Weather and food habits

A couple of weeks back it was pretty cold in Bangalore. There used to be a bit of wind throughout the day, adding to the cold. The floor in my home - all granite, had gotten pretty cold, making me curl up my feet under me when I sat on the sofa. I was munching on some spicy snack and gulping down piping hot filter coffee, saying to myself: "This is the ideal weather to eat hot and spicy food like pakodas, bhajjis and so on".

I don't know what is it about the cold weather that makes people go after spicy foods. As I started thinking about it, I realized that this is not a universal phenomenon. In fact, just the contrary is probably true. Think of places which are well known for spicy foods and chances are, they are some of the hottest places on earth. Mexico, India, Thailand. Even within India, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan. On the other hand, most people in cold climate, like Europeans, prefer non-spicy foods. Even within India, Kashmiri food is pretty sweet, isn't it? Of course, there are exceptions to these rules. Especially in India, where there are exceptions to pretty much every rule. However, I can surely say, in general, cold places are not well known for spicy foods. So what is the relation between the weather and food habits? I did some googling, but could not spot anything obvious quickly.

If you know, please do let me know.

Spam taking over the internet

I read recently that 95% of all e-mail in the world is just spam. I can readily believe that. I am pretty conservative about giving out my mail ids on the internet. In spite of that, gmail tells me I receive more spam than genuine mail. I used to use a mail id on an obscure website long time back. The only reason for using their mail id was that they were giving me 100MB of storage, whereas everyone else was at 2-4MB range back then. I had not visited that mail id in years. Last week somehow I remembered this id and curiously logged into it. While I was not looking, this mail id was slowly and steadily accumulating around 30 spam e-mail ids every day. Everything from offering me millions of dollars for free to offering me online degrees to selling me the blue diamond-shaped pill at very low cost. Some of the mails claimed that they arrived long before I, for that matter, the internet, was born!

Update: Yes, I know why it is 1969. After all, I have worked on UNIX!

ಡಬ್ಬದ ಹೊರಗಿನ ಯೋಚನೆ

ಮಕ್ಕಳು ಯೋಚಿಸುವ ರೀತಿಯನ್ನು ಊಹಿಸುವುದೂ ಕಷ್ಟ. ಇದಕ್ಕೊಂದು ಉತ್ತಮ ಉದಾಹರಣೆ ನನ್ನ ತಂಗಿಯ ಮಗನ ಡಬ್ಬದ ಹೊರಗಿನ ಯೋಚನೆ (ಅದೇ, "thinking outside the box" ಕಣ್ರೀ!)

ಒಂದು ದಿನ ಶಾಲೆಯಿಂದ ಮನೆಗೆ ಬರುವಾಗ ಒಂದು ಒಂಟೆಯನ್ನು ನೋಡಿದ. ಮಕ್ಕಳಿಗೆ ಸಹಜವಾಗಿ ಎಲ್ಲಾ ವಿಷಯಗಳ ಮೇಲೂ ಕುತೂಹಲ. "ಅದೇನಮ್ಮ?" "ಅದು ಒಂಟೆ ಕಣಪ್ಪಾ".

ಮಾರನೆಯ ದಿನ ಅದೇ ಜಾಗದಲ್ಲಿ ಮೂರು ಒಂಟೆಗಳು ಹೋಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದವು. ತಕ್ಷಣ ಅವನ ಬಾಯಿಯಿಂದ ಹೊರಟೇ ಬಿಟ್ಟಿತ್ತು: "ಒಂಟೆ, ಟೂಟೇ, ತ್ರೀಟೇ" ("one-tay, two-tay, three-tay"). ಹೇಗಿದೆ? ಹೊಟ್ಟೆ ಹುಣ್ಣಾಗುವಷ್ಟು ನಗುತ್ತಿದ್ದ ನನ್ನ ತಂಗಿಯ ಸ್ಕೂಟಿ ಬೀಳದೆ ಇದ್ದದ್ದೇ ಆಶ್ಚರ್ಯ.

Petrol bunk: part of Bangalore's history?

Last Friday, as I pulled my car into my usual BP Petrol bunk (Yes, we call them petrol bunks in Bangalore, not petrol pumps) on Hosur Road, I noticed something different. I usually fill petrol at Venkateswara and Co, which is on South-bound Hosur road, just before Silk Board fly-over. This place is the most reliable one on my way home. They have never tried to cheat me either by not making the meter zero before beginning or distracting me while petrol is being filled (you know, "Cash or Card, saar?" types). The owner is usually right there, ready to jump in and ensure that the staff don't cheat. This day, the whole place was lit up with colorful lights. There was a little podium made at one end and flower bouquets were placed all over the place, including on the pumps. The owner, all excited, was roaming around instructing the staff to make final moment touch-ups to the decoration. It looked like there was going to be a speech of something.

I picked up a chat with the cashier while my car was being filled. He says "It has been 50 years since this petrol bunk was opened, sir. That's why the celebrations". I can't believe my ears. "50 years?" I say with a lot of exclamation in my voice. "Yes, golden jubilee. The current owner is a third generation owner of this place". The cashier said the news in a matter-of-fact way. I am sure he cannot feel as excited as the owner for this event. After all, he works there for a salary and the owner being strict may in fact be a hinderance for his income.

As I drove off, I kept telling to myself: "Man, 1959. Really? What was there in India back then?" Was Premier Padmini there, at least? This page says NO. Was Ambassador there, after all, it has existed for ever? This page says Ambassador started in 1957, so it was barely there. So there were pretty much no cars at all, except may be a few imported ones. Even Tata trucks hadn't been around for too long. Secondly, this place was well outside the city. Hosur road was probably there, but it wasn't going up to Madras back then. There was no Koramangala and no Indiranagar, forget about BTM. So this place must have been one of the extremely few petrol bunks in Bangalore back then. This is incredible that they have been selling fuel for that long. This place is a part of Bangalore's history!

First rain of 2009

I have this tradition of recording the first rain of the year I see in Bangalore. Today (Jan 8), it rained. Well, okay, it kinda drizzled, but what the heck. This is probably the earliest rain I have seen in Bangalore. Another interesting observation: I have seen it rain in Bangalore in most of the months of the year. Probably all, with the possible exception of February. I wonder how many cities in India can claim this.

Start early!

To ensure the next generation is well versed with Linux, not some proprietary OS, it is important to give them an early start. How early? 1 year olds are perfect.

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.