लेखन

Designing for scalability – a startup perspective

2017-06-27T12:35:00.000+05:30

What is scale? Is it the number of customers a company has? Is it the number of products that are sold? Is it the amount of revenue the company makes? Is it the amount of infrastructure one has? Or is it the number of features the product has? Well, it can be all of this or none of this. When an organization talks about scale it is not just a number. When an economist talks about it, again it’s not just a number. For an economist, the scale is about doing more with less. Scale is about perspective, about relationship between two or more variables that ultimately help you generate optimum value for your efforts.

Consider this, let’s say you are into making a lollipop. Selling 10 lollipops you earn $100 revenue of which $10 is you profit and $90 is the cost. When you increase you production you start selling 100 lollypops and earn $1000 revenue with $100 as your profit and $900 as cost. Did you really benefit from the scale here? In absolute terms, of course. In terms of ratios though, nothing has changed. Your costs are still 90% of the revenues, your cost per lollipop is still $9. Is this the scalability you would like to achieve for a sustainable business? From economic perspective, there is zero gain from this scaling as the law of economies of scale has not been realized. What if your costs actually shoot up and become $950? You are indeed not benefited from the scale. What if tomorrow, the demand for lollipops shrinks suddenly and you end up selling only 50 of them? Would your costs still be at 90% or what if the extra infrastructure that you have bought for higher production pushes your costs to $800? This is a very simple example, but the point here is that when you talk about scalability, it is not just the gigantic numbers we throw out, it is about the relationship between them and how do you benefit the most out of it.

Check out this cartoon from xkcd on what scale is not:

Source: xkcd.com/1737/

A good scalable system, whether it is manufacturing or IT, inherently must have two properties:

Higher the scale (of production), lower must be the cost per unit of produce
It must be a bidirectional scalability, meaning, it should be possible to scale upwards for higher demands and scale downward for lower demands with minimal impact on cost per unit of production.

The first property comes from economics while second comes from technology. This is what the entire cloud computing economy is based on. If this is not considered while designing a software system on cloud, it may turn out to be a futile exercise of following the herd on to the cloud without reaping the true benefits of a truly scalable application and cloud infrastructure.

It is important to understand that scalability does no come as an off the shelf product, just hosting your site on cloud won’t make it scalable. It is important to understand that true scalability lies in the design. The design of not just the infrastructure but also the software would eventually impact the total scalability. Think of it in terms of web 2.0 practices. Had there been no extensive use of ajax methods and caching techniques, we would still be loading pages after pages jamming the networks, overloading the servers, apart from tiring the users with 90s internet.

While the established big players have already learned the tricks of the trade through experience and past failures, they have indeed evolved with and helped building the right ecosystem for computing scalability, the most startups don’t see the opportunity to do it right since the first step of implementation. Let’s talk about all these factors that would affect scalability and how a startup/new project can cope with it in detail in further posts.

Featured in the 'Startup of the Week!' from SBC

2017-05-22T18:26:00.001+05:30

We have recently been featured as the startup of the week on the StartupBootCamp Fintech Mumbai website. Just sharing the link to the original post by SBC here:

https://www.startupbootcamp.org/blog/2017/05/fintech-mumbai-startup-week-manage-fortune/

Thats Sameer (Founder and CEO) and myself (CTO)

Will write more about the startup, what we do, how you may benefit from it and how has been our experience in separate posts. Till then, do check out our platform at ManageMyFortune.com

Asking for a slate that already is written into!

2017-04-22T16:51:00.001+05:30

If I give you a slate or a notebook and a chalk or pencil, would you respond by complaining that it does not have anything written on it? Well that is how most educationist view technology as and that is what the problem with technology providers is. We are so habituated to fast food instant noodle, that we want even our slates to be pre-written by someone else. The marketeers have lost the vision of utility of slate so much that they are still busy in selling slates with pre-written alphabets on them, and they are not giving you any chalk for your own writing as well.

Sounds absurd? Then remove slate and notebook, and put in its place the modern technology, computers, laptops, tablets and online learning solutions. In place of chalk and pencil, consider your ability to create and modify your own digital knowledge. Of the hundreds of e-learning, online tutorials, online courses, are there any that focus on giving their learners the experience of creating knowledge on their own, putting it in practice, collaborate with peers and evaluate based on this collective learning? Most products in this space today are driven by the shortsighted product and marketing choices that focus on quickly showing the returns, KPIs that measure the success of the platform, not necessarily that of the people who learn through it.

I would not like to name the platforms, but if a website providing videos of pre-recorded coursework comes to your mind when you think of e-learning or the term edu-tech, then the point is already made. This is not to say that there aren't any platforms which kept this essence of learning alive in their core product design. Unfortunately, there needs a lot of training for the users of these platforms to make them work efficiently. The result is that, even on these platforms, people have gone back to the same pattern of instructor-to-student model of one-way information.

Another problem is the overemphasis on the mobile and tablet use cases. Yes these are great technological advances but are they suitable for every use case? Are these devices and the software they run with suitable for a complete learning experience? Are there any success stories from the hyped educational tablets that came out recently? Problem is, this form factor allows very little creative space. Forget about running advanced scientific simulations, is it even comfortable to make fairly well formatted documents on them? A learner needs experimentation, creation of things she is learning about, whether physical or virtual, visualization of concepts, sharing the thought models or the artworks, collaborate with fellow learners. In place of all of this, what profit driven markets are giving today is merely the content to be consumed. In past, we did some efforts to correct this, but could not stand long enough against the profit driven consumerism of education. Hope some sense prevails in coming times and technology does not remain a non-writable slate but an accelerator of knowledge.

Fedora 21 Release Party Mumbai

2014-12-26T16:22:00.000+05:30

On Sunday, 21st December 2014, we had the Fedora 21 Release Party at Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education (TIFR). I thought I would put together few major points from the event as a report and follow-up. But it seems few participants have already done a good job of writing excellent reports on the event. So just wish to pass on links to their blogs for detailed reports. If you are wondering what's there to report on a small party like this, then please do read them, they may seem interesting and educating.

1. Trupti Kini's take on the event

2. Praveen Kumar's report as a speaker

Thanks to both Trupti and Praveen!

Special thanks to HBCSE and the team in Gnowledge lab, and especially Dr. Nagarjun who has been our inspiration for working on free software, for helping us out in managing the event, letting us use the space, and most importantly guiding us for future directions.

[P.S. Will write separately about the contemplation over and ideas that emerged during the wonderful discussions at the party. ]

Teach how to think and not what to think

2014-09-21T21:43:00.000+05:30

With the changing times and across levels of education, one thing that might have remained constant is that good teachers always teach how to think instead of being just the source of information on what to think. They use all the resources around them to help student's build their personalities. The goal of education cannot be mere preparation for earning livelihood in future. Coaching and training are enough for that purpose and anyone with proper access to the information can gain enough knowledge to earn a living. Better society is not formed by better earning future generation alone, it is formed by better ideas, innovation and evolution of human values, generation after generation.

Given the technological advances and access to enormous information, students of 21st century are not dependent on formal coaching for making ends meet. Before a teacher starts teaching a topic in classroom, some of the students may already have number of different pieces of information on the topic which may very well be differing from the textbook version of the facts, not any particular of them being necessarily the correct one. This makes the role of teachers in the process of education of 21st century even more critical and challenging.

In the vast sea of information, teachers first need to learn fast on their own, be updated on the various perspectives on the same topic, learn from the students, and above all of this, they need to be the guides who will ensure that the learners are going in the right direction while surfing through all the information. While technology brings lot of resources for teachers, it also makes their role even more challenging. The more reluctant teachers are to adapting this change, the more directionless will be the future generations.

So should the teachers gain a lot of knowledge? Should they really know which direction is correct for each of the students? That would fairly impractical and inefficient. So while being updated on the teaching resources, the teachers need to be able to guide and mentor their students on certain basic values which will help them filter the information for its rationality, correctness, interest, ethics and practicality. There would be more such basic values and each teacher needs to develop them on their own. But once the students get the sufficient 'coaching' on these while learning the set courses, there is more likelihood that they would neither be lost in the amount of content, nor be restricted in their perspectives. This would further help them be more self-driven, innovative and practical. Once these values are imbibed, they would be sufficiently equipped to both sustaining a livelihood as well as making a better society of their own.

Teachers need not just remain the source of information, either from textbooks or from internet, either on paper or on the screen, they just need to provide proper pointers on what to look out for, how to filter that, and further encourage its practical use by means of 'creating' various kinds of useful resources from that. For doing all these, they can very well make use of the technology solutions, which facilitate creationism, collaboration, prototyping, and automation for the mundane tasks.

Launching the project 'i18nWidgets for Android'

2014-09-18T04:28:00.000+05:30

A lot of Android devices, platforms and apps have several issues regarding rendering of non-English text especially that of Indic text. Though many of them claim to support various Indic and other languages, it usually either means that they have a font for that language included or they have some of the native apps supporting all these languages. But this does not mean all the app will be able to render the non-English text properly. This usually happens for one of the following problem being present:

1. No fonts added in the device (or the native android system)

2. Fonts are not accessible by the third party application

3. App has its own Unicode font, but the native android system does not support text layout rendering for the language

4. App has the font and the android system also supports the language, but the sdk for the particular platform does not have widgets integrated with the complex text rendering features.

This problem gave birth to the idea of developing and extending android widgets which will be integrated with text layout and rendering system on their own. So that, the apps that make use of these widgets will have their own independent rendering system free from the underlying bugs and limitations of the base android system.

The good part is, we do not need to rewrite those rendering systems. The two very well known projects that we need to make use of are Harfbuzz and Freetype. Harfbuzz for text layout of the complex scripts, and Freetype for drawing the font glyphs.

So, this is what the project 'i18nWidgets for Android' is, under which we are developing independent widgets for app development which will have their own complex text rendering support through integration with freetype and harfbuzz libraries.

The project can be found on GitHub: https://github.com/GnowTantra/i18nWidgets

The project tree is already made suitable for using with eclipse and hence is readily testable from within eclipse. There are three dependencies to take care of while building:

1. Andoroid SDK 14/15: You may have to configure your development environment for Android SDK 14/15

2. Android NDK 8: Make sure to have NDK 8 support enabled.

3. Also have the appcompat_v7_2 library added properly to the project dependencies.

Please make sure to have exact sdk and ndk versions setup, as the project includes working with native C/C++ libraries along with android platform and hence may run into tedious binary incompatibility issues if not built with proper resources. I have made best attempt to keep things simple for working within eclipse, but do go through the documentation of above development environment thoroughly if you are new to developing native android apps, in case you are struck at some compilation issue.

The project tree has following important components:

1. /jni : This contains the complex-script-rendering library that integrates Android Java widget with the C/C++ libraries of Harfbuzz and Freetype. The entire source tree of particular working snapshot of HB and FT are given in the repo to avoid any incompatibilities during the compilation. Also their makefiles are tuned to work with the given setup.

2. /src/gujaratirendering : This package contains a widget IndicTextView, an extension to the TextView widget which can render Gujarati text. Currently

3. /src/com/example/i18nwidgetdemo: This is a demo package for testing the the IndicTextView widget with sample text on a simple app screen with Lohit-Gujarati font.

4. /assets: It contains the Lohit-Gujarati font to be used in the demo app

The library complex-script-rendering is based on the original work from Shiva Kumar, and is enhanced and made more generic. Indeed the attempt is to make it further generic and extendable.

As of now, the project supports text rendering on app being developed for ICS platform and Gujarati language, but the language is not a necessarily limitation. Its just that I tried it with one language to start with, and this can be easily extended and made flexible for auto-supporting any language on the fly. Currently, one will have to make a small change in the complex-script-rendering.c to support language other than Gujarati and add the font of the respective language.

The objectives of the project are:

1. To further improve the library and the widgets code (may involve a lot of code cleaning to fit the norms)

2. Add support for all the languages, by detecting the language of the running text

3. Add more extended widgets to support complete android SDK

4. Create and maintain different branches supporting different android platforms

As of now the platform supported is Android 4.0.3 ICS. One would argue why support an older revision, but that's exactly where the problem is relevant. As many of the lower end widely used android devices are still to upgrade to the latest version, there are vast number of users still struggling to use their native languages, where as the developers who wish to maintain compatibility with these devices are also struggling while making apps for those users.

While the language support on android systems and their sdk is continuously improving, there is no reason why an independent, reliable, native lang support cannot be added to the apps with help of widgets developed in such manner. This would only improve the reach of technology to those who are facing the economical and linguistic barriers.

Installing fonts on Android, simple yet unnecessarily tricky

2014-08-25T14:13:00.000+05:30

Most android devices come with set of fonts already installed for all the general purpose use with variety of styles and various languages. There is also something called 'fallback' font which ensures that in case a required font is not available, the system falls back to this font with wide range of characters and more generic style to display the text. But sometimes, you really want to use that specific font which is not there on the device or you just 'have' to use a some non-english font because the system by default does not have the font for the language you wish to use. Though upfront it looks like a simple task of installing the font, unfortunately android does not yet provide a simple way of doing it in user space. It is possible for an application to provide a custom font and use it within the application, but that's not really installing it on the device, its applicable only within the app.

Recently while working with some Indic languages on android, I was faced with this problem where I had to display Kannada and Gujarati in browser, but my old ICS device, did not have any Gujarati or Kannada font by default. So I started looking for an app for installing fonts. Interestingly every app I could find required the phone to be rooted. Rooting the device for such a simple task! But anyway had to do it, and that's actually not very difficult with ready to use apps like vroot. Next downloaded one of the popular font installing app, iFont. Good thing about iFont is it provides numerous fonts by default, so if any of them suites your purpose, you may go ahead with it. But if the font you want is not listed, you need to add it to the app and then install it from there. So went ahead and installed the Gujarati font using iFont, it gave some sort of warning that things may break somehow, which I of course ignored. Reboot. And things did break down. All of the text on my screen was just vanished, except for few bits of Gujarati somewhere. So following just the icons, I started the iFont again and somehow figured out the section where my font was listed and tried uninstalling it. Reboot. And everything was back. That was scary for a simple font addition.

Later I figured out from the application logs, what exactly this iFont did. It simply took the backup of DroidSansFallback.ttf font on the system and replaced it with my font. It meant all the characters (glyphs) in fallback font other than Gujarati were gone. For weird reasons, my system was looking into DroidSansFallback.ttf for displaying the normal English text on screen. Hence all the text was vanished. In any case whatever iFont was doing did not seem promising and it also appeared that most available font installers did the same thing. So I fell back to look for a manual procedure.

In general font installing involves just two things, copying the font file to specific location and sourcing some configuration file to declare few properties to the system. On desktops, these things mostly happen automatically, or at the most you have to click the install button and it does everything required. The basic procedure on android is also similar, just that there is no direct button yet. So once the phone/device is rooted, this is what you need to do:

1. Copy the font file to /system/fonts/ directory.

2. Add an entry in some xml file for the font.

Of these, step '1' can be done in multiple ways. but most commonly you will have to use adb shell to get access to the device file system. There is enough documentation on installing android developer environments and using adb shell over internet depending upon your operating system. So not repeating all that. So once connected by adb shell, you can simply use 'adb push MyFont.ttf /system/fonts/MyFont.ttf' to push the font file from computer to the direct path on the phone. Or you may also use 'adb shell' to get shell access of the android system. By default android will not provide 'cp' command, so you may have to use 'cat inputfile -> outputfile' method to copy. Or you may also download 'busybox' to get ease of using all the general purpose linux commands on android shell.

For the step '2', again we do not have luxury of fontconfig like tool for configuring everything. So you need to check the font properties, such as 'font-family' on your own, any font viewer on the desktop system would be able to show that much. Now if you have already done the 'busybox' thing mentioned earlier, you may directly use 'vi editor' on the 'adb shell' or you may get the xml file copied to the desktop machine by 'adb pull file', edit on desktop and then push to the device. The file you need to look for is '/system/etc/fallback_fonts.xml'. See the file '/system/etc/system_fonts.xml' for more details on format and possible parameters. Save the file on the device after making proper entries for your font and your font would be installed on the system after reboot.

If you are already used to accessing and editing android system files, this should be a simple two step procedure, otherwise you may need a little getting used to and few google searches to get your way to safely accessing and editing system files. Sorry for not giving the step-by-step guide on this, but that was never the purpose.

Ideally, there shouldn't have been a need to root the phone in first place for simple font installation. It should have been possible to install the font in user domain by simply keeping font file in some user accessible location and a related xml file for describing it. Did not get the logic behind keeping it so inaccessible to common people. Anyone would have done a simple app to give user interface to it. I may not be aware, but if anyone knows better on this, I would love to know it. If indeed there is no other proper way than rooting the device, I think android should give it a serious thought to improve font management, even integrating fontconfig by default may be enough for this.

Apart from that, the apps like iFont can also do away with dangerously insane modification of fallback font. It virtually disables everything that needs to fall back, and given the number of languages, a lot of people do need to fall back for basic viewing of text. Anyway the app needs root access, so why not use it responsibly and make only intended changes to simple configuration files instead of other shortcuts. Hopefully the upcoming versions of android will have better font management by default, especially since use of non-english languages is consistently growing on mobile platform where this feature could become increasingly critical.

[Also read at: GnowTantra]

15th Aug, Independence Day, a Beggar and a Tea

2014-08-19T05:20:00.000+05:30

On this 15th August, afternoon, I was sipping on a tea at a roadside stall, sitting on a bench, waiting for a colleague, when I heard an aged female voice over my head, 'चहा पाजतु का दादा' ('would you help with some tea'). Before I could realize that there was a fairly old couple, woman having a limped leg, and old man, mostly her husband in 70s, were asking the two cab drivers for some tea, the cab drivers responded, 'पाजतु ना' (sure why not). I generally have a strict rule of not heeding to the pleas of beggars (and I have my moral position on that considering the beggar mafia openly ruling the streets in Mumbai), but once in a while some one catches your attention and you just can't help stopping yourself from doing something if not just giving away 2 rupees. This time the instant assurance of the cab driver to buy them two cups of tea caught my eye and especially ear. The old couple did not look exactly like beggars, their clothes were fine for someone from rural area, just helpless people out of home, out of money and without any support at all. The driver asked her about her situation, whether she has a family etc. to which the woman told him about her only son, a drunkard, who is selling off every vessel and nut of the house for his liquor, his beaten up wife has left the house and prefers staying at her parents, even the land and farm in the village are on the way to get sold, the son has lost so much of himself that he even runs after his father with a knife in hand for money for his drink. So finally, they have been thrown out to roam on streets and beg for 2 rupees as the old man could not get any physical work, while woman was already on one leg and a stick in hand. Quite a heart-touching story it was, and for most of it, it looked real.

I was silently appreciating the cab drivers kindness of lending the tea for two, just then he said something to the woman, something so drastic, unimaginable, sudden and sharp, that it took that moment to a completely different level for me. "Now listen to me, do one thing, both of you, there's a railway-station nearby, just go there. Walk a few yards beyond the platform and then just sleep on the tracks. And ohh yes! bring your son too and make him go under the train before you go." Cruel. Disgusting insults on two lives of more than 70 years by someone in his 30s, in exchange of two 'cutting chai' Rs 6 each. Realization of why one poor showed some pity on another poor, for being able to insult in such a way and enjoy the authority to do so for just 12 bucks was worse than my own cruel rule of ignoring beggars and a little guilt that follows at times. But that was not the end. The woman was adamant for continuation of her son's life, as well as her own. Death was not an option for her, life, no matter what it meant had to be lived. I didn't understand the need of her 2-3 sentences of adamant denial to the man who advised death, but appreciated the will to survive.

Once this was settled, the drivers gone, and couple calmly sipping the tea, I initiated a talk with the woman with no specific plan. As she went on about her helplessness, and as she said 'our nature is of giving not begging, but have to do it', it had both a reflection of a decent past, a little bit of pride, and huge hollowness of everything before survival. With an intent to help in a more meaningful manner, I asked her to stop roaming around like beggars at this age, asked if she knew anything about any charitable organizations nearby. On knowing that the couple knew nothing of the sorts, I gave them options where they could find some help. At least a roof, and some food on daily basis. This included some charitable orphanages, Temple trusts, rich spiritual shrines nearby, including a Balaji temple, Gurudwara, Sai Baba temple, a list of social and govt organizations who could help, and were within few minutes distance by train, the nearest of them being a Buddha vihar at a 5 mins of walking distance. She looked intrigued and willing to consider those suggestions over the option of begging on streets. But then something happened that took me on another mental journey altogether.

This woman, defeated by life, defeated by the conditions, betrayed by her own blood, having been asked to die in exchange of two cutting chai, having lost the meaning of her life if anything was there, came closer and in a slightly lowered voice, repeated the list of places I suggested, took names of all the gods, whose named trusts I suggested, went on adding gods from her own list, and said she will go to any of them, Balaji will do, even Sai Baba will do, "but I will NOT go to the Buddha temple!" Shocked and taken aback, I tried to recompose and asked "why not, its just there, beyond this street" but "No, not that. No Buddha temple!"

My friend had arrived, he called me out, and off we went. I kept looking back for a while, not sure if indeed physically turning my neck or just in my thoughts, but her words kept coming back.

Its not that I didn't get what she meant, she certainly did not know a thing about Buddha's teachings, so there was no way I could take it as an offence against Buddha, also since I wasn't selling her any religion or preaching there, merely advising on what places she could go, being an atheist actually listing most of the temples, her choice of any of them had no bearing on what I should have felt. But why would a woman, in her condition, rather than making a simple choice of where she should go, takes efforts to let me know where she would NOT go, no matter what. So all my educated and intellectual friends, please spare a moment to think over it why this would have happened. Why for a poor Hindu (ahh well there were enough signs on them to suggest that, so don't bring up the stereotypical allegation of stereotyping religion. Sometimes common sense prevails), a Sikh charity is all right, any imaginary god is fine, government is fine, even a Muslim sage is fine, but not a very own Indian real person of the stature of Buddha whose teachings have shaped major part of our accommodating non-violent culture, not so fine? Put your grey cells to work and make me understand the contradiction to the intellectual Indian's constant rhetoric that Buddha is very much Hindu and very much a part of the same system, just another 'panth'(branch), in the same family of spiritual and cultural traditions against the practicality of this unusual separatism.

No, its not just Buddha. Of course he does not fit as well as the intellectuals try to fit him into the Indian Hindu nationalist spiritual rhetoric. But there is something deeper than that. If you know even a little bit about rural Maharashtra, Buddha means only one thing, the new God of the 'untouchable' people, the 'untouchable God'. By all means the emotional journey over the sad life of a poor old couple, took me through several planes and suddenly dropped in the pile of castes. Making me realize that even beggars could have a false-pride, note that its not your good romantic self-esteem, its an outrageous, unnatural, hollow pride. And my dear friends, I know some of you who love me a little extra would be jumping to put the credit of bringing caste into this, but no, it was forced. Forced by the woman thrashed on the roads, by her own son, still having a hollow sense of pride and separatism based on a very 'important(?)' aspect of her life, the caste. Being unnecessarily looked down or rejected by the people with possessions is not at all new for someone from depressed class, but being looked down, for no reason from someone with no possessions, no powers, no resources and no knowledge, only on the basis of a false sense of caste-pride and that hollow dignity was all new experience that intellectual educated Indians will rarely understand. No my dear friends, its not that a beggar cannot look down upon someone, its not that a beggar cannot have a self-esteem, every researcher and every sage who lives on donation amounts and free alms is a beggar, so any beggar with apt possessions in various moral and ethical forms can and should have the dignity, self-esteem, self-respect, but when its based on something as stupid and as ugly as caste, its not a self-esteem, its a farce, ugly farce, that's going on for generations after generations. Its everywhere, and each one of the depressed class human, and not just human but even their God, is facing it every day. I could give number of examples of casteist attitudes and insults thrown towards people I know personally, experiences of my own, but don't want to dilute the intensity of this one experience, they are more of a regular offences, everybody likes to turn blind eye to them. But no matter how much you deny, caste is 'the' en-slaver of Indian mind, just remember how you got married or how in future you would and you would know what I mean. The society and the mind of Indians are still not free from this mental gutter which does transform itself into physical plagues on a regular basis. The freedom is a long awaited dream and far away target. Hope the real freedom will rise some day. May the old couple get to any one of the place and spend their remaining life in peace and in search of meaning, not just bread and pride.

[P.S. So my educated intellectual friends, no matter what your opinions are, on what basis they are formed, and no matter how much you declare yourself not guilty of being part and fuel in this entire scheme of caste based discrimination, atrocious culture and separatism, if you utter a word about caste being just a political tool, not a social evil as much, it being only irrelevant and non-existent or a non-significant problem, and claim that your religion(whichever it is) has no base for this menace, and its the dalits/untouchables that are responsible for its existence, just imagine the level of sanity that would be attributed to you. If there is any anger or bitterness in my words, its not against the poor lady, she is just another slave of the system, so the anger is against this system, against this culture. Also this is not just a random rambling, yes there would be proactive opponents who would ask what's the use of all these rants. But before going into the usefulness of words against actions and before some outrageous good-for-nothing person asks about the evidence of action(the usual 'what have YOU done'), let me remind that I am not obliged to answer that, this is a collection words and thoughts based on personal experience without any specific target, apart from a simple objective of expression and hope that even if some of the people realize how deep rooted the imprints of caste and its false pride and divisiveness are on the Indian mind, even if only a few realize how much disservice this attitude of forced separatism with false superiority is doing towards overall economic, social and spiritual growth of the people of this country and people who follow this culture, even if only one person at a time changes his/her mental attitude on reading such snippets of experiences, it would be enough for this much writing effort. You don't inhale each breath with a plan to change the world, with every breath its only the oxygen that matters, rest goes on independently. Hope sane people get sane message to ponder upon from this slightly painful but a lot more disturbing experience. (uff, see how many defenses one has to be prepared with even before talking about such topics in a supposedly free speech society!)]

My takeaways from FUEL GILT Conference 2013

2013-09-11T22:07:00.002+05:30

This is going to be a long post and I am going to think aloud while typing it out. So before you lose interest, first of all, let me thank both Red Hat and CDAC for jointly hosting the FUEL-GILT Conference 2013. The 2 days conference at Pune not just helped the default objective of advancing on the Fuel project but also revived the Indic computing community. It is after a long time that the stalwarts of Indian Language technology all got together on the same platform and worked on ideas and tasks that have been waiting for a long time. The significant highlight of the event has to be the growing harmony and collaboration between the technologists, linguists, Government bodies and Open Source community.

So what is FUEL? Going by the words on the brochure and what I understand over the years, FUEL started with a simple idea of standardizing the most commonly used entries in the menus and submenus of a desktop and hence the name FUEL (Frequently Used Entries for Localization). Today the concept has gone on to cover the web and mobile platforms as well. It may look like a simple idea, but considering the impact that it has on the use of ICT on various platforms in various languages, it actually addresses a very important issue. Its absence can very well deteriorate the effective elimination of linguistic barrier in technology. No wonder it has grown on to cover more than 40 languages and eGovernance standards in India are taking it seriously in their guidelines. For more on FUEL project see this and this.

The conference started with the special address from Mr. Satish Mohan of Red Hat and Mr. M. D. Kulkarni of CDAC. Both of them highlighted the progress and achievement so far in the field of Indian Language Computing and also gave some crucial directions on way forward and thing yet undone. Although organized under the banner of FUEL, the stage was set for contemplating on problems and ideas related to language computing which were left aside for a long time at least in the open source community.

Talking about the ideas and initiatives, the ones worth noting had to be Zanata translation management tool, hadoop based auto-translation framework, UTRRS testing system for text rendering, matrix based translation assessment system, standardization or guidelines for indic fonts, issues and ideas on indic typing on mobile, automatic language detection for input methods and last but not least my own appeal to extend FUEL efforts for vertical specific localization.

In my humble opinion, there exist a lot of translation management tools, but what is necessary is to make them more user-friendly, improve their capability in suggesting translations and ensuring consistency of terminology. In this respect I think Zanata does have the features and capabilities to smoothen the process of accurate translations and I am really hopeful that it will grow towards these goals. What I would like to see though in near future is a public portal of something like Zanata that will help both the upstream and downstream localization. Such a portal can become a very prominent starting point for any localization project and help new projects benefit from the translation memories created by the work done in previous ones.

We have been looking at the google translations for a long time now. It does have a good support for European languages, but so far the performance with Indian languages has not been very impressive. Now making an auto-translation work seamlessly is not an easy task. It requires mammoth efforts, not just the backend technology but also the not so technical training of the algorithms and linguistic resources that these backend frameworks can make use of. It won’t be a sane thought if we expect one organization or team to achieve all of it. It certainly needs efforts from hundreds of dedicated developers and linguists. From this perspective, the hadoop based framework discussed by Mr. Rajat Gupta may provide a strong technical framework. But to switch the plug on and make the machine translation giant work, it’s going to need enormous amount of data corpus fed to it. I am neither an expert on the quality of translation framework nor do I know of the plans to feed the machine, but it would be really great if they indeed succeed in their efforts on collecting the unorganized data. I would love to see the development of this get into the public domain and get help from crowd-sourcing at least on the data side.

For those who do not know about UTRRS, it’s the testing reference system for rendering of local language scripts. Satyabrata Maitra gave nice introduction of the system that was long awaited in the open source community, especially the ones concerned about the consistent rendering of Indic fonts. Hope this gives a headstart to the efforts of developing more Indic fonts that are bug-free across applications and platforms. There is a discussion going on renaming this system and my vote goes for SUTRA which not just appears to be a sensible Indic word but also reflects the meaning of the system i.e. equation, in a sense this framework provides us the equations to verify against for testing local fonts’ rendering.

Right since 2004 when I and my team started working on developing Samyak fonts, one of our major focuses was to ensure standard multilingual text usage. We not only tried to standardize styles and sizes of the fonts among the Indic scripts that we developed the font for but also with the Latin text that can co-exist with Indic text. On day 2 of the conference, Guntupalli Karunakar presented ideas and need for standardizing the font features and giving various levels of compatibility to the Indic fonts based on the complex set of rules they support. The discussions went on to cover the problems of intermixing the text from various scripts and ensuring similar look and feel, especially the size and line widths, the same issue we have been trying to resolve for so long. I think there needs to be a general guideline on the em-sizes and alignments for font developers to ensure compatibility with at least few of the most commonly used Latin fonts. In the offline, I discussed the issue along with few of my suggestions with Peiying Mo of Mozilla and one of my friends, the Indic font designer Ravi Pande. I am planning to look closer on this issue and come up with few guidelines that I will try to implement with Samyak fonts and if possible on Lohit as well.

Coming to the mobile platform, it seems with the progress in smartphone developments and android, the language computing on mobile platform is gaining pace. When Anivar Arvind presented the developments and problems in mobile Indic computing, I was reminded of the same major hurdle, an efficient input method. Considering the complexities of the Indic scripts and large character sets, no matter how big the phones get in size, they are still small for efficient input. Considering that users are yet to get acquainted with the typing on desktop, its actually a far-stretched hope that same input mechanisms will thrive on the mobile platform. Let’s assume that the screen size is also not an issue and we can have sufficiently large tablet displays, still typing on a touch-screen is a lot different than a physical keyboard, especially the need to hold ‘shift’ key so frequently while typing in Indian languages using some of the traditional keyboard layout. I personally use Ashoka map on my android phone but it’s not even complete let alone efficient. At GnowTantra, we have been researching about the various accessibility solutions including the ones that not only bridge linguistic barriers but also help blind users in their daily activities using handheld devices. I think we got a new topic and direction to think over now.

Pravin Satpute from Red Hat’s i18n team presented an innovative idea for seamless multi-lingual typing. He discussed the possibility of detecting the language being typed without the user having to switch between layouts every time the language changes. I surely get irritated when I am talking via text and have to switch the language whenever there is a word from English that comes inevitable. It would be good to get something like this actually implemented although I am not sure how effectively such system can handle the ambiguities of language detection, I hope it becomes possible to some extent at least for non-phonetic layouts such as inscript.

Talking about my own contributions to the conference, I made an appeal to extend FUEL to various verticals apart from ICT. This comes from our recent experience at GnowTantra when we worked on globalization of an application in the Accounting domain. We realized that the difficulties in working on a particular vertical are not covered during the general ICT localization. It needs a more focused approach and contributions from specialists of the vertical from various linguistic backgrounds. And even if we do it for one application, we do not solve the problem for other applications in the same vertical since there is no standard guideline. Hence FUEL. Thanks to Rajesh for accepting this request in the panel discussion. I myself and GnowTantra would like to contribute in whichever way possible towards these efforts. Verticals ensure specific solutions for specific problems, and hence unless we work on consistent solutions to increase the reach of these specific solutions, technology will not become accessible and useful to the masses.

Apart from all these technicalities and difficulties, one of the issues highlighted through various talks including the ones by Mr. Ravikant, Mr. Ravishankar Shrivastava and few others, was the usefulness of the translated terms in conveying the meaning. This gives us a direction that the language is supposed to convey meaning and not just an alternative word. A lot of interesting discussions went on about Hinglish, Minglish, Malinglish and so on.

So these are my takeaways from the conference. But the most important and fortunate thing that happened and in my opinion benefited both the community and the FUEL project was the keynote from Mr. Sam Pitroda. He joined over video conference, and shared his ideas, concerns and assurance to help the development of Indic computing solutions. I think this is one area of computing that needs collaboration than anything else. Mr. Pitroda highlighted the importance of language computing and assured the government’s sustained collaborative efforts in the field. I hope he takes closer look into opening up huge wealth of linguistic resources such as literature, language corpus, research material etc. that is available with the government institutes but not yet into the public domain. He talked about convincing the academic institutes to publish their PhD research works over internet for people and also governments preference to Open Soruce. In spite of the cultural barriers he mentioned about non-sharing of knowledge resources in the country, this has to be very encouraging for the community, future of Indic computing and reach of the technology in general.

I would once again like to thank the organizers and especially Mr. Rajesh Ranjan, "the man behind FUEL" and my ex-colleague from Red Hat for making it a successful project and an event. We hope to see even more significant achievements and more such events in the future.

[P.S. : Everything written here is my personal thought process and it may not be accurate. Hope we have only healthy discussions. J]

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!