For years I have shied away from adding my family and relatives to my Facebook account. I know I have made the right choice and I will explain that a little later. But last evening, I got into a discussion with a cousin who lives in the US, and desperately wants me to be on Facebook. I told her that I can’t be on Facebook because I am busy all day at work and do not find much time to post updates on Facebook. For most part of the week, this is true. But yes, I do admit here that I get time to look at Facebook during my weekend and occasionally I end up posting updates there.

But my cousin sounded desperate. She didn’t realize that I am already connected to her via Orkut, GTalk, Skype, Picasa and email. There are enough reasons for her to follow me on these networks than on Facebook. She sounded frustrated that by not ‘connecting’ with her on Facebook I am committing a sin. But that’s not the case. The real reason for not adding her, or any other family member to my Facebook is explained below.

Facebook is a very open platform for people to interact with each other. It is so open that I can get to know what my ‘friend’ commented on his/her other ‘friend’s’ photo. But how useful is that to me? Can Mark Zuckerberg answer that? I do not want to broadcast to the whole world what I am posting to a particular friend’s profile. What may be fun posting for one person can be inflammatory for another. I do not want to get involved in petty fights with my friends just over a particular posting on another friend’s wall.

Which brings me to the real reason – I do not want my family to know how I interact with my friends and vice versa. On Facebook, everything is out in the open. And I do not want my life to be an open book like millions around the world do.

I joined Facebook sometime in late-2006, hence I am a veteran there. And I have been aware of Facebook’s privacy issues since 2007. Given these facts why must I not be protective about what I post on my and other friend’s walls? I know a lot of employers too look through the wall postings of unsuspecting employees, and sometimes it even plays a part in their being hired by a prospective employer. My ex-manager of my current organization is in my friend list, hence I know I must be careful about what I must post on my wall.

The bottom-line is, I want to keep my family and friends separate on Facebook. This can only be done by blocking one set of people. I have blocked everyone from my family on my Facebook account. My friends remain my precious asset and I will do anything and everything to protect my relationship with them.

It wasn’t late in the evening when I was standing just outside the main entrance of IIT-Delhi. I knew that is a place where I can get an autorickshaw easily. I asked one guy if he would go to my destination. He agreed instantly. I didn’t even need to haggle with him about the amount he would charge me. I stay about 20kms away from that place and knew approximately how much I would need to pay him. And he quoted about the same price.

When everything was decided I motioned to get into his autorickshaw. He was standing outside and had kept some things on the passenger seat. I expected him to remove them instantly now that I had decided to hire his autorick for the journey. But he didn’t remove them. Instead he said in plain and good English, “Sir, can you wait for 10 mins?”

Puzzled, I asked him in Hindi, “Kya hua?”

He answered, “Sir, let me finish my drink. Just one peg left sir!”

I was dumbfounded, taken aback! He was going to drive after getting drunk. And he was being honest about it!!!

I quickly took a step back and immediately said, “No, I won’t go if you are drunk.”

To this he replied, again in English, that he knew that he was violating the rules but that it had been a long and hard day for him and all that blah blah that I don’t remember much of now. He then began imploring that he wanted to take me to my destination and that he would still be driving safely despite being drunk. I stuck to my point and told him that since he was drunk, I won’t hire him anymore to go to my destination.

I walked a few steps ahead and took another autorickshaw to get back home. But all through my journey, I kept thinking about his honesty about telling his customer that he will be drunk while he is driving. He could have just as easily skipped that minor detail, taken me in and sped away. Agreed that he may still have got me home safely, but there was an equal (and probably higher) chance of him getting me badly injured in an accident. Perhaps he knew that he would lose the customer if he told of his state of drunkenness but he took his chances.

If he remains honest like this, I sincerely hope that he stops drinking, especially before driving.

Some months ago, I had ranted about how difficult it has become to set and remember a password. It turns out that since then my problems have only got compounded. Here’s why -

Since that post, I have stopped using that nationalized bank’s online account. I simply go to the bank regularly and get my passbook updated. I did this for sake of simplicity, but of course being a nationalized bank, it doesn’t believe in simplicity. The branch is located far (literally, far!) away, so I go to a nearby branch, hand them my passbook and ask them to update it for me. They can’t do that. Reason? There are many -

• Printer kharaab hai. (Hand it over to me please, I am the mister fixit guy!)
• Server down hai. (Why is your server down ONLY when I have to transact with you?)
• Connectivity issues (am I the only one who has no issues with MTNL’s broadband services???)
• Hamara computer operator chutti par hai. (OK, let me do it myself, I am an ace geek!)

Never mind. I am a patient man, I can wait. But other than that, there are plenty of reasons why passwords bug me everyday.

Recently, I joined a new firm. My new employer is extremely paranoid about data security. They have a good reason too, for they handle some of the most critical data of their clients. It is but obvious that they will be crazy about keeping their IT systems secure all the time. As a result of which, they have a very difficult-to-remember password policy. Their policy indicates -

• That my password must be alphanumeric. (so far so good)
• It must have at least one capital letter (OK, I can handle that!)
• It must have at least one number and special character (Yeah, that’s a bit tough to remember)
• It must end with an alphabet only (So if I have a number in the end, it won’t be accepted. Damn you #$%^^# )
• The password you use to log into your computer must be different from the password you use to access your corporate email and the intranet. (WTF!!)
• And recently, they asked us to set another password to view our payslips on the intranet. (Now, this is becoming seriously insane!)

In my initial days at my new firm, I was at my wit’s end as to set up such a ‘strong’ password that nobody can crack. Thankfully, they took about 4 working days to set up my corporate email, by which time I did come up with a password that confirmed to their policy.

But there is a rider attached: I still do not know their password retention policy. Nobody has mentioned it to me till now, nor have I bothered to ask for it. I am still in the dark about when they will expire both my login, and email passwords.

These are not the only passwords that I have to remember. I generally access Vodafone’s online account to make my monthly bill payment. Recently, they too changed their password policy and made it a mix and match of the rules I have mentioned above. Add to that, I have to remember my other online banking passwords, email passwords, credit card and debit card PINs and a few other important things. It is taxing on my mind, especially since I work in an environment where I have stiff daily deadlines.

I guess I will have to go the way of my dad and start keeping passwords in a file safely somewhere in my home. It is not a good solution and I know that. But there’s little else I can come up with at the moment. Readers, please suggest. Is there a better way for me to remember, recall and use passwords?

If you are 30, or older, you might think this is hilarious!

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning…. Uphill… Barefoot… BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they’ve got it!

But now that I’m over the ripe old age of thirty, I can’t help but look around and notice the youth of today.  You’ve got it so easy!  I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don’t know how good you’ve got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn’t have the Internet.  If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email!!  We had to actually write somebody a letter – with a pen!   Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox, and it would take like a week to get there!  Stamps were 10 cents!

Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us.  As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!

There were no MP3′s or Napsters or iTunes!  If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!  There were no CD players!  We had tape decks in our car.  We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless.  Cause, hey, that’s how we rolled, Baby!  Dig?

We didn’t have fancy crap like Call Waiting!  If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal, that’s it!

There weren’t any freakin’ cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn’t make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your “friends”. OH MY GOD !!!  Think of the horror… not being in touch with someone 24/7!!!  And then there’s TEXTING.  Yeah, right.  Please!  You kids have no idea how annoying you are.

And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was!  It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent… you just didn’t know!!!  You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn’t have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics!  We had the Atari 2600!  With games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’.  Your screen guy was a little square!  You actually had to use your imagination!!!  And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen… Forever!  And you could never win.  The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died!  Just like LIFE! (No Atari for me!)

You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing!  You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel!!!  NO REMOTES!!!  Oh, no, what’s the world coming to?!?!

There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning.  Do you hear what I’m saying? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-finks!

And we didn’t have microwaves.  If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove!  Imagine that!

And our parents told us to stay outside and play… all day long.  Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort.  And if you came back inside… you were doing chores!
And car seats – oh, please!  Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on.  If you were lucky, you got the “safety arm” across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling “shot gun” in the first place!
See!  That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled rotten!  You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or any time before!

Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd
(Send this to someone you’d like to make smile)

In the last 24 hours I have seen a near-fatal accident and a serious traffic rule violation.

Yesterday evening when I was returning home, I saw this accident happen near the Delhi-Gurgaon toll plaza. This middle-aged couple was approaching the toll plaza from the Gurgaon side, driving on their bike, trying to turn right and go towards the cash-only lane. They were giving the correct signal on their bike. However, this cab on their right side,  trying to overtake them, without giving any signal, driving at over 80km/hr, hits them head on. The couple’s bike spins out of control and lands a few meters ahead. The couple is thrown off the bike. The man driving the bike was wearing a helmet and escaped almost uninjured. He stood up immediately. However his wife, whose head hit the speeding Innova lay injured on the road. Luckily she survived, for if she had come under the wheels of the heavy car, she would’ve been dead in an instant.

By this time the Innova had stopped there. I was in the cab behind them. The driver of my cab slammed the brakes immediately and got out to help the injured lady on the road. Luckily, since we were barely 200meters from the toll plaza, help came immediately from there. A traffic cop was summoned who immediately started managing the traffic. Within 2 minutes we were asked to take our car away even as the lady was put into another car and taken to a nearby hospital. The driver of my cab said that she looked fine, though in pain, looks like her leg is broken. From the way I saw it, I think she is extremely lucky to be alive.

Then this evening, I saw this jacka** of a driver near my home. A police van was navigating through a 4-way crossing that doesn’t have any stoplight. The cop’s car had its red beaming lights on. It was clear that in such a scenario, the cop’s car had the right of way. Almost all the traffic stopped to give him the way but this man came steaming in his Tata Sumo and zipped past the cop’s car, missing it just by less than a whisker. It was dark at that hour but I could see that the driver of the cop’s car was left dumbfounded by the speed with which the Sumo went past it.

Click to enlarge

I captured this image from my camera phone a couple of weeks ago. In India, people never drive in the lane, are always in a hurry, and always believe that a 3 lane road is made for 6 or 7 vehicles at the same time. They believe in parking in the middle of the road and many two-wheeler riders and bikers believe that footpaths and sidewalks are meant for them to drive rather than the pedestrians to walk. Nobody follows traffic rules and you are labeled an idiot if you make any effort to follow rules on the roads.

No wonder India records one of the highest number of casualties on the roads in the world.

Circa 2009. I again thought of using Linux. This time I was apprehensive, owing to my previous failure. But I knew that a lot had changed in the last 4 years. The biggest change perhaps in the linux world came with the popularity of Ubuntu, the Debian based Linux distribution.

What Got Me On to Ubuntu

I was actually getting rather dissatisfied with Windows based PCs. Over time, they ended up being buggy, slow and a pain in the a** requiring constant software updates, patches, anti virus softwares and service updates. I actually realized that I was spending a good amount of time every month servicing my laptop rather than actually working on it. My laptop works on Windows XP and this thankfully takes care of a lot of issues that have cropped up with Vista. I never used Vista, and had hoped to buy a Windows 7 based laptop as soon as possible, until I ran into Ubuntu.

Don’t get me wrong. Windows 7 is an outstanding operating system. But Win 7 based laptops are mighty expensive at the moment. My laptop is getting old, having been purchased in mid-2007, but with XP it still works reasonably well. But in recent months I realized that I was spending more time maintaining it rather than using it. And with the recent troubles I was having with my anti virus, I decided that I need to have a look at linux again. Thankfully, Ubuntu was readily available to me. All I needed to do was go to shipit and order a live CD of Ubuntu. Canonical Ltd sends the CD free of cost to you anywhere in the world. Within 2 weeks I had a CD of Ubuntu 9.10 (also known as Karmic Koala) in my hands.

The First Step

Ubuntu Setup

Once I had the live CD in my hand I put it into my laptop and started exploring it. It needed a system restart, upon which the system booted from the CD (to do this, make sure that your BIOS is set to boot from the CD/DVD drive first). The strangely familiar Ubuntu desktop interface loaded on my screen and then I started checking out some of the pre-loaded programs available on the CD. Internet didn’t work so I couldn’t use Firefox at this stage. Using the live CD for a few days made me wonder should I install the OS on my laptop or not.

Now I had 2 choices – install it via Wubi or go in for a full install. With Wubi, you can install Ubuntu on your existing Windows partition just like any other Windows program. However, it greatly reduces the system performance of Ubuntu. However the advantage is that you can uninstall it any time, just like any other Windows program.

I chose not to take this step. I realized that since my laptop is already old and somewhat f***ed up with a few bad sectors on the hard drive, I may as well take the risk and install Ubuntu on a separate partition. After reading a few Ubuntu forums, I went for the kill.

Most Ubuntu forums described the installation process as a breeze up until the time you need to designate a partition for your system.  Almost all of them recommended this step to be done manually. However I decided to let the setup process take care of it. It thankfully did not harm my laptop and a ext4 based Ubuntu partition was successfully created.

Setting up and customizing the settings of Ubuntu was a breeze, almost mirrored those of Windows. The installation took about 20 mins during which time it installed not only the operating system but also the default browser Firefox and Open Office.

The Problem

Had I been writing about Windows, I would’ve written ‘problems’ but with Ubuntu so far I have faced only one problem, and that too was right in the beginning. Apparently, Ubuntu did not quite identify the right device driver for my wifi system. I plugged the ethernet cable into my laptop and connected it to the Internet and found out from some Ubuntu forums that wifi driver was a proprietary software that needed to be installed separately. I did that and viola, it worked!

The Journey So Far

While I won’t describe Ubuntu as a breeze, especially for someone who has worked on Windows systems all along, it certainly isn’t difficult. It has it’s learning curve, thanks to it’s different interface and different names for same type of programs and functionalities.

The biggest difference is with the use of Open Office. While one may be used to using simple commands and shortcuts of WORD and EXCEL, they are a little bit different in Open Office. The advantage is that since open office is a more standards compliant software, files created using it can be run on almost any other office utility software.

Similarly, GIMP has many utilities found in Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. I found F-Spot photo manager to be a big buggy and slow, don’t use it much. Picasa has therefore become my default photo manager.

Terminal

The Terminal may put off most people but is actually a very powerful tool. From simple tasks such as pinging (as shown above) to installing softwares using root privileges can be done using commands in terminal. Most developers that ask you to use terminal to install or run their programs also provide specific and clear instructions on how to use it.

The greatest advantage of Ubuntu, as with many other linux distributions, is that it uses a package repository to keep a record of all programs available for the system. The Synaptic package manager is used to install, de-install and completely remove a software from an Ubuntu system. Ubuntu 9.10 has introduced the Ubuntu Software Center which has a database of over 2000 softwares available for Ubuntu from developers around the world. It is set to completely replace Synaptic in Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

Updating the system is easy as well. The Update Manager will report the updates as and when they are made available to be downloaded and can be installed with the click of a button. In general, updates do not even require you to reboot your system and hence you can carry on working while the updates get installed in the background.

Rhythmbox takes care of my MP3s and though I did download VLC Player, I found it of little use since Totem Movie Player plays almost all popular video formats. These are installed from the live CD itself.

Gray Areas

There are a few gray areas. The only reason I now have to log on to my windows partition is that there is no good substitute for iTunes on Linux. Syncing my ipod is a pain and I constantly need to turn on Windows to get it synced.

Ubuntu 9.10 uses empathy as it’s default messenger software. However, IMO it doesn’t have as many functionalities as Pidgin. This can be countered by downloading Pidgin from the Ubuntu software center.

Despite the development of Linux, you may still find it difficult to locate good hardware drivers for some of your hardware. For instance, I have not been able to find a good enough linux driver for my Canon LBP2900 printer. I constantly have to log on to windows to complete any print jobs.

Overall Impression

The greatest advantage of Ubuntu is that it uses a mere 256MB of RAM. I have double that amount of RAM but with so low memory requirements, it is an added bonus to use it in place of Windows. It also has a feature that enables you to spin down your hard drive whenever possible. This setting can be tweaked in the power management module.

The result is that I have observed that ever since I started using Ubuntu, my laptop has become more energy efficient, faster and I don’t have to worry about defragging it every now and then. If Ubuntu carries on working as well as it has for me in the last 3 months, I may as well switch to Linux forever.

Tata Sky is expensive by the way, and when my subscription came up for renewal earlier this month, I decided to add 4 English movie channels as part of their Cosmos package. I thought I’d watch some quality movies in the weekends but no, my parents have other brilliant ideas. They intend to watch the funeral procession of Jyoti Basu on one TV set while on the other they want to watch a child bride get drowned in bucket full of artificial tears.

I was saving money to buy an air-conditioner for my room before the summer season. Maybe I should divert the money to buy a 3rd TV set and a separate DTH connection for myself.

Damn!

I hold a savings account in one of the leading private banks of India. This bank’s online banking is simple and easy to operate and very convenient otherwise too. In my few years of relationship with them I’ve had literally no complaints with them. They follow a policy of expiring an online banking password approximately every 3 months or about 90 days. This suits me well since I believe it is a reasonably long time to change your passwords in most places online.

Now recently, I also started banking with a nationalized bank of India. For a start, I was surprised that their online banking seems to actually work! Getting online banking enabled from them was another 2 month long effort that deserves a separate post but when it finally was enabled for me, I found that they want me to set 2 passwords – one for logging into my account and the other to transact online. The good part – 2 passwords ensure more safety. The bad part – more passwords to remember!

I also sometimes manage my dad’s account online, which incidentally is also held in another private bank of India. This is the account that pisses me off the most. The online banking service of this bank seems to have settled down in stone age, the interface is poorly designed, and worst of all, they ask me to change their password every 2 weeks!!!!!

It results in more problems than solutions. Since my dad is not good at remembering passwords he generally writes them down in a file and stores it in a safe place. I know it’s a bad habit but there’s little I can do about it. Changing password for his account every 2 weeks not only complicates matters for me but also for him. He needs to note down a new password twice a month. What’s worse is that by the time I manage to remember and recall a new password, 2 weeks are already over! There have been instances when even I have forgotten his password and have asked him to look it up in his file and tell me so that I can open his online account.

I am aware that setting long and difficult to crack passwords will secure the accounts of customers but by forcing people to make such arbitrary changes, system admins are only making banking systems less usable for their customers.

Earlier in the morning I saw a couple of missed calls on my cellphone from some unknown phone numbers. I ignored them, knowing that most of these calls are from telemarketers. There was nothing in these numbers that would get me to notice them. Unfortunately, one of these missed calls was from a lady I am doing some business with.

I also noticed a voicemail alert from Vodafone and when I called up my voicemail, I found that no message had been left. In effect, the caller had left a blank message on my voicemail. I again ignored it, thinking that it must’ve been from a telemarketer.

Later in the afternoon I got an email from this lady in which she informs me that she tried to call me earlier in the day but could not talk to me because my phone was on ‘voicemail’. Ah! Such a creative reply. I must say, only my countrymen (Indians!) can come up with such creative replies.

I was amused. In fact I was pissed at the time I saw her email. Now that I think of it, I am amused, smiling at her stupidity. I want to say to her ‘Hello lady! knock knock! You got some common sense?’ If she got thru to my ‘voicemail’ as she claims then the least that she could do to get to me was to leave a message asking me to call her back. It’s just that simple!

Had she left a proper message I would’ve called her back immediately on hearing it.

Voicemail is a very popular concept abroad (i.e.: outside India). Phone companies in India too provide it to their customers. I have subscribed to this service from Vodafone. It helps me keep telemarketers at bay. (I have already registered my phone number on the NDNC list, but it is of no use). While I generally accept all calls from unknown numbers, voicemail helps in getting messages at times when I can’t take phone calls. And many times such phone calls come from telemarketers who want to sell credit cards to me. I am least interested in them.

If only, this lady had the common sense of leaving a message! It would’ve saved me a lot of hassle of emailing her again in the evening.

and

Finally, wish you a great new year 2010.