rohitj's domain

Women reservation in India

rohitj — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:29:54 +0000

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.

PLUG Talk : Introduction to Open Source

rohitj — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:12:15 +0000

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

What should stop you from doing right

rohitj — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:07:03 +0000

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

Bollywood@2009

rohitj — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:18:48 +0000

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.

Site Upgrade

rohitj — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:44:31 +0000

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

Kontact Journal

rohitj — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:08:38 +0000

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.

Google mail labels

rohitj — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:00:23 +0000

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.

Greyhouse Coffee Shop

rohitj — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:30:59 +0000

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.

Ubuntu upgrade

rohitj — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:34:38 +0000

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.

Scent of Free Food

rohitj — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 11:49:16 +0000

Author : Manu Bansal
Copied from his IM status message, with permission.

Who comes, who goes
Why, where, nobody knows.
But the corridors,
they itch my nose,
the gap I close.

The desks are full,
the stacks are high,
lo and behold,
its pizza time!

I eat a slice, I fill some more,
why free food, nobody knows
back at work, I wonder still,
but on my cup, Microsoft grows!!

Reminds me of last 2 semesters at IITK. But I guess PhD aspirants working in labs day n’ night might relate to this better.