructed the jihadis located closeby to attack them. Even after the agencies realised this and switched off the cable/satellite TV feed to the hotels, the terrorists continued to get updates from their local handlers having access to TV channels". Besides, they were also instructed to kill till death and used Google Earth Maps for geo locations of their targets. Apparently four terrorists are still believed to be at large and a hunt is on for them..... Scary and depressing !!

the 11/26 mumbai attack

SVAKSHA — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 07:34:00 +0530

First, thanks to all those who mailed me to find out if I am ok and I realize I should have blogged but then...... its raining, cold and depressingly sick and ..well, never mind ! So although I moved out, half my life is still in Bombay and it was very upsetting to read that Mumbai has been held hostage yet again .... "The most audacious terror attack in Mumbai began Wednesday night, when militants attacked high profile landmarks, including the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, Oberoi Trident Hotel, Metro Theatre and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) railway station." says NDTV.

Nothing new that all of these are landmarks especially when the terrorists had ample resources like google and yahoo maps to trace each path of attack and plan maximum damage physically and mentally. This is not just Mumbai's 9/11 as this time the terrorists targeted British and American nationals and not just the aam aadmi (common Indian)..... " The involvement of westerners, including Americans, Britons and Israelis as victims and hostages in the ordeal also ensured greater coverage than usual with US experts trying to connect the dots and link the attack to Kashmir and al-Qaida, and its possible repercussions on United States." says the TOI.

Their planning and accuracy shows the goal was to instill fear and dread within the Indian economy and business industry. Although Indian lives may be cheap, its nice to note that the US and EU dont treat their citizens as dispensable objects. But since I dont have very high expectations from the Indian ~~government~~ political parties as this terrorist attack will be used as another vote-garnering tool for the next elections.

I have no great solution or suggestions to a very large problem that is now poised to be a world problem and the US would indeed be smart if it stopped doling out 'development aid' to Pakistan. Its not difficult to see how your Financial Aid Dollars create a (b)lasting impact. Another root cause of all of India's problems and evil is CORRUPTION and until such time that every citizen does not learn ethics and values, to say "NO Bribes", we will accelerate the downward spiral. The same goes for foreign businesses that come to India. Take a stand, say NO to corruption and kickbacks. Life is circular.... and I'm done with Mumbai !!

Updated the title to 11/26, not 28.

Linuxchix and Bangalore LUG dinner

SVAKSHA — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 00:59:00 +0530

IndiChix and Ilug-Bengaluru are having yet another dinner meetup at MG road today. An earlier meet was at the ThoughtWorks office and I hope they are kind enough to allow us to use the place in future too !! Granted, last week its was a farewell dinner but the fact that this is the fourth meetup in one month is a good sign of a live 'n kickin group !

Date: Wednesday 26th November 2008
Time: 1900hrs (That's 7o'clock in the evening!)
Place: Hotel Shelton Grand - MG Road/ Church Street @ 24hr Coffee Shop - BTDT (Been There Done That)
Food: All you can eat Buffet for INR.199+taxes = INR.235 (all inclusive)

Directions to the Dinner meet : The Shelton Grand entrance on MG Road is right next to the Deccan Herald office and they have a vertical neon light which should be viewable from a distance. They also have an entrance on church street in case you want to park on Church Street/Museum Rd/Resthouse Rd and walk to the venue.

The IndicChix mailing list has the map details so go register using the link therein. Feel free to join us and pass the word around....See you there !!!

déjà vu

SVAKSHA — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 23:01:00 +0530

It was a feeling of déjà vu all the way. Living with a Frantic Tornado means one gets to hear a "you are not helping me!!" cry very often. How is it possible for a FT to have a yen for numbers, math and logic and yet forget keys just beats me alltogether.... Is that the complexity of the human brain and the way each individual processes information ?...i dunno but would love to decipher this one !! Meanwhile, my suggestion to tie a small bell to the keyring was shot down coldly.