appaji.net: Morsels of life!

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 21:44:57 GMT
Harmandir Sahib

Harmandir Sahib (Popularly known as the Golden Temple).

This happens to be one of the favorite angles for people taking pictures of the golden temple. Certainly not for no reason. This picture is best viewed large.

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:22:06 GMT
Five fine movies

~~Five~~ Six exceptional movies that I saw over the past few weeks:

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer: The rise and fall of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a genius perfume maker who scripts his own end.

The Illusionist: The story of a magician who returns after 15 years to do what his childhood sweetheart wants him to (make them disappear together).

The Black Dahlia: Based on James Ellroy's novel with the same name, the movie gives the unsolved-in-real-life mystery a plausible end.

The Lives of Others: Art moves, and changes people and every single action makes a difference. Stasi Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (HGW) was _fantabulos_.

Infamous: A beautifully made movie about Truman Capote and his life while he is researching for his book In Cold Blood.

The Kite Runner: In which Aamir redeems himself -- of his guilt of being a coward and not helping his childhood friend Hassan, when he is raped -- by saving Hassan's son from the Taliban.

Links to the corresponding Wikipedia articles are rather unimaginative, but I am in no mood for a lot of text.

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 07:54:33 GMT
Remembering the Jallianwala Bagh massacre

Remembering the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Exactly 89 years ago this day (the 13th of April 1919), people were shot at from here:

Jallianwala Bagh - People were fired at from here

Quoting from the Wikipedia article:

A group of 90 ~~Indian~~ British Indian Army soldiers marched to the park accompanied by two armoured cars. The vehicles were unable to enter the Bagh through the narrow entrance.

The Jallianwala Bagh, or garden, was bounded on all sides by houses and buildings and had few narrow entrances, most of which were kept permanently locked. Since there was only one open exit except for the one already blocked by the troops, people desperately tried to climb the walls of the park. Many jumped into a well inside the compound to escape from the bullets. A plaque in the monument says that 120 bodies were plucked out of the well.

As a result of the firing, hundreds of people were killed and thousands were injured. Official records put the figures at 379 killed (337 men, 41 boys and a six-week-old baby) and 200 injured, though the actual figure is hotly disputed to this day. The wounded could not be moved from where they had fallen, as a curfew had been declared.

Few more pictures from the memorial:

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:56:58 GMT
Gimme space!

You've always apt-get installed a whole lot of packages, used them once -- if at all, now want your hard disk space back. So which packages on your machine consume the most of disk space, and can be removed?

The following tell you just that:

$ /usr/bin/grep-status -FStatus -sInstalled-Size,Package -n "install ok installed" | paste -sd " \n" | sort -n [snip...] 40796 gnome-applets-data 45924 valgrind 54148 linux-image-2.6.24-1-686 65380 sun-java5-bin

$ /usr/sbin/popcon-largest-unused 65376 sun-java5-bin 54148 linux-image-2.6.24-1-686 45924 valgrind 40796 gnome-applets-data [snip...] $

Now go ahead and aptitude / apt-get remove those that you don't want to keep around, and then repeatedly do ...

$ aptitude (or apt-get) remove `deborphan`

... till you see no more packages being removed.

PS: /usr/sbin/popcon-largest-unused is from the popularity-contest package which you should install and submit usage data (it is anonymous) if you want Debian to get better. /usr/bin/grep-status is from dctrl-tools, a very useful bunch of tools (despite their quirky syntax) if you are interested in Debian development.

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:37:03 GMT
First NMU

My first Non-maintainer upload (for reportbug. Thanks Thomas Viehmann for uploading the modified package), and the package hit the archive the other day.

On a related note, an excuse people often have when contributing to Debian (or for that matter any free software project) is that all the important stuff is being done by others already. This is not really true, there is a ton of things that need to be done and it is just a matter of going ahead and doing it. The reportbug package is important (Priority: standard) in Debian and it could do with some more love.

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 11:21:55 GMT
ELinks packages in experimental

I uploaded ELinks packages to Debian experimental (based on upstream 0.12 GIT snapshot as on 2008-01-27) and sent out a call for testing. Please test the packages and report issues to the Debian BTS in case you find some bugs or if you don't like the way something works.

0.12 uses UTF-8 as terminal charset and has support for browsing SMB/CIFS shares via libsmbclient. I also enabled Javascript and support for a bunch of scripting languages in these builds. The packages have been compiled in debug mode (builtin assertions, extra sanity checks etc.).

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 06:05:39 GMT
Night at the Harmandir Sahib

I happened to be in Amritsar on the night of Guru Nanak Dev Jayanthi. When I first realised that it was an important occasion, I thought to myself: "I am sooo dead, the Golden teample would be a sea of people". But I was pleasantly (and very much) surprised that everything was very calm and peaceful. Everybody behaved and seemed to do so very naturally. This is one place of worship that is truly amazing. Pictures from the night (I missed the annual display of fireworks by an hour or so).

Clock tower entrance (large)

Sanctum and watch tower (large)

Both the pictures are best viewed large but neither does justice to the real sight. Few more in the Harmandar Sahib - Guru Nanak Jayanthi set of pictures.

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 13:47:18 GMT
Life update -- Actually, a Debian update

The past many weeks were exciting and a lot of things kept me busy, work for one. Part of the excitement was about a trip to Punjab (pictures on their way). And after a long period of lurking on mailing lists, reading policy manuals and the once-in-a-while bug report with a patch, I decided to get a little more active in Debian.

Even though there wasn't a whole lot of software I was using regularly but not present in Debian (which is what a lot of people seem to look to package), there _is_ plenty of software that one uses and has Debian package maintainers, but could probably do with a few more hands at its maintenance.

I took the plunge when I stumbled upon a few orphaned packages and took up their maintenance. Here is what I did to them that I should say I am proud of as a beginner in Debian package maintenance.

SPLint: There aren't many free static code checkers and splint does a decent job. I split splint to build the architecture independent parts as a separate package and also removed the DFSG non-free parts. The documentation is also built from the splint source package (The splint-doc source package has been removed). I convinced upstream author to release the documentation under a DFSG free license (it wasn't licensed at all earlier).
ELinks: A sexy text mode browser and my favorite :-). Now there is a separate package for documentation (built from source rather than copying from the upstream tarball) and the architecture independent parts are in elinks-data. I picked up a fair amount of GIT, thanks to elinks. I am co-maintaining this package with Moritz Muehlenhoff (who advocated me for Debian NM) and we will upload ELinks 0.12 packages soon to experimental.
Axel: I've been using axel for a few years but it had some annoying bugs like crashing on HTTP 404/401s. Not anymore, if you are using Axel 1.1. I am also doing the upstream maintenance now. Future development may be slow, but standby for some new features.

Update: Despite the above, I am not happy about an upload that I requested of xxdiff. But then that was my first upload and everybody is allowed mistakes to correct ;). The Debian xxdiff SVN is seeing fixes slowly but surely though, so standby for a much better package.

And a few others too. All these packages are maintained in Subversion (except ELinks, for which I am using GIT like upstream) and I will be very happy if I can get people to come forward as co-maintainers.

Hack away!

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 08:03:29 GMT
Orphaned Packages?

Since today's XKCD comic is about Debian, I couldn't resist re-posting it here :)

Orphaned Projects

Now you know why the WNPP orphaned list is growing in size ;)

PS: XKCD is a cool geek comic. xkcd_rss if you want to follow it on Livejournal.

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:52:47 GMT
Chak de

What one really needs, to feel good after a week of terrible put-downing bout of sickness is a top-quality entertainer.

Chak de India is just that, and more.

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 13:48:55 GMT
DFSG Freeness of The Open Group Test Suite License

I was trying to apply the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) to The Open Group Test Suite License and it looks like the license would be considered non-free.

Free Redistribution: Giving away is allowed, does not require a royalty or other fee for doing so. However, in cause 5:
You may charge a reasonable copying fee for any distribution of this Package. You may charge any fee you choose for support of this Package. You may not charge a fee for this Package itself.
~~To distribute the original Package under this license, one is not allowed to charge any fee. This makes the package non-free.~~

Source Code: Allows distribution in source code as well as compiled form.

Derived Works: Derived works are allowed.

Integrity of The Author's Source Code: Has clauses (3 and 4) for maintaining the integrity of the original source code. However, in clause 3:
rename any non-standard executables and testcases so the names do not conflict with standard executables and testcases, which must also be provided, and provide a separate manual page for each non-standard executable and testcase that clearly documents how it differs from the Standard Version.
and in clause 4:
accompany any non-standard executables and testcases with their corresponding Standard Version executables and testcases, giving the non-standard executables and testcases non-standard names, and clearly documenting the differences in manual pages (or equivalent), together with instructions on where to get the Standard Version.
So, even though integrity can be ensured by renaming non-standard executables and testcases, the license mandates distribution of the Standard Version executables and testcases. This probably make this license non-free (Note: See the reason I consider this to be a non-free clause).

No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: No discrimination.

No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: No discrimination.

Distribution of License: The same license terms apply to those who the program is redistributed to.

License Must Not Be Specific to Debian: The software can be taken from Debian and still be used under the same license terms.

License Must Not Contaminate Other Software: Allows distribution in aggregate with other (possibly commercial) programs / distributions.

Comments on my analysis are welcome.

Update: Modified the original with the ~~deletion~~ and the Note after discussion with

prahlad.

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 07:45:27 GMT
Potter on the move

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Apparenty people have been queuing up at the bookstores as early as 5:00 in the morning for a copy. Here is one of those Potter-book fans trying to finish reading the book, determined not to give his friends at school a chance to throw a spoiler at him.

Mon, 28 May 2007 11:00:14 GMT
Music and Copyright

Talking to Hindustan Times, music composer A.R. Rahman says that has a new policy for composing music:

I just want to push for the financial rights of composers and lyricists, even producers. It's not as though I'm saying I want to be the sole proprietor of the songs I compose. But I want a share. There's nothing wrong with that. I can't run to music companies like T Series and Sa Re Ga Ma every time I need to use my own song.

What is interesting about the article is this quote of his:

Music companies must recognise the changing ground reality. Today the conventional outlets for music sales are drying up. Soon all music will be free while the performers and performances will be paid for.

Record companies advertising against illegal music often talk about artists in the music industry, much like people that support patents talk about the starving genius-inventor. Rahman's recent experiences seem to suggest that these companies don't put their money where their mouth is.

Wed, 16 May 2007 04:59:26 GMT
The search for a webhost

Mohit Jaggi, a senior of mine at university and I were debating whether we should be hosting the IITG alumni mailboxes with Google Apps. The free-of-cost offer from Google was quite attractive but I am still not very comfortable with the idea for various reasons:

People have their own personal e-mail providers, and in most cases they would use a new e-mail ID only in forwarding mode, this makes the 2GB space not-so-attractive.

Those who like the cool gmail interface or the generous space offered by gmail, would probably already be using it for their daily needs and they would be happy with a forwarding e-mail address.

Alumnus already have an authenticated account on the alumni website but the Google Apps SAML based single sign-on is an expensive service (Comes with the Premier edition - $50 per person, per year).

This reason, IMO, is very important: The data isn't ours and Google doesn't provide tools to export the data (It is a TBD for the Premier edition). Moving would be painful.

Our future needs (like a good CMS, a private Jabber server, Planet for aggregating junta's blogs etc.) are not really fulfilled by Google Apps.

I strongly feel that, to start with, shared or VPS hosting with a solid provider should be a good enough for our needs (A couple of GB of web and database space, a few hundreds of small email boxes, mailing lists etc.). Quite close to the Advanced or Webmaster plans of pair.com, just that they don't allow mailing lists or a Jabber server. Do you have any suggestions? An option to move to VPS (or even start with a reasonably priced VPS) should be available.

The case of the disappearing yahoogroup:

While the discussion was on, the IITG Class 99 mailing list (Wayback machine copy) hosted with yahoogroups disappeared. When contacted, Yahoo sent in a canned response:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Groups.

Yahoo! may, in appropriate circumstances and in its sole discretion,
terminate Groups that appear to have violated the Yahoo! Terms of
Service (TOS). In some cases, Groups may be deleted by an Owner or
Moderator. You may want to contact the owner or moderator(s) regarding
your concern.

Please feel free to visit the Yahoo! Terms of Service at:

  http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Kate

which wasn't very helpful. Just the kind of thing that I thought about earlier too.

PS: If you know someone who works with the yahoo abuse / TOS enforcement desk, can you help us get a better explanation?

Tue, 15 May 2007 11:43:31 GMT
The Complete Bootleg Woodstock 69 - ID3v2 tags

A few weeks ago, I was searching for ID3v2 tags for The Complete Bootleg Woodstock 69 collection for a friend of mine. I was able to find them at FreeDB but:

The Artist information was not always correct.
All the music was marked as being of genre Rock.

So armed with Wikipedia's help, we created better tags on our own. In case you are interested, the tags are available for download here.

Each directory has a tags.txt file (which has also been split into individual TrackXX.tags files for all the tracks). The files are 'scripting' friendly.

PS: It seems the collection converted to mp3 (at a constant 128kbps bit rate) comes to 618MB. Very nice if you want to burn it to a single CD.

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 07:02:29 GMT
Enforcing the GNU GPL

Eben Moglen on enforcing the GNU GPL and using the courts to do so:

But perhaps we have succeeded too well. If I had used the courts to enforce the GPL years ago, Microsoft's whispering would now be falling on deaf ears. Just this month I have been working on a couple of moderately sticky situations. ``Look,'' I say, ``at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?''

Someday someone will. But that someone's customers are going to go elsewhere, talented technologists who don't want their own reputations associated with such an enterprise will quit, and bad publicity will smother them. And that's all before we even walk into court. The first person who tries it will certainly wish he hadn't. Our way of doing law has been as unusual as our way of doing software, but that's just the point. Free software matters because it turns out that the different way is the right way after all.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:06:47 GMT
Traffic signal tele-marketing

The best scene in the movie is the one in which Bhaai-jaan's men beat the shit outta the tele-marketing dudes.

Sweet, very! Bole to!

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 04:38:33 GMT
Using your URL as your OpenID

Over at mannu's journal (2007: the year of OpenID?), there was a discussion about how OpenID works which was when I looked at it seriously for the first time.

The distributed identity system that OpenID provides is very convenient. If you run a blog at your own website but want a community of people to be able to comment and participate in discussions, you should run an OpenID consumer at your blog. There are consumer and server implementations in various languages.

If you want to use your own URL as your OpenID with consumer sites, but don't want to run your own server, you can use a third party server. Here is how:

1. Select a service provider (like Livejournal, MyOpenID, or one of the several OpenID providers) and signup with them.

2. Add the following lines (replace appaji with your own userid) to the HEAD section of the page serving the URL that you want to use as your OpenID.

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml"/> <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://appaji.livejournal.com/"/>

This example is specific to Livejournal. Check the FAQs/help of your OpenID service provider for the openid.server and openid.delegate information.

As with a other web-based authentication, users should watchout for phishing attacks while using OpenID consumer sites.

My OpenID is http://www.appaji.net/ and I delegate it to http://appaji.livejournal.com/.

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 11:33:01 GMT
Of memes.

ga_woo would be delighted to know that SUN's CEO Jonathan Schwartz not only does memes, but also tags people to keep the chain alive :-).

Wed, 10 Jan 2007 06:17:29 GMT
Those things you wear!

I think pretty much anything you can find yourself wearing on your body is patented. Your underwear, vest, that sports shirt, trousers (and the zip fastner on it, probably patented more than once)!

And the next time you buy that imported Reebook "monkey bag" hanging from a road-side stall in Sultan Bazaar for your favorite nephew, don't bargain too much for a discount. Poor Reebook must be paying loads of money as royalties to Case Logic, Inc. for their amazing invention.

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 06:26:31 GMT
My nude photoalbum?

I suppose arunshanbhag will not be too happy with google for this one ;)

Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:44:10 GMT
hsbc.co.in works with Iceweasel / the season is here

Here is some good news for all users of HSBC India net-banking on Firefox-derivatives. http://www.hsbc.co.in/ seems to work pretty well in its new avtar with Firefox and its derivatives (like Iceweasel on Debian).

Prior to their revamp, we would need the User Agent Switcher extension to masquerade as Internet Explorer 6. That stopped working after their recent re-design (which had plenty of JavaScript kludge that would just refuse to work with Firefox). And as of today, the HSBC India website seems to work fine without the user agent switcher (Their "verified by visa" and "mastercard securecode" still seem to require User-Agent spoofing though).

Update: This seems to work on Debian Sid/XFCE but not on Debian Etch/Gnome. I haven't investigated why, yet.

In other news, K, V and J are respectively taking the plunge, throwing in the towel and biting the bullet in the next few days. I am off to Hyderabad on the 24th to attend V's wedding. Tempting as it might be to travel to Delhi and meet J and a whole bunch of other junta, I am not too sure if I would be able to make it to his wedding ceremony early February. It is that time of the year, I guess :)

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 04:21:51 GMT
Load, aim and shoot

At Tipu sultan's summer palace (Dariya Daulat Bagh) in Srirangapatnam:

Load the canon:

Take a good aim at your target:

And fire away:

Hope you all had a blast on the new years eve. And here is wishing you a good good year 2007.

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:14:33 GMT
Will the real president please stand up, stand up.

It confuses me to no end as to who people are talking about when they say president. However, I am eagerly waiting for rileen's election campaign if he decides to contest :)

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 12:07:14 GMT
Life and times of U. M. Rao

This post originally started off by being about Umrao Jaan (hence the title) in which I would drift off and talk mostly about Abhishek Bachchan and the magnitude of his loser-ity (Those American Express ads -- one of these days, Farex will sign up Big-B to feed Can-Never-B for one of their commercials). And while we are at it, the new Don movie deserves more than the just-above-average ratings that the rigged reviews in Slimes of India seem to reluctantly hand it. The "Mai hoon don" song is a class act, really.

Anyway, I drifted off and started praising how much I liked Casino Royale because it wasn't like the rest of the Mithunkanth-style Bond-movies and all that blah. But I realised that I would be a hypocrite -- I actually like Rajiniborthy-style movies. The thing that really ticks me off is that a jump over the hill wearing a flashy bell-bottom or a lungi clad dude countering bullets with a pocket knife is less real and more-mockable than a fist fight in outer space in a Brioni suit / Tuxedo.

Anyway, Kabul ~~Fiza~~ Express is a very good movie, go watch it.

And I think I should stick to posting pictures, mostly. To create text my child, is tough.