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.

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.

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.

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.

All 7 IITs in India and IISc joined together to open their course materials so that people could use them. IITs and IISc are the best technical schools in India and are pretty much world renowned. They have started collecting course materials in the form of slides. The slides can be accessed from http://nptel.iitm.ac.in . Its still an on going process, and it will take time to have course materials for most of the courses. But its surely an awesome initiative. Now, they have also started uploading lecture videos. I don’t think they are actual classroom lectures, I think its all staged. But I think it will still be helpful.

These institutes got Google’s help to get the videos uploaded on youtube. All videos can be accessed from http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=nptelhrd

For more details see the IITK site here .

So, I got to see this youtube video. Actually I saw the actual version of the video, but you can find it in the youtube link. It talks about some habbits while using Vim. These are not some very techy stuffs, but it talks about some basic tricks and tips which can make you use while using Vim as your editor. I found some of the tricks very useful. Specially the use of the “Ctrl+N”.

2007 was overall good. I got to learn lots of things, and got to do lots of things. Got to talk to lot of cool people. Though I wouldn’t forget that it also brought 7th semester which was like the most difficult semester I ever had. This semester probably took my anxiety level to top. Some of the highlights of 2007 are below:

1. Got a job at Microsoft, India. I am excited about it.
2. Got involved into Free Culture activities.
3. Shifted 99% to open source softwares. (flash )
4. Shifted 100% to free songs. (though, this is true.)
5. Shifted to wonderful KDE. I will write an entry for it.
6. No more Gentoo, it takes time. Ubuntu on other hand is wonderful. (Apologies to all those who are on Gentoo or are thinking of shifting to Gentoo because I asked them to do so. )
7. Hiking
8. Another hobby now is Photography …. need money to buy DSLR.
9. Bought a new web space to play with different things. Its been wonderful till now.
10. Zeropage removed restrictions from their songs.
11. Kelly Allyn sent me her autograph, need to go home to get it.
12. Met some wonderful people during internship at Virginia Tech.
13. <compressed because its personal>

Hopes from 2008 :

1. Grad School or a good job (or a startup?)
2. DSLR
3. Free Culture Club at IITK
4. Passing IITK
5. openmoko / android
6. make IITK music club release an album under CC ( www.tempostand.com should help us)
7. Finish talk with Vox Populi guys

In my post about google products, I had shown my wish to have a desktop application for calendar which should sync it’s data with an online server so that I will not have to open browser to see calendar, and I will be able to see calendar even if I do not have my laptop with me.

Now, in software engineering course, we are asked to make a software using different software engineering techniques. And I could persuade my project partners to work on this dream calendar. Mainly the calendar will have following properties :

1. API for making desktop application and web application. First release will have API for perl only. (will serve both desktop and web application )
2. All normal calendar things
3. The software will be under GPL.
4. Others will be able to change your calendar, if you have given them permission.
5. others will be able to send you a request to add an entry in your schedule, like your friend may want you to attend a meeting, (s)he can put an entry for that in your calendar, but you have to accept that request so it finally appear in your schedule.
6. We are trying to understand how iCal works, once we understand that, we will try to include iCal as well, so that you could use current softwares which supports iCal. (iCal is RFC standard for calendars, that means I can freely use it. right?)
7. As of now, if iCal doesn’t make sense, we will have our own thing, for now we are calling it oCal.
8. I will run this server on my web server, so if you others wouldn’t have a server to sync their data, they should be able to do that.
9. We are thinking of including some plugin system as well, so users could modify the calendar functionalities, though we are looking at how different plugin systems works
10. Current status of the project can be seen at http://rohitj.net/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=software_engineering_project

If you think you want a particular feature in the calendar, let me know. We want to know what users want.