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.