rohitj's domain

Having used Gnome, KDE, Unity among other desktop environments, having seen the designs like desktops, workspaces and activities, I still find somethings missing, somethings very important. I will explain it with few examples :

1) Recently, a friend of mine (an android user) had an episode. She was in class and her Pandora application in her android phone started playing music all of a sudden. She had her phone in silent mode, but supposedly android (and now ubuntu (not sure about other distributions)) has different sound settings for different applications. Hence, a silent mode did not ensure that Pandora didn’t create sound.

2) I usually put my laptop on sleep mode when traveling from one place to another. One time, I took my laptop for presentation, and on projector people could see that my current tab was facebook and I was playing some song. Similar thing happens when I go to talk, and open my laptop to work while listening to talk.

3) I work on my laptop. At home, I have an external monitor where I prefer to use Skype and I like a bigger font, and none of the windows are full screen.

4) When I am working, I have a certain set of applications and when I am not working, I have a different set of applications. When I am not working, I don’t want my work applications to waste my system resources, and vice-versa. Also when I switch between these modes, I want certain applications and settings to start or quit.

Now, with activities or workspaces or desktops, you can separate applications from 2 kinds of environments, but most of the environment settings are still shared. For example, audio will still be the same on both activities, and probably font size as well. Also, both activities run in parallel. There is no way for a user to say that I am going into work mode and hence these set of applications should start automatically.

It will be really nice to have an additional feature so that, when I log in or unlock screen, I am asked what kind of environment I want, so that I could pick if I need my audio to be mute or not. If I want only a particular set of applications to be visible or not. Such things are not really important for desktops as desktops stay in similar environment, but laptops change environment very frequently, from lab to home to presentation to talk. One can not always ensure that the desired settings are indeed enabled before a mishap happens.

What I don’t understand is how come no one has addressed this. Also, to my understand, it should rather be simple to atleast achieve partial goals in this line.

It seems to me that as you grow old, your rate of getting emails increases. Or at least thats the case for folks in academia it seems. The question is, how do you respond to these emails or take actions on these emails. This is what I do, and I am eager to know how others do it.

I have a huge hierarchy of email folders and I have Inbox. There are different groups/clubs I am attached with. I have email filters which filter emails from these mailing lists and send them to their respective folders. These are the emails which I don’t want to respond to or read immediately. All my work emails and other emails remain in Inbox. And they remain there till I have taken action on them. That may mean just reading them again, or replying back or doing something else. So, basically, at any point of time, my Inbox has emails that are either unread or I haven’t taken action on them.
Now sometimes, I get emails to which I want to respond but I don’t have time/I am lazy. They stay in Inbox. And sometimes they stay there for a month or so. And sometimes when I get back to those emails, I see that there is no point replying to them anymore. Now, I feel bad about that because I usually claim that if you have emailed me, I will reply to it even if I reply late. So, what do you do?

There are things which people find embarrassing when they are with others. Like standing straight when national anthem is playing at a place which is not really some national celebration day. I remember going to Rave 3 theatre in Kanpur where they played National Anthem before the movie. Some people hesitated to stand up. And then one person stood, and then stood another, and then everyone. Sometimes we don’t take first step thinking we will be alone in that and that would be embarrassing. But most of the times, others would be thinking the same. Take the first step. And even if you end up being alone, those who find you weird are wrong.

Indian parliament is trying to bring women reservation in elections. Which means that each political party will have atleast 1/3rd women candidates in elections. I personally find this decision useful. Useful because we need women in political system. Some might argue that its not gonna help. But I think it will. Having more women in political system means more concerns about women empowerment in society. The biggest opposition for this bill probably came from SP, the party which has quite some influence from Muslims. Now a women leader from Muslim side is quite uncommon. This bill will encourage Muslim women to come up and have a voice. Of course, one women leader in a city will empower other women in that city.

Now I know this is sexist. I am not really against sexism or racism, but this is too much. But you can not win this war with ideals. (I don’t fully support Gandhi philosophy).  What is important is that it remains at 1/3rd, and doesnt increase. Come on, women is India are not that incompetitive.

So, we are trying to resurrect the almost dead Linux User Group at Purdue (PLUG). We (I shouldn’t be using we, but anyways) had our first event today. A Talk on “Introduction to Open Source”. Seems like lack (none?) of advertisement did affect the turn out. 10-15 students were present including 2 apache contributors. I gave the talk. We had some nice questions at the end, and I am happy about that.

Below are the slides I used for the same. Some people from Navya suggested that I mixed up Free Culture ideas with Open Source in these slides, but I believe there is an overlap, and I used that overlap. But anyways, I still hope it gave some perspective to audience. I would love to hear your feedback on it.

For those who were curious about how I made the slides. I used Latex and a document style called “beamer”  Think link might be useful : beamer

[0] Tex file
[1] PDF File

I know that not every time can one take the right step. For example, there shouldn’t be racism, yet lot of minority people are given extra attention. But is it always required to think of consequences even when you are doing right thing? And if you don’t take that right step to avoid some consequences, don’t you bring other?

In America, these days, a new issue is being discussed. Obama changing rules to provide better insurance to people. Which pretty much means that doctors will have more patients. An advertisement said that since number of doctors are not going to change, this will harm people who need special medical attention. It doesn’t make sense to me. Yes, those who are already using medical services may have to wait, but what about those others who so far were not able to use medical services? Just because there are not enough doctors doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be more patients. The first problem in hand is that there are people who need medical services but are not able to get that. Make arrangements to do so. And if the shortage of doctors creates problem, deal with it. Thats what I feel. The right step is to let everyone (who needs it) to use medical services. And its consequence might be that there will be shortage of doctors. On the other hand if you don’t do that, there will be people who were not using services (even though they needed it) and will not be using it in future as well.
I am glad my research is about probability. Because this world sure doesn’t have certain answers

Late 80s and 90s was the worst time for Indian cinema. Indian movies lost the idea of having a theme in it. People like Salman Khan, Govinda, Shahrukh khan, Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol became top actors. Most of them didn’t have any clue of acting. Shahrukh who ruled the industry for some time was merely a joke as far as serious acting is concerned. I do like Shahrukh Khan’s movies, but thats just because its usually a light movie, not because it has some nice theme, or nice acting. People like Naseeruddin Shah, Nana Patekar, Amitabh Bachchan, Shabaana Aazmi were missed. Songs were made basic necessity. Old movies used to have songs as well, but they didn’t come out of blue. Those songs used to move the movie forward. But songs like Kurta Phaad Ke were there for no good reason.

I see a new trend in Indian cinema now. Actors like Kay Kay, Irfan Khan, Rahul Bose, Konkana Sen are proper actors. Their movies may not be “commercial” movies as such, but their movies always have a theme, and more importantly a serious acting. These actors make me like Indian Cinema again.

Update : I have talking about Bollywood, not Indian Cinema as such. Apologies for mixing the terms. Bollywood means just Hindi/English movies, not south/east indian movies. I do not know much about South/East Indian movies.

I didn’t mean to upgrade this site, but since I screwed up some files, and i didn’t have backup, I took this opportunity to shift this site from “self designed CMS + 3 wordpress blogs” to “wordpress multi user”.  I expected wordpress MU to ease my life a lot, but thats not true.  It only made it tough. wordpress MU is not a good substitute for what I had before. Its no doubt good if you want to create a blog for each student in your school, like navya did for IIT Kanpur (see http://blogs.iitk.ac.in/). Though I hope/think that in long run it will be helpful.

While upgrading, thing went smooth apart from one problem. When you install wordpress, by default it creates a blog, and its posts has URL /blog/blah blah. But /blog/ will give 404 error. Now, this meant I could import all my posts from old blog, and I don’t have to worry about indexing by different search engines.  But feed url shifted from /blog/feed/ to /feed/. Now this was bad. So, I tried to change settings so that this defualt blog could work properly with /blog/ urls. But alas, it didn’t work out well. and I am pretty much sure that there is no way of doing so. So, I wrote some rewrite rule sin htaccess and now it works. (hopefully). This site was useful : http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds.

If  you find any problem with the site, please let me know

Another glitch with Kontact. I use wordpress for this blog. And I recently started using kontact journal to keep some private journal entries. Now, Kontact journal allows you to use XML-RPC, which means I can use kontact to write and read blog posts from this blog. I tried that, and I changed my last blog entry in Kontact. But instead of changing the post, Kontact deleted the post. This is ridiculous. Seriously, Kontact people need to straighten up their basic testing protocols. The first and foremost thing is that data *must* not be deleted. And someone told me that open source developers are the most intelligent developers. I sincerely and with sadness doubt that.

So, I use a pop3 client for all my email accounts. I prefer to keep all my emails on my computer rather than on web. And I organize my emails properly. I have lots of folders, and lots of subfolders. And lot of subsubfolders. I liked the folder system most of the time. I didn’t like the label system because I prefer not to see the read emails (read ‘read’ as ‘labelled’). In my email client, I move my read emails to the right folder, so in my inbox, there are only those emails which either I have not read or I haven’t responded. But, now I am finding folder system a little annoying. The problem is that if in an email thread there are 10 emails, and 5 of them are already in some folder, and the new 5 are in inbox. Its difficult to switch back and forth between different folders. In label system, this is easy. Also, it makes it easy to leave all emails in inbox. So, I do not have to plan move emails all the time. I wonder how difficult it will be to implement label system in Kontact or Thunderbird. I have been noticing that Google interface seems bad and ugly, but there are subtle things which make it much more usable. Google HCI people are way too intelligent.