world

i still vividly remember the ordeal we went through last year.. it was water everywhere, with rain pouring down mercilessly, and people stranded on top of taxies and buses... man, for the first time in life i had seen so much water, and people drowning in front of me.. no wonder i have developed a flood-o-phobia these days, and its going to stay for sometime


i did take some pictures while i was feeling i was extraordinarily brave that evening.. i climbed on top of a drowning taxi, then on top of three already drowned autos, then on top of bus stand, then climbed up a nearby building to save my ass..


whoever said mumbai's inhabitants are rude.. i have completely different experiences to tell.. that night which i spent on top of building reaffirmed my belief in humanity and that huge heart mumbai has.. i still remember the taste of the food which a muslim family in that building served to all those who had climbed successfully to that building.. and i still remember those people who were still hanging on top of buses with water all around them..


then next day was a long walk from shattered kurla, to office in sakinaka, to ghatkopar, all the way from eastern express highway to chembur, to my sweet /home... i stopped at three places to have vada pav and bread being served by the people who were voluntarily helping hungry people stuck in traffic jams..

am glad that i made it to /home safely my family had almost panicked.

[newsflash] Government blocks Blogspot, Typepad and Geocities blogs. Programmers become 40% more productive.

[newsflash] Government blocks Freenode IRC Channels. Programmer's productivity reaches an alltime high, 98%.

[newsflash] Government blocks Google.com search engine. Programmers found roaming on roads, unable to write any code.

Svaksha's blog talks about how women are actively discouraged from participating in free software projects world over. The article emphasises how much it is important that we give greater responsibilities to women newcomers (while completely forgetting there are euqally large number of male newcomers who would wish to handle responsibilities). I fail to understand why women should get some kind of preference for tasks like being a listadmin..

Besides, i've spent some portion of my career training women from SNDT women's university. Some of these brilliant women students were involved in writing a plugin for implementing a client for Conceptual Graphs in python as a plugin for Dia. They did all their research on their own and used to ask for help regularly. I wonder why would someone call women incompetent.

I believe, women are equally brilliant in doing anything as men are. Encouraging a policy of reservationism has always backfired.

you never know, when you'll drown in flood waters.. or be pelted with stones.. or get blasted into peices while travelling in train.. mumbai, you are a dangerous place to live in

This is an excellent post by Devdas on the ILUG-BOM mailing list, which could not be posted due to some reasons. It explains in great detail how the ISPs operate in india and what their sources of revenue are. Truely an insighting post posted with permission from Devdas.


From: Devdas Bhagat
To: linuxexx@xxxxxxx
Date: Sun, 9 Jul 2006 20:16:04 +0530
Subject: Re: [ILUG-BOM] [OT] Airtel Broadband In Mumbai
On 09/07/06 09:54 +0000, vvcrishxx@xxxxxxx wrote:


> This is an interesting point of view, but I am not sure of its validity. What is
> implied by 'propah'? The valuation of costs on the basis of downloads in
> entirely an artefact and bears little or no relation to the actual costs. How
> much are the other costs (I don't want to know someone's business plans, but
> merely an idea of the real cost of doing business as an ISP)?
>
Ok, the ISP business model basically runs like this:

Buy x units of bandwidth for d0 currency.
Sell y units of bandwidth for d1 currency per unit, where y*d1 > d0 and
y > x. This is also called overselling.

The ISP business has high capital costs, and requires low operating
expense to be profitable.

sometime last year around christmas, Jonathan Coulton released a self made video demonstrating the power of creative commons licensed work.. this entire video is made with pictures taken from Flickr, and best part is all images are free to share..

the way flickr's pictures are made to match the song is just fantastic.. each and every word matches the picture in a slide show.. a perfect goody for christmas

click on continue reading to view the video .. and switch on your speakers

first #ubuntu-in BoF meet was held this sunday at Mc. Donald's (V.T.), Mumbai. Baishampayan/G0SUB was in Mumbai for some personal work and we decided to meet at mc. donald's.. btw, Baishampayan has made it to Google Summer of Code.. congratulations buddy

Shelly's blog talks about Linux, an european threat to computers

She's extremely proud to have an IBM laptop which she considers as an American marvel, while the truth is that IBM has been outsourcing all of its PC manufacturing business to chinese maker Legend (now Lenovo).. I wonder if her blog post was a work of humour or something that she seriously felt about?

[ Spoiler Warning: Content written below is best described as a Rant ]

Google sometimes makes all of us wonder, a faboulous email service, 2.6GB and ever growing inbox,industry leading search service, messenger, homepage builder, calendar, orkut social networking, blogger, news, googlegroups.. you think of it and google offers that service.. if not then it will start offering it from next April fool's day

Why is Google doing all this? People say they have revolutionalised the email and search market so much, so that all other look like playing a catching up game. But think of it in this way, Google allows you to use those services only if you have a Google Account. Something like your profile by which Google refers to you. Who knows google might be operating an internal Google Human Profiling Services?

Google never asked you to join Gmail service. Its your friends who asked you to signup and sent you invitations. And this whole mesh of friends was started by a few initial Gmail users. Every Gmail user was invited by some other existing Gmail user. This means google has an extremely large friend's circle diagram at their disposal, using which they can calculate human statistics with pinpoint accuracy, where other such providers can only guess.

Google now offers you to signup to their search engine service so that your search history is available for later reference (to them, most importantly).. Google can now build up a personal profile of your online tastes, and what information you generally search for. Using Orkut they can identify who your friends are, they could even identify what you and your friend look like in real life using their orkut photo albums.

If you extensively use Google Calendar service then they can find out all about your appointments, schedules and reminders.. Google is even offering Wifi service all over the city of San Fransisco, that means they can even locate you where you are.. If you are using their Google Talk instant messaging services then they even know what you talk about and with whom... Google has huuge storage space at its disposal, and whatever you delete from your inbox is permanently archived by them..

If you regularly access google services, then using your IP, they also know from which part on earth you connect to their service. Finding name of your ISP and then later finding details of your location is a matter of child's play.

Now the question is, how could this be of so much importance to anyone? But then think from the perspective of a prospective employer.. If you mention a Gmail.com email account as contact email address in your resume, then your employer can ask Google Human Profiling Services and find out details about what kind of emails you get, and out of them what kind of emails you generally reply to.. what kind of friend circle to you have.. what kind of relationship do you keep with women/men..

for example, if you are subscribed to Python and PHP mailing lists/newsgroups, then you are somewhat interested in Python and PHP. If you sometimes reply to Python mailing list then you are a pro in that language. And if you often keep replying with python code, then you might be an expert in python. If you repeatedly keep answering several threads in python mailing lists, then you could well be a guru...

And If your google search profile indicates that you have been searching for python code snippets for past 3 years then it means you have been into python programming for past 3 years probably. Your employer will get a positive signal from Google's human profiling services.. and your employer will not hesitate in employing you.

Well yes, normal companies and organisations wont be able to utilize this excellent info, but such human profiles are definately very important to CIA/RAW/NASA.

You just can't be sure who is keeping track of you, can you? Google surely knows what everyone of us did last summer.

Last week (Saturday 15th April) we were all at HBCSE, taking part in a workshop to setup a wifi mesh of access points and wifi enabled devices. Fred Pook (.nl) came down to HBCSE to help us in setting up the antennas.



We dismantled all the Netgear access points (except for that cute Apple Airport Station) and reflashed their EPROMS with friefunk's firmware. Our adventures continued till next day when we actually got some of the access points working in the Ad-Hoc mode. The day ended with a dinner at Orchid's (mmm... chicken barbeques and 6 of us )

The entire collection of pictures taken are available here.