rohitj's domain

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.

Continuing my post about business models for open source, here are some other things which make me think if open source is right way.

0) Well, as usual the first thing that I am able to think of is Office Suit. I am thinking of getting a tablet pc. I have wanted a touch screen laptop for long time time. Now, with touch screen I want to write notes and I want it to convert to text by itself. I owned a windows mobile for sometime. I used to use MS Word in it. And believe it or not, it was awesome. Handwriting recognition worked very good (after a small amount of practice, of course). Is there such thing in open source world? I bet not. Why not? Because it require research and lot of work. And then open sourcing it of course doesn’t make sense.

1) As all of you agree Evolution is a dead end. Thunderbird is good. I use Kontact though. I like to use default applications. This makes things look decent, and interconnectivity better. I did not shift to KDE4 untill KDE4.1 came. At 4.1, I expected things to work a little stable. Let me tell you a funny story about Kontact. In 4.1.0, if you close kill Kontact, you account information used to get vanish. Thankfully not the emails. So, you have to enter all the account settings again. In 4.1.4 things got improved, it stopped happening. But 2 days back, this happened again. I do not know why. I haven’t tried regenerating that problem. Another problem is that if I don’t give the kwallet password for sometime, it starts asking for password for accounts. Now this is ridiculous. There is no point asking for account password unless I am giving wrong password for kwallet. And when it ask for account password, and you don’t give it, rather you you logoff, it will ask for this password even if you give kwallet password. What a ridiculous sytem. You can not even properly store data. The worst part is the removal of all account settings. What a crappy thing must be going on inside that your data written in files is gone. Now this is called lack of structure. How did they even think of making a program which can remove data from a file. I am not able to think of any excuse for this problem.

2) PDF is an open standard. I use pdf a lot. But it seems that there is no proper software in ubuntu repository that could render pdf properly. I am mainly talking about different standard symbols used. Like ‘belong to’ sign, ‘equivalent’ sign and so on. Now these are very-very popular symbols. Open source people are not even able to support open standards, how worse can it get. (I tried using Okular and Evince, latest versions in ubuntu intrepid repositories.)

An interesting thing happened yesterday. Supreme Court of India said that content on a blog is your responsibility. And the disclaimer “views expressed on the blog are that of the writers” will not help you at all. Here is the news link. This happened after someone started an orkut community against Shiv Sena. And of course, content became vulgar. Those who don’t know, Shiv Sena is a group of extremist Hindus. I think they usually are bad in expressing their views, which usually involves violence. But anyways, this raises the question of Freedom of Speech. Does it snatch that freedom? If it does, is that right?

Few months back, there was an arrest. The guy made an Orkut community “I hate Sonia Gandhi”. And posted some vulgars comments as well. Here is the news link. Now, I hate Sonia Gandhi as well, and it seems Police and court accepted that its fine to hate Sonia Gandhi, and its fine to even write that. But writing opinions in vulgar language was not accepted. And hence the guy was arrested. (on a side note, google gave information about the guy to the police). Those who don’t know, Sonia Gandhi is Congress President. Congress is the ruling party in India right now. Sonia Gandhi, according to me, is dumb. I don’t think she knows anything about India.

So, the question is, is it really against the fundamental rights of expression and speech? It might be interesting to note that anti-campaigning in India is not allowed. Which means that to promote your product, you can not say that other products are bad. And to promote your party in elections, you can not say other parties are bad. Those who don’t know, in US you can do anti-campaigning. Now, I am not sure what is right. Should vulgar language be allowed in public? If yes, then of course it should be allowed on web as well. If not, it shouldn’t be allowed on web as well. And visa-versa.

I don’t think I like the concept of anti-campaigning. And I don’t think I like the concept of vulgar language in public places. Internet has become very important and very used part of communication system. And so, the etiquettes we teach the children and expect from people in general should be applicable on web as well. Why is it that a guy should be allowed to use vulgar language on web, but not in public places? (socially and legally both)

2008 :

• Graduated from IITK. I miss those days.
• Got into Purdue. For Phd. So, now I am student for another 4-5 years.
• No papers yet.
• Wasted summers in coding. Should have gone to some hill, and should have camped there for a month.
• Deleted Orkut account
• started using facebook.
• Bought Guitar and DSLR
• got 3.85/4.00 in first semester here. Not so happy about it.

2009:

• No web2.0 (mainly facebook), apart from little blogging.
• A little bit of photography
• Research
• Rare movies.
• Take Quals.

I bought my laptop in India. In India, I didn’t use my DVD drive to play movies much, because all the time when I wanted to watch a movie/song, I used to get the pirated avi/mp3 file. Now, recently I rented few DVDs and none worked. I tried everything, nothing worked. Even when I have been using Linux exclusively for more than 2 years now, I always have a feeling that if things are not working than its the Linux bug. So I cursed Ubuntu for having bugs. But I really wanted to watch movie, so I explored more, and found out it was the region code problem. Some non-social people started this concept of regions so that DVDs work only in a area, and wouldn’t work in other areas. Thankfully, you can change your region code 5 times. So, I change my region from India to US, and things are working now. This is really a ridiculous thing though. I was talking with a friend who is American and she said that she has problems watching international movies because the international DVDs they buy in US they are sometimes in different region code. Now, for people like me who love watching Hindi, English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and what not language movies, its a big trouble. Isn’t it funny that those who are paying money to buy these DVDs face this problem. And those who don’t (like I never bought a movie DVD, I always got the pirated avi files), its so easier. I mean, this is really stupid. The only people who you can restrict are the ones who are paying for it, not the ones who are downloading the pirated copies. I guess its just about putting too much restrictions for no reasons.

My the best memories of Cricket are of course that of Sachin’s. His batting is the only thing that makes me watch cricket. I can not also forget those awesome innings which Sachin Tendulkar and Saurav Ganguly played together. No doubt most of the Indians enjoyed Saurabh Ganguly’s glory days. Then came the time when he slipped down in performance (and team spirit as well I believe). Anyways, it was his last inning 2 days back. A test match against Australia. His performance was good in first inning. But in second inning, he got out duck. Zero runs in last inning of his test cricket life. Surely a sad story. But then Bradman also got Duck in his last inning. Anyways, of course his fans and his rivals put that video of his last inning on youtube. Since I don’t watch TV, I turned to youtube to watch that final moments, but it so seems that BCCI has made google remove those videos. Why? Well, I don’t know. BCCI doesn’t even have the copyright on those videos. This is what youtube says about those videos “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Board of Control for Cricket in India”. No, I do not understand. First of all, BCCI doesn’t own any copyright on these videos. Second of all, even if they were afraid that people will insult Ganguly, where is the freedom of expression. Didn’t they insult Ganguly by kicking him out of team for sometime. And didn’t they insult him by making him play under a junior’s captaincy who once played under Ganguly’s captancy. And what about the fans? The fans who couldn’t watch his last inning. BCCI simply snatched the freedom of expression. And of course Google supported them.

There are 3 posts that I started writing and left incomplete. So, here is the tiny summary to everything:

• I am alive.
• Nostalgia has been replaced by load of technical work. Thank God!!
• Proposal for NERD (a new magazine in IITK which is going to talk about research and development and FOSS and Free Culture) has been approved. The magazine will be released under a CC license (probably CC-BY-SA). Final Compilation of the articles is going on.
• I am admin for some Windows machines now. Can not make the company shift to open source, its impossible. And its a family affair, so I can not deny the work. But this made me believe it even stronger that shifting from windows to linux is as difficult as shifting from linux to windows.
• finally made a flickr account. http://www.flickr.com/photos/rohitjiitk/ ….. there are 1-2 photos from my small, yet dangerous hike near a national park
• I have got an XBox. Its bulky, so I can not take it to US, otherwise I would have installed xebian on it. I do not know what to do with it.
• Finally a family trip seems to become reality. We are going to Manali and Rohtang Pas. A 5 day trip, with all luxury.
• Lot of Mangoes …. after 2 Mango-less summers. ….. and before 4-5 mango-less summers
• Finally met my old and gold friends Aakash and Sachin
• The “personal” stuff here, no more exists.
• deleted my orkut account. Only gmail left.

Finally Bluehost guys didn’t listen to any logic. I sent them a complete list of all songs and their source and license. They still weren’t ready to listen. Of course I didn’t remove the songs. So, my site was pulled down. 1 day before the given deadline. I hope I didn’t loose any important email. The mailing list I made on my account are still working .

Anyways, I now plan to run my own server. Where (yes, this is the first question)? Not sure. When? Not sure. Will decide very soon. Till then I am using NearlyFreeSpeech.net . Because of the tight schedule, I couldn’t do this before. NearlyFreeSpeech ‘s services are rather impressive. Leave emails, for which they don’t provide any near decent solution, rest of the things are quite good. I will be charged for what I use. I think if I remove my photo section (which I have as I don’t have enough net speed) my cost would be pretty low as compared to Bl(oody)uehost. Also, they didn’t ask for passport copy or license copy for ssh access. That was nice. The concept of “site” is pretty nice. You can make as many “site”s as you want, and you can ssh to the site individually. I had some glitches with php file write permissions, but it was settled soon. Their  control panel is way too decent. They have put the neccessary things only. Not like cPanel where you find lot of random stuff which you never use. I hope to have happy time here.

There might be some broken links in this site now. Please excuse me for that, I am in process of fixing some broken links that I could find.

So, yesterday I got a mail from bluehost saying that there are some copyrighted material on my site. I bought an account with bluehost in June/July 2007. I share it with some of my friends. One of them is bheekling who hates US copyright laws and the way they use it to exploit people. If you talk in favor of RIAA, he will probably kill you. . And he also prefers to play with these laws. … so anyways, when we bought the hosting space, we decided that we will not put any pirated material on the site. It so seems that initially we were in doubt that japanese animes are not copyrighted. But it so seems they are. Its not copyrighted in US though. So, US law can not make me remove them from my site. Anyways Bluehost guys said that I have the following thing on site, which I must remove. (they use the word “copy written material”. I have no idea what that means )

Now, “Movie” is surely copyrighted. bheekling uploaded that temporarily by mistake. He has removed.
This is my response to bluehost. Let us see what happens. :

For last few days, I have been talking to people (mainly IITK students) about different events we have in FOSSKriti. I found people pretty enthusiastic about different events. I am pointing out those events here:

0: RoR : Y4 batch, being highly affected by Prof. TVP’s, is highly interested in attending RoR workshop. Some people want to learn RoR, some people want to discuss RoR. And I assume that some people will come because they know Saurabh Nanda.

1: Linux Kernel : Those who eff around there linux distro, especially Gentoo users, and those who have slightest interest in systems, were found interested in this.

2: Lisp : I personally am going to attend this event as a participant, not as organizing team. . And I am sure I will bring 10 more people. Actually no, some people were found interested in this workshop, specially those who are doing compilers course, or those who have done compilers course.

3: Linux Chix :

(female.isIITian())&&(female.isGeek())&&(female.hasTalkedTorohitj()) = 0

So, I am not sure how many females will turn up, but I am sure people will be there. This is the second event I want to attend. I want to see what they are upto.

4: KDE4 : Those who do not know, recently there was a big shift in IITK linux community. People broke their long loyalty for Gnome, and shifted to KDE. Alas!! KDE4 is still not in official repos, but they are still on KDE. They think its worth waiting for KDE4. Of course, this talk will attract these people.

Left are beagle hackfest and Clutter talk. Beagle is a must-attend hackfest. (afterall it substitutes stupid google desktop ). And clutter? I have no idea about it.