Rahul

Scientific interpretation of Ganapati's story!

2011-09-10T05:06:00.001+05:30

http://samadiyami.blogspot.com/2011/09/scientific-interpretation-of-ganapatis.html

What is so wrong with Bhagwad Geeta?

2011-07-23T13:46:00.001+05:30

Here's a discussion I had with someone over Bhagwad Geeta on TOI forum (Stop reading now if you don't want to go to the end, it may mislead):

mukunda (Bengaluru) replies to Siddharth

21 Jul, 2011 02:50 PM

Ok,lets read ch 4 verse 13. catur-varnyam maya srstam guna-karma-vibhagasah tasya kartaram api mam viddhy akartaram avyayam "According to the three modes of material nature and the work associated with them, the four divisions of human society are created by Me. And although I am the creator of this system, you should know that I am yet the nondoer, being unchangeable." 1st line"catur-varnyam maya srstam" 4 varnas are created by Me(Paramatma),2nd line "guna-karma-vibhagasah" where the vabhajan\categorization is based on one's guna composition and karma composition. 3rd and 4th line states how He is the non doer and unchangable. Sri Krishna says that each living entity is categorized into one of the 4 varnas based ONLY on their previous records of Gunas and their Karma. NOWHERE He mentions about janana\birth as the basis of categorization (example: a son of a brahmana is not a brahmana(by birth), but he becomes a brahmana by his gunas and karma), where as caste system is a system which is categorized purely based on birth(example: a son of a brahmana is automatically placed in the general merit(due to birth in a brahmana family) and a son of a scheduled caste is placed as a scheduled caste(due to birth in a scheduled caste family)). now can you please explain your statement "Gita encourages caste system. How can we allow a book that doesn't consider all humans as equal and believes that the humans are divided in 4 castes." Gita states that you earn your varna due to your previous deeds and guna records. this system is present everywhere. you dont ask a school dropout person to become an IAS officer. he has to earn this position by doing required action(passing IAS exam) and also including his guna composition. NOTE: its very easy to read anti hindu articles on the internet and comment by taking bits and pieces. but Satyameva Jayate, Truth alone triumphs. regards, mukunda

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Siddharth replies to mukunda

11 hrs ago (02:36 PM)

If Varna is NOT determined by birth then tell me how many people were there in our entire history that were the born in the house of shudras but became Brahmins by their deeds? You just can't name it. Because a son of brahmin is always considered a brahmin and it is assumed that he did good deeds in his past life. and same goes for the shudras. Hence, encouragement of caste system.

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Rahul Bhalerao (bglr) replies to mukunda

21 Jul, 2011 10:41 PM

Why doesn't Geeta clearly say that it is not the birth that determines varna? why make ambiguous statements? Previous deeds/karma means what? The deeds/education/skills acquired in this birth or the popular interpretation of previous birth's karma? If deeds decide varna then just like deeds can keep changing why can't a varna change? If it is only the deeds that determine varna, why are the atrocities based on varna justified? Let the incompetent be poor, why do we need to torture them? Why doesn't it acknowledge the scientific and philosophical truth that all human beings are equal? Are all these confusions left like that so that it can be interpreted to justify the injustice in the name of varna and dharma? We don't know of practical goodness of the bright interpretations of Geeta but we certainly know the dark side of it, that varna is birth based and has caused injustice for thousands of years.

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mukunda replies to Rahul Bhalerao

11 hrs ago (02:48 PM)

Namaste Rahul,answers to your queries are below 1:"Why doesnt Geeta clearly say that it is not the birth that determines varna? why make ambiguous statements?" ans: its not ambiguous, in fact Sri Krishna clearly states the definition of varna as based ONLY on guna and karma.example: definition of sphere is : a sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object in three-dimensional space, such as the shape of a round ball(wikipedia).here the sphere is defined by categorically placing it in the shape of round and in 3D space. now i would definitely look foolish if i state that its ambigious since it doesnt state anything about squares or rectangle shapes(apart from circular/round). it doesnt include any other shapes since it does not categorically fall in any other shapes. likewise, when Sri Krishna is clearly telling varna is based ONLY on guna and karma, asking the question of janma is irrelevent since this definition is not proof by negation/proof by shortlisting. in ch 18 verse 41, Sri Krishna reaffirms about the varnas "brahmana-kshatriya-visam "O Arjuna, the karma/acitivities of the brahmanas,ksatriyas,vaisyas and sudras are clearly divided according to the gunas/qualities born of their own nature" 2: "previous deeds/karma means what? " again Sri Krishna defines karma as sanchita karma prarabdha karma aagama karma. 1. sanchita karma (karma in storage, karma already done) 2. prArabdha karma (karma that has begun to bear fruit,karma being done) 3. AgAmi karma (karma resulting from future activities). this is a very huge topic to cover here. 3:"If deeds decide varna then just like deeds can keep changing why can't a varna change? " ans:varna does change; a brahmana can become a shudra and vice versa. example: Brahmarishi Vishwamitra was a kshatriya Raja/king and his original name was Kaushika. He was a Kshatriya who became a Brahmana due to his deeds(becoming a Brahmarishi). since nobody is born to any varna, they can change varna depending on their karma and guna. regards,

Rahul Bhalerao:

Mukunda, it is good that you brought the point of altering Varna! I suggest you take a look at the research paper 'who were shudras' by Dr. Ambedkar. There are number of cases where you see varna being changed in mythological history. But the question remains the same, first of all why divide the society in general, and second how did this division became so robust, rigid and remained based on birth for all the practical reality of 3 thousand years? What was it in the religion that caused an apparently mere labor hierarchy into a rigid system of varna and caste that is present in all its glory? Start reading all these mythological scriptures in more un-religious manner and you find the answers. Just like any other society in world, the priest class of brahmins secured unequivocal powers in the times of darkness through religion. Your own Upanishads are the story of competition between kshatriyas and brahmins. Off-course it is not just the Gita that made the varna/caste system the way it is, there has been a steady and well thought process behind it with all the conflict of interests doing their part of the job. Brahmins corrupted Vedas to gain religious sanction for their authority. Kshatriyas in competition with brahmins to control the society made their own versions by posing themselves as the incarnation of Gods. And again brahmins proved their superiority by reciting the brahmin authority through God's own mouth. In order to make sure that the powers of one generation remain reserved for rest of the coming generations of the same class, Varna had to be made rigid. If only Karma was the determinant of one's destiny, then what is the explanation for all the rigidity over thousands of year? Why didn't these apparently great thoughts resulted in a great society? Varna/Caste system as we know and as has existed for thousands of years, is the greatest poison in our society. Now please don't make the futile claims of how great system it used to be and how it must have benefited people. Buddha has already condemned this system very strongly even 2500 years ago. No matter how hard you try to sugar coat a poison, it will still have its effect. The effect is what we have witnessed but the poison is still we deny.

By the way, we don't have problem with round shape being defined specifically and interpreted in one single way without any ambiguity, because there is no way it could be interpreted differently, neither there has been any proof to any interpretation of it being a square. That is mathematical conformance. Coming back to your Varna and Karma and geeta etc., we do know for sure that Varna is indeed practiced based on birth, we all know about the interpretation that the karma of past birth causes one to be born in particular Varna, and the belief that a particular Varna person has particular qualities suitable for that Varna only. All these are well propagated interpretations supporting the rigid system (not flexible as claimed by you) and accepted throughout the Indian society (irrespective of the caste they belonged to or religious practices they had). We don't say Brahmins or Kshatriyas established and manipulated the Varna system for their benefit because they are inherently a cunning race, no, but they did do it certainly and cunningly because they happened to have powers in their hands which made them corrupt. Now that we know the truth of this evident corruption, at least now we can stay away from everything that has caused this corruption in first place. This is the precise reason why no anti-caste movement has ever called for a crusade against brahmins or upper castes but have condemned and burnt all these scriptures that have given opportunity for corruption and caused all the misery.

Out of my 7 questions, only first three were attempted to be answered to some extent, which are appearing non-satisfactory from the above reply. The core of the matter lies in later 4 questions which are not answered by Geeta admirers but better answered through the theory of religion based caste formation for power politics which is well explained by Dr. Ambedkar.

The Kreate logo is done!

2010-07-27T12:37:00.005+05:30

It's been several months now that we have been brainstorming about the logo and caption. We all were thinking on lines of both creativity and value offerings. Gautam was continuously thinking on lines of how to communicate imagination and implementation parts simultaneously, the left and right of the brain. Many tag-lines popped up, but always there was something missing.

Finally, me and joy took up these two words from Gautam and simply put a dot between them. It sounded so crisp! 'Imagination.Implementation'!

Meanwhile, many of us were trying to come up with the design ideas. For me, playing with various shapes of 'K' and using whatever minuscule knowledge of calligraphy/typography I had, became my regular pass-time to keep myself awake in gaseous classrooms. In later stages, I got stuck on the idea of creating a character out of K that can personify the values we worked on so long. Finally emerged the k-man that is so carefree, cheerful, and aesthetic.

Joy took this design for digitization to Suvarna studio. My color vision not being so good, I left the coloring part to Joy's discretion with minimal theoretical inputs. All three of us were too amused by the head of the k-man. Some called it a cute leaf, some called it a droplet or dewdrop, whatever they could see out of it. It somehow became the logo of the logo and we wanted to put it everywhere we could! For me it was the source of creativity, nurturing and vision. I leave rest of the details of interpretation, including colors, shapes and caption to the viewers.

In final touch, the dot in the tag got replaced by this droplet, and following is what the logo of Kreate Media is now:

We decided to keep it transparent, and played with back-ground to get the nice looks..

Thanks to the entire team of Kreate for all the efforts right from conceptualization and brainstorming to the final implementation. Cheers!!

Are products more important than philosophies?

2010-07-23T07:37:00.005+05:30

[Continuing from previous post]..

Open source and free software community has been growing and preaching its philosophy for over decades. This preaching has also been supported by solid product lines that are freely available, better in performance and are more addictive than any other proprietary software around. Yet the ground realities of the software world are still largely favorable for proprietary model. Comparing market shares, or user base would be futile since open source hardly follows any market mechanism. It is very difficult to keep track of number of open source users. Hence the only method to understand the popularity and usage patterns is to call hundreds of common software users and ask them what software do they have on their home computers.

I have been a part of a marketing campaign and fortunate enough to be present in the actual execution at various places, which gave an opportunity of understanding thousands of common computer users. With no exception, all of the people involved had some version of windows installed on their machines. That is not to say that there isn't anyone who uses anything other than windows. In fact, I myself have not used windows in past 6 years and am very well aware of the circles where Linux-based systems are used as a principle and Mac OS is of course there among niche markets. But for a common man, a personal computer means windows, he doesn't care what operating system means, he only knows there is something called windows on his machine and there is some version of it which is latest. Coming back to open source in general, there are indeed a few open source softwares that have made successful penetration. The most important software on a home computer in today's world, when a computer is almost useless without internet, is the web browser. And the only open source software that people mentioned widely was, Mozilla Firefox. The major reason for its success was that it was freely downloadable, worked on windows, and performed better than the default browser IE. Many people in fact defended Firefox against IE on performance and features front. But I cannot imagine these people saying that they used it because its offering them some kind of a freedom. I have to admit that it was very unlikely that they knew that it falls under something called 'open source', same is the story with vlc, dc etc. They use it, because it works for them.

These observations may have a few variations depending upon various demographics and geographies, but overall I don't think it would be very objectionable if I try to generalize them.

Thus we see that, on one hand, few important products such as linux-based open source operating systems (fedora, ubuntu, debian etc.) are being successful on philosophical terms, they aren't yet successful as products themselves in terms of usage by common people, while there are products like firefox, that are successful in terms of common usage but not contributing much for the philosophical front.

I won't say one success is more important than other, but probably there is something to be learned from both of these cases. Every open source enthusiast would like to see success on both the fronts. The question is how to market the philosophy and the products simultaneously?

Would you look through a window or go out and play in open?

2010-07-19T11:10:00.002+05:30

Freedom of knowledge has always been worshiped across philosophies and religions all over the world. It has been applicable to the most fields of science and technology. This freedom has helped the growth of science, technology, and benefited the human world in every aspect. When Jonas Salk invented polio vaccine, he said "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" He did not try to hide its formula. When you buy a car, nobody stops you from opening its bonnet, fix a few problems, do a few modifications. That, is the freedom of knowledge, applied throughout the branches of science. But when it comes to software, abruptly, everyone starts hiding the source code, the formula behind it. You would be even denied from making similar kind of products, by means of patents. Some of the readers might have already guessed where I am taking this topic to.
[Those who know enough about foss, may skip the following paragraph.]

When you buy a software, it is most likely that you would be denied of few of the following freedoms:
1. You are not provided with the source code (consider it as the formula behind the software, that is necessary for making, modifying and improving that software, readable by most software programmers), neither you are allowed to ask for it, not even trying to re-engineer it.
2. You are not supposed to lend the software to anyone else.
3. Since you do not have the source code, you do not have the freedom to make any changes or improvements to that software, even if you are Bill Gates.
4. Leave alone making improvements and showing them to you friends, or start a garage for servicing these softwares.
Entire software industry has been very obsessive with protecting the secrecy of source codes and denial of these freedoms. It may sound trivial, but this denial of freedoms has sever implications for entire generation. After all software is also a piece of knowledge, like any mathematical or medical formula. Hence there has been a movement against such unethical practices, which we commonly know as Free and Open Source Software movement that strives for the realization of these freedoms, since 1984. For better understanding of rest of the articles, this was a very short introductory background of what open source and free software is all about. For more details refer to websites like gnu.org, opensource.org, fsf.org etc.

In spite of all these good things, during past 26 years of the movement, proprietary softwares have ruled the markets. Except for a few commercial successes, we do not see a general penetration of open source software among common users. Few softwares like Firefox and VLC, may have succeeded, but that hardly contributes to the awareness about the philosophical movement behind it. Why people are so ignorant about their dependence on few companies for the growth of the science behind computers? What is so wrong with accepting a product that ensures all the ethical and essential freedom, for almost no cost? Why this philosophy is yet to find a place in common mans living room?

A major problem here is that, common users do not understand what source code means and why is it so important. This restricts their understanding of the term 'open source' or 'free/freedom/libre' software, and leads to a notion of softwares that are free of cost. They also mistakenly relate it to early periods of computer science evolution when software used to be bundled with hardware without extra explicit charges.

In next few days, I am planning to do an unbiased analysis of the problems associated with open source and whether it has any scope for large, sustainable and inclusive success from the perspectives of business model, development model, marketing and most importantly the users' (consumer) behavior. Please excuse me if I am not able to express the humbleness of this attempt in words. Ideas, suggestions and feedbacks are always welcome!

[P.S. For simplicity and also as a personal preference I am using the terms 'free' and 'open source' interchangeably.]
[P.S. Thanks to RMS for giving us the analogy of car.]

अग्निपथ से धूलपथ तक!

2010-05-28T10:42:00.005+05:30

अक्सर दिल्ली की धूप में 'दोपहर' के १० बजे घरसे निकलो, तो अपनी ही दशा को देखकर सबसे बड़े बच्चनजी की पंक्तियाँ याद आती हैं।

यह महान दृश्य है, चल रहा मनुष्य है,
अश्रु-स्वेद-रक्त से लथपथ लथपथ लथपथ।
अग्निपथ अग्निपथ अग्निपथ...

किंतु आज तापमान में गिरावट और धूल-वायू की लहरों के चलते, दिल्ली की सड़कों को अग्निपथ से 'धूलपथ' में परिवर्तित होते पाया गया है। फिरभी देखा जाए, तो इसे उष्मा से मुक्ती का एक तात्कालिक ही सही लेकिन सुखद अनुभव कहा जा सकता है।

Prahlad Jani can be the survivor for India and most of the world

2010-05-11T21:25:00.003+05:30

On the lines of Baba Ramdev, Mataji Prahlad Jani should also start some kind of training institute to teach his unique art of surviving without food, water and bathroom for last 65 years or so. What is use of going through futile medical observations and creating a buzz on national media. If he is the man of god, better try to pass on this art to millions of Indians and if possible to other 3rd world citizens who have been sleeping without food for centuries, who have been wondering in deserts all their lives and who still have to use public places for all their bathroom activities.

One Baba is already bringing back health to these highly malnutrition-ed people of the country. Another should become the Buddha for them by eliminating their sorrows of hunger forever. Jai Mataji!

Mission Taj Mahal :)

2010-05-10T01:22:00.014+05:30

A very unplanned trip to Agra turned out to be pretty eventful. Having considered lot many people to join in, it actually ended up with only two of us die hard travelers to go on our own. Firstly, not getting on the spot tickets of train to Agra, I got into a tourist bus, that had its entire plan of the Agra-Mathura-Vrindavan trip pre-planned. Here is a short picture story.

First encounter is this huge Agra Fort which took three Mughal generations to build up. And we are allowed to see only 1/3rd of it!

Right in front of the fort is this hurriedly clicked, statue of Ch. Shivaji Maharaj. Aurangzeb would have never thought that once his prisoner, Shivaji, who made a great escape from this mighty fort would be standing as a proud statue in front of the fort itself!

Then there are several huge and beautiful buildings inside the fort.

Notice the Taj Mahal in background. This must be the only view for Shah Jahan himself for his last seven years spent imprisoned here :( .

Taking the Hot Seats :)

Amazing designs on the carved on the marble walls!

Then comes the real treat! The Taj Mahal!

I cannot imagine a structure more beautiful and marvelous than this. Simply amazing!

Oh! I forgot to mention, there was huge drama of missing the travel bus, then managing it to Taj on our own, and then facing a queue that would easily eat 3 hours. But with all the good luck, a friend surprised us by suddenly appearing in front of us, and it was a pleasant one that he was already almost at the front side of the queue with his family. It made our entry a lot more smoother!

Then there is one more interesting incident on our way back through Mathura, typed down here.

[PS: More pics on orkut and facebook.]

A good step ahead

2010-05-05T07:32:00.003+05:30

The Tamil Nadu state government in its IT policies declared two important points:
1. Unicode would be accepted as a standard for encoding Tamil
2. Tamil glossaries would be made available through Wiktionary

I think this is a really good step in a state where there has been a lot of fight and controversy over the encoding standard. As far the glossaries are concerned, Governments should always ensure the public accessibility of the digital resources being created in their institutes, be it glossaries, corpora, fonts or research papers.

Just hoping that these stated objectives would be achieved in a timely manner.

Read more at:
http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/04/stories/2010050454560400.htm

PVR is so wierd!

2010-05-01T15:50:00.003+05:30

Yesterday we went second time to a mall bit far from office to complete the earlier failed mission of watching this 3D movie, Clash of the Titans. On ticket counter, we were first told that evening show was house full. Then we asked for a night show, and were told there isn't any show then and the gentleman handed us the pamphlet of all movie schedules. We checked on the nearby digital kiosk and also on the printed schedule to be sure of the show timings. Then went to second counter, and asked the lady for the night show tickets, and without any problem got the tickets for back seats. In fact this show was hardly 20% full, wonder how the evening show became houseful.

But the biggest wonder/blunder is yet to come. On the entrance we were stopped for having a laptop bag along with (we had went straight after the office). In spite of having checked the bag, we were not allowed, because laptops were not allowed inside! Then we asked for keeping it at the baggage counter. But then, they also have a policy to not to keep laptops there! So we were blocked at the entrance and only solution just 5 mins before the show they had was to keep it in the car, or someone's home. Now our places are at least an hour far, and since we are only for a few days in Delhi, nobody has got a car.

Now I don't know what kind of rule is it that people can keep their bags unchecked at the counters but can neither carry nor keep in the safe if it contains laptop.

Then we found some suited man hovering around the ticket counter who looked like some manager and went to discuss the matter. Alas, he was equally unhelpful and showed us the rule lying somewhere in the corner, hidden within the list of many instructions, and written in a very small font size for public place. Finally after some arguments he agreed to let us keep the bag at counter with a judgmental statement that, since this is first time, he was allowing it (as if we were guilty of some crime).

Inside the hall, 3D glasses were small enough to make my original specs uncomfortable. We also noticed that, 3D effects are highly ineffective if being watched from side seats. Since hall was almost empty, we moved to center seats and it became slightly better. But one more problem with 3D glasses is that, they make the screen brightness and contrast considerably low. This I guess is not the problem with all movies and all halls, since some of the past experiences were much better.

So having spent almost twice of what other multiplexes charge on weekdays, we ended up watching the movie that wasn't so great.

Looking back, in spite of all the high-tech movies in past few months, these multiplexes have starved me of a good 3D action experience, leaving the most enjoyed 3D movie being the Chota Chetan.

Are viruses such a big problem?

2010-04-20T13:16:00.004+05:30

Reply to this and the kinds..

Its wonderful how the highly literate and even the ones considered to be belonging to the policy making cult, who do rigorous analysis of things and subjects of wide variety, end up coming to such ill-informed (should I say insane?) conclusions and opinions when it comes to simple computer security from viruses, trojans and spywares. Even the computerized CAT could not survive such attacks. Why not just use a system that isn't vulnerable to the viruses and is just simply more secure than anything else in its class? Its a 3 decade old fact that Unix like architecture/systems are highly immune to virus attacks. And it is not the lesser user spread causing less viruses being created but the simple architectural design that prevents the harmful program's actions. Let it be any of the Gnu/Linux distributions, Mac OS(again unix like) or any Unix, they are all immune to most of the security problems and many of them are very much desktop user friendly.

By the way, I was told in my 8th class that there exist evil minded psychopaths who create viruses just to enjoy the destruction of computers. I still cannot believe that they are able to create an industry on their own. Do they really exist?

Existence of internet criminals and crackers is sensible to believe, but psychopaths?

Its a high time that people realize that they are being fooled and its a high time for companies to realize that they cannot fool people forever.

Why spend on and trouble yourself with anti-viruses, and still be vulnerable to those viruses that are still not created and prevented by the current anti-virus programs? Why not just make all the viruses void altogether?

[P.S. Language in this post might be harsh, but that is the mildest I could express after hearing same things over and again from both the software and management gurus.]

Playing with GarageBand :)

2010-01-13T17:40:00.004+05:30

Long time no see :(

2009-12-05T14:12:00.012+05:30

Its been about six months since I have been distanced form the regular spheres of open source and language computing community, partly by choice, largely inevitable. It was obvious that contributions will decline after leaving Red Hat. Life at IIM has also been busier than expected. Problem with student life is that it gives you some degree of freedom, but at same time, puts enough constraints to ensure the under utilization of that freedom.

Feeling a bit sorry for missing the hat-trick for foss.in. It would have been third consecutive year of participation had I been able to do so this time. Hope things have been as interesting as ever at foss.in 2009.

Anyway. Meanwhile the only significant touch with foss has been being on the user side of it. I haven't found any instance of any linux distro (in use by students) on campus except the one I am running, that too as a parallel machine. Even the B-school guys seem to be reluctant to leave the windows world.

I used to wonder why many of the foss developers themselves enjoy using Apple products, especially Mac. Now I think I have an interpretation of it. Its best to work for open source products as a developer, but as a user you may be more content to use industry standards that have state-of-the-art technology. May be it is not all that bad, since it provides with checkpoints and models for open source products to look for. No wonder why many of the features are making the desktop distros resemble with Mac. I would personally like to see many of the Mac features on desktop gnu/linux and other foss apps. I am loving my mac but yet missing the flexibility, scalability and freedom of fedora.

The first two terms have been rapid with the second term about to get over soon. Rest of the month will be hectic for sure with many project deadlines and too many subjects for the end-terms. Wish the time-to-exam goes slow while time-to-break comes fast (more than being homesick, I am sick of this mountain now). I know both the things are not possible, but that's how the mind expects. :-)

Outputs from foss.in/2008 (new locale)

2008-12-13T14:19:00.001+05:30

"Show me the code" is really showing its outputs. With help from Gora Mohanty and Ravishankar Shrivastava, we now have a new Chhattisgarhi (hne_IN) locale defined in glibc with changelog:

""
2008-12-05  Ulrich Drepper  

 * SUPPORTED (SUPPORTED-LOCALES): Add hne_IN.

 * locales/hne_IN: New file.
 Contributed by Pravin Satpute .

""

Thanks Pravin and Urlich for making it upstream, http://sourceware.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/localedata/locales/hne_IN?cvsroot=glibc

I am sure there is a lot more to come in near future.

- Cheers!

Pics from foss.in

2008-12-03T18:01:00.005+05:30

We didn't have a great camera and skills with us but clicked every moment that looked interesting and worth saving. Here I have uploaded few pics taken from either Pravin's digicam or my cellphone cam. Lookout for ones that are tagged with 'fossin2008'. Apart from foss.in, there are few taken while wandering around in the city of Bangaluru. There are few more, but they would better fit in my orkut profile. cheers :)

Wrapping up at foss.in@2008

2008-11-29T12:11:00.002+05:30

With the start of 5th day, starts the end of a journey. A journey of talks, presentations, discussions, BoFs and of course the workouts at foss.in accompanied by a nice not-too-hot-not-too-cold rainy climate in Bangalore, negated by the depressed concerns about the terrible happenings back in Mumbai.

About the event, my personal highlights have been the talks, workouts and BoFs around Indic computing. It is interesting how the language computing forms a significant part of almost any foss event in India. The collation workout, Indic BoF, talks on text-to-speech, speech recognition, machine translations all went fine along with my own talk about language i18n support accompanied by Pravin on very first day. On other notes, the Nokia stall very well showcased maemo and N810, with the talks inline with the applications it runs.

The workout on collation helped update the status of all the Indic sorting and proceed with the remaining ones like Malayalam. Bengali still remains uncertain. It was nice to see how OLPC's 'sugar' attempts at going away from the traditional metaphors of files and folders, just something I had mentioned a day before in my presentation where I talked about the metaphoric localization. Apart from some formative steps in Indic Computing, what we could found is the students eager to contribute and the Tibetan community of developers in India.

Although the Talk was cheap this time, my feeling was that except for few, workouts were mostly dried up. I am not sure how much real code it produced but what I really missed there is the drive to attract more contributors. The talks probably did it better. May be next time they need to revise the concept.

Overall things have been good, not as huge as last year, but that could be intentional.

Have to return by today evening, means I'll miss the party!

Workout on Internationalization

2008-11-01T18:06:00.003+05:30

They say, "i18n is not a feature, its an architecture". Its not about downloading and configuring stuff around thats available somewhere in pieces, its about creating something that was not there at all.

Me and Pravin have been recently working on getting few of the yet-to-be (digitally) visible languages to meet a minimum technical support/usability criteria. On this background both of us came up with an idea of having a talk or demo on this at foss.in 2008. But looking at the amount of information and practical work involved with the entire thing, a workout looked like a more sound option. So we proposed the workout with title, "Creating Language Support Architecture (i18n) For A New Language On Desktop" which is right now in the first shortlist.
The plan is to start with essential theory and some demo about the work, followed by some real work with the help of participants. The proposed abstract is as follows..

Aim is to guide developers from languages that still need to be visible on desktop. The session will guide and call for participation to initiate work on new languages that have been ignored so far. The general agenda for the work out is as follows:

- Introduction to i18n
- Architecture of i18n/l10n
- Workshop/demo for adding a new language (e.g. Maithili/Kashmiri)
- Proceed with the workout:
-- Support in Unicode
-- Creating and adding "locale" file for glibc
-- A Unicode Font
-- Support in fontconfig
-- Shaping Engine
-- Creating Input Methods
-- Ensuring support on gdm
-- Other packages to support l10n activities
-- dictionaries, configurations, text-to-speech, translations, etc.
-- Working with community of all the developers

We expect work related to the languages such as kashmiri, manipuri, sindhi, konkani, bodo etc. be initiated at the workshop. Anyone having knowledge about such languages is highly welcome. All you need to know is some basic understanding of programming in linux. Knowledge and experience with i18n or l10n is a plus.

Some bits related to the subject were documented here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/I18N#Adding_Language_Support

Right now the workout got listed as a 'talk', but hopefully that will be resolved soon.

Proposing Minimum Criteria for I18N Support

2008-07-11T11:43:00.002+05:30

I think the term 'Language Support' has been used in more vague sense so far (please correct me if I am wrong). Also there has been a difference between a language being supported technically and a language that is supported with all the localization. Thus there has been a need to define the terms with more clarity. I think it would be good if we have two different sections for a language support namely, i18n and l10n.

Recently I have tried to formulate a minimum criteria for a language to have "I18N Support". The same is documented here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/I18N/LanguageSupportCriteria

On the same lines we may even have similar criteria for l10n support.

Although the above has been defined from fedora perspective, I hope it would be common for most other distributions. Feedbacks are welcome :-)

Kaarkkodakan fix for Pango

2008-06-10T14:09:00.003+05:30

The pango bug #441654 about mprefixups for Malayalam, better known as "Kaarkkodakan" issue has now undergone a history of one year and has caused a lot of pain among Malayalam users. It has also seen a lot of patches like this so far. But none of them neither solve the problem completely nor were they fit for Pango's coding style.

Now, finally I have come up with a patch that looks pretty much generic and does not affect the coding style much. Also the testing done so far proves to be fine. All the test cases reported so far have been fixed up without anything else getting affected. Manilal has also did his bit by doing the testing himself and posting the screen shots. Now if everything goes fine and Behdad's critical eye doesn't spot any problem :-), hope to see this one getting committed for next pango release soon.

Reply to Anivar

2008-05-05T12:32:00.004+05:30

It seems like there is some problem with comment posting on Anivar's blog. So I decide to put my reply as a separate blog post. Here it goes:

Few factual corrections and comments:
1. About the pango bug 357790 and the patch on it:
The patch on this bug is a mere clean up version of the patch on bug 121672 which was originally created by LingNing. This was also based on the inputs given by Ani about the grammar of 0d30 and 0d31 which was later resolved (to 0d30 only) through discussions with smc.
Point is not to transfer the responsibility, but to acknowledge that pango genuinely has a problem that it does not behave the way Uniscribe does. Another problem in this case is that, Uniscribe bahavior has changed from its version in XP to Vista and we are yet to fix this bug completely. Anyway, my patch was reverted one year back (see Comment #32 on bug 357790). Ever since then I have urged on concentrating on the original issue which I still continue to. And Lohit was agreed to be fixed temporarily to suite the current pango.

2. About the size details of Meera font:
First, Pravin compared Lohit vs Meera (not Rachana vs Meera). But I hope this was only a minor typo.
Second, as can be seen from the comments on Pravin's blog, he is not the only one to complain about this issue.
Third, the Ascent-Descent and Em-size you mentioned here defer from the font that was given for inclusion in fedora. The font given for fedora has Ascent=1147, Descent=901 and Em Size=2048.

3. About Hiran's fixes and bug reports:
Reporting a specific bug is always welcome , but comments like 'a font with 1000 bugs' and 'unfixable font' are the ones that I "personally" felt were 'agitation', although it is not necessarily a negative term.
Thanks to Hiran for his contributions towards lohit and samyak, and I still encourage him to do that. But there are reasons for not accepting his fixes directly. I think they should be understood in detailed and learned as a student to be more efficient in an open source development environment. The reasons are:

[i] Hiran's font has problem in its header section due to which every time the font is open for editing in fontforge, a notice is thrown out that the font has 'restricted license' and you need legal permissions to edit it.
[ii] The font provided by Hiran as a fixed version did not appear to be based on the latest version of .sfd in the cvs (now svn) repository.
[iii] I was not sure of all of his intended changes. As in any other project, Lohit needs to put a Changelog for every commit. So I had to copy the changes based on his email(I regret not forcing the bugzilla then) and the visible fixes in the ttf file.
[iv] Not being based on the original .sfd and not being submitted as an .sfd, there was possibility of cvs conflicts to occur. So it was necessary to create a cleaned diff patch out of his fixed font so that changes could be both recorded and committed without any hassles in the repository.
[v] I should have made him aware of all these factors, but I thought it would be kind of discouraging for him to do all the procedural details, so I did it on my own. May be I was wrong on this. I might post a detailed description of 'How to contribute to open source font projects' sometime soon.

4. About the authority:
I have not received any authority by just claiming it. If you are active on Indlinux community and other upstream mailing lists like gtk-i18n, gnome-i18n etc. you would know that I have got it (if any) through contributions only. My contributions are not limited to only one language but they span through entire Indic spectrum. Not that I over-estimate myself or under-estimate anyone, but do you have anything 'real' against me apart from bug 357790 to say that I have done harm to Malayalam? If one arguably incorrect fix means harm to language, what is your opinion about mistakenly done errors by other members. See bug 504810. It is evident here that the patch for Malayalam is mixed with section of Sinhala, probably a typo. Fortunately there is no side-effect of this detected so far. I wont even blame Praveen A, for mistakenly removing ZWJ flag that he corrected here, I wont say he has "harmed" Malayalam for about an year by doing so in his earlier patch. Things happen and you don't have to see things as black and white. Anyway if you are aware, we already had huge amount of discussion over '0d30' issue too. I may not even raise question about SMC's authority though and leave it up to the people of Kerala.

5. About the smc-fonts inclusion:
I don't know whether to call it duty or anything else. But those who attended my talk in foss.in last year know that including more fonts in fedora from community and for community was on my list of plans this year. We have managed to do that for few other languages as well like sarai-fonts for Hindi, madan-fonts for Nepali and few Thai fonts as well. Idea has been to give more options to the users and there is still a lot do on this plan.

6. Thanks for notifying the incorrect link on www.fedorahosted.org/lohit. It is corrected now.

7. The bug fixing on Lohit started long back in 2006. But continuous changes in the requirements given by various people (bugzillas have all the records), changes in pango, changes to OpenType and recently the changes required in font with reference to my 1st point above, the bugs were ought to be popped up every now and then. Thanks again for notifying the current rendering issues, which are mostly recent. I would appreciate to see them in bugzilla too. Anyone who wishes to do that please refer to i18n bug guidelines. Reading them wont be much effort as they are not too many, but they are certainly worth following.

8. Thanks for documenting the design issues in Lohit. In addition, I would also mention that the kerning and spacing between glyphs is not accurate, which is a major issue IMO that the font looks bad when viewed in paragraphs. This probably was introduced by the original designers when they resized the font to match the readable size.

Hope, we work with more cooperation and harmony.

Lohit, Fedora and Community

2008-05-02T18:03:00.004+05:30

First: _Some updates on Lohit Malayalam fonts_
Recently, there has been a huge agitation by Malayalam community about the bugs in the f9 final version of lohit fonts. You can get a glimpse of it here. Most of these were either last minute hickups or not reported at all until then. But whatever it was, the final product could not be buggy. So, within a short span of time, all these bugs (#444559, #444561, #444563) were fixed for Lohit and tagged into for the f9 final. So the version in fedora and latest upstream, lohit-2.2.1 is free of all these bugs. Malayalam users would be able to find the fixes in the following screenshot.
Second: _Some comments on the events going around_
After working for so many years on so many languages for so many different tools and applications, sometimes for some organizations, sometimes just out of passion, I (or should I say we, the language computing guys) have developed this immense love for all the languages of India. They are all rich in their heritage, tradition, beauty and dynamics and science. It really does not matter if you fluent with them or not. Most of them belong to the same family and those like tamil who are not are not the most complex of all. The only thing that matters is the dedication and the information about them. If you really had to be fluent in all the languages to develop technologies for them, I think no foriegn developer would have ever been come close to making the rendering technologies that we are using currently. It was not Indian developers alone to write Indic modules everywhere, it was not the Chinese developer alone to create technology for that language. We have to work as a global team when we work with i18n. There can be bugs but there may not be issues. But after reading comments on this post:

http://pravin-s.blogspot.com/2008/04/difference-between-malayalam-fonts.html

it felt really sad, disappointing and linguistically discriminating to hear the "malyalee vs non-malyalee" sort of language. I would request guys from SMC to review, rethink and re-evaluate their comments on logical, philosophical, and most importantly technical basis. After all the efforts put in by Fedora guys to include smc-fonts in f9 even after the schedule slippage, we are being blamed for not accepting a non-tested and a questionable feature long time after the development freeze has happened. At least there is a brighter side that all the bugs in Lohit have been fixed now. So even if people say Lohit is ugly, it is still a bug-free and most importantly a "readable" font in most general circumstances.

[PS. I believe that fedora values the freedom more than anything else. All the things happening around fedora are done openly through the processes accepted in fedora by the community. Any prominent developer, whoever might be his employer, can do things that are important for his fedora. My friend Dimitris would be an ideal example that comes to my mind that contribution is the only criteria to get the steering positions in fedora(and may be any real open source project), not the titles.]

Why translations are freezed before development?

2008-04-29T23:55:00.003+05:30

Some time back somebody talked to me about how illogical the schedule of fedora is, why do you have the translations deadline before the final development freeze. There is no point in freezing the translations when your development is still going on. Why don't you do it gnome's way? they don't freeze their translations before development!

Having received this unusual query all of a sudden and being far from internet connectivity to check the facts, I had no clear answer by then. But the logic had to be given.

To go by facts, the example about gnome was wrong! Check the gnome's schedule, they have string freeze (the term they use for translations) a lot before the code (development) freeze.

Having worked on both fedora and gnome l10n projects, I had an idea about the logic behind this, but I think it turned blur with the time. The logic is..

Development (or coding) and translations are two different tasks. In all the projects that need translations, have a set of language guys (generally more than the number of languages supported) who do the translations and set of developers who do the coding and packaging of their products. But to actually make the translations available in the software, the developers need to build(or compile) their packages including the translations done by the translators. Obviously you do not want translators from all the various languages to take care of building the package every time each one of them does some work. So to synchronize with the translations, whenever the developer needs to build his package, the translations at that moment of time are also built with it. Now imagine how difficult it would be for a translator to determine whether his translations actually made it to the final product or not, since he might do some work even after the developer has built his package for a particular freeze. Given the number of packages and loads involved with fedora or such products, it is impossible to expect all of the developers to build their packages all at once. So how do the translators get the deadline? Just keep some buffer period between translations and development freeze!

So translators know they have a particular deadline. All the work done till then should be available in the final product. Any work on translations done after that deadline cannot be expected in the current final product, but it will come in the next version of the product.

On the other hand developers can independently compile and build their packages for the final product, and without being worried about the translations done any time during the buffer period, be assured that whatever has been translated before the translation freeze is going into their package.

Otherwise how chaotic it would be for everyone, if developer has compiled the package and translator does some work after that and comes back to the developer asking for recompiling and so on.. The only solution to that would be to freeze everything, all the packages, all the coding and all the translations all at once! But that kind of coincident is far from possible even for products involving limited number of packages with developers spread all around the geography and working independently. Thus you can see why even gnome does it the way fedora does.

Oh, Ubuntu has something interesting too! Their LanguagePackTranslation deadline is same as the Release Candidate. But worth noting is that their 'NonLanguagePack'Translation freeze is preceding the final freeze. Now you guess why?

Unicode 5.1 release and Indic changes

2008-04-15T20:56:00.001+05:30

Unicode 5.1 release was announced earlier this month on 4th April. Here I have put a diff taken of Unicode 5.1 character database against that of Unicode 5.0. My buddy, Parag also did a nice job of summarizing the Indic specific changes, that I am trying to restate now.

So, here go the updates on Indian scripts UCD:

A. New Indic Scripts Added to Unicode:

1. LEPCHA:

Lepcha is a language spoken by the Lepcha people in Sikkim in India,and parts of Nepal and Bhutan. The Lepcha script (also known as "róng") is a syllabic script which has a lot of special marks and requires ligatures. Its genealogy is unclear. Early Lepcha manuscripts were written vertically, a sign of Chinese influence. Lepcha is considered to be one of the aboriginal languages of the area in which it is spoken.

Total number of speakers numbers near 50,000.

Unicode Range =>U1C00 to U1C4F

Chart URL => http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1C00.pdf

2. OL-CHIKI:

The Ol Chiki script, also known as Ol Cemetʼ ("language of writing"), Ol Ciki, Ol (and sometimes as the Santali alphabet), was created in 1925 by Pandit Raghunath Murmu for the Santali language. Santali is a language in the Munda subfamily of Austro-Asiatic, related to Ho and Mundari. It is spoken by about six million people in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan[citation needed]. Most of its speakers live in India, in the states of Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Orissa, Tripura, and West Bengal. It has its own alphabet, known as Ol Chiki, but literacy is very low, between 10 and 30%. Santali is spoken by the Santals.

Unicode Range => U1C50 to U1C7F

Chart URL => http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1C50.pdf

3. SAURASHTRA :

Saurashtra, more correctly, Sauraṣṭri or Sauraṣṭram or Sourashtra, also known as Palkar, Sowrashtra, Saurashtram, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in parts of the Southern Indian State of Tamil Nadu. The Saurashtra community is referred to by the same name, or sometimes by the Tamil name, Pattunoolkaarar. The Ethnologue puts the number of speakers at 510,000 (1997 IMA), although the actual number could be double this figure or even more.

Unicode Range => UA880 to UA8D9

Chart URL => http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UA880.pdf

B. Updates to Existing SCripts in Unicode:

1. DEVANAGARI (2 New Characters):

0971; SIGN HIGH SPACING DOT
0972; LETTER CANDRA A

2. GURMUKHI (2 New Characters):

0A51; SIGN UDAAT
0A75; SIGN YAKASH

3. ORIYA (3 New Characters):

0B44; VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC RR
0B62; VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC L
0B63; VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC LL

4. TAMIL (1 New Characters):

0BD0; OM

5. TELUGU (13 New Characters):

0C3D; SIGN AVAGRAHA
0C58; LETTER TSA
0C59; LETTER DZA
0C62; VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC L
0C63; VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC LL
0C78; FRACTION DIGIT ZERO FOR ODD POWERS OF FOUR
0C79; FRACTION DIGIT ONE FOR ODD POWERS OF FOUR
0C7A; FRACTION DIGIT TWO FOR ODD POWERS OF FOUR
0C7B; FRACTION DIGIT THREE FOR ODD POWERS OF FOUR
0C7C; FRACTION DIGIT ONE FOR EVEN POWERS OF FOUR
0C7D; FRACTION DIGIT TWO FOR EVEN POWERS OF FOUR
0C7E; FRACTION DIGIT THREE FOR EVEN POWERS OF FOUR
0C7F; SIGN TUUMU

6. MALAYALAM (17 New Characters):

0D3D; SIGN AVAGRAHA
0D44; VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC RR
0D62; VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC L
0D63; VOWEL SIGN VOCALIC LL
0D70; NUMBER TEN
0D71; NUMBER ONE HUNDRED
0D72; NUMBER ONE THOUSAND
0D73; FRACTION ONE QUARTER
0D74; FRACTION ONE HALF
0D75; FRACTION THREE QUARTERS
0D79; DATE MARK
0D7A; LETTER CHILLU NN
0D7B; LETTER CHILLU N
0D7C; LETTER CHILLU RR
0D7D; LETTER CHILLU L
0D7E; LETTER CHILLU LL
0D7F; LETTER CHILLU K

All the New Unicode Charts can now be found here:

http://www.unicode.org/charts/

Changes to Tamil and Malayalam have a lot more to discuss than just additional characters. On one side, I think Tamil community would be happy about Unicode rewarding Tamil Named Character Sequences to simplify the script processing, on other side, Malayalam community is not so happy about the Atomic Chillu Characters. Here is their opposition.

I am myself very happy about the 0972 (Letter Candra A) being added to Devanagari. This will help fixing the 'Apple' and 'Anaconda' for Marathi. Also, the inclusion of Ol-Chiki script is a very good initiative.

There is actually a lot of work to be done related to all these changes, ranging through fonts, rendering, keymaps, locales etc. I will have to come up with the details of all that very soon.

Do not buy gifts from Big Bazar

2008-04-14T02:26:00.002+05:30

..on Sundays.

This is a bit off topic, but just to warn others who might be interested.

If you are on a weekend shopping and are planning to buy some gift items, and don't want to give the gifts without proper covering, make sure if the shopping center or the mall wherever you are shopping is providing Gift Wrap service or not.

In a peculiar event this Sunday, the shopping assistant at Big Bazar (Vashi) informed us that the articles will be gift wrapped at their Costumer Service counter free of cost. But after clearing the cash counter, when we reached the C.S. counter, we were denied of the service saying that it is not provided on Sunday. huh? If there would have been a huge crowd, it could be still understood. But with their decaying reputation, this Sunday wasn't much busy at BB. The man on the counter was so much reluctant to provide the service that he actually offered us to take the goods back, sending us back to the floor we got it from and returning the money, but not to wrap it!!

This isn't the only example of arrogant behavior of BB staff. Every time you visit, someone will be found troubled. One of such very common observation is, Eight out of Ten cash counters are handled by ill-trained people causing each customer to spend Ten odd minutes resolving issues with the billing machine.

I cannot expect professionalism at these shopping centers to improve due to this blog post (there are already so many other online reviews), but at least some other customers will come to know about such small precautions.

Go round.. but which way?

2008-03-22T01:48:00.004+05:30

It all started with Kushal's query about python's strange behavior regarding % operator. But my own digging went on so much that I got tempted to write an entire post than just a reply. Kushal, you might find the answer for your query somewhere at the end.

Integer division is far more interesting than one could imagine. Especially when it comes to negative numbers. Even more interesting are the topics of remainder, modulo and truncation. In general, for given two integers N and D, you would simply divide the absolute values |N| by |D| and if only one of them carries negative sign you would mark the quotient negative otherwise positive, the remainder would carry the sign of N. Now take an example,
-2/3. Your quotient would be 0 and remainder would be -2. Now try the same thing on Python. You will get
-2/3 = -1 and -2%3 = 1.
Now lets rethink of both manual and python's results.
Your manual quotient is zero because the absolute value of N is less than that of D. But thinking in terms of absolute values is just a convenient method and not the fundamental operation of division. So what is it? Can we take 3 zero times so that we will be left with -2? Is it at all correct to get a negative remainder while the portion you have chosen to divide with is positive?

And what does python does to get this apparently incorrect result? In literal sense it takes away 3 one time from -2 and you are left with 1. It could actually take 3 any number of times and the remainder would change respectively. But in most of those cases, the remainder would be greater in its absolute value than 3, so lets discard them all. But the remainder -2 and +1 are both indivisible and lesser in absolute value than three. So what decides which way is the correct one?
Things might get even complicated in practical sense with negative divisors.

Now consider the rational division which is approximately -0.6666. Thus computationally you can round it to -1. But consider -1/3. Here the rational division is -0.3333. But still, python gives the result as -1. So which way is python rounding the numbers when it comes to division? Lets take 2/3, python gives 2/3=0, which is the correct quotient. But the exact division is 0.6666 which could be rounded up to 1 rather than 0. Actually there are various ways you can truncate a given number to an integer,
1. towards the nearest integer,
2. towards zero
3. away from zero
4. round up i.e. always to the greater integer
5. and finally round down i.e. always towards lesser integer.

Manually we chose the option #2. But Python in case of division is observed to be always rounding DOWN. That is why a positive 0.6666 is rounded down to 0 and negative -0.6666 is rounded further down to -1 and not 0. This works for positive integers, but does it for negatives as well? Shouldn't it be towards zero when it comes to integer division? This is probably the reason why python behaves differently for negative number's division and modulo(%). A general formula to calculate remainder is:

rem(N,D) = N - (N/D)*D

So, assuming rounding down as python does(i.e. -2/3 = -1), the remainder for -2/3 this way comes out to be 1.
If you consider rounding up, or the manual calculation (i.e. -2/3 = 0), the remainder comes out to be -2.

So which one is correct? Lets examine few tests from maths itself.
One rule says,
(-N)/D = N/(-D) = - (N/D)

This is where python fails. Because -2/3= -1 while -(2/3) = 0.
But there is one case where python would give you the correct practical answer with the same computations. Lets first see how do we use mod functions in real life. Assume the current time in a 12 hour clock to be 9:00. You want to see what will it show after 4 hours?
So you do 9+4 which is 13 and then take the modulo 12 of this i.e. (9+4)%12=1 i.e. the remainder when you divide 13 by 12.

The same way if you want to know what time it was 10 hours back you would do:

(9-10) % 12
= -1 % 12

Going by normal way of division and remainder, you find out -1/12=0 and the remainder is -1. But which 12hr practical clock will ever show you the time to be -1? None.

Now lets do it python way. You take the division -1/12=-1 (i.e. rounding down to -1), thus according to above mentioned formula the remainder is:

-1 - (-1/12) * 12 = -1 - (-1) *12 = -1 + 12 =11

Practically 10 hours before 9 is also always 11. So python is correct here giving (9-10)%12= 11. Hurray :-)

Now one more fundamental question, is modulo, which is generally what we call the % operator, the same number as the remainder in division or not? Answer is No. After looking around for the difference between remainder and modulo, I found this: http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52343.html
Scroll down on the above page to get the table that illustrates different values of rem and mod functions. Now you would know that the analysis in this post is partly based on the above reference.

So finally whats the conclusion? About maths, I still could not find an affirmative source that would deny the condition (-N)/D=N/(-D)=-(N/D) and use of absolute values. So most probably python is wrong about the division, but its still only a doubt.

When it comes to modulo operator %, Python lives up to its name, i.e. modulo and returns the correct value instead of the mere remainder. This might be an effect of the probable inaccuracy in division. But its hard to imagine if it was unintentional. Specially since its different from C which leaves the confusion up to the compiler which in most cases follows the other way of correct quotient and wrong modulo. So the developers of python must be aware about this. It would be really nice if some of them could explain their own intentions and solve this riddle.