സ്വതന്ത്ര മലയാളം കമ്പ്യൂട്ടിങ്ങ് പ്ലാനറ്റ്

The SICP study group met today. We agreed to do the following:

• read a section of the book.
• solve the exercises in the section.
• see the videos.
• come with doubts/insights etc for the next meetup.

We agreed to meetup once in 2 weeks.

So, here I am, (re)starting the SICP from today.Hopefully this time I will complete the book. I am very tempted to do the exercises in clojure, so that I won’t copy the code as it is from the text. I am not sure whether future chapters can become difficult for me  because of this, but I think I will give it a try with clojure.

Paper presented by Hon. Member of Rajya Sabha Sri. K Chandran Pillai in the one day Conference on Public Sector Telecom Services at BTH, Ernakulam on 14-08-2008.

Dear All,

Efforts to bring representatives of all the stake holders of the Public Sector Telecom Company and to identify the issues that are to be sorted out to ensure its continued existence is to be well appreciated. I too do it first.

Telecom sector has a unique status among the various industrial sectors, not only because of its importance as one of the basic infrastructure facility, but because of the un precedented technological advancement, convergence of communication and computers, convergence of VOICE, IMAGE and TEXT into DATA, emergence of integrated data networks and the internet, resultant integration of various information based services and the consequent possibility of restructuring and re-engineering of each and every service sector, the single major commodity which they deal with is information, etc. taking place in that area. The advancement in technology, that from electrical to electronic, to integrated circuits, to micro processors and micro chips helped in mass production and consequent price reduction combined with expanding market has contributed to unprecedented expansion of communication network and services. Cost of per line connectivity is reported to have been reduced from 50000 to 1000 with the transition from electro-mechanical switches and cable based system to the present micro-processor based wireless system. The present day expansion of telecom facility is attributed to the entry of private operators in the fray, according to an analysis based on formal logic. But, it is in fact a result of the technology change from electrical to micro-chips and micro-processors. It opened up chance for private capital to make quick bucks. I neednot go into those aspects as I know that those from Telecom sector will discuss those peculiarities for the consumption of the customers. But the effect of these changes on the other sectors of economic activities cannot go unnoticed.

History of Telecom development in India shows that before Independence the Technology was provided, naturally, by the British. Thereafter till the end of eighties, the technology came from almost all advanced nations like Britain, France, Itally, Germany and Japan. Note that not from USA. But, by the middle of 1980's, with the appointment of Mr. Sam Pitroda as the Chairman of Telecom Commission and the institution of C-DoT, his so called brain child, the Indian Telecom Market was opened to USA. Still some of the problems of this Technology shift from European to US haunts us. Our communication system conforms to European standards, while IT equipments available in the market conforms to US standards. One such glaring example is the common MODEM available in indian market, which is charged as for VOICE, FAX and DATA, but incapable of identifying the caller number due to the mismatch in the standards used for transmission of tone.

This shift from European to US has to be read with the leadership role of USA in the field of Computer Hardware and Software. All the first 5 software corporates are US based. That means by 1990, USA was somehow able to avert a huge crisis in its economy caused by the downward slide of its engineering industry, including automobile, market for which was captured by others like Japan. The leadership of USA in the area of communication technology, fondly renamed as information technology, which is one of the area with which US economy was sustained, with the increased flow of wealth from all the nations that started using computer hardware and software, was passively acceded to by others to avoid a collapse in the global capitalist economy with the a crisis in its leading one.

I need not tell you that Telecom switches are using software and that the size of the switch comes down with the increased use of software. Every piece of equipments used in information communication sector has a software component now. Software, once upon a time, the property of Tele communication sector alone was taken out of communication industry and is now supplied to it at huge cost, embedded in the equipments, which even the communication experts are unable to handle, the maintenance for which the producers or suppliers themselves are to be retained, a way of loot with proprietary systems.

We have to learn lessens from the dynamism with which the information technology industry was nursed and brought up, identifying innumerable number of uses and thereby business avenues. This appreciation is not meant to imitate them in their cut throat competition and unmindful exploitation of the society as a whole. We can use such dynamism for the well being of the society at large. The business model created in Software, the development of ready to use packages, identified for each and every area and aspect of information handling, howsoever minute it may be, has become one of the mainstay of the present day economy. But for this business model created by capitalism, the spread of information technology to this extend would not have been possible. This credit goes to them. But, the effect of this new found industry shall not go unnoticed. Wealth from all the other sectors, using information, is being siphoned away at the cost of those sectors and ultimately risking the very health of the economy. Health of any economy is dependent on balanced development based on primary sectors, where alone real wealth is generated.

Balanced growth of economy is alien to Capitalism. Its existence is based on constant upheavals and that is the trend behind the present day neo liberal policies. That is what we witness in share markets. Initial Public Offer of BSNL shares to the extent of 10% is under consideration, it is reported. Justification mooted out is the requirement of about Rs. 60,000 Crores for immediate expansion. History of Telecom in post independent India shows that it has grown without any budgetary support. On the contrary, it has supported even the wasteful expenditures of the Govt. It is worth while to recall the earlier assessment of Rs.1,60,000 crores required for expansion and the proposal for collection of licence fee from private operators to meet it and later conversion of licence fee into profit sharing to the extend of only Rs. 50,000 Crores and that too finally waived, how much is not known yet, the process of which commenced with Minister Sukh Ram, which shows the hollowness of such declarations. What exactly happened was that the private operators came to stay to compete with BSNL. The much trumpeted resource mobilisation has miserably failed. In fact made it a failure. You are aware of the further decisions of TRAI etc with respect to ADC, USO etc. Added to this is the fraud committed to loot the BSNL of its revenue.

Cash reserve of BSNL is reported to be Rs.50,000 Crores. (Remember the sale of VSNL having Rs. 2400 Crores of cash reserve for a meagre price of Rs. 1400 to TATA and consequent laments of the then minister when TATA withdrew that money for reinvestment in their own businesses which was the natural and accepted course for TATA. BSNL having Rs. 50,000 Crores in Cash reserve alone in addition to fixed assets like land and buildings at prime locations throughout India need not have any scarcity of funds. Link it with the yet another decision of the Govt to appoint private banks as EPF managers. Rs. 2,40,000 Crores is the figure. Why not the Govt itself or through the earlier fund manager SBI invest in telecom. Why not PSUs invest in other PSUs. Who is blocking it. The Govt. There is no justification or need for handing over the Govt and PSU funds to private and then private investing in PSU. Yes, there is yet another arguement that the vigilance of share holders alone will make the PSUs shred its lethargy and work properly. I am leaving this question to be answered by this house.

With all due respect to your sentiments and eagerness to protect the BSNL, I must warn you that your goal cannot be achieved in isolation, insulated from the reality that the threat to the existence of Public Telecom Service Company comes from its very owner the Central Govt itself. This warning is not to deter you from your endeavor to take steps to protect the company, but to impress upon you the seriousness of the threat. Disinvestment forms part of over all policy frame work of the UPA Govt (now free from the constraints put in by the left parties through CMP) to withdraw from service sector to leave it to the finance capital in the context of Imperialist Globalisation. The ideas behind Globalisation is to do away with all sorts of social security measures, job security, state control on the market inorder to give free hand for finance capital. Free market also means exit of small entrepreneurs, closures, mergers, cartalisation and finally share market crisis, often artificial and calculated and at times spontaneous. Therefore, no body can depend on the share market, without risking their savings. To achieve your objective, you must close ranks with all those who are interested in similar aims, protecting their work, their wages, a decent livelihood and social security.

As far as the customers are concerned, their immediate interest tends them to opt for the cheap and quality service. It is quite natural. BSNL faces the problem of organisational rigidity and lack of dynamism, inherent with a large nation-wide, vast organisation as it is. It may not be able to respond as quickly as others to the price variations brought by its competitors. But the customers, in Kerala, by and large, they are having a better social outlook, and are pro public sector, has to see to the long term interest as well.

On the part of BSNL business organisation, it has to strike hard to attain customer satisfaction. The lethargy shall not be tolerated. Mis-management, corruption, wastage of resources, if any, have to be put an end to. BSNL services are said to be far better than any other. But service delivery has to improve. From the notes circulated for discussion, I am to understand that you are discussing the possibility of diversification of activities, products and services as well. Lateral and vertifical diversification, which means dynamism, is a means of sustenance of an organisation in the competitive environment. Telecom services in Public Sector shall have a role to play in the well being and betterment of our society.

Wish you all success and hope that concrete suggestions and decisions will come out of this forum.

K Chandran Pillai (Member, Rajya Sabha).

Dt: 14-08-2008.

It is miniproject time for every Sixth semester B Tech students. I would like to update about my miniproject.
I am implementing a Wireless Linux Terminal Server project, Which is an extension to LTSP project.

Basically LTSP as quoted from wikipedia “Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is a free and open source add-on package for Linux that allows many people to simultaneously use the same computer. Applications run on the server with a terminal known as a thin client (also known as an X terminal) handling input and output. Generally, terminals are low-powered, lack a hard disk and are quieter than desktop computers because they do not have any moving parts.”

LTSP facilities to use a powerful machine shared by many users from different terminals or thin clients. Thin client machines actually don’t do any processing rather than setting up a minimal system to run an X server. Basic principle of an LTSP system are as follows.

There will be a server machine which is having considerable ram, processing power and attached to a network. The client machines are low end machine with few megabytes of ram, low processing power and attached to the same network over LAN through ethernet card. Ethernet cards come with a special chip socket. We can actually flash a chip / ROM containing a minimal OS. We flash a minimal OS in it and call it PXE ( Preboot Execution Environment).
This ROM will setup a Linux kernel and an initial ramdisk atmost of 10MB. Thus the minimal OS will boot and detect the required devices, like ethernet card. The it loads nfs kernel module and establishes network connection through DHCP and remote root filesystem is mounted via NFS as read only. It places symbolic links to the core parts of root filesystem structure like /bin , /sbin, /lib, /usr and other directories are created in the ram and copies from the readonly directory. The system switches the root to the new root filesystem, sets up a minimal system that can run X. Now it remote login to the server machine using XDMCP.

I am implementing a similar version of LTSP with wireless support. The limitation of Wireless card is that it does not have a facility like PXE to boot the minimal OS. So we have to look at some other ways to boot the minimal OS. So I decided to use either a CDRom or USB pendrive to make an equivalent setup like PXE. I am basing Pardus 2009 for my project though Pardus 2009.1 has recently released.

I have been hacking around Linux distros over 4-5 years. My first tryst with hacking a distro was with Knoppix in 2005.
My first task was to hack around the Pardus initial ramdisk scripts. Basically to boot a Linux OS, we need Linux kernel and a filesystem to support it. We use a bootloader like GRUB, Lilo, Syslinux. GRUB is the most advanced one among them now. I will be using syslinux as my client bootloader since we need something very light weight.

A custom compiled kernel or native Pardus 2009 kernel ( 2.6.30-123), an initrd file to act as base filesystem for the WLTSP client. My aim is to implement wireless support and reinventing LTSP with Pardus. I was more enthusiastic to see how it would work such that a client boots from a 10MB ROM and runs a full fledged OS. I wrote a small script to decompress and compress the initrd.img file.

#!/bin/bash

if [ "$1" == "extract" ];
then
	mkdir fsroot;
	cp initrd.img fsroot/
	cd fsroot
	mv initrd.img initrd.gz
	gunzip initrd.gz
	cpio -i  initrd
	rm initrd ;

elif [ "$1" == "bake" ];
then
	cd fsroot;
	find ./ | cpio -H newc -o > ../initrd.cpio
	cd ..
	gzip -c initrd.cpio > initrd.img
	rm initrd.cpio
	rm -rf fsroot
fi

I customized the init script to add few more features, I cut off some of the unnecessary things from the script. Basically an initrd.img file consists of a Busybox filesystem. Busybox is a commonly used initial ramdisk base. There are a lot of interesting things about Busybox. Busybox looks a small real Root filesystem as most GNU/Linux operating systems has. Firing an ls inside initrd would look like this.

slynux@slynux-laptop:~/miniproject/initrd_bake/fsroot$ ls
bin  bootsplash  dev  etc  init  lib  newroot  proc  sbin  sys

/bin and /sbin contain lots of binaries. There are many common utilities that comes along it including ifconfi, grep, sed, awk etc. I thought they are similar to real elf files, like they are individual binaries. Interestingly, in Busybox there is only one elf file. All other binaries are hardlinked to the same It actually checks for argv[0] and finds its name and does its function. That is, suppose if i rename /bin/ls to /bin/ifconfig. It will work as ifconfig rather than showing ls ouput. It is done to keep the system really small. You can also put your own binaries to the busybox environment. But it should be noted that dynamically linked binaries won’t work. You have to compile as static. For that, use -static option for gcc while compiling.

The initrd that came with pardus had no wireless extensions since no kernel modules required to fire up the drivers were present. I looked to to /lib/modules/2.6.30-123 and went through .ko files, modprobe.dep, modprobe.alias. The device probing and corresponding module loading is handled by coolplug, an excellent program written by Pardus developers. Kudos to them. I went to my Pardus 2009 installation, looked into lsmod and figured out some of the required modules and their dependencies. I hacked the initrd again and added the dependencies, required kernel modules. I booted from the minimal system I had. I am using intel wireless card, so I tried to load manually modprobe iwl3945. It worked fine, but no wlan0 interface comes up. I looked into dmesg and found some errors related to crypt auth etc. I troubled me a little to figure out what was happening around. Finally I understood that some more kernel modules are required to make it work. The culprit were “arc4 and ecb”. I added those modules. The wlan0 interface came up. Next task was to port some of the wireless utilities to busybox environment. I decided to use klcc, which klibc compiler to make it small and simple. I tried to port iwconfig first. I failed to do it since it required lots of changes to make it suit for klibc. After trying out for some days, i left it and went through new set of wireless utils called iw. After few tweaks with Makefile, I got iw compiled with klcc. But the problem is that I couldn’t make it static. I fired up ldd to check the dependencies and found that it is dependent on lib-nl (netlink lib). So in order to make it static, lib-nl is also made to be static as libnl.a. So went tweaking libnl Makefile also. Finally i got iw as static bin having huge size around 1MB. It was the first time I was encountering with iw. A funny thing happened, I found iw being very experimental so it was not working as I expected :P. I went back to iwconfig and tweaked the Makefiles to get a static version. I placed iwconfig and iwlist in /bin of initrd and executed a shell to check the wireless. Everything went fine. But when I used ifconfig to set IP or making the wireless interface up, it hangs up. I got clueless. After going through enough googleing and mailing lists, I learned that it was problem with firmware loading. Devices like wireless cards require firmware to work, when they are first used, the kernel will look for a specific location, /sys$DEVPATH/data for firmware data. It is to be made available at request time. Usually, it is handled by Linux hotplug daemon. Currently in most distros, udev is the device node creation and management backend. udev handles the firmware loading. In busybox environment, there is no udev available, so I have to manually do the firmware loading somehow. /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug can be manupulated to run a hotplug application so that, when the kernel does some requests it executes the file that is set as hotplug with some environment variables like $SUBSYSTEM,$ACTION,$FIRMWARE.

So I setup a script to handle the firmware loading to act as firmware loader.

if [ "$SUBSYSTEM/$ACTION" == "firmware/add" ]; then
    [ -e "/sys$DEVPATH/loading" ] || exit 1
    DIR=/lib/firmware
    [ -e "$DIR/$FIRMWARE" ] || exit 1
    echo 1 > /sys$DEVPATH/loading

    cat "$DIR/$FIRMWARE" > /sys$DEVPATH/data
    echo 0 > /sys$DEVPATH/loading
    exit 0
fi

passed it path to /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug

# echo /bin/hotplug > /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug

Required fimware are placed in /lib/firmware. For iwl, its iwlwifi-3945-1.ucode.

Now everything went fine. iwconfig and ifconfig tuned well and wireless connectivity is up.

I setup another machine with Pardus-2009 to act as the server. Installed NFS server.

Next thing to be done is to get connectivity from client, mount an NFS share from the server. Build the newroot and switch to it. I needed to build a small and custom version of Pardus that just requires to run an X server. Pardusman, my GSOC-2009 project came for the help. Oh. I didn’t upload any videos of Pardusman yet ? I will do it in a couple of days. Using pardusman, I built a small iso having size around 130 MB. I extracted the pardus.img squashfs and exported via NFS share. The client could now mount the share using mount -o nfs, nolock, ro 192.168.1.100:/opt/pardusroot /newroot/mnt/client. Now some of the required directories to be writable are copied from the ro filesystem. The init script is setup to handle all things. I added a little configuration parser so that init script will read a .conf file and perform the actions like wifi ip, nfs server etc.

After a couple of days of effort i could setup the minimal system with X server support. I used XDMCP to remote login. So the remote login worked pretty well. Now the client can login to a beatiful KDE 4 desktop

It wasn’t that slow as I expected through wifi. It was working considerably well. Now it does everything from the server. Now as the final task, I need to forward the sound and device discovery. Since it logs into the server, once you play some music, it plays it at server. No sound comes out of client. Similarly devices plugged in the client are not shown, it shows the storage devices from the server only. Pulse audio came to help for sound forwarding. Pulse server is an awesome sound server that can be used to reroute sound. I also added pulseaudio server to the base pardus.img. Pulseaudio is very advanced so that it can run in session mode and system wide mode. We need system wide. Enough configuration tweaks are to be done in /etc/pulseaudio/system.pa to allow the tcp via authentication over a network. In the server side, /etc/X11/ a script is added to setup the PULSE_SERVER env variable to IP address from $DISPLAY. Now the X will be started by passing the environment variable PULSE_SERVER=client_ip:port. Hence sound will be rerouted.

Next and final thing to be done was forwarding devices ~/Drives directory is created in user home directories. lbuscd and ltspfs came to help. ltspfs is a fuse extension like sshfs which and remotely mount a filesystem. lbuscd can handle a pseudo fstab so that it can listen and mount,umount devices as it comes. lbuscd is a daemon that listens to /tmp/lbus.fifo, which is a first in first out file. A udev rule is setup such that once devices like [sh]d[a-z] or [sh]d[a-z][0-9] appears their dev path is notified to another script so that it can update the fifo. The lbusd which listens to it handles the mounting and umounting. ltspfs updates the availability of devices in ~/Drives and synchronises the changes.

Finally the 11MB Client is ready it boots to a full fledged KDE 4 powered desktop in a couple of minutes. I check out the free -m and found that it is taking atmost 150 MB ram usage for caching all the remote readonly filesystem.

Right now I am tweaking it more to make it lightweight. Probably using desktop like XFCE4 will scale down the memory usage to very minimal level. KDE is a heavy desktop environment.

I will push the WLTSP code to github soon.

Happy Hacking.

A few days back I came to know about this project :Text Prediction on GNOME based on GTK+ Input Method context. Basically it is an input method with text prediction feature.

I had a similar project idea during 2009 May and had done some amount of coding for that. The project was to have an IBUS input method which can do letter prediction as well as word prediction. The prediction is based on ngrams.  Since it is based on ibus, it works on all desktop applications.  You can see the screenshots of prototype from here, here and here

The core code was ready. It was written in python and use ibus-python. Unfortunately I did not get time to spend on this project for a long time and currently this project is not there in my top priorities.  Since I see many people interested in auto-completion or predictive text entry, I uploaded the code here http://github.com/santhoshtr/ibus-sulekha .  It is not in a working state as of now, but I would be happy if anybody interested in taking it forward.  I wrote a small documentation on algorithm here, and feel free to contact me if any help is required.

Some of us in the bangalore-fp group have decided to form a study group on SICP. The main reason behind study groups is that it is a great way to learn any new subject or a literary work. People share what they read, ask questions, have discussions around these questions they ask etc etc. Also regular meetups provide a time tick to the group and is very motivational.
If anyone is interested, please contact me or subscribe to bangalore-fp. We will most likely have a meetup this sunday. The venue and time is not yet decided. I will update this post once it is agreed upon.
I am not sure whether this will be a “success”. I don’t even know how to measure success (in general, not just in this context). If one person manage to get inspired to complete the entire book, then I guess it can be considered as a success.
Update: The meeting is at this place called Jaaga on sunday, 14th March 2010 from 3pm.

Don't trust me on this ... I've been wrong before.

The difference between good friends and bad shows itself when you're wrong - when you're wrong and you don't know it. Sure, misfortune is a true test, but it hardly comes around every day and I'm glad it doesn't. But try being wrong about something. And you'll notice a strange fact.

These days friendships are too shallow. We're too independent to really need them. No, I'm not decrying the current times from the chair of age. I'm talking about the way my life's taken. And I notice that I've stopped being wrong - there was no wrong way to live my life. For a while, I thought it was because I finally had life figured out.

And I was wrong. Wrong on both counts. And people have noticed. I've been insulted. Told off by people that I was an idiot. But I didn't care for insults. They've never been a way to make me comply with anything. People have tried shame on me for years and failed. I've rarely got anything to prove to anyone but me.

A friend would've told me why. Felt comfortable enough to sit me down and outline the flaws. Because I'm not my mistakes, I'm more. Friends have got stuff to salvage, the snipers from afar don't seem to. There's a world of a difference between "He's such an idiot!" and "Don't be an idiot". And I react very differently to both.

Like I said, I've been wrong before. And I see no reason to stop now.

Well, you know what to do. Also, bring popcorn.

You & I both know there's no We here.

As I write down blog entry after the other, I've come to realize that there's only one person I can talk about with any sort of clarity - me. I can't speak for anyone else. Everything is as I observe, as I experience and as I feel - all mixed up into a general pile of nothing. To draw out a clear & coherent thread of thought out of that requires me to unravel a bit of myself in the process.

Self reflection leaves its own smudges in my thoughts. The searchlight of my mind leaves shadows, of contrasts & comparisons with itself. The similarities just merge into the backdrop, the differences stick out like a sore thumb. The edges & cracks appear, just like on a lake in winter, when the fluidity of thought is frozen into something solid.

And the words, like charcoal rubbing on paper, merely picks up what stands out. Everything in black & white, clearly marked out. Makes for a pretty picture, but is hardly what really exists.

Frame it up, hang it up and sign my name. And call it a blog.

ദുഫായില്‍ പോലീസുകാരില്ലേ?

Unless otherwise noted, all works published under this blog are original works of the author, and licensed under Creative Commons Deed © Evuraan. All Rights Reserved.

Common folklore (confirmed by some Norwegian friends) is that heat is not a friend of laptop batteries. The life of a laptop battery tend to reduce in Indian weather. One of the Dell Laptops I bought in early 2008 can now work barely 30 minutes with a fully charged battery.

Linux kernel provides a wealth of information (through ACPI) about the Battery like the make, type, serial number etc. Look under
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/. This is what I have:

~$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status
Unknown
~$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/technology
Li-ion
~$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/type
Battery
~$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/serial_number
32511
~$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/manufacturer
SANYO
~$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/model_name
42T4511
~$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_full_design
84240000
~$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_full
64530000
~$ cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now
63160000

It looks like, my battery (this is a work laptop, Lenovo Thinkpad T61 running Debian x86-64 unstable) is functioning at a lesser capacity than it is designed. It will be nice to corelate these readings with the actual performance of the battery. I tend to run this machine mostly with AC, but I will try profiling it for battery performance and see how much time these numbers translate to.

It all started with the petty battles, with a collective comedown on a cultural philistine like me - one without taste in music, art, literature or topic du jour.

What they looked in each other was not for glimmers of intelligence, but for a bit of something shared. Something to set them apart from the rest, the secret handshakes, the shibboleth to exclude those of a lower culture. Respect doled out for abstract obscurity, while clarity was despised. The vaguer it got, the easier could everyone trot out their pet ideas without stepping on each others' toes.

I could've been a mute spectator to all that. But then the challenges appeared on my table.

I never did define my identity with things external. Rarely was it propped up with books, music or art. Something reprehensible to embellish yourself with someone else's creativity. To listen, read, collect it. And dole it out instead of your own. There I was, with life's experiences and I thought that was all that remained to be said about me. What I do, that is where my fount of self is rooted on and with some sort of gratitude, I pour myself back into it.

Never felt the urge to defend my choices, in anything that fed my mind. But I almost fanatically defend the choices I make, when it comes to actions. What went in seemed far insignificant to what eventually came out. My principles, ethics and the path I tread in life, those are up for criticism - always have been.

There was no point in responding to those challenges - to be beaten down just for someone's pleasure. For them in their world to feel superior. Maybe that's what gets them through their day, but I've got no time or energy to fight these petty battles. I've got things to do.

Culture intrigues me. I'd rather learn than fight about my personal opinions. Bizarrely, the same people fighting for their opinions object to others sharing theirs. What they always craved I guess was smug superiority, not to convince. Popularity of their niche seems to be their enemy rather than a sign of success.

The world of high culture is full of people who'd love something, yet dissuade the world from sharing it. In a sort of self destructive selfishness, they cordon off their niches. Watching them over the years, I've seen these hypocrites slink away from the bright sunlight of popular attention. Not revel in the new found wisdom of the world or applaud at its good taste.

I've tried to learn what it is about these ideas that make it special. Read Hegel & Kant, Foucault & Derida. Listened to Mozart (ooh, the 5th!), gone to Chopin recitals (thankee hyacie), observed the layered randomness of Coltrane. I've liked some, I haven't others. Perhaps arbitrarily, I don't know.

But equally arbitrarily, I've followed popular culture. I've liked some, I couldn't care less for others. I dig down into Simpsons or Futurama, I play Lady Gaga in a loop for days. Not mindlessly, I notice the nuances of timing & melody of the Gaga, the college level literature references littered in Simpsons, the secret messages written in alienese in Futurama. I notice, I enjoy and I'm not ashamed of it.

I'm overcome by an urge to share & enjoy. I think the fact that more people enjoy it, the better it was. Perhaps it takes more talent to make something the whole world can enjoy. A deeper understanding of all humanity perhaps. And I'll do my part. I can't understand how someone can enjoy something so much, but dissuade someone else from exploring. Even more puzzlingly, only seem to enjoy things that nobody else around seem to be capable of appreciating. Are you that special or is that all a facade put up?

After much thought, I've come to a shocking, but inescapable conclusion.

Setting out to make social change is good to hear but it is tough to actually get done. I haven't made any or for that matter actually have started doing anything big towards that but I have had opportunities to be part of or to contribute to multiple ventures/initiatives over the course of the last 4 years. Through these learning experiences I have come to realize the importance of two factors for making sustainable social change - persistence and scalability. A case in point is the TidyCity campaign which started in 2009 and which has been gaining ground and momentum over the past year or so.

Click here to read the rest of this article

I have an ego. A nice, cheap and refurbished one in good condition.

And yes, I'm proud to have one. I've been without one, lost nearly all traces of it. Killed, choked it, sacrificed it at the altar of love & togetherness. Apologized for what wasn't my fault, forgave without apologies, silenced my self respect and cut off my ego from my life.

And that nearly was the end of me.

I couldn't survive. Because here's the thing - the world isn't always fair. Life's a bitch and it shows its true colours. It criticizes without reason and often without gain. To keep your course through that minefield of criticism requires a tough skin and a crumple zone. An ego is the crumple zone for your real self. It stands up to the world, in your stead. Takes a few dents, but nothing permanent.

Building myself back up from nearly nothing, there was my ego, leading the charge. Driving me, pushing me to do things I'd never done before, channeling my Id into the useful. Everything accomplished was an ego boost. Every failure hurt, but every failure challenged.

An ego strong enough to repel the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, from the inner sanctum of your self and spirit. Something to keep the material world out of the spiritual, something with an edge to cut my path through the world.

There's that bright light within my eyes again. A smile on my lips and a spring in my step. And screams that it is here to stay, till death do us part. But there's balance. Between me, my ego and my Id, I'm ambitious, curious and cautious all at the same time.

In a mirror, I see me. And I smile.

So bluesmoon wrote a blog entry on function currying in javascript. Read it first, if you've got no idea what I'm talking about.

But the example given there is hardly the *nice* one - you don't need a makeAdder(), you can sprinkle a little bit more magical pixie dust to make a maker. I remembered that I had a better sample lying around from early 2005, but unfortunately it wasn't quoted in my journal entry.

I couldn't find the exact code I wrote back then, but here's a re-do of the same idea.

function curried(f, args, arity)
{

  return function() {
    var fullargs = args.concat(toArray(arguments));
    if(fullargs.length < arity) 
    {
      /* recurse */
      return curry(f).apply(null, fullargs);
    }
    else 
    {
      return f.apply(null, fullargs);
    }
  };

}

function curry(f, arity) 
{
  if(!arity) arity = f.length;

  return function() {
    var args = toArray(arguments);
    if(args.length < arity) 
    {
      return curried(f, args, arity);
    }
    else 
    {
      /* boring */
      return f.apply(null, args);
    }
  };

}

Basically with the help of two closures (the two function() calls without names), I created a generic currying mechanism which can be used as follows.

function add(a,b) { return a+b;}

add = curry(add);

var add1 = add(1);
var c = add1(2);

Now, the hack works because of the arguments object available for use in every javascript function. Also every function, being an object as well, lets you look up the number of arguments (arity) it accepts by default. You can even make a full-class decorator, if you pay more attention to the scope (null, in my examples) passed to the function apply().

Here's the full code example.

Five years is a long time, no matter how I look at it. I've been in Yahoo! for half a decade now or to put it in perspective, half my adult life.

If I had to describe the last year of here, I'd use almost the same words as I'd used to describe my first year here (with fairy godmothers and unicorns inked in). And it almost feels like all that was yesterday as I stare at that gumball machine at my desk.

No matter how I look at it, working here has been a huge personal event in my life. Not just professionally, but with everything else that I've managed to accomplish over the years. I guess that's what's kept me here, year after year.

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 All credits to http://www.americanidol.com

Heaven by Bryan Adams

Play song from Lala.com So Far So Good - 1993 - 4:03 Listen on: Lala - iLike - Rhapsody - Pandora

Unless otherwise noted, all works published under this blog are original works of the author, and licensed under Creative Commons Deed © Evuraan. All Rights Reserved.

I love Bokeh. Nothing stands out more in a portrait or a macro photo than the bokeh and the shallow DoF you can get out of a wide aperture lens. Here's a quick tutorial on how I managed to add to the effect of bokeh with some cheap carboard, masking tape and a bit of math.

The idea is to mask out the light from distant sources, without masking out the close up objects at all. The lens is designed such that the distant object light rays hit the lens and form large circles of light, instead of points as the beams focus before the sensor and diverge out into blurs. The math involved in designing the lens hood is to actually cut off some of the distant beams while retaining all the close object beams.

This is drawn roughly from a 50mm f/1.8 Nikkor. Anything covering the internal 15mm would block closer objects , but everything within the 20mm (approx) ring would only block distant objects. So anything you could punch out between those, would form a neat and clean bokeh image.

After trying to remember enough of 1st year engineering drawing, in my attempt to draw a heart with a 5mm tolerance, I gave up. Instead, I just took a print-out (A4) of something I could easily draw on a computer. Here's an easily printable PDF, in case you want to try it out on your own.

Here's how my Mk1 version looked like. I eventually ended up making a more collapsible version nearly completely out of duct-tape, which is far uglier, but has a slot in the top to slide in different filters. The tube collapses, making it slightly squarer and the pdf has the pull-tab version that the Mk2 uses.

Update: Someone pointed out that today's flickrblog covers this exact topic ... *ugh*, I'm an hour late. But at least, the PDF should come of some use to the lazier of you :).

The same is true in the case of the ubiquitous modern device, the computer. The keyboard is the same on all of them, the compact disks we use are of the same size and we need not relearn the use of a keyboard when we buy a new computer, nor do we have to specify a certain size for the CD we buy. These are all examples of open standards that have been adopted by the industry. And these standards make our life easier because we need not unduly worry about what we buy. However, that is not necessarily the case with what we use in the computer.

Society has started using the computer for all kinds of purposes, including creating documents, pictures, animations, videos, databases and so on. These are stored in a manner that only a computer can decipher. This happens transparently so that even computer users may not realise how they are stored. For instance, when I type this article, it is stored in the computer in the form of what we call a “file”. A file is a collection of ones and zeroes stored electronically. Each character in a text document like this one or each tiny bit of colour in a picture is represented in a computer by a group of ones and zeroes. What set of ones and zeroes represent a character is decided by the method of encoding used for creating the file. For many purposes, the rule by which this conversion is made is open to the public – such as ASCII or Unicode. But certain applications, such as Microsoft Word, save files it creates in a manner that is not open. It writes files into hard disks in a purely “binary” format that consists of ones and zeroes in an order that is determined by a rule that is known only to the makers of Word. In other words, that file can be opened and the original document seen in the proper manner only if Microsoft Word is used. Of course, some other people have worked out the manner in which Word does it, but not perfectly. Therefore, the file could be opened, albeit imperfectly, using some other applications also. This is the case not only with Microsoft Word, but is true of all proprietary applications including Adobe Photoshop, Lotus 123 and CorelDraw. Of course, this is the default behaviour and each of these is capable of saving the files in other formats (which, again, may not be perfect).

But that is certainly not an ideal situation. What it means is that we users become dependent on the software that we use to create our documents to open them. That means, if we want to open a document created using Microsoft Word, and see it in the way we had made it, we will have to use Microsoft Word itself. The problem is that we don't know what a later version of the application will support. There is no guarantee that a file created with an earlier version will be cleanly opened by a new version of the same software. More importantly, in today's dog eats dog world, there is no guarantee that even the company wll exist a few years hence. And this is not mere speculation. WordPerfect used to be the most popular word processor some years back. But very few people use it today, even though it is probably the best word processor ever according to many people. WordPerfect was purchased by Corel, which itself is a struggling company. It could be wound up any day, and WordPerfect may no longer be available. And no other application today can cleanly open documents created with WordPerfect.

Such a situation is bad enough for private documents. Imagine the situation in which important documents related to the matters of a country are stored in formats created by proprietary software companies – formats that are not open and therefore inaccessible to anyone other than those who created the software. It could become very difficult to retrieve the information. Or critical information about citizens of a country. The risk is not only of the information getting locked in, but also of a software company potentially holding a country to ransom. It may be appropriate to narrate an incident in this connection.

Venezuela is a poor country that is very much dependent on its oil resources. Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA), often pronounced Pedevesa, is a state-owned company that runs the oil industry there. A whole lot of processes, including metering, invoicing, billing, and customer service, was handled by proprietary software. At a particular point in the political transformation that happened in Venezuela, a large number of employees who were managing the computer system resigned and left suddenly, and took the user manuals with them (it seems under instigation from external sources that wanted to create trouble for the new regime). Not only was the whole system left without anyone to manage, the entire data, in a format designed by the company making it inaccessible to others. The company, conveniently, refused to help the country. The entire economy of the country was on the brink of collapse. It was saved only because a group of young people managed to migrate the entire computer system to Free Software – software that would save all information in a format that is open, ensuring that it will always be accessible.

Obviously, governments should ensure that all their data are stored in open formats so that at no time will they held to ransom by agencies, external or internal, that wished to create trouble for them. Use of standards is a requirement for a technological society. The standards for the units of measurement were an important step in the history of mankind. The possibility of interoperability of equipment such as telephones, radios or televisions, among others, is based on common standards of operation. The only way to ensure that everyone can build appliances, equipment or software that interact with each other is the use of open standards. This enables the storage and exchange of information and data between individuals or groups in different places and times.

There seems to exist an argument that proprietary standards should be allowed to co-exist with free and open standards. But this is meaningless, since there can be only one standard for one purpose. Else, it ceases to be a standard. Imagine having the metre and the fathom as "standards". While the former is a measure of length that is defined as precisely as humanly possible, the other is a rough measure based on the distance between the fingertips of an average individual's hands. Let us forget this aspect for the moment, and imagine that the fathom is another standard. What could happen is that some people could specify lengths in terms of the metre, and others could use the fathom. People would have to go on converting from one system to the other. Of course, this may contribute to improving the computing skills of individuals, but it could contribute much more to confusion. Remember the times we used to get bolts, nuts and screws in both the Imperial and the metric standards. Many unwary people landed up purchasing bolts that would not fit the nuts and screws that wouldn't go into threaded holes that were meant for them.

In any case, it is not good for government documents that will have to be maintained for a number of years. Problems could be especially severe if the "standard" adopted is not Free and Open and is proprietary. In the case of Free and open standards, even if the application that created the documents ceased to exist, the government could hire someone to create an application to open the document, since the format is open. Documents that are encoded in proprietary formats, such as the .doc format of MS Word or the .pm format of Adobe Pagemaker, would make it extremely difficult to open if the original application ceases to exist. Even if it did not, the government would become dependent on that company for ever. It is for such reasons that Free Software activists and others who understand the trap have been saying that the formats used by the governments for storing documents should be free and open.

But the latest draft document on formats to be used for e-governance speaks about other formats co-existing with free and open formats, which it had not till the previous draft. Why this change was made is totally unclear. Till the previous version, the draft was prepared after extensive consultations with the industry and the community, making it rather transparent. But the latest draft was prepared by someone (a bureaucrat?) under the strong influence of one or more company executives. The government seems to have placed the interests of the companies before those of the nation and the people. I would like to join a number of people including Free Software enthusiasts to urge the government to drop this move and admit only the use of Free and Open formats for documents of the government.

I will not forget this day (22-Feb-2010). I saw a man who was working in the noon. I saw the same man dead in the evening A poor guy from North India ( don’t know the exact place) who came to Bangalore for the sake of job. He was helping his master to demolish a building. All of a sudden the beam of the building fell over him and he died. I shed tears for him. Because I know that the government is not going to help his wife neither his new born baby ( I am not here for a flame war ). Its just a feeling that I am sharing nothing more I can do, I can only watch and cry for him. I wish some NGO’s come and help his family. Again I can only wish

Test post - embedding LaTeX in HTML using jslatex

2010-2-22

Do you see a properly rendered math equation here?

Check out this page to learn how to embed LaTeX equations in HTML pages. I am using "jekyll", a static site generation tool and writing my posts in plain HTML - so this has been very easy to implement for me!

Thanks to MeasuringMeasures for this trick!

I would like to share the Oats payasam recipe which I made for the dinner, with you all. After boiling milk, I added oats and sugar, and stirred. I was happily listening to Ilayaraja songs and stirring the combination. Grr. I saw the milk+oats+sugar combination turning into a payasam, may be because I added more oats. Which looked exactly like the payasam, my mom brings from the temple. Got an idea. Added cashew nut and dry grapes to the existing combination. Woow. Now it really looks awesome and tastes yummy. My roomie was laughing at me. He must have thought, “Poor chap, thought of preparing something and ended up with something else ”.

Unfortunately I couldn’t take the snap of my recipe. May be I will take next time. But this is how sometimes things workout. Some ideas come into mind. We deliver those ideas into code (milk+sugar+oats ). And then sometimes we feel that user may like to see it in a different way and  give some spicy looks( cashew + dry grapes ) for enhancement. I know its a bad analogy. I couldn’t think worser than this

ഇന്റര്‍നെറ്റ് കാലത്ത് ജനങ്ങള്‍ ‘ഗൂഗിള്‍ മാപ്പ് + ഇന്ത്യാ പോലീസ്‘ എന്ന് സര്‍ച്ച് എഞ്ചിനില്‍ തിരഞ്ഞാല്‍ ലഭ്യമാകുന്ന വിവരത്തില്‍ സൈബരാബാദിന്റെ ഗൂഗിള്‍ ചങ്ങാത്തവും കേരളത്തിന്റെ പിന്തിരിയലും ദൃശ്യമാകുന്നത് ആശാവഹമല്ല. രാജ്യസുരക്ഷയാണ് മാനദണ്ഡമെങ്കില്‍ രാജ്യമൊട്ടുക്കും ഒരു നയമല്ലേ അഭികാമ്യം. മാത്രവുമല്ല ഭാരതത്തിന്റെ യശസ് വാനോളം ഉയര്‍ത്തുന്ന ഐ‌എസ്‌ആര്‍‌ഓ ഇക്കഴിഞ്ഞ വര്‍ഷമാണല്ലോ ഭുവന്‍ എന്ന സമാന സംരംഭവുമായി രംഗത്തെത്തിയത് അന്നും ഈ ആശങ്ക പ്രകടിപ്പിച്ചു കണ്ടില്ല. ഈ മാപ്പിംഗ് പാര്‍ട്ടി നടത്തിയില്ലെങ്കിലും ഗൂഗിള്‍ മാപ്പില്‍ നേരത്തേ തന്നെ കേരള വിവരങ്ങള്‍ സമൃദ്ധമായി ഉണ്ടല്ലോ അത് എത്രയോ റിപ്പോര്‍ട്ടുകളായി ദിനപത്രങ്ങളിലും ഐടി മാസികകളിലും വന്നിരിക്കുന്നു. അന്നൊന്നും എതിരഭിപ്രായം ഉയര്‍ത്താതിരുന്നതെന്തേ? മാത്രമല്ല യാഹൂ, മൈക്രോസോഫ്‌ട്,നോക്കിയ ഒ‌വി‌ഐ ,ഓപ്പണ്‍ സ്റ്റ്രീറ്റ് എന്നിവയുടെ മാപ്പും ഉണ്ടല്ലോ. കേന്ദ്രസര്‍ക്കാരിന്റെ ശാസ്ത്രസാങ്കേതിക വകുപ്പിന്റെ വെബ് സൈറ്റില്‍ കൊടുത്തിരിക്കുന്ന ലൊക്കേഷന്‍ മാപ്പ് ഈ ലിങ്കില്‍ നോക്കുക http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/mapnew.htm .കേന്ദ്ര സര്‍ക്കാരും ആന്ധ്രാ പൊലീസും നേരിട്ട് തന്നെ ഗൂഗിളിന്റെ സേവനം ഉപയോഗിക്കുമ്പോള്‍ നമ്മുടെ കൊച്ചു കേരളത്തില്‍ ഇതില്‍ എതിര്‍പ്പുയരുന്നതിന്റെ കാരണം സാങ്കേതികപരമായ അജ്ഞത കൂടിയല്ലേ.

ഇന്നത്തെ സാഹചര്യത്തില്‍ നാം മികവോടെ മുന്നോട്ട് പോകണമെങ്കില്‍ വിവരവിനിമയ സാങ്കേതികവിദ്യയേ സഫലമായി ഉപയുക്തമാക്കിയേ പറ്റൂ, ആശങ്ക മൂലം അല്പകാലത്തേക്കെങ്കിലും തടസം വരുന്നത് പോലും ദൂരവ്യാപകമായി നമ്മെ ബഹുകാതം പിന്നിലാക്കും. സാങ്കേതികവിദ്യയുമായി ബന്ധപ്പെടുത്തി ആശങ്കകള്‍ ഉണ്ടാകുന്നത് സ്വഭാവികം എന്നാല്‍ സന്ദേഹം കൃത്യമായി പരിഹരിക്കാനും ഇതുയര്‍ത്തിയ കേന്ദ്രങ്ങള്‍ തന്നെ നടപടിയെടുക്കണം. രാജ്യസുരക്ഷയുമായി ബന്ധപ്പെട്ട പ്രശ്നം നിലനില്‍ക്കുന്നതാണങ്കില്‍ അത് ഗൂഗിള്‍ പോലെയുള്ള എജന്‍സികളുമായി സംസാരിച്ച് വ്യക്തത വരുത്തി തന്ത്രപ്രധാനമായ സ്ഥലങ്ങളുടെ വിശദവിവരത്തിന്റെ ദൃശ്യസൂക്ഷ്മത കുറയ്ക്കാം, അല്ലെങ്കില്‍ യുക്തമായ മറ്റെന്തെങ്കിലും പോംവഴി തേടാം. പക്ഷെ ഇതിന് രാജ്യം മുഴുവന്‍ ഒരു എകീകൃത നയവും രൂപവും ആകണം.

ഇന്റലിജന്‍സ് എ‌ഡിജി‌പിയുടെ കത്തിന് മുന്നെ സംസ്ഥാന റവന്യൂ വകുപ്പിന്റെ മേല്‍നോട്ടത്തില്‍ പ്രവര്‍ത്തിക്കുന്ന ‘ഭൂമി കേരളം‘ പദ്ധതി ഒരു ഐ‌‌എ‌എസ് ഓഫീസറും എതാനും ഉദ്യോഗസ്ഥരും ഉള്‍പ്പടെ കുറച്ച് പേരേ ഗൂഗിള്‍ മാപ്പിംഗ് പാര്‍ട്ടിക്കയക്കാന്‍ തീരുമാനം എടുത്ത് തയാറെടുക്കുകയും ചെയ്തു. കത്തിന് ശേഷം മുകളില്‍ നിന്ന് നിര്‍ദ്ദേശം കിട്ടിയിട്ടാകണം എല്ലാവരും വിട്ടു നിന്നു. ഈ മീറ്റിംഗിനുള്ള ക്ഷണം മെയില്‍ വഴി ലഭിച്ചപ്പോള്‍ കര്‍ശനമായ ചില നിബന്ധനകള്‍ മുന്നോട്ട് വച്ചിരുന്നു. വൈ-ഫൈ ലാപ്‌ടോപ്പ് ഉണ്ടായിരിക്കണം നിര്‍ബന്ധമായും പങ്കെടുക്കണം ഇല്ലെങ്കില്‍ ക്യൂവില്‍ പിന്നില്‍ നില്‍ക്കുന്നവര്‍ക്ക് ഊഴം കൈമാറും. പരിമിതമായ സീറ്റുമാത്രമേ ഉള്ളൂ എന്നോര്‍മിപ്പിക്കാനും മറന്നില്ല. എന്നാല്‍ അന്നേ ദിവസം എത്തിചേര്‍ന്നത് കേവലം മുപ്പത് പേരില്‍ താഴെ മാത്രം. ഏറെ മാധ്യമപ്രവര്‍ത്തകരും, വിവാദം ഇല്ലെങ്കില്‍ സ്ഥിതി മറിച്ചായേനേ. ആകെ നിറം കെട്ട പരിപാടിയില്‍ പങ്കെടുത്തവരില്‍ ചിലരാകട്ടെ പൊലീസ് വരുമോ എന്ന ആശങ്കയിലുമായിരുന്നു, കൂട്ടത്തില്‍ ഒരാളെ ക്രൈം ബ്രാഞ്ച് ചോദ്യം ചെയ്തെന്ന വര്‍ത്തമാനം എതാനും മിനുട്ടുകള്‍ക്കകം ട്വിറ്ററില്‍ എത്തി, പടരുകയും ചെയ്തു.

സിറ്റിസണ്‍ കാര്‍ട്ടോഗ്രാഫര്‍മാരെ സൃഷ്ടിക്കുക എന്ന സദുദ്ദേശത്തോടെയാണ് ഗൂഗിള്‍ പരിപാടി സംഘടിപ്പിച്ചത്.ഒരു പണി ഒറ്റയ്ക്ക് ചെയ്യുന്നതിനേക്കാള്‍ നല്ലതും എളുപ്പവും അത് കൂട്ടായി ചെയ്യുന്നതാണന്നതിന് വിക്കിപീഡിയ തന്നെ മികച്ച ഉദാഹരണം, ഇന്റര്‍നെറ്റിലൂടെ എവിടെയിരുന്നും എപ്പോള്‍ വേണമെങ്കിലും ചെയ്യാമെന്നതും ചിലവ് കുറവാണന്നതും എല്ലാവരേയും ആകര്‍ഷിച്ചു. വികേന്ദ്രീകൃതമായി ചെയ്യുന്നതിന്റെ ഗുണവും അളവും വര്‍ധിപ്പിക്കാന്‍ ഇത്തരം മുഖാമുഖ പരിപാടികള്‍ ഉപകരിക്കുമെന്ന ബോധ്യമാകണം ഒട്ടേറെ പേരെ ഇതില്‍ സംബന്ധിക്കാന്‍ പ്രേരിപ്പിച്ചതും. എതായാലും കേരളത്തിലെ സമീപകാല ശാസ്ത്ര സാങ്കേതിക ചരിത്രമെഴുതിയാല്‍ ഈ ഗൂഗിള്‍ പിണക്കത്തെ ഒഴിവാക്കാനാകില്ല, ഭാവിയില്‍ ആവര്‍ത്തിക്കാതെയിരിക്കാനെങ്കിലും ഇത്തരം രേഖപ്പെടുത്തലുകള്‍ അനിവാര്യമാണ്‍. IEEE, കമ്പ്യൂട്ടര്‍ സൊസൈറ്റി ഓഫ് ഇന്ത്യ(CSI) എന്നീ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങളുടെ കേരള ഘടകം നേരിട്ട് ഈ പരിപാടിയുമായി ആദ്യന്തം സഹകരിക്കുകയും ചെയ്തു, ഒരു വ്യത്യാസം മാത്രം. കത്തിന് മുന്നെ ഈ രണ്ടു സംഘടനകളുടേയും ലോഗോ അടക്കം വിവരങ്ങള്‍ മാപ്പിംഗ് പാര്‍ട്ടി വെബ്‌സൈറ്റില്‍ ഉണ്ടായിരുന്നു. വിവാദ(മാന!) ഭയത്താലാകണം ലോഗോയും മറ്റും നീക്കം ചെയ്ത് പരോക്ഷമായി ഇവര്‍ക്ക് പരിപാടിയില്‍ സഹകരിക്കേണ്ടി വന്നത്. അതേ സമയം ഗൂഗിളിന്റെ വാണിജ്യ താത്പര്യം സ്വതന്ത്ര സോഫ്ട്‌വെയര്‍ പ്രേമികളില്‍ നിന്നും ഉയര്‍ന്നു വന്നിട്ടുമുണ്ട് ഈ ‘സുരക്ഷാ വിവാദ പ്രളയത്തില്‍ ‘ കാര്യമായ ചര്‍ച്ചയ്ക്കെത്തിയില്ല എന്നതാണ് ദുഖകരമായ വസ്തുത.

തീര്‍ച്ചയായും ആധുനീകരിക്കേണ്ട ചില മേഖലകളുണ്ട്, ഭൂവിവരങ്ങളും അനുബന്ധവിവര സന്നാഹങ്ങളും അക്കൂട്ടത്തില്‍ പെടുന്നു. മാത്രമല്ല ആസന്ന ഭാവികാലത്തില്‍ തന്നെ മൊബൈല്‍ ഫോണിലൂടെ നമ്മുടെ നാട്ടില്‍ ഗൂഗിള്‍ മാപ്പ് വഴി തൊട്ടടുത്ത എടി‌എം/പെട്രോള്‍ ബങ്ക്/വിദ്യാഭ്യാസ സ്ഥാപനങ്ങള്‍ /ആശുപത്രി/മെഡിക്കല്‍ സ്റ്റോര്‍ /ഷോപ്പിംഗ് മാളുകള്‍ എന്നിവ എവിടെയെന്ന് തിരയുന്ന കാലം വരും, ചിലപ്പോള്‍ പൊലീസ് സ്റ്റേഷനാണ് തിരയുന്നതെങ്കിലോ?

Its a long I updated my web page. So I thought of a new start. This time I made my page more simpler with basic black & white colour.

These days I was busy with my PG Diploma course in Embedded System Design. Update is going on…

Recently I was discussing about some topics related to corpus and search. After having the discussion i revised some of the points and found some interesting facts related to people preference and search. I am sharing some of the thoughts for you here.

Preference

Our discussion on corpus was related to a corpus in NLTK. It is a personal corpus collected from internet sources. My friend asked to get the dispersion plot of the words 'handsome', 'rich' and 'sexy' with NLTK. The result was quite disappointing. There was no 'rich' and 'handsome' found in the corpus but the word 'sexy' was there :-). After some re-examination we found that the words are there but occurred only once in the corpus and it occurred as uppercase. So why we got blank plot. When I pointed out, my friend told that 'handsome', 'rich' and 'well-employed' are the common specifications found in matrimony websites. It was a new information for me. Because I was wondering that how can we define 'handsome'?? Again I googled for "rich well employed handsome groom" and found that all the ads which appearing contains these words :-) What a strange preference. If an automatic match maker is there how it will compare the request?? Because the views about 'handsome' will be different for different persons!!

Search

After making this experiment I discussed the matter with a colleague. He was telling something different on search patterns he found. He told that find the suggestions appearing for the search term 'how to' ! It was quite interesting the first suggestion was 'how to get pregnant' :-( . Even though much educative information is available in the internet what makes peoples to coin such a search phrase ?? Interestingly I found some other how to question 'how to tell a girl that i love her' ?? Huh Is it the result of internet addiction and isolation from society or friends. I collected the search result . The first hit was from wikihow.com . it contains guidelines,tips and tricks and warning :-)

Some of the how to queries are quite interesting. Observing such queries i wonder that whether we are properly using our information systems. Instead of getting educated still people are following some old myths and wrong information. Because people searches for 'how to test virginity' too.

Taken From -  http://fsfe.org/campaigns/valentine-2010/valentine-2010.html

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