rohitj's domain

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.

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.

Back in IIT Kanpur, CSE ground floor lab used to be my daily hangout/work place because it was not a silent place, and yet not noisy place and because there was a coffee shop nearby. I started missing that after coming to Purdue. I tried using the brewing machine in my office, but that wasn’t that great, and anyways, it’s a little lonely working in office. And then I found Greyhouse Coffee Shop.
This shop features some awesome decoration, a class room (yes, a room with black board, chairs and tables), nice sitting place, nice sound tracks, nice wifi, nice timing and last but not the least, good coffee. It opens at 7AM and closes at midnight or 1AM depending upon day. Few weeks back we had a class in this coffee shop, thats when I discovered that its a good place to sit. Yesterday, I spent almost the whole day here. It was awesome. Constant supply of coffee, ice creams, cakes and other supplies. And if you are hungry, you can go outside and eat something in some shop in Chauncey and come back. In night, its a little crowded, so you may not find your choice of seat, but if you plan to sit here for sometime, you will eventually get your seat. They have 4 types of normal coffee. Go for bottomless coffee and try out each one of them. They are all good.

If you live around this place, you are most welcome to give me company here.

So, one of the reasons why I use ubuntu and not debian is that I want relatively new softwares. But ubuntu’s release period is really irritating now. They release a new version in every 6 months. Of course, nothing major changes this short duration. So, all they do is mainly add new release of KDE or gnome, thats it. Basically in ubuntu upgrade is practically equal to a decent size update. Now, there is nothing wrong is releasing new releases every six months, the problem is that those new softwares are not supported in previous release. For example, Jaunty has KDE4.2. But Intrepid will not have 4.2. Just because KDE updated, and because I want to use KDE4.2, I have to upgrade (or I have to use unsupported KDE, which I want to avoid, for obvious reasons). I wonder how big an issue it would be for system administrators. This is getting irritating. The definition of upgrade and update is totally screwed for Ubuntu.
The only decent difference as I see between Jaunty and Intrepid is KDE version, couldn’t they just give an update for KDE. I believe same goes with gnome.

Now then summer is coming, I think I will again be exploring various distros. Any suggestions?

Update : Oh, the issue with upgrading is that there are chances of things breaking. For example, when I upgraded to Jaunty, my knetworkmanager was gone. So, I had to use LAN and install it. fglrx drivers are not installed. And stuff like that.

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.)

I was coming back from a meeting. I was standing in the bus stop chilling, waiting for the bus which was late. Then came this girl and a guy. I hardly noticed them. They stood in front of me. Girl was talking on phone. When she finished on phone she asked the guy what he did on weekend. The guy said “Nothing on Saturday. On Sunday I watched Slumdog Millionaire.” <pause> “Its a good movie”. The girl replied, “yeah its a good movie. The part which I was atleast was, was SO India.” <”So” with a stress>. I was standing there, I heard it. My next inpulse asked me to ask her what she knows about India. And those who know me, know that its natural for me. I would fight with this person. But to your surprise, and mine too, I didn’t say anything. I smiled. No, I laughed.

I laughed because some people still think that India is a land of snake. It is full of poverty and thats all it has. I laughed at the ignorance and unintellect of that person. This is specially significant here. Here as in America. Because America has lot of Indians. (I never noticed that untill I started looking at different research groups in academia and industry in general). And after this, if this person could still think that way, I am sorry for her. Now, I am not saying that the life shown in that movie is untrue. With good approximation I can say the story is true (not the millionaire part, but the slum life). But is this India? Oh, not just India, she said “*so India*”.

When I read this post, I thought its just exaggeration, but guess what? I was wrong.

-by guest blogger nareshov

Let’s begin then:

Let’s see, I’ve been asked to post here by rohitj on some sort of Fedora vs. Ubuntu. (He was more interested in “Fedora sucks” than “Ubuntu rocks” ).

I have my own experiences with these distros ever since the FC3 days (and then Ubuntu 5.04). I’ve had n00bs having trouble with the default SELinux settings in Fedora given the LAN environment in IITK. Hunting for everyday requirements such as Valknut (those days, we didn’t have linuxdcpp). This repo and that repo and more. The troubles people had with not having mp3 support out of the box in either of these distros.

I hate hunting 3rd party repos and installing nvidia drivers only to experience strange lockups or X crashes. Many of us have had bad experiences with nvidia and deb-distros. Freezes and Crashes were common (not sure now, with gutsy things might’ve changed).

Ubuntu has seen a lot of improvements since Breezy. Trying to adjust time+date asks you to install NTP support if you choose to use a time-server. Ubuntu asks you to install either NFS or Samba if you try to share a folder. Totem calls synaptic to install gstreamer-plugins-{ugly|bad} when needed. I’m not aware if Fedora does the same. They probably do. While Shuttleworth still insists on a brown+orange mixture in the default appearance of the desktop, Fedora has been playing around with their blues ever since the Bluecurves in RedHat9.

Here in India, the “old” linux junta is primarily a RedHat fanbase. Ever since Ubuntu started sending CDs for free, we see things changing. Many who have a lot of faith in RedHat (for good reasons) use Fedora, only to realise that it’s more of a community playground for the RedHat folks to experiment on. I’m not really sure why SuSE wasn’t very popular until Novell showed up in Bangalore.

More? When I do an aptitude install mysql-server , Debian would ask me to set the root password for the server and start the service. Now, yesterday RohitJ had trouble even starting the service and didn’t know the default root server (Probably had none). I can understand Gentoo not setting a default root passwd and not starting the service for you, but Fedora?

Another point of dissatisfaction being the GUI Server administrative tools in Fedora. Boy do they suck donkey balls. I don’t even have to describe what we went through a year ago in that hurry.

Gutsy is here btw, I can see the Indian Ubuntu servers go slow with the rush as I write. Ubuntu has a decent Compiz-fusion set up that hasn’t crashed on me so far – been two days roughly. It also has a n00b-friendly restricted drivers manager. All this cuts trouble and time-expenditure, you know? Ubuntu even understands that when I do an aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree on an amd64 machine it first gets nsplugin-wrapper and then downloads the flashplugin from Adobe’s mirrors and voila! Your 64-bit firefox can play videos on Youtube. I seriously doubt if Fedora can do this (comments please).

What else? Ah yes, good things Fedora has done recently is to stop messing around with the upstream Gnome default layout and combining /core and /extras. But Livna et al still exist >_>.

Look at Debian or Gentoo, it’s all there in one place. *Most* of it at least, compared to the rest – Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva where you _have_ to depend on third party repositories for some software which might not be popular in the US but very popular in Russia or India (DC++ !). Come on!

Well, guess I’ll drop by when the comments are pouring in

So, I got to know about this from nareshov‘s blog post. I tried it, all I needed was answering 20 easy and fast question… and here is the result :

Auditory : 60%
Visual : 40%
Left : 68%
Right : 31%

Rohit, you are mildly left-hemisphere dominant while showing a slight preference for auditory processing. This overall combination seems to indicate a well-working blend of logic and judgment and organization, with sufficient intuition, perception and creativity to balance that dominance.

You will at times experience conflict between how you feel and what you think which will generally be resolved in favor of what you think. You will find yourself interested in the practical applications of whatever material you have learned or whatever situation you face and will retain the ability to refine whatever knowledge you possess or aspects of whatever position you are in.

By and large, you will orient yourself toward intellectual activities and structure. Though not rigid, you will schedule yourself, plan, and focus on routine and continuity of operations, rather than on changes and disruptions

When changes or disruptions occur, you are likely to consider first how to ensure that such disruptions do The same balance is reflected in your sensory preference. You will tend to be reflective and measured in your interaction style. For the most part, you will be considered objective without being cold and goal-oriented while retaining the capacity to listen to others.

Preferentially you learn by listening and maintaining significant internal dialogues with yourself. Nevertheless, you have sufficient visualization capabilities to benefit from using graphs, charts, doodles, or even body movement to enhance your comprehension and memory.

To the extent that you are even implicitly aware of your hemispheric dominance and sensory style, you will feel most comfortable in those arenas which emphasize verbal skills and logic. Teaching, law, and science are those that stand out among the professions, along with technical sales and management.

Curious

UPDATE : Is it possible that these things make anysense?

So, finally CS Department of IIT Kanpur has taken a step to decrease faculty-student distance. Every Wednesday students and faculty members meet at 5PM and talk over a cup of tea and samosas. The topics are supposed to be informal. So, it wouldn’t be just about acads. Today was second meet. I couldn’t attend last meeting, but today I was there. I was 20 mins late, so missed tea and samosa. But  it will be compensated next time, we are going to have pizzas and cold drinks in next get-together . Yes baby, CS department is the coolest (at least pretends) department of IITK.

As of now, we are still talking about different serious issues about department, but I am sure if this meeting will keep going, we will have some real informal chat. There were 4 professors. Prof. Manindra Agarwal (HOD), Prof. Sanghi (DUGC), Prof. Jain, Prof. SKA. I appreciate that these professors were there. I think in last meeting Prof. Karnick were there. I hope others will show up as well. Though for one meet, I think 4-5 professors would be enough. But that shouldn’t mean that same professors are there in every meet. Special thanks to Prof. Manin and Prof. Sanghi for taking this initiative.

So, how is this meet helpful? Lets take one example. Prof. Manindra is a real cool personality. He is one of the best professors, IITK has. Though UGs usually do not get to interact with him, because he (usually) teaches only PG courses, and also he is a laconic speaker ( Am I wrong?), though he is very down to earth. There are other such professors. These interactions will remove such distances. These interactions will surely show students that professors are not devil. You can talk to them as frankly as you talk to others ( but you have to be a bit formal). I am sure this interaction will make the department a better family.

And yeah, please keep variety of stuff to eat and drink. I don’t want to miss these meeting.