Morsels of life!

Proud to be an official part of Debian

2008-10-14T06:24:04Z

I am proud to be officially a part of what is quite possibly the largest free software project on the planet. To all the people (few of you don't even use Debian - you know who you are) who have been motivating and helping me, and some that actually spent time working in past few days/weeks towards making this happen: hazaar thanks!

te_IN translation for Debian Installer

2008-10-12T05:12:59Z

My parents found it strange that I spend considerable time in the night doing "some Linux thing", so the other day I explained to them what Free software is and we talked about copyright and licensing. I was very happy that they were able to appreciate it. I also gave a Debian Installer demo.

While there are a bunch of Indian languages supported in the Debian Installer, తెలుగు (Telugu) isn't one of them. They noticed it and motivated me to work on te_IN translation for d-i and promised to help me. So the three of us have been discussing translation strings. I have been committing changes slowly and intend to complete this activity in a few months.

Lack of interest in translation meant that I never gave much thought to it but I see that translating software is rather difficult and it is an activity that would benefit a lot from two or three people doing it together. I found a glossary at swecha.org but there are a bunch of problems

Computing terminology is context sensitive and one word doesn't fit all uses.
A lot of words in the glossary are rather contrived.
Most words can be understood only by the elite of the Telugu speaking world.

I am using these simple guidelines for translation:

Use language that is used in the newspapers today. Most people who can read would be used to this and understand it best. e.g password would be రహస్యపదం rather than సంకేతపదము.
Do not invent words. If a certain computing term or a word doesn't have an equivalent colloquial Telugu word, use the English word written in Telugu script. Include the English word in paranthesis next to it. e.g. Registering modules... would be మాడ్యూల్స్ (modules) నమోదు చేయబడుతున్నాయి...
If a translated Telugu word sounds complex or ambiguous in the translation context, include the corresponding English word in Telugu as well as English in parentheses next to it. e.g Partitioning scheme: would be విభజన (పార్టీషనింగ్ [partitioning]) ప్రణాలిక:

A few resources that I have been using:

lekhini - a browser based tool for transliteration based on RTS.
en2te and uchicago.edu's Charles Philip Brown Telugu to English dictionaries.
J. P. L. Gwynn's Telugu to English dictionary hosted by uchicago.edu

I will have to find a good quality comprehensive Telugu general knowledge book or an official A.P. govt. document to translate ISO 3166 codes etc. The Manorama yearbook would've been great, unfortunately Telugu is not one of the few languages it is published in. I will also bring my copy of Sankaranarayan's dictionary from my next month Hyderabad visit.

If you have suggestions on any of these (pointers to guidelines, resources that are DFSG free and I could copy from etc.) that would make doing this easy for me, please do let me know.

Naidu does good one-off Telugu string translations in Launchpad (so does praveenkumarg, btw), and Naidu has promised to do some of the work as well as review. If all goes well, I will try and create a debian-10n-telugu sometime in the future.

One for revealingerrors.com

2008-10-04T10:19:05Z

This one derives inspiration from revealing errors site that Benjamin Mako Hill runs.

medium/large

The kid in the picture was trying to use the Tata Indicom kiosk at Richmond Road (Bangalore) and suddenly a Windows start menu turned up on the screen. Sound and tested technology backing is what the kiosk reads in bold; well, if you insist!

BOSS Distribution

2008-09-29T07:27:38Z

I came across a news item in The Hindu business section written by a Corporate Reporter about BOSS GNU/Linux 3.0. The piece said that BOSS is a linux based operating system (OS) in 18 Indian languages, but the main features were described saying

The OS is endowed with Bluetooth for short range communications along with salient features such as RSS feed reader and PDF viewer to edit documents.

I would've expected better from The Hindu.

Then I hopped onto the BOSS Linux website, and even though it is a Debian derivative, Debian has not been acknowledged. The FAQs and a bunch of other documents have been copied directly from Debian without the copyright notices and the original authors have not been credited. Most changes were s/Debian/BOSS/g (with a few mistakes). What a shame, BOSS comes from CDAC and NRCFOSS, Govt. of India.

I suppose we could learn a thing or two from Bhutan.

/whois appaji

2008-09-14T09:33:12Z

Since the past few months I've been getting a lot of email at gmail.com not intended for me. Initially I thought it was spam but I realised that people have been inadvertently sending me mail thinking appaji is somebody else. So I get:

Digitally signed (unencrypted) stock market contract notes
Business emails like tender plans, press releases etc.
Bank credit card and Mutual fund account statements
Match Alerts and frequent updates from jeevansathi.com
Invitations to web-casts, conferences etc.
A bunch of personal email, possibly from friends and relatives

Obviously, I also get mail that sometimes says "I did not get your response". I've often tried responding explaining to the senders that I am not who they think I am, but there is no use. There is a LOT of personal or otherwise important information like addresses, phone numbers, financial transactions, passwords to some web-service accounts, domain transfer authorisation keys etc. in these emails. This makes me very uncomfortable.

It had to be a UFO

2008-06-06T19:53:18Z

I just got back from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, a movie in which Steven Spielberg takes his obsession with the extra terrestrial to the next level.

Please watch it if you feel that times goes too fast, the two hours that you are watching the movie will seem like two years.

And it had to be a UFO in the end :)

Update: I should have kept the spoiler under lj-cut, but now that I think of it, that wouldn't help people aggregating the posts. I suppose I will avoid posting spoilers.

Alumni mail service moves to Hotmail

2008-05-30T18:43:57Z

I knew better when I neither advertised nor used my IITG Alumni forwarding email address, and I suppose I'll not do that, ever.

For one, the ID given was ridiculous, connected to my name in a rather weird fashion with a number thrown into it and nobody bothered to reply when I asked if I could change it. And now the domain-name part of the email ID has been changed forcing people to tell all their contacts about the change, but this takes the cake -- the service has been moved to Hotmail with 2GB free space.

Huh! Thanks but no thanks.

I really disapprove of such widespread services (which should really not have a commercial angle to them) being taken over by the Googles, Ciscos and the Microsofts of the world.

What should be NEW?

2008-05-28T08:27:26Z

For some reason, I was under the impression that uploading a new upstream release would place the package in the NEW queue. I was proved wrong because I was able to upload ELinks 0.12~20080527-1 to experimental yesterday and I am a DM who can't upload NEW packages.

To me, this did not make a whole lot of sense. NEW exists to keep the Debian archive legal and to prevent serious QA issues. Uploading a new upstream release of a package pushes a _new_ orig.tar.gz file to the archive and could contain potentially DFSG non-free material which is an issue if the package is being uploaded to main.

What is a bit ironic here is that a DM can't upload an updated package that is essentially the same except that it creates new debugging-symbols packages from the same source package. To a very large extent, these -dbg packages should neither be of questionable legality nor have serious QA issues. What I don't know is if it is necessary that these go to NEW because the FTP masters add overrides manually.

In the Valley of Elah

2008-05-20T08:59:33Z

A brilliant commentary on how the mindless war in Iraq has been effecting the lives of people in the USA, In the Valley of Elah says a lot without speaking much. By the end of the movie, a father -- the same who tells his disturbed soldier-son over the phone: "it is your nerves speaking" -- hangs the US flag upside down.

A full week of high fever kept me down and even the "low hanging fruit" of life went undone. Then, another few days of blood-red eyes, thanks to some stiff antibiotics that I was on. The cause for this recurring fever seems to be an infection of the throat and tonsils, so it looks like I might have to consider getting my tonsils removed. To some extent, In the Valley of Elah shook me out of my moroseness. H says that Charlize Theron is a very cerebral actress and I must agree.

On a related note, I was pointed to this neat article titled Why Do They Hate Us? in which Mohsin Hamid says that the question that US-o-American's should be asking is Why do they love us?.

Harmandir Sahib

2008-04-18T21:44:57Z

Harmandir Sahib (Popularly known as the Golden Temple).

This happens to be one of the favorite angles for people taking pictures of the golden temple. Certainly not for no reason. This picture is best viewed large.

Five fine movies

2008-04-13T18:22:06Z

~~Five~~ Six exceptional movies that I saw over the past few weeks:

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer: The rise and fall of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, a genius perfume maker who scripts his own end.

The Illusionist: The story of a magician who returns after 15 years to do what his childhood sweetheart wants him to (make them disappear together).

The Black Dahlia: Based on James Ellroy's novel with the same name, the movie gives the unsolved-in-real-life mystery a plausible end.

The Lives of Others: Art moves, and changes people and every single action makes a difference. Stasi Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (HGW) was _fantabulos_.

Infamous: A beautifully made movie about Truman Capote and his life while he is researching for his book In Cold Blood.

The Kite Runner: In which Aamir redeems himself -- of his guilt of being a coward and not helping his childhood friend Hassan, when he is raped -- by saving Hassan's son from the Taliban.

Links to the corresponding Wikipedia articles are rather unimaginative, but I am in no mood for a lot of text.

Remembering the Jallianwala Bagh massacre

2008-04-13T07:54:33Z

Remembering the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Exactly 89 years ago this day (the 13th of April 1919), people were shot at from here: Quoting from the Wikipedia article:

A group of 90 ~~Indian~~ British Indian Army soldiers marched to the park accompanied by two armoured cars. The vehicles were unable to enter the Bagh through the narrow entrance.

The Jallianwala Bagh, or garden, was bounded on all sides by houses and buildings and had few narrow entrances, most of which were kept permanently locked. Since there was only one open exit except for the one already blocked by the troops, people desperately tried to climb the walls of the park. Many jumped into a well inside the compound to escape from the bullets. A plaque in the monument says that 120 bodies were plucked out of the well.

As a result of the firing, hundreds of people were killed and thousands were injured. Official records put the figures at 379 killed (337 men, 41 boys and a six-week-old baby) and 200 injured, though the actual figure is hotly disputed to this day. The wounded could not be moved from where they had fallen, as a curfew had been declared.

Few more pictures from the memorial:

Gimme space!

2008-04-11T12:56:58Z

You've always apt-get installed a whole lot of packages, used them once -- if at all, now want your hard disk space back. So which packages on your machine consume the most of disk space, and can be removed?

The following tell you just that:

$ /usr/bin/grep-status -FStatus -sInstalled-Size,Package -n "install ok installed" | paste -sd " \n" | sort -n [snip...] 40796 gnome-applets-data 45924 valgrind 54148 linux-image-2.6.24-1-686 65380 sun-java5-bin

$ /usr/sbin/popcon-largest-unused 65376 sun-java5-bin 54148 linux-image-2.6.24-1-686 45924 valgrind 40796 gnome-applets-data [snip...] $

Now go ahead and aptitude / apt-get remove those that you don't want to keep around, and then repeatedly do ...

$ aptitude (or apt-get) remove `deborphan`

... till you see no more packages being removed.

PS: /usr/sbin/popcon-largest-unused is from the popularity-contest package which you should install and submit usage data (it is anonymous) if you want Debian to get better. /usr/bin/grep-status is from dctrl-tools, a very useful bunch of tools (despite their quirky syntax) if you are interested in Debian development.

First NMU

2008-04-08T10:37:03Z

My first Non-maintainer upload (for reportbug. Thanks Thomas Viehmann for uploading the modified package), and the package hit the archive the other day.

On a related note, an excuse people often have when contributing to Debian (or for that matter any free software project) is that all the important stuff is being done by others already. This is not really true, there is a ton of things that need to be done and it is just a matter of going ahead and doing it. The reportbug package is important (Priority: standard) in Debian and it could do with some more love.

ELinks packages in experimental

2008-03-13T11:21:55Z

I uploaded ELinks packages to Debian experimental (based on upstream 0.12 GIT snapshot as on 2008-01-27) and sent out a call for testing. Please test the packages and report issues to the Debian BTS in case you find some bugs or if you don't like the way something works.

0.12 uses UTF-8 as terminal charset and has support for browsing SMB/CIFS shares via libsmbclient. I also enabled Javascript and support for a bunch of scripting languages in these builds. The packages have been compiled in debug mode (builtin assertions, extra sanity checks etc.).

Night at the Harmandir Sahib

2008-01-26T06:05:39Z

I happened to be in Amritsar on the night of Guru Nanak Dev Jayanthi. When I first realised that it was an important occasion, I thought to myself: "I am sooo dead, the Golden teample would be a sea of people". But I was pleasantly (and very much) surprised that everything was very calm and peaceful. Everybody behaved and seemed to do so very naturally. This is one place of worship that is truly amazing. Pictures from the night (I missed the annual display of fireworks by an hour or so).

Clock tower entrance (large)

Sanctum and watch tower (large)

Both the pictures are best viewed large but neither does justice to the real sight. Few more in the Harmandar Sahib - Guru Nanak Jayanthi set of pictures.

Life update -- Actually, a Debian update

2008-01-25T13:47:18Z

The past many weeks were exciting and a lot of things kept me busy, work for one. Part of the excitement was about a trip to Punjab (pictures on their way). And after a long period of lurking on mailing lists, reading policy manuals and the once-in-a-while bug report with a patch, I decided to get a little more active in Debian.

Even though there wasn't a whole lot of software I was using regularly but not present in Debian (which is what a lot of people seem to look to package), there _is_ plenty of software that one uses and has Debian package maintainers, but could probably do with a few more hands at its maintenance.

I took the plunge when I stumbled upon a few orphaned packages and took up their maintenance. Here is what I did to them that I should say I am proud of as a beginner in Debian package maintenance.

SPLint: There aren't many free static code checkers and splint does a decent job. I split splint to build the architecture independent parts as a separate package and also removed the DFSG non-free parts. The documentation is also built from the splint source package (The splint-doc source package has been removed). I convinced upstream author to release the documentation under a DFSG free license (it wasn't licensed at all earlier).
ELinks: A sexy text mode browser and my favorite :-). Now there is a separate package for documentation (built from source rather than copying from the upstream tarball) and the architecture independent parts are in elinks-data. I picked up a fair amount of GIT, thanks to elinks. I am co-maintaining this package with Moritz Muehlenhoff (who advocated me for Debian NM) and we will upload ELinks 0.12 packages soon to experimental.
Axel: I've been using axel for a few years but it had some annoying bugs like crashing on HTTP 404/401s. Not anymore, if you are using Axel 1.1. I am also doing the upstream maintenance now. Future development may be slow, but standby for some new features.

Update: Despite the above, I am not happy about an upload that I requested of xxdiff. But then that was my first upload and everybody is allowed mistakes to correct ;). The Debian xxdiff SVN is seeing fixes slowly but surely though, so standby for a much better package.

And a few others too. All these packages are maintained in Subversion (except ELinks, for which I am using GIT like upstream) and I will be very happy if I can get people to come forward as co-maintainers.

Hack away!

Orphaned Packages?

2007-08-22T08:03:29Z

Since today's XKCD comic is about Debian, I couldn't resist re-posting it here :)

Now you know why the WNPP orphaned list is growing in size ;)

PS: XKCD is a cool geek comic. xkcd_rss if you want to follow it on Livejournal.

Chak de

2007-08-21T10:52:47Z

What one really needs, to feel good after a week of terrible put-downing bout of sickness is a top-quality entertainer.

Chak de India is just that, and more.

DFSG Freeness of The Open Group Test Suite License

2007-08-10T13:48:55Z

I was trying to apply the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) to The Open Group Test Suite License and it looks like the license would be considered non-free.

Free Redistribution: Giving away is allowed, does not require a royalty or other fee for doing so. However, in cause 5:
You may charge a reasonable copying fee for any distribution of this Package. You may charge any fee you choose for support of this Package. You may not charge a fee for this Package itself.
~~To distribute the original Package under this license, one is not allowed to charge any fee. This makes the package non-free.~~

Source Code: Allows distribution in source code as well as compiled form.

Derived Works: Derived works are allowed.

Integrity of The Author's Source Code: Has clauses (3 and 4) for maintaining the integrity of the original source code. However, in clause 3:
rename any non-standard executables and testcases so the names do not conflict with standard executables and testcases, which must also be provided, and provide a separate manual page for each non-standard executable and testcase that clearly documents how it differs from the Standard Version.
and in clause 4:
accompany any non-standard executables and testcases with their corresponding Standard Version executables and testcases, giving the non-standard executables and testcases non-standard names, and clearly documenting the differences in manual pages (or equivalent), together with instructions on where to get the Standard Version.
So, even though integrity can be ensured by renaming non-standard executables and testcases, the license mandates distribution of the Standard Version executables and testcases. This probably make this license non-free (Note: See the reason I consider this to be a non-free clause).

No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: No discrimination.

No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor: No discrimination.

Distribution of License: The same license terms apply to those who the program is redistributed to.

License Must Not Be Specific to Debian: The software can be taken from Debian and still be used under the same license terms.

License Must Not Contaminate Other Software: Allows distribution in aggregate with other (possibly commercial) programs / distributions.

Comments on my analysis are welcome.

Update: Modified the original with the ~~deletion~~ and the Note after discussion with prahlad.

Potter on the move

2007-07-22T07:45:27Z

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Apparenty people have been queuing up at the bookstores as early as 5:00 in the morning for a copy. Here is one of those Potter-book fans trying to finish reading the book, determined not to give his friends at school a chance to throw a spoiler at him.

Music and Copyright

2007-05-28T11:00:14Z

Talking to Hindustan Times, music composer A.R. Rahman says that has a new policy for composing music:

I just want to push for the financial rights of composers and lyricists, even producers. It's not as though I'm saying I want to be the sole proprietor of the songs I compose. But I want a share. There's nothing wrong with that. I can't run to music companies like T Series and Sa Re Ga Ma every time I need to use my own song.

What is interesting about the article is this quote of his:

Music companies must recognise the changing ground reality. Today the conventional outlets for music sales are drying up. Soon all music will be free while the performers and performances will be paid for.

Record companies advertising against illegal music often talk about artists in the music industry, much like people that support patents talk about the starving genius-inventor. Rahman's recent experiences seem to suggest that these companies don't put their money where their mouth is.

The search for a webhost

2007-05-16T04:59:26Z

Mohit Jaggi, a senior of mine at university and I were debating whether we should be hosting the IITG alumni mailboxes with Google Apps. The free-of-cost offer from Google was quite attractive but I am still not very comfortable with the idea for various reasons:

People have their own personal e-mail providers, and in most cases they would use a new e-mail ID only in forwarding mode, this makes the 2GB space not-so-attractive.

Those who like the cool gmail interface or the generous space offered by gmail, would probably already be using it for their daily needs and they would be happy with a forwarding e-mail address.

Alumnus already have an authenticated account on the alumni website but the Google Apps SAML based single sign-on is an expensive service (Comes with the Premier edition - $50 per person, per year).

This reason, IMO, is very important: The data isn't ours and Google doesn't provide tools to export the data (It is a TBD for the Premier edition). Moving would be painful.

Our future needs (like a good CMS, a private Jabber server, Planet for aggregating junta's blogs etc.) are not really fulfilled by Google Apps.

I strongly feel that, to start with, shared or VPS hosting with a solid provider should be a good enough for our needs (A couple of GB of web and database space, a few hundreds of small email boxes, mailing lists etc.). Quite close to the Advanced or Webmaster plans of pair.com, just that they don't allow mailing lists or a Jabber server. Do you have any suggestions? An option to move to VPS (or even start with a reasonably priced VPS) should be available.

The case of the disappearing yahoogroup:

While the discussion was on, the IITG Class 99 mailing list (Wayback machine copy) hosted with yahoogroups disappeared. When contacted, Yahoo sent in a canned response:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Groups.

Yahoo! may, in appropriate circumstances and in its sole discretion,
terminate Groups that appear to have violated the Yahoo! Terms of
Service (TOS). In some cases, Groups may be deleted by an Owner or
Moderator. You may want to contact the owner or moderator(s) regarding
your concern.

Please feel free to visit the Yahoo! Terms of Service at:

  http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care.

Regards,

Kate

which wasn't very helpful. Just the kind of thing that I thought about earlier too.

PS: If you know someone who works with the yahoo abuse / TOS enforcement desk, can you help us get a better explanation?

The Complete Bootleg Woodstock 69 - ID3 (ID3v2) tags

2007-05-15T11:43:31Z

A few weeks ago, I was searching for ID3 (ID3v2) tags for The Complete Bootleg Woodstock 69 collection for a friend of mine. I was able to find them at FreeDB but:

The Artist information was not always correct.
All the music was marked as being of genre Rock.

So armed with Wikipedia's help, we created better tags on our own. In case you are interested, the tags are available for download here.

Each directory has a tags.txt file (which has also been split into individual TrackXX.tags files for all the tracks). The files are 'scripting' friendly.

PS: It seems the collection converted to mp3 (at a constant 128kbps bit rate) comes to 618MB. Very nice if you want to burn it to a single CD.

Enforcing the GNU GPL

2007-02-24T07:02:29Z

Eben Moglen on enforcing the GNU GPL and using the courts to do so:

But perhaps we have succeeded too well. If I had used the courts to enforce the GPL years ago, Microsoft's whispering would now be falling on deaf ears. Just this month I have been working on a couple of moderately sticky situations. ``Look,'' I say, ``at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?''

Someday someone will. But that someone's customers are going to go elsewhere, talented technologists who don't want their own reputations associated with such an enterprise will quit, and bad publicity will smother them. And that's all before we even walk into court. The first person who tries it will certainly wish he hadn't. Our way of doing law has been as unusual as our way of doing software, but that's just the point. Free software matters because it turns out that the different way is the right way after all.

Beautiful, isn't it?