Manufacturing might

I am amazed at how good China is in manufacturing everything that was ever to be made. Especially toys. Pretty much every toy you can buy - both in stores and foot paths, are now made in China. I bought a little plastic bird, fitted with a motion sensor, a speaker and a little 'button' cell, so that it chirps when it senses any movement near it. They can make it in a huge factory somewhere in China, ship it all the way to India, possibly Chennai, transport it on road to Bangalore, distribute to stockists, resellers and foot-path vendors and they can still sell it for a meagre 20 Rupees. What should be the cost of manufacturing the toy? At what price can they sell this toy in the town it is manufactured at? While this is terrific, what is even more amazing is that if you want to replace the battery in the toy, you will need to shell out 40-70 Rupees. Do your math now!

Bangalore? Bengaluru?

Bangalore is on it's way to become Bengaluru. There are people who like the change and there are people who don't. There is yet another class of people who cannot make up their mind either way. They spell it "Bangalooru" :-)

A feature I wish for

I sometimes connect my laptop to an LCD monitor at work. The monitor supports lower resolution than what my laptop supports. Hence I often keep switching between two resolutions on my GNOME desktop. When I switch to higher resolution, all my windows retain their old size (pixel-wise), so they turn out to be too small. I need to manually resize each window to my taste.

What I need is a way to set the size of the window to be relative to the size of the desktop. That is, I want all my terminal windows to be around 75% of the width of the desktop and 100% of the height of the desktop, excluding the taskbars. I want my pidgin IRC client to be 50% in width and 75% in height. Is that even possible with the existing GNOME desktop? If not, is it possible with any other desktop on Linux? If not, I wonder whether any other OS has such a feature.

Weird problem with Linux file system

How big is the problem of your hard disk drive getting full? If it is anything like what happened to me, LOTS. I am still trying to come to terms with all that happened on my laptop.

Like any self-respecting geek, I run Linux as my primary desktop. In fact I have 3 Linux distros installed on my fairly small hard disk. As a result, most of my disk partitions are filled to the brim. Sometimes I need to delete stuff from my disk even to make way for even a 300MB file. On my Fedora9 partition, I have both root and /home on the same partition. On one of the unfortunate days last week, while I was compiling some code, the partition reached 100% full. I wasn't alarmed, after all, how bad can this be? But it was going to be quite bad.

The first thing that I noticed was that bash command history did not work. The next bash shell I spawned did not show a proper prompt (PS1). Little investigation showed that my ~/.bash* files did not exist any more! I frantically started looking at my $HOME to noticed that a number of small files, like my custom scripts directory, were missing. I don't know what else and how much more I have lost. Didn't I back up my entire home dir? Yeah, right.

I know, this is NOT what you expect and people will tell me this cannot happen. Unless I am trying one of the bleeding edge file systems. But I was on good old ext3. I did not find any hint about this in kernel messages. I tried googling for this, but this problem is very difficult to phrase and my attempts did not hit anything. I wonder whether anyone who reads this blog has hit such a problem or have any idea what might have happened. One more thing: I am NOT willing to try to recreate this problem ;-)

Scripts I use

These are a couple of scripts I use to convert files between media formats. The only advantage of using these is that I don't need to remember all the crazy command line options.

rm_to_wav.sh
--------------------
basename=`echo $1 |awk -F. '{print $1}'`
mplayer -cache 32 -ao pcm -ao pcm:file=$basename.wav $1


wav_to_mp3.sh
----------------------
basename=`echo $1 |awk -F. '{print $1}'`
lame -V2 $1 $basename.mp3


Usage:
-----------
rm_to_wav.sh filename.rm
wav_to_mp3.sh filename.wav

FOSS.in 2008

FOSS.in conference is over! As I mentioned in my previous post, I gave a talk there. What do I feel about how the event went?

First, the bad things.

This year's conference had an unique, unprecedented build up. It all started with this Atul's post. It turned out to be very controversial and it put off a lot of people, especially abroad. I am not guessing this. I met a few people at Linux Kongress this year, who personally told me that they felt unwelcome at FOSS.in this year and hence refrained from sending a talk proposal. The organizers provided some clarification towards the end of the year, but the damage had been done.

Next, the global economic meltdown meant finding money for sponsoring the event was going to be tough, because very few companies were willing to spend money on this. This meant low propaganda for the event, leading to much lower anticipation building up to the event. All this led to much smaller number of delegates this year. Someone who had been to FOSS.in 2007 would immediately recognize the difference.

Now the good things.

FOSS.in organizers did a lot of things right, especially as the conference approached. First, they corrected some of the misconceptions in the minds of people, especially with this post.

Secondly, they communicated effectively with the speakers to ensure the workout sessions, which was the most unique thing about this year's conference, were planned pretty well.

Third, they showed the openness to Linux kernel talks, thus alleviating one of the biggest complaints from my team at work. In fact they stepped back and let the people who know about kernel plan sessions related to this area.

They ensured that the conference ran smoothly by ensuring that a lot of little things were taken care of well. Food was good, biscuits served with tea were even better. Little things like running around and getting us more extension cords for workout sessions, ensuring that logistics at the conference were handled well go a long way in enhancing satisfaction in the minds of attendees. I also liked the "Show me the..." theme.

There was live streaming of talks from the main hall, which was another cool thing.

The talks themselves were pretty good, but I think they could have been better. I really enjoyed the closing note by Kalyan Varma. While his photos were obviously very good, it was clear that he had prepared a lot for this talk and it showed in the class his talk exhibited.

Finally, there were far too many good things about the conference than bad ones. The event was an overall success. Talks, workouts, logistics, everything was a success. Lower turnout compared to last year was expected, hence I can't say that was a failure either. I don't know what the organizers are thinking about FOSS.in 2009, but I hope they retain the format of this year and just polish up some of the rough edges. I hope the people who participated in FOSS.in 2008 will come back with much more enthusiasm next year and get their friends involved. The Linux kernel people will surely be more interested about the conference next year. I hope we will be able to advertise the event much better next year, which hopefully will bring in much more sponsorship money. This conference is surely one of the better organized FOSS conferences in the world, I hope it only gets better.

My talk at FOSS.in

Hey, I will be talking at FOSS.in today! The talk can be heard live online. Just point your media player to http://radioverve.com/foss.in.pls!

One of my best photos

I obviously have thousands of photos of her by now, but this one most deserves to be here on my blog as well.

My crazy thoughts

For lack of a better one, this blog post will go with this stupid title. These are some random thoughts that have run through my mind. Only when I tried to express them in writing did I realize how vague these thoughts are.

Lets say an air plane crashes somewhere in the world and 50 people die. Lets say another 50 people die in a train or bus accident. Guess which of these gets the maximum coverage in our news media?

Lets say 20 people die on a particular day in a bus accident in Bangalore. Let's say another 20 individuals die in various isolated (lets say, 10) accidents across Bangalore on the same day. Now guess which of these becomes the major news story in news papers and news channels and which doesn't?

Lets say 20 people die in a bomb blast in some city. On the same day, more people would have died due to reasons like deadly diseases in the same city. Which one becomes the 'breaking news' that evening? More US soldiers die in motorcycle accidents than in Iraq. While there is a huge hue and cry over the latter, the former hardly ever gets mentioned.

Let's consider another scenario. MNS activists beating up a North Indian in Mumbai is a much bigger news than dacoits breaking into a house in Mumbai, killing it's residents and running away with valuables. Isn't that strange? Hari has wondered why Article 355 was not imposed on Maharashtra Government because it did not protect the North Indians from miscreants. I wonder how different it is from protecting the locals from dacoits. If the purpose behind the crime determines it's significance, there are a number of such hate crimes which don't hog any limelight.

A techie doing anything, including committing suicide is a much bigger news than a non-techie doing it.

Well, I don't just blame the media for this. It is how most people think as well. A lot of people may think this is just normal. However, it intrigues me to know that the value of life (or death) depends on the mode in which it was lost and what the profession of the person was. The world is a strange place.

Photo from Deepavali

One of my better photos from this Deepavali. I was randomly exposing it for 2 seconds and I happened to catch this firework by luck. No doubt there is noise because it was at ISO200, but what else can you expect from a puny Canon A520? The view is from the terrace of my home, looking north towards BTM 2nd Stage.

Speed limit for tanks

Remember, if you drive your tank to Hamburg, please follow the speed limits! Yes, the German traffic cop won't mind if you drive a war tank right into the market street, as far as you are driving within speed limits. I wonder whether shooting at the building all around is allowed. But then, if I am really driving a tank, do I care?

PS: Some intense googling revealed that these are weight limits, not speed limits. It still doesn't make complete sense, but much better.

Car car car!!!

It was not as if I did not know about it, but still, the sheer percentage of high-end cars on the roads of Hamburg was impressive. If it was not a Mercedes, it would be an Audi or BMW or Skoda. Volkswagens were a dime a dozen, somewhat like the Alto on Indian roads. Most of the taxis were Mercedes and so were the police cars. There were very few Japanese or Korean cars to be found. The only American brand that I could easily sight was Ford. Unless you count Opel, of course.


However, not everyone in Hamburg can be rich. Hence I was bound to see some low-end cars as well. The ones that used to catch my attention were the ones sold in India. I first spotted a Suzuki Swift and then a Hyundai Getz. So the claim by these guys that these are global cars is kind of true.



Next, I found a Chevy Spark, named Matiz. Oh, so there are people who buy Chevy in this country.










But I was not ready for the next big surprise... I spotted.... a Hyundai Santro Xing. Yes, a Santro!! It was called "Atos Prime" here. Seeing the humble Santro rubbing shoulders with the likes of Alpha Romeos and Audis has increased my respect for my own Santro.

Funs of machine translation

Google may be one of the best at what they do, but even they cannot translate natural languages perfectly. This is fine most of the time, but leads to some hilarious bloopers once in a while. I saw a fine example of this a few days ago while I was researching about Germany. Take a look.

Original German text:
Wir möchten uns für Ihr Interesse an unserem Unternehmen bedanken und begrüßen SIe hier auf unseren Internetseiten.
Translation by Babelfish:
We would like to thank you and welcome for your interest in our enterprise they here on our Internet sites.
Translation by Google translate:
We apologize for your interest in our company to thank and welcome you here on our web pages.

Proof in the picture below.
P.S: After going on a trip, it is now so customary to blog about it, that it almost seems like a rule. Hence I am going to write a bit about my Germany trip in the coming days.

Linux Kongress

I will be speaking at the Linux Kongress conference next week. My talk is related to the real-time Linux kernel. This is the first time I will be visiting Germany and I am looking forward to it. Please wish me luck.

This is not fair!

No, not fair at all. Absolutely not. Just when I was wondering why newly joined employees in my office behave so differently from the way I used to behave back then, I see this article which says there is a generation gap between junior and senior students in the same college, who differ by just 2 years in age. I wonder what these kids would think of me... may be same as what I think about ancient Egyptian civilization.

2 years? Is that all it takes to create generation gap? It is as if the Orkut generation is different from the Facebook generation, which itself is ancient compared to the Twitter generation. What about people who started off with Yahoo Groups? Listen to me people, a generation is around 30 years. Or at least 20. Not 2. Okay? Do you listen?

Chitranna Chitranna

ನಾನು ಸಾಧಾರಣವಾಗಿ ಸುಮಧುರ, ಮಂದಗತಿಯ, ಉತ್ತಮ ಸಾಹಿತ್ಯವಿರುವ ಹಾಡುಗಳನ್ನೇ ಕೇಳಲು ಇಷ್ಟ ಪಡುತ್ತೇನೆ. ಒಮ್ಮೊಮ್ಮೆ ಇದಕ್ಕೆ ತದ್ವಿರುದ್ಧವಾದ, 'ಗಲಾಟೆ' ತುಂಬಿರುವ ಹಾಡುಗಳೂ ಇಷ್ಟವಾಗುತ್ತವೆ. ಆದರೆ ಇಂಥಹ ಹಾಡುಗಳು ಬಹಳ ದಿನವೇನೂ favourite ಆಗಿ ಉಳಿಯುವುದಿಲ್ಲ. 'ಮುಂಗಾರು ಮಳೆ'ಯ ನಂತರ ಹೆಚ್ಚಿನ ಸಂಗೀತ ನಿರ್ದೇಶಕರು ಅದೇ 'ಫಾರ್ಮುಲ' ಅನುಸರಿಸಿ ಮಧುರ ಗೀತೆಗಳನ್ನು ನೀಡಲು ಪ್ರಯತ್ನಿಸುತ್ತಿರುವುದರಿಂದ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ನನಗೆ ಇಷ್ಟ ಆಗುವ fast beats ಇರುವ ಹಾಡುಗಳೇ ಬಂದಿರಲಿಲ್ಲ. ಆದರೆ ಕಳೆದ ವಾರದಿಂದ ಚಿತ್ರಾನ್ನ ಚಿತ್ರಾನ್ನ ಹಾಡು ನನ್ನ ಮನಸ್ಸನ್ನು ಹಿಡಿದಿಡುವಲ್ಲಿ ಯಶಸ್ವಿಯಾಗಿದೆ. ಇದರ ಟ್ಯೂನ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ಒಂಥರಾ ಆಕರ್ಷಣೆ ಇದೆ. ಎಲ್ಲಾ ರೇಡಿಯೋ ಸ್ಟೇಷನ್ ಗಳೂ ಈ ಹಾಡನ್ನು ದಿನಕ್ಕೆ ನೂರು ಸಲ ಹಾಕಿ ಇದರ ಮೇಲೆ ವಾಕರಿಕೆ ಬರುವಂತೆ ಮಾಡುವುದು ಗ್ಯಾರೆಂಟಿ. ಆದರೆ ಅಲ್ಲಿಯವರೆಗೆ ಈ 'different' ಹಾಡು ನನಗಿಷ್ಟ.

Aid for one-handed steering

Anyone who drives in Bangalore's peak hour traffic will be good at steering with just one hand. The left hand is busy with changing between 1st and 2nd gears. Unless of course you drive an automatic. If we are going to do one-handed steering, we might as well make it easy. Now-a-days these knobs that cling on to a side of the steering wheel are becoming popular. It somehow caught my fancy and I bought one.


The knob turns internally, making it super-easy to make any complex turn, even a sharp U-turn with just one hand. It is also useful on a straight road, because it makes steering much easier. So far, I have liked it. If you have been thinking about buying it, I suggest you go right ahead.

How not to place your advertisements

This was an example of not planning the placement of your newspaper advertisement properly.

On Page 23, there is this news:
On Page 24, some more about this topic:
And on Page 26, this advertisement:

Buying a mobile phone

It is that time again.... time to buy a mobile phone. My old cell phone is still alive, but it doesn't have much life left in it. It is a trusted Nokia 3230. It was a prized possession when I bought it in 2005. It was a fashion statement. Now, looking back, I cannot figure how a phone that is as slow as that (a full 45 second boot-up time + 15 seconds for menu to get activated) could become such a big success. This phone has absorbed a lot of physical impact, like falling and rolling from Savanadurga hill, being dropped to ground innumerable times and so on. It has bruises all over to show for it's adventures. However, what gravity could not do, water did. It fell in a wash-basin when the tap was on!

I am a really slow decision maker, so I may not buy another phone just yet. I am not really too much electronics-crazy. However, we males have this strange brain model that makes us want a gadget that we don't need. This phone has a speakerphone with sub-woofer and home theatre support? Wow! That phone runs Linux? Can I run bash on it and run my python scripts? Tri-band phone is a necessity even though I never carry my phone abroad. That sort of creature we males are. No wonder handset manufacturers love us!

Thankfully, reality strikes us when we look at the prices. 31 freaking K for that snazzy new touchscreen phone? If I were spending that sort of money I would expect to get a laptop, not a cellphone. 25K for that phone that syncs my e-mail to the phone? Oh... I don't really need to see my mail on my mobile.... Eventually you settle for something that is still more than what you need, but less than what you want.

I have looked at the specs of a few phones. I am looking at a range of phones from Nokia 3600 the Sony-Ericsson P1i. I wonder which one I end up buying eventually. And when.

Update: I got my trusted 3230 resurrected by spending Rs. 650 and convinced myself that it can do everything I need from a mobile phone for now.

Jharkhand (Part 2)

It must have been a while since I wrote 2 posts on consecutive days! Here is part 2 of my Jamshedpur trip highlights.

We went to Bistupur main road a couple of times. This is the Brigade Road of Jamshedpur. Pretty neat.

We were looking for a vegetarian restaurant and were directed to one on Bistupur main road (where else?). This happened to be the place known for South Indian food. However, the restaurant seemed to be run by a North Indian, hence we decided to do what I have learnt over the years: Eat the local food. By the time we got rotis and subji on our table, we looked around the hall and saw everyone... I mean literally every single customer in the restaurant... including the locals, sardars, huge families... was eating dosa. Wow, I am sure the restaurant staff were laughing their guts out because we ordered rotis in that restaurant. We too quickly corrected ourselves and switched to a dosa.

Oh, by the way, we were in Jamshedpur because we were visiting NIT Jamshedpur. It seemed like any other NIT that I have visited. Pretty good facilities, pretty good students, good experience. What surprised me was how far from the main road was this place. It seemed to be connected to the main road by narrow and bad roads. This being a pretty old institution, I am not sure why they did not build it closer to the main roads or provided wide enough roads. I suspect the roads were wide, but were encroached upon over the years.

On the day we were leaving Jharkhand, our train was at 6:15AM. When we came out of the hotel at 5:30, we were surprised to see the amount of sunlight. We had gone more northwards and eastwards from Bangalore and it was the summer in Northern hemisphere, so I was expecting early sunrise. However, I was surprised to see the number of people already on the road. The town seemed to be more active at 5:30 than Bangalore is at 7AM.

Our return journey was in a train, so we were not going to experience the roads again. A couple of things in the train reminded us again about the amount of impact naxals have in this area. As we entered our coach, we saw a commando - in full gear with a machine gun, strolling in it. Later, as the train passed through a certain area, they closed and locked all doors from inside and pulled down all the window shutters. Wow!

After watching more paddy fields, we were back in Kolkata.

Jharkhand! (Part 1)

Recently, I got an opportunity to visit Jamshedpur. No, I am not writing a travelogue. That is the domain of guys like this. My expertise lie elsewhere. I am not sure exactly where, though. Hence I will just jot down some of the interesting things that happened in this trip in a systematic fashion that I call 'random'.

This was my first time ever in Jharkhand or undivided Bihar. There were 3 of us. We took a cab from Kolkata to Jamshedpur. It was an air-conditioned Toyota Innova, so we did not get to 'experience' Kolkata as such. I had seen the city before, but the folks with me kept saying the whole city looks like it is covered with soot... everything was of dull grey without much other color or shine. I know the reasons for this: 1) We were passing through the old part of the city 2) Kolkata's proximity to the sea. It is not easy to maintain the external paint of buildings in this weather.

The road we took - the highway to Mumbai was in excellent shape. However, good things can't last. We took a deviation from the highway near Kharagpur (of IIT fame) towards Jamshedpur. I have a big suspicion that at this stage our Innova somehow launched into space and landed on the moon. The 'national highway' that we were on had no resemblance whatsoever to the national highway we were on until then. The ideal vehicle for this road was not an Innova but a hovercraft.

Throughout our 6 hour journey, every single piece of agricultural land we saw on the sides of the road had paddy cultivated in it. We literally did not see a single other crop anywhere on the way. How's that?

We passed through a few villages, but we hardly saw any shops selling condiments. This is unlike the South India, where you can find a shop selling Kurkure, Bisleri and Pepsi even in smallest villages on the highway.

We saw a huge number of those long trucks carrying industrial produces, most of them steel products. Surprisingly, a disproportionately large number of them were Nagaland registered (NL). Yes, I have a habit of observing vehicle registration plates. Most of these trucks were carrying railway axles. There must some reason to Nagaland trucks plying on Jharkhand roads, like tax benefits, unless the railways are planning major rail network explansion in Nagaland. That would be fun, though. Trains on mountains, more locations to shoot songs like Chaiya Chaiya.

The only English newspaper easily available in Jamshedpur was "The Telegraph". Well, I know this is a historic, great newspaper and all, but I never thought this would be so popular in this state. In Kolkata, I can understand...

The Telegraph told us why the national highways were in the stage they were. Money had been approved for repairing them, tenders had been called multiple times, but nobody had placed a bid. This is because the naxals don't let any road repair work happen at all. We now quickly linked naxals to absense of condiment stores along the highway as well.

The public are not far too behind. Bus service between Ranchi (yeah, Dhoni's) and Jamshedpur was in dire conditions because of non-co-operation of general public. Bad condition of the roads and naxals only added to the trouble.

Parts of Jamshedpur are maintained by the tatas (Tatanagar) and the rest of the urban local body (municipality?) Tatanagar is a huge contrast to everything else we saw in Jharkhand. We saw the "Jubilee Park", which I must admit is one of the best maintained parks I have seen in a while.

Wow, I have written a lot! I never thought I would write so much. I have some more. In Part 2.

KDE hack

Everyone's needs from a Linux desktop is different from others. Hence each desktop is configured in a unique way. I have a couple of strange needs from my desktop, so mine is 'different' in it's own way.

I am a GNOME convert. However, there are some KDE apps I still like. For example, I use Kmail for my mails. Hence I install both KDE and GNOME on my system, but run GNOME as the default desktop. When I click on a web link in kmail, I want it to open in Firefox. However, by default kmail opens web links in Konqueror. This is because it uses KDE's default settings. So what I do is I go to KDE's control center and set the default application for html to be Firefox. This fixes the problem. Or it did all these days.

On My new Fedora 9 desktop, the above trick did not work. I suspect KDE4 that is shipped with Fedora9 does not like Firefox. I ensured that my GNOME
settings too make Firefox the default web browser, but web links still kept opening in Konqueror. I googled, but only found references to things I
had already tried.

Can I just remove konqueror from my system, since I don't use it anyway? Well, no. It is part of kdebase rpm. So it looks like Konqueror is closely tied to KDE. Hmm.. can I remove the konqueror binary from /usr/bin? When I did that, kmail did not open the weblinks at all. I suspect it reported an error somewhere that it could not find the browser, but it said nothing directly to me through an error window! Next, I wanted to find out how kmail finds out the browser application. After straceing and ltraceing kde binaries running on my system, I had found nothing.

That's when Srikar reminded me of an old trick in the bag. Replace /usr/bin/konqueror with a symlink to /usr/bin/firefox :) This of course worked as expected. I know it is a horrible hack. It must have broken a few things in the KDE desktop. However, I don't use KDE as the desktop. I just need apps. Hence, it works for me :)

Did this ever happen to you?

I was at one of my company's events recently and I was listening to a presentation. Some guy came and sat in the vacant seat next to mine. From my quick glance towards him, I figured that this is someone I know pretty well. I turned around and looked at his face. From the side view, I was quite confident that I know this person. I tapped his shoulder and said "Hi". He turned around and from the front, he looked quite different. He was not the person I thought he was, I had done a mistake. However, by this time this guy was in the game. From the looks on his face, I could easily tell he was totally confused inside and was trying to guess who I was. He of course tried not to show it on his face and replied "Hi. How are you doing? Which project are you in now?" What could I do? I too acted as if I knew him and exchanged pleasantries. At the end of the day, he must still be wondering who this stranger who spoke to him was.

Sarvam Bollywood Mayam

Another post about FM radio stations. Hopefully the last for a while.

Typically I listen to FM on my way to work. I keep switching stations at the rate of approximately 0.5 seconds. I think it is required by some biological law for men to keep switching TV channels and radio stations at this frequency. A couple of weeks back, I was pleasantly surprised to hear to some old(ish) Hindi music on one of the stations. Mithun's "I am a disco dancer" and such stuff. Only towards the end of my 1 hour journey I realized the reason behind this: The radio station was celebrating 25 years of India's cricket world-cup victory in 1983 and to make us recall how those days were, they were playing Bollywood songs from that year. It left me wondering how these guys can link anything to Bollywood.

However, nothing tops what I heard a few more days back on another radio station. It was the World Environment Day and there was a movie star in the studio to discuss about it. I guess the movie star knew as much about the environment as the squirrels know about space shuttles. However, the host was intelligent. She went "Hi ! Today is world environment day. Environment is all about greenery. So who do you think is the evergreen star of Bollywood."

LOL!!!!!

Traffic report on radio stations

What is one common program across all FM radio stations in Bangalore? Something that they play tens of times every day? Something that the radio stations want you to believe you cannot live without? Something that claims to make your life easy every day? Something, in spite of all these claims, is roughly as useful as navel lint? It is none other than traffic congestion report, of course.

First of all, the methodology used to obtain traffic congestion information is the biggest culprit. I have seen traffic reports coming out of helicopters in the US. Here in Bangalore, radio jockeys ask the commuters to send out traffic jam information to them and they in turn broadcast it to the entire city. The concept is nice, but sadly it doesn't work. The people stuck in a traffic jam often have no clue about the cause of the jam. Often, they don't want to or cannot get out of their cars to find out. However, they cannot control the urge to send out an SMS. Hence you hear reports like "The outer ring road is blocked all the way from Sarakki to Mysore Road". Hey, that is around 7KMs of jam. How does any one person know that the jam is that big?

Secondly, the information is often incomplete. In the evenings I always get to hear this: "Huge traffic pile-up reported in Madivala". Alternatively how about this: "Slow moving traffic on Airport Road". Well, where on Airport Road? Eastbound or westbound? Which parts of Madivala? This information is meaningful only when it is qualified with more details, like "Huge traffic pile-up on Hosur road, heading towards Electronics city, at Bommanahalli junction".

Lastly, in most cases, there is very little you can do with the information, even though it is accurate. In most areas on the outskirts of Bangalore, which are hardly planned, there are no alternative roads. For example, if I hear in the morning that Bannerghatta Road is choked north-bound, I still get on to that road, because I have no credible alternative. This would be true for most roads heading out of the city and the outer ring road. The only use of this traffic information would be to mentally prepare in advance to suffer. That is not much of a use, is it?

My Nokia thinks the headset is connected even though it isn't!

My old faithful Nokia 3230 showed the first real illness today. Well, first, if you don't count the hangs and instantaneous reboots sometimes seen, because that is almost a 'feature' of Symbian OS. The other thing to discount is the slowness. The phone is notoriously slow. How slow is it? From the time you power it on, you need to wait more than a minute to make your first phone call :) On the positive side, this phone has the best build quality I have seen. It has fallen from all sorts of places without showing any signs of damage, including one incidence when it was rolling down the Savanadurga hill.

Today, the phone claimed that the wired headset, which is both the hands-free and the FM radio device, is connected to the phone, even though the alleged headset was nowhere within 10 feet distance from the phone! The phone refused to send out voice through the speaker, turned off the built-in mic, instead expecting the headphone to do these jobs. Now phone was useless without the headset.

A bit of googling led me to all sorts of suggestions, like the rebooting ritual, hard power cycling ritual, firmware upgrade ritual. None of them worked. The other possibility was liquid ingression (scary terms which just means water getting into the phone) and malfunctioning of the data port pins of the phone. Finally, I left the phone in sunshine for an hour and voila, my phone had cured itself! All it needed was some Vitamin-D :-) The rituals of debugging mobile phone problems is very similar to debugging your computer problems (especially Windows), except computers don't need a suntan.

Does this ever happen to you?

I used to visit my grandfather's house quite often during my childhood. Of late, I go there quite rarely, because nobody lives in that house. Every time I visit the place now-a-days, a strange feeling happens to me. I feel the whole place is much 'smaller' than what is imprinted in my mind. The whole house, rooms in it, the surroundings, the private lake nearby, the front courtyard, everything seems smaller. Further, the distances to nearby places seems much lesser. Distance to the nearby temple, to the beach, to the paddy fields, to the neighbor's house, everything. This has happened to me at a number of places I used to live in while I was a kid. When I visit the towns where I spent my childhood, did my schooling, everything seems to be smaller now. It appears as though the impression in my mind is the relative sizes of these objects to my own size and since I have grown now, the places now appear smaller. This does not seem to happen with places I lived in after my teen years. My college in Mysore, the surroundings, my hostel and so on seem to be of the same size as before.

For a long time, I used to think this happens only to me. Recently, I came to know that I am not alone. Now I wonder whether this happens to everyone. If you read this blog, could you please comment on this?

IPL and royalty

Well, why is IPL so terribly obsession with the royalty? I mean, really. Out of the eight teams, four of them had a name that contained word referring to the kings. Rajasthan Royals, Chennai SuperKings, King's XI Punjab, Bangalore Royal Challengers. Even Kolkata had Knight, a related term, in the name. Of course, Bangalore had a good reason to use that name. I don't know what reasoning other teams had to choose their names.

Wow, what an error message

I saw this wonderful message on my Linux system today when I tried to launch Nautilus. Just imagine the impact of this message on someone who is very new to Linux.

About the new airport in Bangalore

The HAL airport in Bangalore was shut down at the dawn of today, in lieu of the new Airport at Devanahalli. There won't be any commercial flights landing at this airport. All these days, I used to see flights in the sky from my home, as they circle around to land at the HAL airport. My office is so close to the HAL airport that the people in planes could probably recognize us on the ground as the flights landed. All this will change. My home is more than 40Kms from the new airport, so I will only be seeing planes only at a great distance.

The biggest impact of this will be on people living far away from the new airport, because it will be order of times more difficult to reach the new airport. There is a lot of discussion happening about keeping the HAL airport open, because the new one is too far away from the city. However, is 35Kms really too much? Don't many great cities of the airport have their airports tens of miles away from the city center? With the exception of the old airport of Hong Kong, I don't think any great city of the world has it's airport in the heart of the city. I think the people in Bangalore are fighting the wrong battle. The problem is of connectivity to the new airport, not the distance to it. However, that is a much more difficult problem to solve, considering the political system of the state. Hence they just choose to fight the easy battle - demanding keeping the HAL airport open.

When should a kid start using computers?

I didn't use a computer until I was 18 years old. But now-a-days, kids demand to use computers as soon as they are 5 months old. The first thing that my daughter demanded in all her life was not a toy or a food, but my laptop. Tough days ahead for me!

What have YOU won in all these years?

Now-a-days, there are a number of programs on TV where they ask you to either send SMSes or make phone calls for various reasons. The most common of these, of course, are talent shows where you think you are deciding the winner of the competition by sending lots of messages and your mobile service provider walks laughing all the way to the bank! The other kind is where they give out 'prizes' to the callers. One such program runs on a Kannada TV channel in the afternoon. It works like this: You basically send as many messages as you want/can on the previous day to 'register' for the program next day. The program is run live, where they call the people who have sent highest number of messages. They show a sari and ask us to guess it's price. If you guess it correctly, or if your guess is closer to the actual than others on that day, the sari is yours. Simple?

One of these days (18th March), my wife got the crazy idea of actually competing in this event. Off she went, sending a few messages, but she sent it in my daughter's name. The next day she was in front of the TV in the afternoon, to see how she fared. Unfortunately, the number of messages she had sent was nowhere close to the highest numbers that day. There was no way they were going to call her. However, as she sat there watching the program, it turned out that a number of people who the TV anchor called either did not pick up the call or were unreachable or busy and so on. As a result, the last person to be called for the day turned out to be my daughter! As the anchor announced the name of my daughter, there was a lot of cheering in my home from all. Celebrations had already begun. We didn't get the sari, but we got the consolation prize - cosmetics worth Rs. 1000. But my mom and wife didn't mind that. They were celebrating as if my daughter had got the first rank in CAT exams. My daughter, meanwhile, being all of 5 months old, was blissfully unaware of her achievement(!) and was thinking exactly what most babies of her age think, that is, "Should I cry now or later?" and "Huh?"

Now, winning the prize is one thing, actually going to the office of the TV channel and getting it from there is totally another. Considering that we were only going to get a box of cosmetics, most of which may be unusable, I was not even close to thinking of actually going and getting it. But my mom and wife had other ideas. "What have you won on TV in all these years? Nothing. She is just 5 months old and she has already won something in her very first attempt. At least for that reason you must go and get the prize". It was only then that the importance of my daughter's achievement and the gravity of the situation started sinking in to me. I quickly realized that I had no choice.

The office of the TV channel was right in the middle of the city, with no parking available anywhere in 2 Km radius of it. Finding the office was an appropriate job for Indiana Jones. Further, I had to make two trips to their office because of their restrictive timings. Finally, there was a little shocker. They wanted the person who had won the prize to come and claim it! We convinced them that the 'winner' was a 5 month old baby who won't claim anything in the world as hers for another few months. Finally, the prize was ours! It was a package of various cosmetic items from an obscure Japanese company which mostly sells in Sri Lanka. Not bad. Hey, my daughter must now be famous in Japan and Sri Lanka too. What an achievement!!!

Human alcohol meter

A few days back, I was at the Kempegowda bus stand, a.k.a "Majestic", at around 11PM. I was dropping off someone for a late night bus. I started heading back and was at the first traffic signal, near Sangam, where a traffic policeman stopped my car by literally standing in my path. When he approached me I rolled down the glass of my car, wondering what this was about. He then put his head _into_ my car, so far inside that it seemed as if he was going to kiss the steering wheel. Well, I too like my car quite a bit, but not so much as to kiss it. While I was wondering whether this guy is drunk, he said "Your good name please, sir?" I quickly answered and he said "Okay okay. Just checking", took his head out and asked me to carry on. I was still surprised, but I carried on. Only after a couple of seconds did I realize why he did that: He was checking if I was drunk and he wanted to smell my breath to confirm. He was a human alcohol meter! I left pretty amused, but impressed. I ho
pe they take all drunk people out of roads and make roads safer for driving in the night.

How cpu frequency scaling can affect applications

I have seen a very interesting problem while playing "Cricket 2007" game on Windows. The problem is probably caused by cpu frequency scaling and it gives an interesting perspective on how power management in operating systems and hardware can affect application writers.

My laptop runs at around 800MHz when it is on battery and at around 2.1GHz when it is connected to the mains. Lets say I boot the system running on batteries and connect it to the mains after it boots up fully. If I run Cricket 2007 game on this now, it runs way too fast. The game is almost unusable at this stage. The only way I have found to rectify this is to reboot the system while it is connected to the mains. Alternatively, if I boot up the system while it is connected to the mains and later switch to battery before starting the game, it plays too slowly, far slower than a typical slow-mo replay. It is not the problem with the battery, because if I boot the system on battery and continue to run the game while it is on battery, it plays correctly.

The problem is pretty interesting. I suspect it is because of cpu frequency scaling because I can't attribute it to anything else. However, whose fault is it? application's? operating system's? I have some thoughts, but I have no idea of Windows internals, so I can't be sure.

The application has no idea that the cpu frequency has changed before it is started. It must be doing some calibration for timing when it is started, by reading the frequency of the cpu from the OS. It is quite possible that the OS does not provide correct information to the application. Lets say the system was booted at 800MHz and the OS stores this value somewhere. Later the system could be running at 2.1GHz, but when the application queries, OS still says it is running at 800Hz. The application does it's calibration based on this number and it goes horribly wrong because the cpu is running much faster.

On second thought, it is not correct for the application to depend on cpu frequency being constant. This frequency could be varying all the time on modern hardware, so any application that depends on this value for it's timing calculation could go wrong. The same holds for any application that performs time calculations based on TSC. Depending on TSC is an even bigger mistake on SMP systems.

What is a .docx file?

Today someone sent me a MS Word file in an e-mail. Being a Linux user, I don't quite like working with MS-Office documents. However, I have accepted it as a reality of life. Also, Openoffice is now good enough to handle most MS-Office files.

The file I got today in mail had a .docx extension to it. I initially thought the sender had saved the file with wrong extension, but soon realized that Openoffice doesn't know how to open it. "file" command on the file says it is a zip file. Hmm... okay, let's unzip it. It contained a bunch of xml files among other things. I wasn't sure what was happening. The obvious next stop was google.

Google told me that .docx is an ooxml file, which is the latest standard for office documents being pushed by Microsoft. Openoffice doesn't support it yet, so there was no way (that I know of) to open it on my Linux. I booted to my Windows partition and showed the file to MS-Word. It too refused to open it. Hmm... some more googling revealed to me that the ooxml format is the default on newer MS-Office versions, whereas older versions don't support it. There is an update available from Microsoft that makes old versions of MS-Office handle ooxml files. The update was 26MB in size, so instead of pulling it down, I asked the sender to save the document in older MS-Word format and resend it.

A couple of things that surprise me are, a) MS-Office has been using ooxml format as the default for a while and I don't even know about it. b) Users of new MS-Office will typically save their files in new format because that is the default. That means all users of old versions will need to pull down this 26MB update to see these files. 26MB is not a very small size for low-bandwidth users.

I hope ODF benefits from all this.

What makes software great?

As time goes by, I have started appreciating usability much more than any feature in software. For that matter, anything. Using a well-designed product is so much more fun that using a feature-rich but difficult to use product. Did I hear someone say "The GIMP"?

Today I was in a well-known hospital who had their registration and billing software custom-made by one of the biggest software services companies in India. I am not going to call names, but lets just say it is the company that is largely owned by one of the richest persons in India. They charged me registration and consultation fees upfront and everything was fine until I was about to leave, when they had to charge some more fees due to the doctor. The software raised an exception that consultation fees cannot be charged two times. There was no other category to put the fees under that would allow the money to go to the doctor and not the hospital. Further, the consultation fees was fixed by the administrator and the lady handling billing system could not change it. After a number of phone calls, she caught hold of the administrator who provided a lengthy workaround to the problem. No wonder, she was cursing the software and the company who wrote it :-)

I wonder how much of actual field testing is done before deploying such software. Do they hand it over to real-world people to try it in actual day-to-day scenarios or just sit in the offices, think of possible scenarios, write the code based on their assumptions and roll out the product.

How much is the cricket commtary worth?

It was not like I had a lot of respect for cricket commentators to begin with. Except when something very special happens in the game, what they say in a particular situation can easily be predicted. Lets say the batsman comes out of the crease for the very first ball he faces and hits the ball over the head of long-on fielder for a six. The commentator will say something like "He has decided to take the bull by it's horns, take the fight to the opposition. It is his natural style and it is a good idea to play your natural game while chasing such a total" Lets say the batsman was not that lucky and ends up sending the ball 'down the throat' of the fielder at long on. The same commentator would now say something like "This shot was absolutely not needed at this time of the game. The need of the hour was to consolidate and go for shots only towards the end of the game".

Recently I played Cricket 2007 game on Windows. This is a pretty nice game, but I admit I am not a game junkie, so it is easy to impress me. The game has pretty good animation, realism and gameplay. But what is commentary without the commentary? So the game contains pretty interesting commentary. They must have analyzed what typical commentators say in various situations in the game and made some voice snippets for each. Lets say it is a six. The commentary is one among "That is huge, he hit it right out of the ground" or "It doesn't matter when he hits it in the air when he hits it so far" or "Oh, I don't think it was a bad ball either" or "The bowler can't really complain, because it was not such a great ball. I am sure the captain won't be very happy with that" and so on. They play one of these randomly depending on the situation. Sometimes they play 2 or 3 together. However, what surprised me is that the commentary doesn't sound too repetitive/boring/unnatural compared to the real one! It sounds pretty alright.

This confirms my suspicion that commentary is not such a great skill after all. If you just collect a bunch of things to say in every situation and play them randomly, that is good enough! Even games can do a pretty good job of it. When I watch cricket matches, I don't mute the TV, because I like to hear the noise created by spectators in the ground. I am not that particular about the commentary.

How valuable is a life?

Today, Bangalore's newspapers had reported the news about a 'techie' killing his wife and committing suicide as the prime news on the first page. I could not understand why all newspapers thought this was the most important news of the day. FM radio stations, not to be left behind, were asking the listeners to send their opinion about the incidence through an SMS to them.

Don't get me wrong. I definitely feel sorry for the young couple and wish their lives had not ended tragically this way. However, this is not the first time entire families have ended their lives in such a tragic way in this city. If you sift through the newspapers, you could find at least one incidence in a month where a mother poisons her children and ends her life, a farmer, not being able to bare the burden of loans, kills himself and so on. Such news gets reported somewhere deep in the internal sheets, hard to find even if you are looking for. However, this incidence gained so much of importance only because the person involved is a 'techie'. (a unique word coined by Indian media which could mean anything from a people manager in a software company to a call center executive in a BPO company.) My thoughts when I saw this were, is the life of a techie more valuable than that of, say, a Government employee? If not, do the newspapers do this only because the readers are more interested in reading about the life of a techie than that of a more humble person? Or is it because.... I don't know...

After all, the families of the deceased would hate nothing more than media glare on the private lives of their
dear ones after this tragedy. I hope the media leaves them alone.

White collar 'crimes'

When I have a quick water cooler chat at work or when I meet people over lunch, one of the favorite topics of discussion is traffic problem. I often hear my friends/colleagues complain about a truck/auto/cab driver driving recklessly and causing danger to everyone on the road. Sometimes the discussion moves on to other related areas of public nuisance. I hear people complaining about the behavior of parking lot attenders at work, cafeteria crew, traffic cops, apartment construction companies, the Government, etc.

If a total outsider, like a foreigner were to join such a discussion, he/she would get this picture: The lower strata of the society, where there are less educated, poor/lower middle class people, is what causes *all* of the problems in Indian society. Bangalore is a better place because it has a large number of software engineers, who are a much better breed. Because hey, you don't hear complaints about other software engineers or other such white collar people. If we were to only look at the English language media, the same opinion will be cemented in our mind.

So in my opinion, software engineers, being the most educated, creamy layer of the society, should be setting examples for others to follow. But are we really doing it? Do we always behave on the road, following all road rules? Do we all stick to lane discipline while taking U-turns? Do we treat the parking lot attenders with respect? Do we thank them for their help in parking our vehicle? Do we thank any support staff at our office? If we ever did, do we do it with a smile on our face?

Whenever I see a silly traffic jam being created by a well heeled, sophisticated type of person in a Corolla, I get doubly angry than seeing a call center cab do the same mistake. Other examples are my colleagues spilling coffee in the microwave and not bother to clean it up, jump queues at the cafeteria, spit chewing gum in the rest room wash basin and so on.

The way things change and the way they don't

I visit my native place (a small village right at the sea coast in Udupi district) once or twice a year, for a couple of days. My visits were much more frequent when I was a kid. Hence most of my memories of my native place are from my childhood. This often makes me blind to the changes that have happened there and I continue to think that the place is as it was a couple of decades back. However, when I see carefully, the changes are vast. Modernisation has swept the entire district and changed it forever.

I clearly remember walking 2 kms from the nearby town Saligrama to reach my grandfather's house, because we would have to wait 4 hours for the next bus. Now, people in the village don't depend on buses which ply every 30minutes. All auto drivers in the town have cell phones. People in the village just call them up and within 15 minutes, you have the auto at your door. People don't mind shelling out 50Rs for this. Also, walking those 2 kms to the town is close to non-existent now.

There are innumerable things that have changed rapidly in the last decade or so. People are eating chaats, buying expensive cars, sending their children to English medium schools, are already tired of Big Bazaar, just like their counterparts in Bangalore. Seeing all this, it is often easy to conclude that everything has changed.

The last time I was in my native place, it was for the annual religious ceremony at the village temple. I had not attended this event for a very long time. I have fond memories of this ceremony from my childhood, when the entire day would be filled with fun and frolic for us. It ended with a grand puja in the evening, followed by distribution of 'prasada' that was extremely tasty. This time, I was observing to see how this has changed in the last couple of decades.

First and foremost, I observed that I was the _only_ one in the entire gathering of hundreds of people who was wearing a trouser, everyone else was in a dhoti. There is no restriction that one should not wear trousers at this event, so I was very surprised to see that even teenagers had worn a dhoti. Later, I observed that the process of the puja had remained virtually unchanged since my childhood. The same procedure, the same puja, kids having a fun time running around the place, elders trying to bring them to order, nostalgic senior citizens... Everything was just the same. For a few hours, I was transported back in time by 20 years.

It is my gut feeling that things will change here too. Eventually, young people will attend the puja wearing cargos or even shorts and eventually there will also be jeans-wearing girls. But for now, the place has resisted the sweeping change and has clung on to an era gone by. I wonder for how much longer.

What's in a name?

When I became a father 3 months back, I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to find a name for my daughter. After all, I have succeeded in giving wonderful (I think so) names to other's kids in the past. How difficult could it be to name my own kid? From what I have learnt in the last few months, a lot. I and my wife had a clear idea of the kind of name we wanted for our baby. However, her idea was completely different from mine :-)

These days, there are a number of avenues available to search for names. There are the good old books, there is the Internet and of course, there are relatives. Relatives suggested names from various places. Some worked as teachers and they remembered the names of all the kids in their class, some suggested names from TV serials, some suggested names they had heard, names of kids of their friends and so on. We read through a couple of "Baby names" books and went through a number of websites.

One of the main problems in reaching a conclusion is that we want a name that has a nice meaning, or at least not have a bad meaning. These days it is easy to choose a cute, sweet name for your baby, having heard it somewhere among your relatives and later realize that the name actually means "lunatic". Most baby name websites publish meanings of the names. However, the meanings are either whatever was given by contributors to the website, or given by whoever among their employees was free when the name was added to the site. It is not uncommon to see a name that doesn't mean anything, but someone in some website says it has some meaning in Hebrew. Or Icelandic.

It was very difficult to find names that was acceptable to both me and my wife and also had a nice meaning. We have not even bothered to get a consensus from other stakeholders. After a lot of effort, we have narrowed down to a small list of names. Next weekend is the deadline before which we need to narrow it down to just one name. Wish me luck please. And never underestimate the complexity of the process of naming your baby.