I was gonna use this blog post to share about the migrant worker woes as there has been multiple stories doing the rounds. For e.g. a story which caught the idea of few people but most of us, i.e. middle-class people are so much into our own thing that we care a fig leaf about what happens to migrants. This should not be a story coming from a humane society but it seems India is no different than any other country of the world and in not a good way. Allow me to share Or for those who don t like youtube, here s an alternative link https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=JGEgZq_1jmc Now the above two editorial shares two stories, one of Trump retaliatory threat to India in the Q&A of the journalist. In fact, Trump has upped the ante on visa sanctions as India buckled so easily under pressure. There have been other stories doing the rounds how people who have illnesses who need HCQ in India are either dying or are close to death because of unavailability of HCQ in the medicine shop. There have been reports in Pune as well as South Mumbai (one of the poshest localities in Mumbai/Bombay) that medicine shops are running empty or emptier. There have been so many stories on that, with reporters going to shops and asking owners of the medicine shops and shop-owners being clueless. I think the best article which vividly describes the Government of India (GOI) response to the pandemic is the free-to-read article shared by Arundhati Roy in Financial Times. It has reduced so much of my work or sharing that it s unbelievable. And she has shared it with pictures and all so I can share other aspects of how the pandemic has been affecting India and bringing the worst out in the Government in its our of need. In fact, not surprisingly though, apparently there was also a pro-Israel similar thing which happened in Africa too . As India has too few friends now globally, hence it decided to give a free pass to them.

Government of India, news agencies and paid News One of the attempts the state tried to do, although very late IMHO is that it tried to reach out to the opposition i.e. Congress party and the others. Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, who is the Congress president asked that the Government should not run any of its ads on private television channels for a period of two years. There had been plenty of articles, both by medianama and others who have alleged that at least from the last 6 odd years, Government ads. comprise of almost 50-60% advertising budget of a channel advertising budget. This has been discussed also in medianama s roundtable on online content which happened few months back. While an edited version is out there on YT, this was full two day s event which happened across two different cities.

or the alternative to youtube https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=c1PhWR1-Urs It was as if the roundtable discussions were not enough, Mrs. Gandhi clarion call was answered by News Broadcaster s Association (NBA) and this is what they had to say

News Broadcasters Association reply to Mrs. Gandhi

To put it simply, NBA deplored the suggestion by Mrs. Gandhi and even called the economy in recession and all they had were the Government s own advertising budget to justify their existence. The statements in themselves are highly pregnant and reveal both the relationship that the media, print or mainstream news channels have with the Government of India. Now if you see that, doesn t it make sense that media always slants the story from the Government s perspective rather than remaining neutral. If my bread basket were on the onus of me siding with the Govt. that is what most sane persons would do, otherwise they would resign and leave which many reporters who had a conscience did. Interestingly enough, the NBA statement didn t just end there but also used the word recession , this is the term that Government of India (GOI) hates and has in turn has been maintaining the word, terminology slowdown . While from a layman s perspective the two terms may seem to be similar, if India has indeed been in recession then the tools and the decisions that should have been taken by GOI should have been much different than what they took. Interestingly, enough GOI has refrained from saying anything on the matter which only reveals their own interests in the matter. Also if an association head is making the statement, it is more than likely that he consulted a lawyer or two and used application of mind while drafting the response. In other words, or put more simply, this was a very carefully drafted letter because they know that tomorrow the opposition party may come into power so they don t want to upset the power dynamics too much.

Privacy issues arising due to the Pandemic On the same Financial Times, two stories which dealt with the possible privacy violations due to the Pandemic have been doing the rounds. The first one, by Yuval Noah Harari is more exploratory by nature and makes some very good points without going far too deep into specific instances of recent times but rather goes into history and past instances where Governments have used the pandemics to exert more control over their populace and drive their agenda. I especially liked the last few lines which he shared in his op-ed Even if the current administration eventually changes tack and comes up with a global plan of action, few would follow a leader who never takes responsibility, who never admits mistakes, and who routinely takes all the credit for himself while leaving all the blame to others. Yuval Noah Harari . The whole statement could right fit onto the American President which he was talking about while at the same time, fits right into the current Indian Prime Minister, Boris Johnson of UK and perhaps Jair Bolsanaro of Brazil. All these three-four individuals have in common is that most of them belong to right-wing and hence cater only to the rich industrialist s agenda. While I don t know about Jair Bolsanaro much, at least three out of four had to turn to socialism and had to give some bailout packages to the public at large, even though continuing to undermine their own actions. More on this probably a bit down the line. The second story shared by Nic Fildes and Javier Espinoza who broke the story of various surveillance attempts and the privacy concerns that people have. Even the Indian PMO has asked this data and because there was no protest by the civil society, a token protest was done by COAI (Cellular Operator Association of India) but beyond that nothing, I am guessing because the civil society didn t make much noise as everybody is busy with their own concerns of safety and things going on, it s possible that such data may have gone to the Government. There is not much new here that people who had been working on the privacy issues know, it s just how easy Governments are finding to do it. The part of informed consent is really a misnomer . Governments lie all the time, for e.g. in the UK, did the leave party and people take informed consent, no they pushed their own agenda. This is and will be similar in many countries of the world.

False Socialism by RW parties In at least the three countries I have observing, simply due to available time, that lot of false promises are being made by our leaders and more often than not, the bailouts will be given to already rich industrialists. An op-ed by Vivek Kaul, who initially went by his handle which means somebody who is educated but unemployed. While Vivek has been one-man army in revealing most of the Government s mischiefs especially as fudging numbers are concerned among other things, there have been others too. As far as the US is concerned, an e-zine called free press (literally) has been sharing Trump s hollowness and proclamations for U.S. . Far more interestingly, I found New York times investigated and found a cache of e-mails starting from early January, which they are calling Red Dawn . The cache is undeniable proof that medical personnel in the U.S. were very much concerned since January 2020 but it was only after other countries started lock-down that U.S. had to follow suit. I am sure Indian medical professionals may have done similar mail exchanges but we will never know as the Indian media isn t independent enough.

Domestic violence and Patriarchy There have been numerous reports of domestic violence against women going up, in fact two prominent publications have shared pieces about how domestic violence has gone up in India since the lockdown but the mainstream press is busy with its own tropes, the reasons already stated above. In fact, interestingly enough, most women can t wear loose fitting clothes inside the house because of the near ones being there 24 7 . This was being shared as India is going through summer where heat waves are common and most families do not have access to A/C s and rely on either a fan or just ventilation to help them out. I can t write more about this as simply I m not a woman so I haven t had to face the pressures that they have to every day. Interestingly though, there was a piece shared by arre. Interestingly, also arre whose content I have shared a few times on my blog has gone from light, funny to be much darker and more serious tone. Whether this is due to the times we live in is something that a social scientist or a social anthropologist may look into in the times to come. One of the good things though, there hasn t been any grid failures as no industrial activity is happening (at all). In fact SEB s (State Electricity Boards) has shown a de-growth in electricity uptake as no industrial activity has been taken. While they haven t reduced any prices (which they ideally should have) as everybody is suffering.

Loot and price rise Again, don t think it is an Indian issue but perhaps may be the same globally. Because of broken supply chains, there are both real and artificial shortages happening which is leading to reasonable and unreasonable price hikes in the market. Fresh veggies which were normally between INR 10/- to INR 20/- for 250 gm have reached INR 40/- 50/- and even above. Many of the things that we have to become depend upon are not there anymore. The shortage of plastic bottles being case in point.

Aryan Plastic bottle

This and many others like these pictures have been shared on social media but it seems the Government is busy doing something else. The only thing we know for sure is that the lock-down period is only gonna increase, no word about PPE s (Personal Protection Equipment) or face masks or anything else. While India has ordered some, those orders are being diverted to US or EU. In fact, many doctors who have asked for the same have been arrested, sacked or suspended for asking such inconvenient questions, although whether in BJP ruled states or otherwise. In fact, the Centre has suspended MPLADS funds , members of parliament get funds which they can use to provide relief work or whatever they think the money is best to spend upon.

Conditions of Labor in the Pandemic Another sort of depressing story has been how the Supreme Court CJI Justice SA Bobde has made statements and refrained from playing any role in directing the Center to provide relief to the daily wage laborers. In fact, Mr. Bobde made statements such as why they need salaries if they are getting food. This was shared by barandbench, a site curated by lawyers and reporters alike. Both livelaw as well as barandbench have worked to enhance people s awareness about the legal happenings in our High Courts and Supreme Court. And while sadly, they cannot cover all, they at least do attempt to cover a bit of what s hot atm. The Chief Justice who draws a salary of INR 250,000 per month besides other perks is perhaps unaware or doesn t care about fate of millions of casual workers, 400 460 million workers who will face abject poverty and by extension even if there are 4 members of the family so probably 1.2 billion people will fall below the poverty line. Three, four major sectors are going to be severely impacted, namely Agriculture, Construction and then MSME (Micro, small and medium enterprises) which cover everything from autos, industrial components, FMCG, electronics, you name it, it s done by the MSME sector. We know that the Rabi crop, even though it was gonna be a bumper crop this year will rot away in the fields. Even the Kharif crop whose window for sowing is at the most 2-3 weeks will not be able to get it done in time. In fact, with the extended lockdown of another 21 days, people will probably return home after 2 months by which time they would have nothing to do there as well as here in the cities. Another good report was done by the wire, the mainstream media has already left the station.

Ministry of Public Health There was an article penned by Dr. Edmond Fernandes which he published last year. The low salary along with the complexities that Indian doctors are and may face in the near future are just mind-boggling.

The Loss Losses have already started pouring in. Just today Air Deccan has ceased all its operations. I had loved Mr. Gopinath s airline which was started in the early 2000 s. While I won t bore you with the history, most of it can be seen from simplify Deccan . This I believe is just the start and it s only after the few months after the lock-down has been lifted would we really know the true extent of losses everywhere. And the more lenghthier the lockdown, the more difficult it would be businesses to ramp back. People have already diagnosed at the very least 15-20 sectors of the economy which would be hit and another similar or more number of sectors which will have first and second-order of losses and ramp-downs. While some guesses are being made, many are wildly optimistic and many are wildly pessimistic, as shared we would only know the results when the lockdown is opened up.

Predictions for the future While things are very much in the air, some predictions can be made or rationally deduced. For instance, investments made in automation and IT would remain and perhaps even accelerate a little. Logistics models would need to be re-worked and maybe, just maybe there would be talk and action in making local supply chains a bit more robust. Financing is going to be a huge issue for at least 6 months to a year. Infrastructure projects which require huge amount of cash upfront will either have to be re-worked or delayed, how they will affect projects like Pune Metro and other such projects only time will tell.

Raghuram Rajan Raghuram Rajan was recently asked if he would come back and let bygones be bygones. Raghuram in his own roundabout way said no. He is right now with Chicago Booth doing the work that he always love. Why would he leave that and be right in the middle of the messes other people have made. He probably gets more money, more freedom and probably has a class full of potential future economists. Immigration Control, Conferences and thought experiment There are so many clueless people out there, who don t know why it takes so long for any visa to be processed. From what little I know, it is to verify who you say you are and you have valid reason to enter the country. The people from home ministry verify credentials, as well as probably check with lists of known criminals and their networks world-wide. They probably have programs for such scenarios and are part and parcel of their everyday work. The same applies to immigration control at Airports. there has been a huge gap at immigration counters and the numbers of passengers who were flying internationally to and fro from India. While in India, we call them as Ministry of Home Affairs, in U.S. it s Department of Homeland security, other countries using similar jargons. Now even before this pandemic happened, the number of people who are supposed to do border control and check people was way less and there have been scenes of Air rage especially in Indian airports after people came after a long-distance flight. Now there are couple of thought experiments, just day before yesterday scientists discovered six new coronaviruses in bats and scientists in Iceland found 40 odd mutations of the virus on people. Now are countries going to ban people from Iceland as in time the icelandic people probably would have anti-bodies on all the forty odd mutations. Now if and when they come in contact onto others who have not, what would happen ? And this is not specifically about one space or ethnicity or whatever, microbes and viruses have been longer on earth than we have. In our greed we have made viruses resistant to antibiotics. While Mr. Trump says as he discovered it today, this has been known to the medical fraternity since tht 1950 s. CDC s own chart shows it. We cannot live in fear of a virus, the only way we can beat it is by understanding it and using science. Jon Cohen shared some of the incredible ways science is looking to beat this thing

or as again an alternative to youtube https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=MPVG_n3w_vM One of the most troubling question is how the differently-abled communities which don t have media coverage at the best of times, haven t had any media coverage at all during the pandemic. What are their stories and what they are experiencing ? How are they coping ? Are there anyways we could help each other ? By not having those stories, we perhaps have left them more vulnerable than we intend. And what does that speak about us, as people or as a community or a society ?

Silver Linings While there is not a lot to be positive about, one interesting project I came about is openbreath.tech . This is an idea, venture started by IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) , IUCAA (Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics). They are collaborating with octogeneraian Capt (Retd) Rustom Barucha from Barucha Instrumentation and Control, besides IndoGenius, New Delhi, and King s College, London. The first two institutes are from my home town, Pune. While I don t know much of the specifics of this idea other than that there is an existing Barucha ventilator which they hope to open-source and make it easier for people to produce their own. While I have more questions than answers at this point, this is something hopefully to watch out for in the coming days and weeks. The other jolly bit of good news has come from Punjab where after several decades, people in Northern Punjab are finally able to see the Himalayas or the Himalayan mountain range.

Dhauladhar range Northern Punjab Copyright CNN.Com

There you have it, What I have covered is barely scratching the surface. As a large section of the media only focuses on one narrative, other stories and narratives are lost. Be safe, till later.

First of all, congratulations to all those who got us 2022 Debconf, so we will finally have a debconf in India. There is of course, lot of work to be done between now and then. For those who would be looking forward to visit India and especially Kochi I would suggest you to hear this enriching tale I am sorry I used youtube link but it is too good a podcast not to be shared. Those who don t want youtube can use the invidio.us link for the same as shared below. https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=BvjgKuKmnQ4 I am sure there are lot more details, questions, answers etc. but would direct them gently to Praveen, Shruti, Balasankar and the rest who are from Kochi to answer if you have any questions about that history.

National Science Day, GMRT 2020 First, as always, we are and were grateful to both NCRA as well as GMRT for taking such good care of us. Even though Akshat was not around, probably getting engaged, a few of us were there. About 6-7 from the Mozilla Nasik while the rest representing the foss community. Here is a small picture which commentrates the event

National Science Day, GMRT 2020

While there is and was a lot to share about the event. For e.g. Akshay had bought RPI- Zero as well as RPI-2 (Raspberry Pi s ) and showed some things. He had also bought up a Debian stable live drive with persistence although the glare from the sun was too much that we couldn t show it to clearly to students. This was also the case with RPI but still we shared what and how much we could. Maybe next year, we either ask them to have double screens or give us dark room so we can showcase things much better. We did try playing with contrast and all but it didn t have much of an effect . Of course in another stall few students had used RPI s as part of their projects so at times we did tell some of the newbies to go to those stalls and see and ask about those projects so they would have a much wider experience of things. The Mozilla people were pushing VR as well as Mozilla lite the browser for the mobile. We also gossiped quite a bit. I shared about indicatelts , a third-party certificate extension although I dunno if I should file a wnpp about it or not. We didn t have a good experience of when I had put an RFP (Request for Package) which was accepted for an extension which had similar functionality which we later come to know was sharing the sites people were using the extension to call home and share both the URL and the IP Address they were using it from. Sadly, didn t leave a good taste in mouth

Delhi Riots One thing I have been disappointed with is the lack of general awareness about things especially in the youth. We have people who didn t know that for e.g. in the Delhi riots which happened recently the law and order (Police) lies with Home Minister of India, Amit Shah. This is perhaps the only capital in the world which has its own Chief Minister but doesn t have any say on its law and order. And this has been the case for last 70 years i.e. since independance. The closest I know so far is the UK but they too changed their tune in 2012. India and especially Delhi seems to be in a time-capsule which while being dysfunctional somehow is made to work. In many ways, it s three body or a body split into three personalities which often makes governance a messy issue but that probably is a topic for another day. In fact, scroll had written a beautiful editorial that full statehood for Delhi was not only Arvind Kejriwal s call (AAP) but also something that both BJP as well as Congress had asked in the past. In fact, nothing about the policing is in AAP s power. All salaries, postings, transfers of police personnel everything is done by the Home Ministry, so if any blame has to be given it has to be given to the Home Ministry for the same.

American Capitalism and Ventilators America had been having a history of high cost healthcare as can be seen in this edition of USA today from 2017 . The Affordable Care Act was signed as a law by President Obama in 2010 which Mr. Trump curtailed when he came into power couple of years back. An estimated 80,000 people died due to seasonal flu in 2018-19 . Similarly, anywhere between 24-63,000 have supposed to have died from Last October to February-March this year. Now if the richest country can t take care of their population which is 1/3rd of the population of this country while at the same time United States has thrice the area that India has. This I am sharing as seasonal flu also strikes the elderly as well as young children more than adults. So in one senses, the vulnerable groups overlap although from some of the recent stats, for Covid-19 even those who are 20+ are also vulnerable but that s another story altogether. If you see the CDC graph of the seasonal flu it is clear that American health experts knew about it. One another common factor which joins both the seasonal flu and covid is both need ventilators for the most serious cases. So, in 2007 it was decided that the number of ventilators needed to be ramped up, they had approximately 62k ventilators at that point in time all over U.S. The U.S. in 2010, asked for bids and got bid from a small californian company called Newport Medic Instruments. The price of the ventilators was approximately INR 700000 at 2010 prices, while Newport said they would be able to mass-produce at INR 200000 at 2010 prices. The company got the order and they started designing the model which needed to be certified by FDA. By 2011, they got the product ready when a big company called Covidgen bought Newport Medic and shutdown the project. This was shared in a press release in 2012. The whole story was broken by New York Times again, just a few days ago which highlighted how America s capitalism rough shod over public health and put people s life unnecessarily in jeopardy. If those new-age ventilators would have been a reality then not just U.S. but India and many other countries would have bought the ventilators as every county has same/similar needs but are unable to pay the high cost which in many cases would be passed on to their citizens either as price of service, or by raising taxes or a mixture of both with public being none the wiser. Due to dearth of ventilators and specialized people to operate it and space, there is possibility that many countries including India may have to make tough choices like Italian doctors had to make as to who to give ventilator to and have the mental and emotional guilt which would be associated with the choices made.

Some science coverage about diseases in wire and other publications Since Covid coverage broke out, the wire has been bringing various reports of India s handling of various epidemics, mysteries, some solved, some still remaining unsolved due to lack of interest or funding or both. The Nipah virus has been amply discussed in the movie Virus (2019) which I shared in the last blog post and how easily it could have been similar to Italy in Kerala. Thankfully, only 24 people including a nurse succumbed to that outbreak as shared in the movie. I had shared about Kerala nurses professionalism when I was in hospital couple of years back. It s no wonder that their understanding of hygeine and nursing procedures are a cut above the rest hence they are sought after not just in India but world-over including US and UK and the middle-east. Another study on respitory illness was bought to my attention by my friend Pavithran.

Possibility of extended lockdown in India There was talk in the media of extended lockdown or better put an environment is being created so that an extended lockdown can be done. This is probably in part due to a mathematical model and its derivatives shared by two Indian-origin Cambridge scholars who predict that a minimum 49 days lockdown may be necessary to flatten the covid curve about a week back.

Predictions of the outcome of the current 21-day lockdown (Source: Rajesh Singh, R. Adhikari, Cambridge University)

Alternative lockdown strategies suggested by the Cambridge model (Source: Rajesh Singh, R. Adhikari, Cambridge University)

India caving to US pressure on Hydroxychloroquine While there has been lot of speculation in U.S. about Hydroxychloroquine as the wonder cure, last night Mr. Trump threatened India in a response to a reporter that Mr. Modi has to say no for Hydroxychloroquine and there may be retaliations.

As shared before if youtube is not your cup you can see the same on invidio.us https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=YP-ewgoJPLw Now while there have been several instances in the past of U.S. trying to bully India, going all the way back to 1954. In fact, in recent memory, there were sanctions on India by US under Atal Bihari Vajpayee Government (BJP) 1998 but he didn t buckle under the pressure and now we see our current PM taking down our own notification from a day ago and not just sharing Hydroxychloroquine but also Paracetemol to other countries so it would look as if India is sharing with other countries. Keep in mind, that India, Brazil haven t seen eye to eye on trade agreements of late and Paracetemol prices have risen in India. The price rise has been because the API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) for the same come from China where the supply chain will take time to be fixed and we would also have to open up, although should we, should we not is another question altogether. I talk about supply chains as lean supply chains were the talk since late 90 s when the Japanese introduced Just-in-time manufacturing which lead to lean supply chains as well as lot of outsourcing as consequence. Of course, the companies saved money but at the cost of flexibility and how this model was perhaps flawed was shared by a series of articles in Economist as early as 2004 when there were lot of shocks to that model and would be exaberated since then. There have been frequent shocks to these fragile ecosystem more since 2008 after the financial meltdown and this would put more companies out of business than ever before. The MSME sector in India had already been severely impacted first by demonetization and then by the horrendous implementation of GST whose cries can be heard from all sectors. Also the frequent changing of GST taxes has made markets jumpy and investors unsure. With judgements such as retrospective taxes, AGR (Adjusted Gross Revenue) etc. it made not only the international investors scared, but also domestic investors. The flight of the capital has been noticeable. This I had shared before when Indian Government shared about LRS report which it hasn t since then. In fact Outlook Business had an interesting article about it where incidentally it talked about localcircles, a community networking platform where you get to know of lot of things and whom I am also a member of. At the very end I apologize for not sharing the blog post before but then I was feeling down but then I m not the only one.

I ve been using Kitten Block for years, since I don t really need the blood pressure spike caused by accidentally following links to certain UK newspapers. Unfortunately it hasn t been ported to Firefox 57. I tried emailing the author a couple of months ago, but my email bounced. However, if your primary goal is just to block the websites in question rather than seeing kitten pictures as such (let s face it, the internet is not short of alternative sources of kitten pictures), then it s easy to do with uBlock Origin. After installing the extension if necessary, go to Tools Add-ons Extensions uBlock Origin Preferences My filters, and add www.dailymail.co.uk and www.express.co.uk, each on its own line. (Of course you can easily add more if you like.) Voil : instant tranquility. Incidentally, this also works fine on Android. The fact that it was easy to install a good ad blocker without having to mess about with a rooted device or strange proxy settings was the main reason I switched to Firefox on my phone.

Review: Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker

Publisher:	Scribner
Copyright:	October 2017
ISBN:	1-5011-4433-2
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	341

The world is full of theories, and corresponding books, about things that will make you healthier or prevent disease. Nearly all of them are scams, either intentional or created through the placebo effect and the human tendency to see patterns that don't exist. The rare ones that aren't have a certain pattern: they're grounded in our best understanding of biology, align with what our body wants to do anyway, have been thoroughly studied using proper testing methodology, and don't make money for powerful corporations. I'm fairly sure this is one of those rare ones that isn't a scam. And, if so, it's rather important and worth your attention. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and biology at the University of California at Berkeley, where he's the founder of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He's not a doctor; he started medical training, but (as he says in the book) found himself more attracted to questions than answers. He's a professional academic researcher who has been studying sleep for decades. This book is a combination of summary of the current state of knowledge of academic sleep research and a plea: get more sleep, because we're literally killing ourselves with the lack of it. Walker opens the book with a discussion of the mechanisms of sleep: how we biologically fall asleep and why, how this has changed over time, and how it changes with age. Along with that, he defines sleep: the REM and NREM sleep cycle that you may have already heard of, how it manifests itself in most people, and where dreams fit in. The second part then discusses what happens when you sleep, with a focus on what goes wrong when you don't. (Spoiler: A lot. Study after study, all cited and footnoted, has found connections between sleep and just about every aspect of mental and physical health.) The third part does the same for dreams, fitting them into the picture along with a scientific discussion of just what's going on during dreams. The fourth and final part tackles the problem: why don't we get enough sleep, and what can we do about it? I will warn in advance that this book will make you paranoid about your sleeping patterns. Walker has the missionary zeal of an academic who has sunk his teeth into something really important that society needs to take into account and will try to drown you in data, analysis, analogies, and sheer earnestness until you will believe him. He wants you to get at least seven, and preferably eight, hours of sleep a night. Every night, with as little variation as you can manage. Everyone, even if you think you're someone who doesn't need as much sleep (you're probably not). There's a ton of science here, a great popularization of a whole field of research, but this is also a book that's trying to get you to do something. Normally, that sort of book raises my shields. I'm not much of a believer in any book of the general genre of "most people are doing this basic part of life wrong, and should do it my way instead." But the hallmarks of good science are here: very widespread medical consensus, no corporate interest or obvious path to profit, and lots of studies (footnoted here, with some discussions of methodology although not the statistical details, which will require looking up the underlying studies and careful caveats where studies indicate correlation but may not find causes). And Walker makes the very telling point early in the book that nearly every form of life on the planet sleeps in one way or another (defined as a daily recurring period of time during which it doesn't respond to outside stimulus), which is a strong indicator of universal necessity. Given the vulnerability and loss of useful hours that come with sleep, one would expect some species to find an evolutionary path away from it if it were dispensable. But except for extremely short-lived species, we've never found a living creature that didn't sleep. Walker's argument for duration is also backed up by repeated studies on human capability before and after various quantities of sleep, and on studies of the sleep phases in various parts of the night. Study after study used six hours as the cutoff point and showed substantial deterioration in physical and mental capabilities even after only one night of short sleeping. (Reducing sleep to four hours is nearly catastrophic.) And, more worrisomely, that degradation is still measurable after "catching up" on sleep on subsequent nights. Sleeping in on weekends doesn't appear to fully compensate for the damage done by short-sleeping during the week. When Walker gets into the biological reasons for sleep, one starts to understand why it's so important. I think the part I found the most fascinating was the detailed analysis of what the brain is doing while you sleep. It's not inactive at all, even outside of REM sleep. Walker and other sleep researchers have done intriguing experiments showing how different parts of the sleep cycle transfer memories from short to long term storage, transfer physical skills into subconscious parts of the brain, discard short term memories that the conscious brain has tagged as being unwanted, and free up space for new knowledge acquisition. REM sleep appears to attempt to connect otherwise unrelated memories and bits of knowledge, inverting how association normally works in the brain, thus providing some concrete explanation for sleep's role in creativity. And (this research is fairly new), deep NREM sleep causes temporary physical changes in the brain that appear to be involved in flushing metabolic waste products away, including the plaque involved in Alzheimer's. The last part of the book is probably the most concretely useful: what can one practically do to get more sleep? There is quite a lot that's proven effective, but Walker starts with something else: sleeping pills. Here, you can almost see the lines drawn by a lawyer around what Walker should say. He stresses that he's not a medical doctor while laying out study after study that all point in the same direction: sleeping pills are a highly dangerous medical fraud that will shorten your lifespan for negligible benefit in helping you fall asleep, while limiting your brain's ability to enter true sleep. They're sedation, sedation is not sleep, and the four billion dollar sleeping pill market is literally making everything worse. The good news is there is an effective treatment for insomnia that works for many people; the better news is that it's completely free (although Walker does suggest some degree of medical supervision for serious insomnia so that some parts of it can be tailored to you). He walks through CBT-I (cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia), which is now the medically recommended primary treatment for insomnia, and takes apart the pieces to show how they line up with the results of sleep research studies. Alongside that are recommendations for improving sleep for people who don't have clinical insomnia but who aren't regularly getting the recommended amount of sleep. There are a lot of interesting bits here (and he of course talks about blue LED light and its relationship to melatonin cycles), but I think the most interesting for me was that you have to lower your core body temperature by a couple of degrees (Fahrenheit) to enter sleep. The temperature of your sleeping environment is therefore doubly important: temperature changes are one of the signals your body uses to regulate circadian rhythms (cold being a signal of night), and a colder sleeping area helps you lower your core body temperature so that you can fall asleep. (The average person does best with a sleeping room temperature of 65F, 18C.) There's even more in here: I haven't touched on Walker's attack on the US tendency to push high school start times earlier and earlier in the day (particularly devastating for teenagers, whose circadian rhythms move two hours later in the day than adults before slowly returning to an adult cycle). Or the serious problems of waking to an alarm clock, and the important benefits of the sleep that comes at the end of a full night's cycle. Or the benefits of dreams in dealing with trauma and some theories for how PTSD may interfere with that process. Or the effect of sleep on the immune system. Walker's writing style throughout Why We Sleep is engaging and clear, although sometimes too earnest. He really wants the reader to believe him and to get more sleep, and sometimes that leaks around the edges. One can also see the effort he's putting into not reading too much into research studies, but if there's a flaw in the science here, it's that I think Walker takes a few tentative conclusions a bit too far. (I'm sure these studies have the standard research problem of being frequently done on readily-available grad students rather than representative samples of the population, although the universality of sleep works in science's favor here.) Some of the recitations of research studies can get rather dry, and I once again discovered how boring I find most discussion of dreams, but for a first book written by an academic, this is quite readable. This is one of those books that I want everyone to read mostly so that they can get the information in it, not as much for the enjoyment of reading the book itself. I've been paying closer attention to my own sleep patterns for the last few years, and my personal experience lines up neatly with the book in both techniques to get better sleep and the benefits of that sleep. I'd already reached the point where I was cringing when people talk about regularly going on four or five hours of sleep; this is an entire book full of researched reasons to not do that. (Walker points out that both Reagan and Thatcher, who bragged about not requiring much sleep, developed Alzheimer's, and calls out Trump for making the same brag.) The whole book may not be of interest to everyone, but I think everyone should at least understand why the World Heath Organization recommends eight hours a night and labels shift work a probable carcinogen. And, as Walker points out, we should be teaching some of this stuff in school health classes alongside nutrition and sex education. Alas, Walker can't provide much advice on what I think is the largest robber of sleep: the constant time pressure of modern life, in which an uninterrupted nine hour sleep opportunity feels like an unaffordable luxury. Rating: 9 out of 10

Review: Provenance, by Ann Leckie

Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	September 2017
ISBN:	0-316-38863-7
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	448

In a rather desperate attempt to please her mother, Ingray has spent every resource she has on extracting the son of a political enemy from Compassionate Removal (think life imprisonment with really good marketing). The reason: vestiges, a cultural touchstone for Ingray's native planet of Hwae. These are invitation cards, floor tiles, wall panels, or just about anything that can be confirmed to have been physically present at an important or historical moment, or in the presence of a famous figure. The person Ingray is retrieving supposedly pulled off the biggest theft of vestiges in history. If she can locate them, it would be a huge coup for her highly-placed politician mother, and the one time she would be victorious in her forced rivalry with her brother. About the best thing that could be said for this plan is that it's audacious. The first obstacle is the arrival of the Geck on the station for a Conclave for renegotiation of the treaty with the Presger, possibly the most important thing going on in the galaxy at the moment, which strands her there without money for food. The second is that the person she has paid so much to extract from Compassionate Removal says they aren't the person she was looking for at all, and are not particularly interested in going with her to Hwae. Only a bit of creative thinking in the face of a visit from the local authorities, and the unexpected kindness of the captain from whom she booked travel, might get her home with the tatters of her plan intact. But she's clearly far out of her depth. Provenance is set in the same universe as Ancillary Justice and its sequels, but it is not set in the empire of the Radchaai. This is another human world entirely, one with smaller and more provincial concerns. The aftermath of Ancillary Mercy is playing out in the background (so do not, on risk of serious spoilers, read the start of this book without having read the previous trilogy), but this is in no way a sequel. Neither the characters nor the plot are involved in that aftermath. It's a story told at a much smaller scale, about two political families, cut-throat maneuvering, horrible parenting, the inexplicable importance of social artifacts, the weirdness of human/alien relations, and the merits of some very unlikely allies. Provenance is a very different type of story than Ancillary Justice, and Ingray is a very different protagonist. The shape of the plot reminded me of one of Lois McMaster Bujold's Miles Vorkosigan stories: hair-brained ideas, improvisation, and unlikely allies. But Ingray couldn't be more different than Miles. She starts the book overwhelmed, despairing, and not at all manic, and one spends the first part of the story feeling sorry for her and becoming quite certain that everything will go horribly wrong. The heart of this book is the parallel path Leckie takes the reader and the characters along as they discover just what Ingray's true talents and capabilities are. It's a book about being hopelessly bad at things one was pressured towards being good at, while being quietly and subtly good at the skills that let one survive a deeply dysfunctional family. There are lots of books with very active protagonists, and a depressing number of books with passive protagonists pushed around by the plot. There are very few books that pull off the delicate characterization that Leckie manages here: a protagonist who is rather hopeless at taking charge of the plot in the way everyone wants (but doesn't particularly expect) her to, but who charts her own path through the plot in an entirely unexpected way. It's a story that grows on you. The plot rhythm never works in quite the way one expects from other books, but it builds its own logic and its own rhythm, and reached a very emotionally satisfying conclusion. The Radchaai, or at least one Radchaai citizen, do show up eventually, providing a glimmer of outside view at the Ancillary Justice world. Even better, the Geck play a significant role. I adore Leckie's aliens: they're strange and confusing, but in a refreshingly blunt way rather than abusing gnomic utterances and incomprehensible intelligence. And the foot-stomping of the spider bot made me laugh every time. The stakes are a lot lower here than in Ancillary Justice, and Ingray isn't the sort of character who's going to change the world. But that's okay; indeed, one of the points of this book is why and how that's okay. I won't lie: I'd love more Breq, and I hope we eventually get an exploration of the larger consequences of her story. But this is a delightful story that made me happy and has defter character work than most SF being written. Recommended, but read the Ancillary trilogy first. One minor closing complaint, which didn't change my experience of the book but which I can't help quibbling about: I'm completely onboard with the three-gender system that Leckie uses for the Hwae (I wish more SF authors would play with social as well as technological ideas), and I think she wove it deftly into the story, but I wish she hadn't used Spivak pronouns for the third gender. (e/em/eir, for those who aren't familiar.) Any of the other gender-neutral pronouns look better to me and cause fewer problems for my involuntary proofreader. I prefer zie/zir for personal reasons, but sie/hir, zhe/zhim/zher, or even thon or per would read more smoothly. Eir is fine, but em looks like 'em and throws my brain into dialect mode and forces a re-parse, and e just looks like a typo. I know from lots of Usenet discussions of pronouns that I'm not the only one who has that reaction to Spivak. But it's a very minor nit. Rating: 8 out of 10

Dear all, This would be a longish blog post (as most of mine are) compiled over days but as there is so short a time and so much to share. I had previously thought to share beautiful photographs of Ganesh mandals taking out the procession at time of immersion of the idol or the last day of Durga Puja recent events around do not make my mood to share photos at this point in time. I may share some of them in a future blog post or two . Before going further, I would like to offer my sympathies and condolences to people hurt and dislocated in Hurricane Irma , the 2017 Central Mexico Earthquake and lastly the most recent Las Vegas shooting as well as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico . I am somewhat nonplussed as to why Americans always want to name, especially hurricanes which destroy people s lives and livelihood built over generations and why most of the hurricanes are named after women. A look at weather.com site unveiled the answer to the mystery. Ironically (or not) I saw some of the best science coverage about Earthquakes or anything scientific reporting and analysis after a long time in mainstream newspapers in India. On another note, I don t understand or even expect to understand why the gunman did what he did 2 days back. Country music AFAIK is one of the most chilled-out kind of music, in some ways very similar to classical Indian singing although they are worlds apart in style of singing, renditions, artists, the way they emote etc. I seriously wish that the gunman had not been shot but caught and reasons were sought about what he did, he did. While this is certainly armchair thinking as was not at the scene of crime, but if a Mumbai Police constable could do it around a decade ago armed only with a lathi could do it, why couldn t the American cops who probably are trained in innumerable ways to subdue people without killing them, did. While investigations are on, I suspect if he were caught just like Ajmal Kasab was caught then lot of revelations might have come up. From what is known, the gentleman was upwardly mobile i.e. he was white, rich and apparently had no reason to have beef with anybody especially a crowd swaying to some nice music, all of which makes absolutely no sense. Indian Economy Slowdown Anyways, back to one of the main reasons of writing this blog post. Few days back, an ex-finance Minister of India Yashwant Sinha wrote what was felt by probably millions of Indians, an Indian Express article called I need to speak up now While there have been many, many arguments made since then by various people. A simple search of I need to speak up would lead to lead to many a result besides the one I have shared above. The only exception I have with the article is the line Forty leading companies of the country are already facing bankruptcy proceedings. Many more are likely to follow suit. I would not bore you but you ask any entrepreneur trying to set up shop in India i.e. ones who actually go through the processes of getting all the licenses for setting up even a small businesses as to the numerous hurdles they have to overcome and laid-back corrupt bureaucracy which they have to overcome. I could have interviewed some of my friends who had the conviction and the courage to set up shop and spent more than half a decade getting all the necessary licenses and approval to set up but it probably would be too specific for one industry or the other and would lead to the same result. Co-incidentally, a new restaurant, leaf opened in my vicinity few weeks before. From the looks it looked like a high-brow, high-priced restaurant hence like many others I did not venture in. After a few days, they introduced south-Indian delicacies like Masala Dosa, Uttapam at prices similar to other restaurants around. So I ventured in and bought some south Indian food to consume between mum and me. Few days later, I became friends with the owner/franchisee and I suggested (in a friendly tone) that why he doesn t make it like a CCD play where many people including yours truly use the service to share, strategize and meet with clients. The CCD joints usually serve coffee and snacks (which are over-priced but still run out pretty fast) but people come as they have chilled-out atmosphere and Wi-Fi access which people need for their smartphones, although the Wi-Fi part may soon become redundant With Reliance Jio making a big play. I also shared why he doesn t add more variety and time (the south Indian items are time-limited) as I see/saw many empty chairs there. Anyways, the shop-owner/franchisee shared his gross costs including salary, stocking, electricity, rent and it doesn t pan out to be serving Rs.80/- dish (roughly a 1US dollar and 25 cents) then serving INR Rs. 400/- a dish (around 6 $USD). One round of INR 400/- + dishes make his costs for the day, around 12 tables were there. It s when they have two full rounds of dishes costing INR 400/- or more that he actually has profits and he is predicting loss for at least 6 months to a year before he makes a rebound. He needs steady customers rather than just walk-ins that will make his business work/click. Currently his family is bearing the costs. He didn t mention the taxes although I know apart from GST there are still some local body taxes that they will have to pay and comply with. There are a multitude of problems for shutting a shop legally as well as they have to again renavigate the bureaucracy for the same. I have seen more than a few retailers downing their shutters for 6-8 months and then either sell it to new management, let go of the lease or simply sell the property to a competitor. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code is probably the first proper exit policy for large companies. So the 40 odd companies that Mr. Sinha were talking about were probably sick for a long time. In India, there is also an additional shame of being a failed entrepreneur unlike in the west where Entrepreneurs start on their next venture. As seen from Retailing In India only 3.3% of the population or at the most 4% of the population is directly or indirectly linked with the retail trade. Most of the economy still derives its wealth from the agrarian sector which is still reeling under the pressure from demonetization which happened last year. Al jazeera surprisingly portrayed a truer picture of the effects demonetization had on common citizen than many Indian newspapers did at the time. Because of the South African Debconf, I had to resort to debit cards and hence was able to escape standing in long lines in which many an old and women perished. It is only yesterday that the Government has acknowledged which many prominent Indians have been saying for months now, that we are in a slowdown . Be aware of the terms being used for effect by the Prime Minister. There are two articles which outlines the troubles India is in atm. The only bright spot has been e-commerce which so far has eluded GST although the Govt. has claimed regulations to put it in check. Indian Education System Interestingly, Ravish Kumar has started a series on NDTV where he is showcasing how Indian education sector, especially public colleges have been left to teachers on contract basis, see the first four episodes on NDTV channel starting with the first one I have shared as a hyperlink. I apologize as the series is in Hindi as the channel is meant for Indians and is mostly limited to Northern areas of the Country (mostly) although he has been honest that it is because they lack resources to tackle the amount of information flowing to them. Ravish started the series with sharing information about the U.S. where the things are similar with some teachers needing to sleep in cars because of high-cost of living to some needing to turn to sex-work . I was shocked when I read the guardian article, that is no way to treat our teachers.I went on to read How the American University was Killed following the breadcrumbs along the way. Reading that it seems Indians have been following the American system playbook from the 1980 s itself. The article talks about HMO as well and that seems to have followed here as well with my own experience of hospital fees and drugs which I had to entail a few weeks/month ago. Few years ago, when me and some of my friends had the teaching bug and we started teaching in a nearby municipal school, couple of teachers had shared that they were doing 2-3 jobs to make ends meet. I don t know about others in my group, at least I was cynical because I thought all the teachers were permanent and they make good money only to realize now that the person was probably speaking the truth. When you have to do three jobs to make ends meet from where do you bring the passion to teach young people and that too outside the syllabus ? Also, with this new knowledge in hindsight, I take back all my comments I made last year and the year before for the pathetic education being put up by the State. With teachers being paid pathetically/underpaid and almost 60% teachers being ad-hoc/adjunct teachers they have to find ways to have some sense of security. Most teachers are bachelors as they are poor and cannot offer any security (either male or female) and for women, after marriage it actually makes no sense for them to continue in this profession. I salute all the professors who are ad-hoc in nature and probably will never get a permanent position in their life. I think in some way, thanx to him, that the government has chosen to give 7th pay commisson salary to teachers. While the numbers may appear be large, there are a lot of questions as to how many people will actually get paid. There needs to be lot of vacancies which need to be filled quickly but don t see any solution in the next 2-3 years as well. The Government has taken a position to use/re-hire retired teachers rather than have new young teachers as an unwritten policy. In this Digital India context how are retired teachers supposed to understand and then pass on digital concepts is beyond me when at few teacher trainings I have seen they lack even the most basic knowledge that I learnt at least a decade or two ago, the difference is that vast. I just don t know what to say to that. My own experience with my own mother who had pretty good education in her time and probably would have made a fine business-woman if she knew that she will have a child that she would have to raise by herself alone (along with maternal grand-parents) is testimonial to the fact how hard it is for older people to grasp technology and here I m talking just using the interface as a consumer rather than a producer or someone in-between who has the idea of how companies and governments profit from whatever data is shared one way or the other. After watching the series/episodes and discussing the issue with my mother it was revealed that both her and my late maternal grandfather were on casual/ad-hoc basis till 20-25 years in their service in the defense sector. If Ravish were to do a series on the defense sector he probably would find the same thing there. To add to that, the defense sector is a vital component to a country s security. If 60% of the defense staff in all defense establishments have temporary staff how do you ensure the loyalty of the people working therein. That brings to my mind Ignorance is bliss . Software development and deployment There is another worry that all are skirting around, the present dispensation/government s mantra is minimum government-maximum governance with digital technologies having all solutions which is leading to massive unemployment. Also from most of the stories/incidents I read in the newspapers, mainstream media and elsewhere it seems most software deployments done in India are done without having any system of internal checks and balances. There is no lintian for software to be implemented. Contracts seem to be given to big companies and there is no mention of what prerequisites or conditions were laid down by the Government for software development and deployment and if any checks were done to ensure that the software being developed was in according to government specifications or not. Ideally this should all be in public domain so that questions can be asked and responsibility fixed if things go haywire, as currently they do not. Software issues As my health been not that great, I have been taking a bit more time and depth while filing bugs. #877638 is a good example. I suspect though that part of the problem might be that mate has moved to gtk3 while guake still has gtk-2 bindings. I also reported the issue upstream both in mate-panel as well as guake . I haven t received any response from either or/and upstreams . I also have been fiddling around with gdb to better understand the tool so I can exploit/use this tool in a better way. There are some commands within the gdb interface which seem to be interesting and hopefully I ll try how the commands perform over days, weeks to a month. I hope we see more action on the mate-panel/guake bug as well as move of guake to gtk+3 but that what seemingly seemed like wait for eternity seems to have done by somebody in last couple of days. As shared in the ticket there are lots of things still to do but it seems the heavy lifting has been done but seems merging will be tricky as two developers have been trying to update to gtk+3 although aichingm seems to have a leg up with his 3! branch. Another interesting thing I saw is the below picture. The firefox version I was using to test the site/wordpress-wp-admin was Mozilla Firefox 52.4.0 which AFAIK is a pretty recentish one and people using Debian stretch would probably be using the same version (firefox stable/LTS) rather than the more recent versions. I went to the link it linked to and it gave no indication as to why it thought my browser is out-of-date and what functionality was/is missing. I have found that wordpress support has declined quite a bit and people don t seem to use the forums as much as they used to before. I also filed a few bugs for qalculate. #877716 where a supposedly transitional package removes the actual application, #877717 as the software has moved its repo. to github.com as well as tickets and other things in process and lastly #877733. I had been searching for a calculator which can do currency calculations on the fly (say for e.g. doing personal budgeting for Taiwan debconf) without needing to manually enter the conversion rates and losing something in the middle. While the current version has support for some limited currencies, the new versions promise more as other people probably have more diverse needs for currency conversions (people who do long or short on oil, stocks overseas is just one example, I am sure there are many others) than simplistic mine.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #American Education System, #bug-filing, #Climate change, #Dignity, #e-commerce, #gtk+3, #gtk2, #Indian Economy 'Slowdown', #Indian Education System, #Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, #Las Vegas shooting, #Modern Retail in India, #planet-debian, #qalculate, Ad-hoc and Adjunct Professors, wordpress.com

Many voices arise now and then against risks linked to the Github use by Free Software projects. Yet the infatuation for the collaborative forge of the Octocat Californian start-ups doesn t seem to fade away.

These recent years, Github and its services take an important role in software engineering as they are seen as easy to use, efficient for a daily workload with interesting functions in enterprise collaborative workflow or amid a Free Software project. What are the arguments against using its services and are they valid? We will list them first, then we ll examine their validity.

1. Critical points

1.1 Centralization

The Github application belongs to a single entity, Github Inc, a US company which manage it alone. So, a unique company under US legislation manages the access to most of Free Software application code sources, which may be a problem with groups using it when a code source is no longer available, for political or technical reason.

The Octocat, the Github mascot

This centralization leads to another trouble: as it obtained critical mass, it becomes more and more difficult not having a Github account. People who don t use Github, by choice or not, are becoming a silent minority. It is now fashionable to use Github, and not doing so is seen as out of date . The same phenomenon is a classic, and even the norm, for proprietary social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).

1.2 A Proprietary Software

When you interact with Github, you are using a proprietary software, with no access to its source code and which may not work the way you think it is. It is a problem at different levels. First, ideologically, but foremost in practice. In the Github case, we send them code we can control outside of their interface. We also send them personal information (profile, Github interactions). And mostly, Github forces any project which goes through the US platform to use a crucial proprietary tools: its bug tracking system.

Windows, the epitome of proprietary software, even if others took the same path

1.3 The Uniformization

Working with Github interface seems easy and intuitive to most. Lots of companies now use it as a source repository, and many developers leaving a company find the same Github working environment in the next one. This pervasive presence of Github in free software development environment is a part of the uniformization of said developers working space.

Uniforms always bring Army in my mind, here the Clone army

2 Critical points cross-examination

2.1 Regarding the centralization

2.1.1 Service availability rate

As said above, nowadays, Github is the main repository of Free Software source code. As such it is a favorite target for cyberattacks. DDOS hit it in March and August 2015. On December 15, 2015, an outage led to the inaccessibility of 5% of the repositories. The same occurred on November 15. And these are only the incident reported by Github itself. One can imagine that the mean outage rate of the platform is underestimated.

2.1.2 Chain reaction could block Free Software development

Today many dependency maintenance tools, as npm for javascript, Bundler for Ruby or even pip for Python can access an application source code directly from Github. Free Software projects getting more and more linked and codependents, if one component is down, all the developing process stop.

One of the best examples is the npmgate. Any company could legally demand that Github take down some source code from its repository, which could create a chain reaction and blocking the development of many Free Software projects, as suffered the Node.js community from the decisions of Npm, Inc, the company managing npm.

2.2 A historical precedent: SourceForge

Github didn t appear out of the blue. In his time, its predecessor, SourceForge, was also extremely popular.

Heavily centralized, based on strong interaction with the community, SourceForge is now seen as an aging SAAS (Software As A Service) and sees most of its customers fleeing to Github. Which creates lots of hurdles for those who stayed. The Gimp project suffered from spams and terrible advertising, which led to the departure of the VLC project, then from installers corrupted with adwares instead of the official Gimp installer for Windows. And finally, the Project Gimp s SourceForge account was hacked by SourceForge team itself!

These are very recent examples of what can do a commercial entity when it is under its stakeholders pressure. It is vital to really understand what it means to trust them with data and exchange centralization, where it could have tremendous repercussion on the day-to-day life and the habits of the Free Software and open source community.

2.3. Regarding proprietary software

2.3.1 One community, several opinions on proprietary software

Mostly based on ideology, this point deals with the definition every member of the community gives to Free Software and open source. Mostly about one thing: is it viral or not? Or GPL vs MIT/BSD.

Those on the side of the viral Free Software will have trouble to use a proprietary software as this last one shouldn t even exist. It must be assimilated, to quote Star Trek, as it is a connected black box, endangering privacy, corrupting for profit our uses and restrain our freedom to use as we re pleased what we own, etc.

Those on the side of complete freedom have no qualms using proprietary software as their very existence is a consequence of freedom without restriction. They even agree that code they developed may be a part of proprietary software, which is quite a common occurrence. This part of the Free Software community has no qualm using Github, which is well within their ideology parameters. Just take a look at the Janson amphitheater during Fosdem and check how many Apple laptops running on macOS are around.

FreeBSD, the main BSD project under the BSD license

2.3.2 Data loss and data restrictions linked to proprietary software use

Even without ideological consideration, and just focusing on Github infrastructure, the bug tracking system is a major problem by itself.

Bug report builds the memory of Free Software projects. It is the entrance point for new contributors, the place to find bug reporting, requests for new functions, etc. The project history can t be limited only to the code. It s very common to find bug reports when you copy and paste an error message in a search engine. Not their historical importance is precious for the project itself, but also for its present and future users.

Github gives the ability to extract bug reports through its API. What would happen if Github is down or if the platform doesn t support this feature anymore? In my opinion, not that many projects ever thought of this outcome. How could they move all the data generated by Github into a new bug tracking system? One old example now is Astrid, a TODO list bought by Yahoo a few years ago. Very popular, it grew fast until it was closed overnight, with only a few weeks for its users to extract their data. It was only a to-do list. The same situation with Github would be tremendously difficult to manage for several projects if they even have the ability to deal with it. Code would still be available and could still live somewhere else, but the project memory would be lost. A project like Debian has today more than 800,000 bug reports, which are a data treasure trove about problems solved, function requests and where the development stand on each. The developers of the Cpython project have anticipated the problem and decided not to use Github bug tracking systems.

Issues, the Github proprietary bug tracking system

Another thing we could lose if Github suddenly disappear: all the work currently done regarding the push requests (aka PRs). This Github function gives the ability to clone one project s Github repository, to modify it to fit your needs, then to offer your own modification to the original repository. The original repository s owner will then review said modification, and if he or she agrees with them will fuse them into the original repository. As such, it s one of the main advantages of Github, since it can be done easily through its graphic interface.

However reviewing all the PRs may be quite long, and most of the successful projects have several ongoing PRs. And this PRs and/or the proprietary bug tracking system are commonly used as a platform for comment and discussion between developers.

Code itself is not lost if Github is down (except one specific situation as seen below), but the peer review works materialized in the PRs and the bug tracking system is lost. Let s remember than the PR mechanism let you clone and modify projects and then generate PRs directly from its proprietary web interface without downloading a single code line on your computer. In this particular case, if Github is down, all the code and the work in progress is lost. Some also use Github as a bookmark place. They follow their favorite projects activity through the Watch function. This technological watch style of data collection would also be lost if Github is down.

Debian, one of the main Free Software projects with at least a thousand official contributors

2.4 Uniformization

The Free Software community is walking a thigh rope between normalization needed for an easier interoperability between its products and an attraction for novelty led by a strong need for differentiation from what is already there.

Github popularized the use of Git, a great tool now used through various sectors far away from its original programming field. Step by step, Git is now so prominent it s almost impossible to even think to another source control manager, even if awesome alternate solutions, unfortunately not as popular, exist as Mercurial.

A new Free Software project is now a Git repository on Github with README.md added as a quick description. All the other solutions are ostracized? How? None or very few potential contributors would notice said projects. It seems very difficult now to encourage potential contributors into learning a new source control manager AND a new forge for every project they want to contribute. Which was a basic requirement a few years ago. It s quite sad because Github, offering an original experience to its users, cut them out of a whole possibility realm. Maybe Github is one of the best web versioning control systems. But being the main one doesn t let room for a new competitor to grow. And it let Github initiate development newcomers into a narrow function set, totally unrelated to the strength of the Git tool itself.

3. Centralization, uniformization, proprietary software What s next? Laziness?

Fight against centralization is a main part of the Free Software ideology as centralization strengthens the power of those who manage it and who through it control those who are managed by it. Uniformization allergies born against main software companies and their wishes to impose a closed commercial software world was for a long time the main fuel for innovation thirst and intelligent alternative development. As we said above, part of the Free Software community was built as a reaction to proprietary software and their threat. The other part, without hoping for their disappearance, still chose a development model opposite to proprietary software, at least in the beginning, as now there s more and more bridges between the two.

The Github effect is a morbid one because of its consequences: at least centralization, uniformization, proprietary software usage as their bug tracking system. But some years ago the Dear Github buzz showed one more side effect, one I ve never thought about: laziness. For those who don t know what it is about, this letter is a complaint from several spokespersons from several Free Software projects which demand to Github team to finally implement, after years of polite asking, new functions. Since when Free Software project facing a roadblock request for clemency and don t build themselves the path they need? When Torvalds was involved in the Bitkeeper problem and the Linux kernel development team couldn t use anymore their revision control software, he developed Git. The mere fact of not being able to use one tool or functions lacking is the main motivation to seek alternative solutions and, as such, of the Free Software movement. Every Free Software community member able to code should have this reflex. You don t like what Github offers? Switch to Gitlab. You don t like it Gitlab? Improve it or make your own solution.

The Gitlab logo

Let s be crystal clear. I ve never said that every Free Software developers blocked should code his or her own alternative. We all have our own priorities, and some of us even like their beauty sleep, including me. But, to see that this open letter to Github has 1340 names attached to it, among them some spokespersons for major Free Software project showed me that need, willpower and strength to code a replacement are here. Maybe said replacement will be born from this letter, it would be the best outcome of this buzz.

In the end, Github usage is just another example of Internet usage massification. As Internet users are bound to go to massively centralized social network as Facebook or Twitter, developers are following the same path with Github. Even if a large fraction of developers realize the threat linked this centralized and proprietary organization, the whole community is following this centralization and uniformization trend. Github service is useful, free or with a reasonable price (depending on the functions you need) easy to use and up most of the time. Why would we try something else? Maybe because others are using us while we are savoring the convenience? The Free Software community seems to be quite sleepy to me.

The lion enjoying the hearth warm

About Me Carl Chenet, Free Software Indie Hacker, founder of the French-speaking Hacker News-like Journal du hacker. Follow me on social networks

• My Mastodon account : @carlchenet
• My Diaspora* account : @carlchenet
• My Twitter account : @carl_chenet

Translated from French by St phanie Chaptal. Original article written in 2015.

Early September, it s about 3 months before PHP 7.2 is expected to be release (schedule here). One of the changes is the removal of the mcrypt extension after it was deprecated in PHP 7.1. The main problem with mcrypt extension is that it is based on libmcrypt that was abandoned by it s upstream since 2007. That s 10 years of keeping a library alive, moving the burden to distribution s security teams. But this isn t new, Remi already wrote about this two years ago: About libmcrypt and php-mcrypt . But with removal of the extension from the PHP code base (about F**King time), it would force the recommendation was done nicely till now. And forcing people means some noise, although an alternative is PHP s owns openssl extension. But as many migrations that require code change it s going slow. The goal of this post is to reach to the PHP eco system and map the components (mostly frameworks and applications) to still require/recommend mcyrpt and to pressure them to fix it before PHP 72 is released. I ll appreciate the readers help with this mapping in the comments. For example, Laravel s release notes for 5.1:

In previous versions of Laravel, encryption was handled by the mcrypt PHP extension. However, beginning in Laravel 5.1, encryption is handled by the openssl extension, which is more actively maintained.

Or, on the other hand Joomla 3 requirements still mentions mcrypt. mcrypt safe:

• Drupal 7 and up, see https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/system-requirements/php
• Lavavel 5.1 and up, see https://laravel.com/docs/5.1/releases

mcrypt dependant:

• Joomla, see https://downloads.joomla.org/technical-requirements
• Magento, see http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.2/install-gde/system-requirements-tech.html
  (Checking 2.2 RC release, as it just added support for PHP 7.1)

For those who really need mcrypt, it is part of PECL, PHP s extensions repository. You re welcome to compile it on your own risk.
Filed under: Debian GNU/Linux, PHP

Here's what happened in the Reproducible Builds effort between Sunday May 28 and Saturday June 3 2017: Past an upcoming events

• On June 9th, Chris Lamb will present at the Hong Kong Open Source Conference 2017 on reproducible builds.
• We restarted our IRC meetings, now with a monthly schedule where we meet on the first Thursday of the month at a varying time. Our next meeting will be on the first 6th of July at 17:00 UTC. At the June meeting we had the following agenda, and if you are interested there is an automated summary and full logs too.
  1. Introductions
  2. Feedback for the reproducible.json spec format - is that suitable for Guix and F-Droid as well? LEDE/OpenWrt? Coreboot?
  3. writing parser + user interface for reproducible.json
  4. tests.r-b.o/Debian once Stretch has been released
  5. Reproducible Builds Summit 2017
  6. Next meeting
  7. Any other business

Documentation updates

• Holger added a link to the blog post with a report about the recent hackathon to our website.

Toolchain development and fixes

• Chris Lamb wrote a proof-of-concept implementation for #863622 ("apt: warn when installing packages that are not reproducible"). Try it, it's fun!
• Russ worked on making the debian-policy package build reproducibly which is a good opportunity to shamelessly plug that #844431 ("debian-policy: Packages should be reproducible") is still a work in progress.

Patches and bugs filed

• Bernhard M. Wiedemann:
  • pycryptopp
  • rpm
  • rpm
  • bam
  • boost/jam
  • premake
  • ruby/rdoc
  • ruby/rdoc
  • sdcc (merged)

4 package reviews have been added, 6 have been updated and 25 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues. Weekly QA work During our reproducibility testing, FTBFS bugs have been detected and reported by:

• Adrian Bunk (2)
• Chris Lamb (1)

diffoscope development

• Chris Lamb:
  • Add comparator for Fontconfig cache files.
• anthraxx:
  • tools: extend external Arch Linux tools
• Ximin Luo:
  • Add a --exclude-command CLI for filtering out long-running commands like "readelf --debug-dump=info"
  • Use unicode chars for the +/- controls instead of hacky punctuation
  • Don't show +/- controls for differences with no children
  • Fix create_limited_print_func
  • Add a size() method to Difference and check that self._visuals is empty in get_reverse()
  • Add a reader for the JSON format
  • Allow the "source" param to overridden compare() methods to be given as a positional argument

tests.reproducible-builds.org Mattia Rizzolo:

• packages-tests: go back to the shorter way of specifying JUnit jobs.
• update_jdn: call jenkins-jobs instead of jenkins-job-builder, as that's how it is named in 1.6.1 version.
• Upload jenkins-job-builder 1.6.1-1~bpo8+1 to jessie-backports.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor:

• Contribute a few typo fixes.

Vagrant Cascadian:

• Update README to reflect switch to PostgreSQL (some time ago).
• Add three new boards for armhf tests:
  • ff64a-armhf-rb.debian.net: Firefly-rk3399, Rockchip six-core (Cortex-A72 x2 + Cortex-A53 x4), 2GB RAM, USB-sata (future plans for native sata.)
  • jtx1a-armhf-rb.debian.net: Jetson-tx1, quad-core (big.LITTLE Cortex-A53/A57), ~3.5GB RAM, native SATA ~500GB disk
  • odc2a-armhf-rb.debian.net: Odroic-C2, quad-core (Cortex-A53), ~2GB ram, 128GB eMMC
• Ressurect rpi2c-armhf-rb.debian.net (Raspberry PI 2B, broadcom bcm2836 quad-core (cortex-A7), 1GB RAM) from the dead.

Holger Levsen:

• Configure the rc.local service on all build nodes to only start when the network is actually up, as configuring half of them to run in the future requires networking to determine the real current date. See Running Services After the Network is up if you want to learn more about networking with systemd. Somehow this doesnt work yet on the Ubuntu 16.05 arm64 nodes; help welcome, either on #debian-qa or #debian-reproducible.
• Add rpi2c back to the armhf network.
• Also add ff64a, odc2a & jtx1a to the armhf network.
  • Add pbuilder/schroot-setup jobs for the new nodes.
  • Add 10 new armhf builder jobs.
  • Disable all build jobs on odc2a again as haveged segfaults on 4.12~rc2, which is needed for this board & setup.
• Reproducible_cleanup_nodes.sh: adapt for new build service
• Make performance.html show if build jobs are down due to remote node problems and make code to count enabled jobs more robust.
• reproducible_build_service: Make it cope with disabled workers.
• jenkins-master-wrapper: Fail loudly if remote node is not accessable.
• Increase maximum scheduling queue sizes, to adjust for faster scheduler.
• New script, init_node, to initialize new build nodes (derived from refactored existing script).
• Update INSTALL documentation to reflect that we're testing arm64 now too.

Misc. This week's edition was written by Chris Lamb, Bernhard M. Wiedemann and Holger Levsen & reviewed by a bunch of Reproducible Builds folks on IRC & the mailing lists.

During last week I've noticed several interesting posts about challenges being free software maintainer. After being active in open source for 16 years I can share much of the feelings I've read and I can also share my dealings with the things. First of all let me link some of the other posts on the topic:

• What it feels like to be an open-source maintainer by Nolan Lawson
• Time to leave by Mikeal Rogers
• Sustainable Open Source: The Maintainers Perspective or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source by Jan Lehnardt

I guess everybody involved in in some popular free software project knows it - there is much more work to be done than people behind the project can handle. It really doesn't matter it those are bug reports, support requests, new features or technical debt, it's simply too much of that. If you are the only one behind the project it can feel even more pressing. There can be several approaches how to deal with that, but you have to choose what you prefer and what is going to work for you and your project. I've used all of the below mentioned approaches on some of the projects, but I don't think there is a silver bullet. Finding more people Obviously if you can not cope with the work, let's find more people to do the work. Unfortunately it's not that easy. Sometimes people come by, contribute few patches, but it's not that easy to turn them into regular contributor. You should encourage them to stay and to care about the part of the project they have touched. You can try to attract completely new contributors through programs as Google Summer of Code (GSoC) or Outreachy, but that has it's own challenges as well. With phpMyAdmin we're participating regularly in GSoC (we've only missed last year as we were not chosen by Google that year) and it indeed helps to bring new people on the board. Many of them even stay around your project (currently 3 of 5 phpMyAdmin team members are former GSoC students). But I think this approach really works only for bigger organizations. You can also motivate people by money. It's way which is not really much used on free software projects, partly because lack of funding (I'll get to that later) and partly because it doesn't necessarily bring long time contributors, just cash hunters. I've been using Bountysource for some of my projects (Weblate and Gammu) and so far it mostly works other way around - if somebody posts bounty on the issue, it means it's quite important for him to get that fixed, so I use that as indication for myself. On attracting new developers it never really worked well, even when I've tried to post bounties to some easy to fix issues, where newbies could learn our code base and get paid for that. These issues stayed opened for months and in the end I've fixed them myself because they annoyed me. Don't care too much I think this is most important aspect - you simply can never fix all the problems. Let's face it and work according to that. There can be various levels of don't caring. I find it always better to try to encourage people to fix their problem, but you can't expect big success rate in that, so you might find it not worth of the time. What I currently do:

• I often ignore direct emails asking for fixing something. The project has public issue tracker on purpose. Once you solve the issue there others will have chance to find it when they face similar problem. Solving things privately in mails will probably make you look at similar problems again and again.
• I try to batch process things. It is really easier to get focused when you work on one project and do not switch contexts. This means people will have to wait until you get to their request, but it also means that you will be able to deal them much more effectively. This is why Free hosting requests for Hosted Weblate get processed once in a month.
• I don't care about number of unread mails, notifications or whatever. Or actually I try to not get much of these at all. This is really related to above, I might to some things once in a month (or even less) and that's still okay. Maybe you're just getting notifications for things you really don't need to get notified on? Do you really need notification for new issues? Isn't it better just to look at the issue tracker once in a time than constantly feeling the pressure of not read notifications?
• I don't have to fix every problem. When it seems like something what could be as well fixed by the reporter, I just try to give them guidance how to dig deeper into the issue. Obviously this can't work for all cases, but getting more people on board always helps.
• I try to focus on things which can save time in future. Many issues turn out to be just some unclear things and once you figure out that, spend few more minutes to improve your documentation to cover that. It's quite likely that this will save your time in future.

If you still can't handle that, you should consider abandoning the project as well. Does it bring something to you other than frustration of not completed work? I know it can be hard decision, in the end it is your child, but sometimes it's the best think you can do. Get paid to do the work Are you doing your fulltime job and then work on free software on nights or weekends? It can probably work for some time, but unless you find some way to make these two match, you will lack free time to relax and spend with friends or family. There are several options to make these work together. You can find job where doing free software will be natural part of it. This worked for me pretty well at SUSE, but I'm sure there are more companies where it will work. It can happen that the job will not cover all your free software activities, but this still helps. You can also make your project to become your employer. This can be sometimes challenging to make volunteers and paid contractors to work on one project, but I think this can be handled. Such setup currently works currently quite well for phpMyAdmin (we will announce second contractor soon) and works quite well for me with Weblate as well. Funding free software projects Once your project is well funded, you can fix many problems by money. You can pay yourself to do the work, hire additional developers, get better infrastructure or travel to conferences to spread word about it. But the question is how to get to the point of being well funded. There are several crowdfunding platforms which can help you with that (Liberapay, Bountysource salt, Gratipay or Snowdrift to mention some). You can also administer the funding yourself or using some legal entity such as Software Freedom Conservancy which handles this for phpMyAdmin. But the most important thing is to persuade people and companies to give back. You know there are lot of companies relying on your project, but how to make them fund the project? I really don't know, I still struggle with this as I don't want to be too pushy in asking for money, but I'd really like to see them to give back. What kind of works is giving your sponsors logo / link placement on your website. If your website is well ranked, you can expect to get quite a lot of SEO sponsors and the question is where to draw a line what you still find acceptable. Obviously the most willing to pay companies will have nothing to do with what you do and they just want to get the link. The industry you can expect is porn, gambling, binary options and various MFA sites. You will get some legitimate sponsors related to your project as well. We felt we've gone too far with phpMyAdmin last year and we've stricten the rules recently, but the outcome is still not visible on our website (as we've just limited new sponsors, but existing contracts will be honored). Another option is to monetize your project more directly. You can offer consulting services or provide it as a service (this is what I currently do with Weblate). It really depends on the product if you can build customer base on that or not, but certainly this is not something what would work well for all projects. Thanks for reading this and I hope it's not too chaotic, as I've moved parts there and back while writing and I'm afraid it got too long in the end.

Filed under: Debian English Gammu phpMyAdmin SUSE Weblate 0 comments

Before I start, I would like to point out #855549 . This is a normal/wishlist bug I have filed against apt, the command-line package manager. I sincerely believe having a history command to know what packages were installed, which were upgraded, which were purged should be easily accessible, easily understood and if the output looks pretty, so much the better. Of particular interest to me is having a list of new packages I have installed in last couple of years after jessie became the stable release. It probably would make for some interesting reading. I dunno how much efforts would be to code something like that, but if it works, it would be the greatest. Apt would have finally arrived. Not that it s a bad tool, it s just that it would then make for a heck of a useful tool. Coming back to the topic on hand, Now for the last couple of weeks we don t have water or rather pressure of water. Water crisis has been hitting Pune every year since 2014 with no end in sight. This has been reported in newspapers addendum but it seems it has been felling on deaf ears. The end result of it is that I have to bring buckets of water from around 50 odd metres. It s not a big thing, it s not like some women in some villages in Rajasthan who have to walk in between 200 metres to 5 odd kilometres to get potable water or Darfur, Western Sudan where women are often kidnapped and sold as sexual slaves when they get to fetch water. The situation in Darfur has been shown quite vividly in Darfur is Dying . It is possible that I may have mentioned about Darfur before. While unfortunately the game is in flash as a web resource, the most disturbing part is that the game is extremely depressing, there is a no-win scenario. So knowing and seeing both those scenarios, I can t complain about 50 metres. BUT .but when you extrapolate the same data over some more or less 3.3-3.4 million citizens, 3.1 million during 2011 census with a conservative 2.3-2.4 percent population growth rate according to scroll.in. Fortunately or unfortunately, Pune Municipal Corporation elections were held today. Fortunately or unfortunately, this time all the political parties bought majorly unknown faces in these elections. For e.g. I belong to ward 14 which is spread over quite a bit of area and has around 10k of registered voters. Now the unfortunate part of having new faces in elections, you don t know anything about them. Apart from the affidavits filed, the only thing I come to know is whether there are criminal cases filed against them and what they have shown as their wealth. While I am and should be thankful to ADR which actually is the force behind having the collated data made public. There is a lot of untold story about political push-back by all the major national and regional political parties even when this bit of news were to be made public. It took major part of a decade for such information to come into public domain. But for my purpose of getting clean air and water supply 24 7 to each household seems a very distant dream. I tried to connect with the corporators about a week before the contest and almost all of the lower party functionaries hid behind their political parties manifestos stating they would do the best without any viable plan. For those not knowing, India has been blessed with 6 odd national parties and about 36 odd regional parties and every election some 20-25 new parties try their luck every time. The problem is we, the public, don t trust them or their manifestos. First of all the political parties themselves engage in mud-slinging as to who s copying whom with the manifesto.Even if a political party wins the elections, there is no *real* pressure for them to follow their own manifesto. This has been going for many a year. OF course, we the citizens are to also blame as most citizens for one reason or other chose to remain aloof of the process. I scanned/leafed through all the manifestos and all of them have the vague-wording we will make Pune tanker-free without any implementation details. While I was unable to meet the soon-to-be-Corporators, I did manage to meet a few of the assistants but all the meetings were entirely fruitless. I asked why can t the city follow the Chennai model. Chennai, not so long ago was at the same place where Pune is, especially in relation to water. What happened next, in 2001 has been beautifully chronicled in Hindustan Times . What has not been shared in that story is that the idea was actually fielded by one of Chennai Mayor s assistants, an IAS Officer, I have forgotten her name, Thankfully, her advise/idea was taken to heart by the political establishment and they drove RWH. Saying why we can t do something similar in Pune, I heard all kinds of excuses. The worst and most used being Marathas can never unite which I think is pure bullshit. For people unfamiliar to the term, Marathas was a warrior clan in Shivaji s army. Shivaji, the king of Marathas were/are an expert tactician and master of guerilla warfare. It is due to the valor of Marathas, that we still have the Maratha Light Infantry a proud member of the Indian army. Why I said bullshit was the composition of people living in Maharashtra has changed over the decades. While at one time both the Brahmins and the Marathas had considerable political and population numbers, that has changed drastically. Maharashtra and more pointedly, Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur have become immigrant centres. Why just a decade back, Shiv Sena, an ultra right-wing political party used to play the Maratha card at each and every election and heckle people coming from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, this has been documented as the 2008 immigrants attacks and 9 years later we see Shiv Sena trying to field its candidates in Uttar Pradesh. So, obviously they cannot use the same tactics which they could at one point of time. One more reason I call it bullshit, is it s a very lame excuse. When the Prime Minister of the country calls for demonetization which affects 1.25 billion people, people die, people stand in queues and is largely peaceful, I do not see people resisting if they bring a good scheme. I almost forgot, as an added sweetener, the Chennai municipality said that if you do RWH and show photos and certificates of the job, you won t have to pay as much property tax as otherwise you would, that also boosted people s participation. And that is not the only solution, one more solution has been outlined in Aaj Bhi Khade hain talaab written by just-deceased Gandhian environmental activist Anupam Mishra. His Book can be downloaded for free at India Water Portal . Unfortunately, the said book doesn t have a good English translation till date. Interestingly, all of his content is licensed under public domain (CC-0) so people can continue to enjoy and learn from his life-work. Another lesson or understanding could be taken from Israel, the father of the modern micro-drip irrigation for crops. One of the things on my bucket lists is to visit Israel and if possible learn how they went from a water-deficient country to a water-surplus one. Which brings me to my second conundrum, most of the people believe that it s the Government s job to provide jobs to its people. India has been experiencing jobless growth for around a decade now, since the 2008 meltdown. While India was lucky to escape that, most of its trading partners weren t hence it slowed down International trade which slowed down creation of new enterprises etc. Laws such as the Bankruptcy law and the upcoming Goods and Services Tax . As everybody else, am a bit excited and a bit apprehensive about how the actual implementation will take place. Even International businesses has been found wanting. The latest example has been Uber and Ola. There have been protests against the two cab/taxi aggregators operating in India. For the millions of jobless students coming out of schools and Universities, there aren t simply enough jobs for them, nor are most (okay 50%) of them qualified for the jobs, these 50 percent are also untrainable, so what to do ? In reality, this is what keeps me awake at night. India is sitting on this ticking bomb-shell. It is really, a miracle that the youths have not rebelled yet. While all the conditions, proposals and counter-proposals have been shared before, I wanted/needed to highlight it. While the issue seems to be local, I would assert that they are all glocal in nature. The questions we are facing, I m sure both developing and to some extent even developed countries have probably been affected by it. I look forward to know what I can learn from them. Update 23/02/17 I had wanted to share about Debian s Voting system a bit, but that got derailed. Hence in order not to do, I ll just point towards 2015 platforms where 3 people vied for DPL post. I *think* I shared about DPL voting process earlier but if not, would do in detail in some future blog post.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Anupam Mishra, #Bankruptcy law, #Chennai model, #clean air, #clean water, #elections, #GST, #immigrant, #immigrants, #Maratha, #Maratha Light Infantry, #migration, #national parties, #Political party manifesto, #regional parties, #ride-sharing, #water availability, Rain Water Harvesting

The other Murakami, Ryu Murakami ( ), is hard to compare to the more famous Haruki. His collection of stories reflects the dark sides of Tokyo, far removed from the happy world of AKB48 and the like. Criminals, prostitutes, depression, loss. A bleak image onto a bleak society.
This collection of short stories is a consequent deconstruction of happiness, love, everything we believe to make our lives worthwhile. The protagonists are idealistic students loosing their faith, office ladies on aberrations, drunkards, movie directors, the usual mixture. But the topic remains constant the unfulfilled search for happiness and love.

I felt I was beginning to understand what happiness is about. It isn t about guzzling ten or twenty energy drinks a day, barreling down the highway for hours at a time, turning over your paycheck to your wife without even opening the envelope, and trying to force your family to respect you. Happiness is based on secrets and lies.Ryu Murakami, It all started just about a year and a half ago

A deep pessimistic undertone is echoing through these stories, and the atmosphere and writing reminds of Charles Bukowski. This pessimism resonates in the melancholy of the running themes in the stories, Cuban music. Murakami was active in disseminating Cuban music in Japan, which included founding his own label. Javier Olmo s pieces are often the connecting parts, as well as lending the short stories their title: Historia de un amor, Se fu .

The belief that what s missing now used to be available to us is just an illusion, if you ask me. But the social pressure of You ve got everything you need, what s your problem? is more powerful than you might ever think, and it s hard to defend yourself against it. In this country it s taboo even to think about looking for something more in life.Ryu Murakami, Historia de un amor

It is interesting to see that on the surface, the women in the stories are the broken characters, leading feminists to incredible rants about the book, see the rant^Wreview of Blake Fraina at Goodreads:

I ll start by saying that, as a feminist, I m deeply suspicious of male writers who obsess over the sex lives of women and, further, have the audacity to write from a female viewpoint
female characters are pretty much all pathetic victims of the male characters
I wish there was absolutely no market for stuff like this and I particularly discourage women readers from buying it Blake Fraina, Goodreads review

On first sight it might look like that the female characters are pretty much all pathetic victims of the male characters, but in fact it is the other way round, the desperate characters, the slaves of their own desperation, are the men, and not the women, in these stories. It is dual to the situation in Hitomi Kanehara s Snakes and Earrings, where on first sight the tattooist and the outlaw friends are the broken characters, but the really cracked one is the sweet Tokyo girly.

Male-female relationships are always in transition. If there s no forward progress, things tend to slip backwards.Ryu Murakami, Se fu

Final verdict: Great reading, hard to put down, very much readable and enjoyable, if one is in the mood of dark and depressing stories. And last but not least, don t trust feminist book reviews.

Around 2 decades back and a bit more I was introduced to computers. The top-line was 386DX which was mainly used as fat servers and some lucky institutions had the 386SX where IF we were lucky we could be able to play some games on it. I was pretty bad at Prince of Persia or most of the games of the era as most of the games depended on lightning reflexes which I didn t possess. Then 1997 happened and I was introduced to GNU/Linux but my love of/for games still continued even though I was bad at most of them. The only saving grace was turn-based RPG s (role-playing games) which didn t have permadeath, so you could plan your next move. Sometimes a wrong decision would lead to getting a place from where it was impossible to move further. As the decision was taken far far break which lead to the tangent, the only recourse was to replay the game which eventually lead to giving most of those kind of games. Then in/around 2000 Maxis came out with Sims. This was the time where I bought my first Pentium. I had never played a game which had you building stuff, designing stuff, no violence and the whole idea used to be about balancing priorities of trying to get new stuff, go to work, maintain relationships and still make sure you are eating, sleeping, have a good time. While I might have spent probably something close to 500 odd hours in the game or even more so, I spent the least amount of time in building the house. It used to be 4 4 when starting (you don t have much of in-game money and other stuff you wanted to buy as well) to 8 8 or at the very grand 12 12. It was only the first time I spent time trying to figure out where the bathroom should be, where the kitchen should, where the bedroom should be and after that I could do that blind-folded. The idea behind my house-design used to be simplicity, efficient (for my character). I used to see other people s grand creations of their houses and couldn t understand why they made such big houses. Now few days back, I saw few episodes of a game called Stranded Deep . The story, plot is simple. You, the player are going in a chartered plane and suddenly lightning strikes ( game trope as today s aircrafts are much better able to deal with lightning strikes) and our hero or heroine washes up on a beach with raft with the barest of possessions. Now the whole game is based upon him/her trying to survive, once you get the hang of the basic mechanics and you know what is to be done, you can do it. The only thing the game doesn t have is farming but as the game has unlimited procedural world, you just paddle or with boat motor go island hopping and take all that what you need. What was interesting to me was seeing a gamer putting so much time and passion in making a house. When I was looking at that video, I realized that maybe because I live in a dense environment, even the designs we make either of houses or anything else is more to try to get more and more people rather than making sure that people are happy which leads to my next sharing. Couple of days back, I read Virali Modi s account of how she was molested three times when trying to use Indian Railways. She made a petition on change.org While I do condemn the molestation as it s an affront against individual rights, freedom, liberty, free movement, dignity. Few of the root causes as pointed out by her, for instance the inability or non-preference to give differently-abled people the right to board first as well as awaiting to see that everybody s boarded properly before starting the train are the most minimum steps that Indian Railways could take without spending even a paise. The same could be told/shared about sensitizing people, although I have an idea of why does Indian Railway not employ women porters or women attendants for precisely this job. I accompanied a blind gentleman friend few times on Indian Railways and let me tell you, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences. The bogies which is given to them is similar or even less than what you see in unreserved compartments. The toilets were/are smelly, the gap between the station and the train was/is considerable for everybody from blind people, differently-abled people, elderly people as well. This is one of the causes of accidents which happen almost every day on Indian Railways. I also learnt that especially for blind people they are looking for a sort of low-frequency whistle/noise which tells them the disabled coupe/bogie/coach will come at a specific spot in the Station. In a platform which could have anything between 1500-2000 people navigating it wouldn t be easy. I don t know about other places but Indian Railway Stations need to learn a lot to make it a space for differently abled to navigate by themselves. Pune Station operates (originating or passing through) around 200 odd trains, with exceptions of all the specials and weekly trains that ply through, adding those would probably another 5-10 trains to the mix. Each train carries anywhere between 750-1000 odd people so roughly anywhere between 15-20 million pass through Pune Railway Station daily. Even if we take conservative estimates of around 5% of the public commuting from Pune, it would mean around 750,000 people travelling daily. Pune Railway Station has 6 stations and if I spread them equally it would come to around 100,000 people on one platform in 24 hours. Divide that equally by 24 hours and it comes to 4,160 people per hour. Now you take those figures and you see the Pune platforms are under severe pressure. I have normalized many figures. For instance, just like airports, even in railways, there are specific timings where more trains come and go. From morning 0500 hrs to late night 2300 hrs. there would be lot many trains, whereas the graveyard shifts would have windows where maintenance of tracks and personnel takes place. I dunno if people can comprehend 4000 odd people on the platform. Add to that you usually arrive at least an hour or two before a train departs even if you are a healthy person as Indian Railways has a habit of changing platforms of trains at the last minute. So if you a differently abled person with some luggage for a long-distance train, the problems just multiply. See drag accidents because of gap between railway bogies and platforms. The width of the entrance to the bogie is probably between 30-40 inches but the design is such that 5-10 inches are taken on each side. I remembered the last year, our current Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi had launched Accessible Campaign with great fanfare and we didn t hear anything much after that. Unfortunately, the site itself has latency and accessibility issues, besides not giving any real advice even if a person wants to know what building norms should one follow if one wants to make an area accessible. This was easily seen by last year s audit in Delhi as well as other places. A couple of web-searches later, I landed up at a Canadian site to have some idea about the width of the wheelchair itself as well as additional room to manoeuvre. Unfortunately, the best or the most modern coaches/bogies that Indian Railways has to offer are the LHB Bogies/Coaches. Now while the Coaches/Bogies by themselves are a big improvement from the ICF Coaches which we still have and use, if you read the advice and directions shared on the Canadian site, the coaches are far from satisfactory for people who are wheel-chair bound. According to Government s own census records, 0.6% of the population have movement issues. Getting all the differently-abled people together, it comes between 2, 2.5% of the population which is quite a bit. If 2-3 people out of every 100 people are differently-abled then we need to figure out something for them.While I don t have any ideas as to how we could improve the surroundings, it is clear that we need the change. While I was thinking,dreaming,understanding some of the nuances inadvertently, my attention/memories shifted to my toilet experiences at both Mumbai and the Doha Airport. As had shared then, had been pleasantly surprised to see that both in Mumbai Airport as well as the Doha Airport, the toilets were pretty wide, a part of me was happy and a part of me was seeing the added space as wastefulness. With the understanding of needs of differently-abled people it started to make whole lot of sense. I don t remember if I had shared then or not. Although am left wondering where they go for loo in the aircraft. The regular toilets are a tight fit for obese people, I am guessing aircrafts have toilets for differently-abled people as well. Looking back at last year s conference, we had 2-3 differently-abled people. I am just guessing that it wouldn t have been a pleasant experience for them. For instance, where we were staying, at UCT it had stairs, no lifts so by default they probably were on ground-floor. Then where we were staying and where most of the talks were about a few hundred metres away and the shortest distance were by stairs, the round-about way was by road but had vehicles around so probably not safe that way as well. I am guessing they had to be dependant on other people to figure out things. There were so many places where there were stairs and no ramps and even if there were ramps they were probably a bit more than the 1:12 which is the advice given. I have heard that this year s venue is also a bit challenging in terms of accessibility for differently-abled people. I am clueless as to did differently-able find debconf16 in terms of accessibility or not ? A related query to that one, if a Debconf s final report mentions issues with accessibility, do the venues make any changes so that at some future date, differently-abled people would have a better time. I know of Indian institutions reluctance to change, to do expenditure, dunno how western countries do it. Any ideas, comments are welcome.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #386, #accessibility, #air-travel, #Computers, #differently-abled, #Railways, gaming

I was reading a thread on phoronix where a student was sharing that it is or can be expensive to get even a used laptop and he shared his predicament and was hammered a bit for it to some going to the extent of questioning his life-choices. While I m not a student it still triggered something in me. I am not dirt poor but neither am I insanely rich. The same questions he has, similar questions I have had. While in his case he is probably in his early to late 20 s, I am pushing 40. Most of the money I make goes in for everyday purchases, veggies, house-rent, electricity, landline, broadband and cell phone bills. What little is left is most of the time kept for a rainy day as there is no Government pension. From what I have heard and read on the web, in the west specifically in the States, if I buy a used laptop, I usually get a 6 months 1 year warranty . Here, while you could get a used laptop for around INR 10k there is no warranty/guarantee, so I never get into that. It s buyer s beware all the time. For people who like/want FOSS or specifically something like Free DOS (like me), I had to wait for almost 6 years to get a model I was happy with, with the specs. I was ok with. Was really lucky enough to get a Thinkpad T440 with 8 GB of RAM for around INR 80k/- with Free DOS. The specs T440 Core I 5 (4300) / Dos (NEW MODEL) 20B7A1SD00 Intel Core i5 4300M (2.5 GHz / 3 MB / 5 GT/s) / Intel QM87 Chipset / Integrated 802.11 n WIFI LAN + Bluetooth 4.0 / 8GB DDR III Memory (2 DIMM SLOT) / 500 GB SATA HDD @ 7200 RPM / 14.0 HDy / FPR / Dos / 2 USB , VGA Port , RJ 45 Port /GB LAN /Track Point with 5 button Glass Touch Pad /Stereo Speakers with Dolby Enhanced Audio / 6 Cell Battery /Approx 2.14KG/ While it is/was actually pretty expensive but then wanted something which can take a beating, deal with all the heat, noise and dust (specifically where I live, right in the middle of the city). The reason I used the word lucky is that now there is no model in the T-series range which has FreeDOS on it. Of course, I hopefully will use it for another 4-5 years at the very least depending on how much it cooperates with me, I have heard that Thinkpads function for a long period of time even in dusty environments so banking on that. What probably pissed me is the condensing note in the comment, how does he know what pressures an another individual might be in. It s almost like saying You are refugee because you made a wrong life choice or something to that effect which again is stupid. I actually feel/felt embarrassed to bring this up as I truly am lucky to be safe, secure, have food on the table, am able to sleep on a bed at night, have a workstation AND a laptop, have somewhat of a sound mind and a body which is able to move around without any hassles. Add to that, incredibly as it may sound, was also able to see another country for a few days In relation to people being persecuted and having to run off to save their own lives or even people living on the streets, I am actually living in luxury. While I can t go through life feeling guilty for all the good things that have happened with me, I do feel disgusted when I see some people put blinding statements like that. One of the biggest reasons that GNU/Linux and Debian in particular gelled with me was that it s incredibly flexible and generous. Nobody tells me which packages I should or shouldn t have. I do right things, good, I do something wrong, an opportunity to learn and hopefully learn from my mistakes. In either case, one of the most forgiving kind of system to learn and hack on. While speaking of mistakes, could somebody look at #849684 . It almost feels like a tennis match going between the maintainers concerned. While I don t have the technical skills to ascertain who s right and who is not, it would be nice if some cooler heads can make sense and see if a way could be found out. Can somebody help ?
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #debian, #Life Choices, #Thinkpad440, laptop

As children use digital media to learn and socialize, others are collecting and analyzing data about these activities. In school and at play, these children find that they are the subjects of data science. As believers in the power of data analysis, we believe that this approach falls short of data science s potential to promote innovation, learning, and power. Motivated by this fact, we have been working over the last three years as part of a team at the MIT Media Lab and the University of Washington to design and build a system that attempts to support an alternative vision: children as data scientists. The system we have built is described in a new paper Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists that will be published in the proceedings of CHI 2017. Our system is built on top of Scratch, a visual, block-based programming language designed for children and youth. Scratch is also an online community with over 15 million registered members who share their Scratch projects, remix each others work, have conversations, provide feedback, bookmark or love projects they like, follow other users, and more. Over the last decade, researchers including us have used the Scratch online community s database to study the youth using Scratch. With Scratch Community Blocks, we attempt to put the power to programmatically analyze these data into the hands of the users themselves. To do so, our new system adds a set of new programming primitives (blocks) to Scratch so that users can access public data from the Scratch website from inside Scratch. Blocks in the new system gives users access to project and user metadata, information about social interaction, and data about what types of code are used in projects. The full palette of blocks to access different categories of data is shown below.

Project metadata

User metadata

Site-wide statistics

The new blocks allow users to programmatically access, filter, and analyze data about their own participation in the community. For example, with the simple script below, we can find whether we have followers in Scratch who report themselves to be from Spain, and what their usernames are. In designing the system, we had two primary motivations. First, we wanted to support avenues through which children can engage in curiosity-driven, creative explorations of public Scratch data. Second, we wanted to foster self-reflection with data. As children looked back upon their own participation and coding activity in Scratch through the project they and their peers made, we wanted them to reflect on their own behavior and learning in ways that shaped their future behavior and promoted exploration. After designing and building the system over 2014 and 2015, we invited a group of active Scratch users to beta test the system in early 2016. Over four months, 700 users created more than 1,600 projects. The diversity and depth of users creativity with the new blocks surprised us. Children created projects that gave the viewer of the project a personalized doughnut-chart visualization of their coding vocabulary on Scratch, rendered the viewer s number of followers as scoops of ice-cream on a cone, attempted to find whether love-its for projects are more common on Scratch than favorites , and told users how talkative they were by counting the cumulative string-length of project titles and descriptions. We found that children, rather than making canonical visualizations such as pie-charts or bar-graphs, frequently made information representations that spoke to their own identities and aesthetic sensibilities. A 13-year-old girl had made a virtual doll dress-up game where the player s ability to buy virtual clothes and accessories for the doll was determined by the level of their activity in the Scratch community. When we asked about her motivation for making such a project, she said:

I was trying to think of something that somebody hadn t done yet, and I didn t see that. And also I really like to do art on Scratch and that was a good opportunity to use that and mix the two [art and data] together.

We also found at least some evidence that the system supported self-reflection with data. For example, after seeing a project that showed its viewers a visualization of their past coding vocabulary, a 15-year-old realized that he does not do much programming with the pen-related primitives in Scratch, and wrote in a comment, epic! looks like we need to use more pen blocks. :D.

Doughnut visualization

Ice-cream visualization

Data-driven doll dress up

Additionally, we noted that that as children made and interacted with projects made with Scratch Community Blocks, they started to critically think about the implications of data collection and analysis. These conversations are the subject of another paper (also being published in CHI 2017). In a 1971 article called Teaching Children to be Mathematicians vs. Teaching About Mathematics , Seymour Papert argued for the need for children doing mathematics vs. learning about it. He showed how Logo, the programming language he was developing at that time with his colleagues, could offer children a space to use and engage with mathematical ideas in creative and personally motivated ways. This, he argued, enabled children to go beyond knowing about mathematics to doing mathematics, as a mathematician would. Scratch Community Blocks has not yet been launched for all Scratch users and has several important limitations we discuss in the paper. That said, we feel that the projects created by children in our the beta test demonstrate the real potential for children to do data science, and not just know about it, provide data for it, and to have their behavior nudged and shaped by it.

The Budget The story which I wanted to share is there are few friends (from Debian as well as elsewhere) who shared that they didn t get the whole demonetisation play or what the Government is/was trying to do. As budget is just round the corner (India will be presenting its yearly budget on 1st of February), thought it is prudent to share at least some basics, ideas and theories of what goals the Finance Minister would be looking at when presenting his budget. I would NOT talk of Inflation targeting or some such exotica as those topics would require their own blog-posts altogether. I would mainly be talking a bit about Taxation and in that Personal Income Tax. I would also not use words like Receivables and like which thought bit more accurate are not used in everyday language. Just like Private Companies and increasingly public utilities, The Government of the day has two-three different aims when it is presenting a budget a. The first is to give an update about how things went last year. Did all the incomes that were projected, did it happen or was there a short-fall ? If there was a short-fall what were the reasons for the shortfall. Similarly, did all the budgeted expenditure earmarked for the year was spent and were it spent under the heads they were supposed to ? If not what went wrong there ? There is usually a tussle between Planned and Unplanned expenditure and one of the hallmarks of good governance is that unplanned expenditure is kept at minimum, while planned expenditure and projects completion or/and assets coming on-line were within the estimated time-frames. So these updates are given to the Parliament and hence public at large. The second and the more interesting part are the plans for the immediate future, 1 year down-the-line. Based on the performance last year, a bit of crystal-ball gazing of external and internal conditions of the country, the Finance Minister along with her/his colleagues of Finance Ministry. Trivia There hasn t been a female finance minister till date in India. The Finance Ministry as a whole also holds consultations with most sections of the society before sharing/putting his Fiscal Policy (Planned Expenditure) for debate and passage in form of the Budget. While the budget itself is a technical exercise, it is also a Political exercise as both the budget and the finance bill (which contains the taxation proposals) need to be passed in Lok Sabha (Lower house). After passing scrutiny of Lok Sabha (Lower House having people s representatives directly elected) and Rajya Sabha (Upper House, indirectly elected), the taxation proposals becomes the law. It isn t that simple but for our understanding, keeping it simple. This Political model of governance with two houses is modeled under the British (Westminister) model since 1947. The Government, just like any other Organization gives a similar Profit and Loss Account and a Balance Sheet. I am a newbie to graphviz. The graph was made like this
graph Budget
subgraph tier1
node [color="limegreen",style="filled",group="tier1"]
Country_Budget

......
Country_Budget -- Profit_and_Loss_Account [type=s];
It might be possible to make the graph much better than it is currently . The Profit and Loss Account of the Government tells what Incomes it is projected to earn in the upcoming year and whatever Expenditures it hopes to do this year. The Income and Expenditure independently can be bifurcated into two, Revenue Income and Capital Income and Revenue Expenditure and Capital Expenditure. The simplest example of such planned expenditure which comes to my mind is the Indian Railways Budget which is all planned expenditure. As can be seen even with ample funds Railways were able to spent only 50% of the total amount disbursed last year. Similarly income generation for Railways was far below the target. Examples of Revenue Income include taxes of all sorts, while Capital Income are rare, like divestment/stake sale of a company owned by the Government. These are usually one-off events. Examples of Capital Expenditure is when the Government makes a road, makes a bridge etc. Usually large expenditures come under Capital Expenditure while salaries to Government employees and routine expenditures are known as Revenue Expenditure. There was a statement by the present Government that the last 6-7 years the budgets has been more or less static as far as numbers are concerned. This hampers Government s ability to take up any new work. The Revenue income earned by the Government can again be bifurcated primarily into two Direct Taxes and Indirect Taxes. Direct Taxes are those which the Government earns through Personal Income Tax and Corporate Tax. As only 1 percent of Indians pay Personal income tax, the rest Government tries to raise by

• Corporate Tax (which is told to be higher than neighbouring countries around us)
• Indirect Taxes like VAT (Value Added Tax introduced in 2005 over select items at 1% and now it s almost 15%,)
• Duties on all imported goods depending on what the Government thinks of a certain class of goods.For instance, should life-saving drugs be taxed or not and going either way has immediate as well as long-term consequences.

Hence the Government of the day is in fix. It needs to have more money if it wants to invest into infrastructure, defence spending, social spending such as health and education and so on and so forth. It cannot

• raise VAT rates more as it may stall public spending
• raise Corporate Taxes beyond a point otherwise people may either start doing work in black or shadow economy or may leave the country, a term used to describe this is also Capital Flight.
• raise personal Income Taxes beyond a point otherwise the same thing will happen as above.

Another point is that unlike China which is a Large State-backed Enterprises Export-led Economy which has its own problems, India s economy is much more consumption-based, hence any large tinkering upwards may possibly stall whatever little spending the middle-class does, similar to the stall in consumer durables which has been happening over the last few years. There are a couple of short-term solutions that the Government may do

• It can raise finances from the market by using a mix of debt and equity instruments such as Bonds and targeted finances for specific schemes under EEE (Exempt, Exempt, Exempt or EET i.e. Exempt, Exempt Tax)
• The Government prints more money

While both seem to be attractive ways, but both have their disadvantages also, both have costs associated for them. In the first one, like any other scheme, when any scheme is launched, it needs to be underwritten by GOI which means even if it s not a success they would have to service all and any obligations towards investors. Also they have to be careful how much they are borrowing as excessive borrowing for today could lead to a Greece-like meltdown situation, whether internal or external borrowers. With external borrowers they also usually like to have a guarantee that the Rupee will not slide beyond a point otherwise the Government will have to pay all and any losses but this is going beyond what I wanted to share. Printing excess money in the system could lead to loss in the value of the money itself as well as leading to inflationary pressures which leads to more problems for the poor and greater inequality between the classes among other things. So while the Government may use all of the above ways in varying degrees, the present Government had the idea that if we were to reduce black money or hidden economy (AFAIK no country can claim to completely eliminate it) we would be able to raise the finance we need without a major cost associated to it. For instance, I was reading that even in Canada, it is expected that 20% of black money/shadow economy works and that assessment is by their own taxation authorities. So While doing demonetization, it came out with an equivalent Black Money Declaration Scheme (IDS). The idea is simple, even if 1 percent of the population comes in the traditional tax net the Government of the day would be able to enhance budgets to various expenditure. Now while the idea is good in theory, implementation has been the Achilees heel. While the Government s expected something like 15% of the whole economy was black money or shadow money, almost 95% of the money in circulation came back in Banks during demonetization ( These are unofficial figures, Finance Ministry/RBI would be disclosing the real figures on 1st of February 2017 so we will know). It is suspected that 10% of money in Banks is black money. There are considerable costs to search analyze, prove in the court of law that it is so. There are and would be considerable costs to train new officers as existing Income Tax Officers are already burdened with Advance Tax being paid by Corporates and small business-man paying round the year (every 3 months), The existing Income Tax Officers already have their hands full. Also till Governments don t fix up realty sector/real-estate sector and other places where the black money/shadow economy may prevail. Hence all the training, salary, buildings where new Income Tax Officers could work, infrastructure, new buildings where suspect cases have to be tried and lawyers for those. As have shared a few times on this blog, India has almost 29 million court cases pending in the lower judiciary alone. Unless any such cases are not successfully tried within time by the Government, it would be a waste. Now whether the Government knew of these issues or not would probably be never known. Lastly, there is a voluntary part that the Government hopes, that they will by themselves join the mainstream tax-paying public. This might happen but any such happening will happen over years. People make their own choices. And unless there are not any stick and carrot approach to the Government s Policies people will tend to go back to their old ways. I would share an example from the demonetisation process which would help prove my point During demonetization, there was a great push towards doing digital transaction either via smartphones or greater usage of debit and credit cards etc. For the first 60 days till 31st December 2016, you could do digital transactions without paying any transaction fee. During that period, I used my Debit card to shop, to eat at restaurants or/and even small shops. But come 1st January 2017, the charges for digital transactions are anything between 1.5% to 3% of transactions. Naturally, I stopped using them and use them very sparingly where cash won t work. So at the end, while the Government made the whole demonetization drive to drive out shadow economy, terror financing etc. While terror financing has been hurt quite a bit, the same cannot be said of the shadow/black economy. It seems that the Government would need to close many more doors and windows before people join the mainstream. While Politically it was risky, socially it was also a bit risky move as it was uncertain how and where things will move. Venezuela tried the same thing and fell flat on its face. All said and done, if and when people become part of the tax-paying class/people, The most optimistic idea that the Government has that everybody will go cashless and it would be far easier to find out who s not paying taxes. As shared before, I don t think this will happen unless the charges for cashless is at 0.05% or something similar. Even IF people do join the mainstream, it is very much possible that the present Govt. will not enjoy fruits of this labour as fruits might come in 2018/19 or even later even if they do come. So whether the decision had the right affect or not, we may never come to know. Governments tend to tinker around with the figures as well. But I hope some idea of how things happen is known now.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #demonetization, #Government Budget, #graphviz, #Limitations, #Profit and Loss Account, #Taxation

I participated in Nanowrimo in November, but I failed to actually finish the required 50,000 words during the month. Oh well. I plan on finishing the book eventually, anyway. Furthermore, as an open source exhibitionist I thought I'd publish a chapter each month. This will put a bit of pressure on me to keep writing, and hopefully I'll get some nice feedback too. The working title is "Hacker Noir". I've put the first chapter up on http://noir.liw.fi/.

Since I've got a few weeks off I've decided I need to find a project, or two, to occupy me. Happily the baby is settling in well, mostly he sleeps for 4-5 hours, then eats, before the cycle repeats. It could have been so much worse. My plan is to start exploring Arduino-related projects. It has been years since I touched hardware, with the exception of building a new PC for myself every 12-48 months. There are a few "starter kits" you can buy, consisting of a board, and some discrete components such as a bunch of buttons, an LCD-output screen, some sensors (pressure, water, tilt), etc. There are also some nifty little pre-cooked components you can buy such as:

• An MP3-playback module.
  • With integrated SD-card reader.

The appeal of the former is that I can get the hang of marrying hardware with software, and the appeal of the latter is that the whole thing is pre-built, so I don't need to worry about anything complex. Looking over similar builds people have made, the process is more akin to building with Lego than real hardware-assembling. So, for the next few weeks my plan is to :

• Explore the various sensors, and tutorials, via the starter-kit.
• Wire the MP3-playback device to a wireless D1-mini-board.
  • Which will allow me to listen to (static) music stored on an SD-card.
  • And sending "next", "previous", "play", "volume-up", etc, via a mobile.

The end result should be that I will be able to listen to music in my living room. Albeit in a constrained fashion (if I want to change the music I'll have to swap out the files on the SD-card). But it's something that's vaguely useful, and something that I think is within my capability, even as a beginner. I'm actually not sure what else I could usefully do, but I figured I could probably wire up a vibration sensor to another wireless board. The device can sit on the top of my washing machine:

• If vibration is sensed move into the "washing is on" state.
  • If vibration stops after a few minutes move into the "washing machine done" state.
    • Send a HTTP GET-request, which will trigger an SMS/similar.

There's probably more to it than that, but I expect that a simple vibration sensor will be sufficient to allow me to get an alert of some kind when the washing machine is ready to be emptied - and I don't need to poke inside the guts of the washing machine, nor hang reed-switches off the door, etc. Anyway the only downside to my plan is that no doubt shipping the toys from AliExpress will take 2-4 weeks. Oops.

While I try to minimize Politics and Economics as much as I can on this blog, it sometimes surfaces. It is possible that some people may benefit or at least be aware. A bit of background is necessary before I jump into the intricacies of the Maharashtra Real Estate Rules and Regulation Draft Rules 2016 (RERA) . Since ever, but more prominently since 2007/8 potential homeowners from across the country have been suffering at the hands of the builder/promoter for number of years. While it would be wrong to paint all the Real Estate Developers and Builders as cheats (we as in all tenants and homeowners hope there are good ones out there) many Real Estate Builders and promoters have cheated homeowners of their hard-earned money. This has also lessened the secondary (resale) market and tenants like me have to fight over morsels as supply is tight. There were two broad ways in which the cheating is/was done a. Take deposits and run away i.e. fly by night operators Here the only option for a homeowner is to file an FIR (First Information Report) and hope the culprits are caught. 99% of the time the builder/promoter goes somewhere abroad and the potential home buyers/home-owners are left holding the can. This is usually done by small real estate promoters and builders. b. The big boys would take all or most money of the project, may register or not register the flat in your name, either build a quarter or half-finished building and then make excuses. There are some who do not even build. The money given is used by the builder/developer either for his own needs or using that money in some high-profile project which is expensive and may have huge returns. They know that home-owners can t do anything, at the most go to the court which will take more than a decade or two during which time the developer would have interest-free income and do whatever he wants to do. One of the bigger stories which came up this year was when the Indian Cricket Captain, M.S. Dhoni (cricket is a religion in India, and the cricketers gods for millions of Indians) had to end his brand engagement and ambassadorship from Amrapali Housing Group. Apparently, his wife Sakshi was on the Board of directors at Amrapali Housing and had to resign The Government knew of such issues and had been working since last few years. Under the present Government, a Model Agreement and a Model Real Estate Rules and Regulation Bill was passed on 31st March and came into force on 1st May 2016. India, similar to the U.S. and U.K. follows a federal structure. While I have shared this before, most of the laws in India fall in either of three lists, Central List, Concurrent Lists and State Lists. Housing for instance, is a state subject so any laws concerning housing has to be made by the state legislature. Having a statutory requirement to put the bill in 6 months from 1st of May, the Government of Maharashtra chose to put the draft rules in public domain on 12th December 2016, about 10 days ago and there were efforts to let it remain low-key so people do not object as we are still in the throes of demonetisation. By law they should have given 30 days for people to raise objections and give suggestions. The State Government too could have easily asked an extension and as both the State and the Centre are of the same Political Party they would have easily got it. With that, below is the e-mail I sent to suggesstionsonrera@maharashtra.gov.in Sub Some suggestions for RERA biggest suggestion, need to give more time study the implications for house-owners. Respected Sir/Madame, I will be publishing the below mail as a public letter on my blog as well. I am writing as a citizen, a voter, a potential home owner, currently a tenant . If houses supply is not in time, it is us, the tenants who have the most to lose as we have to fight over whatever is in the market. I do also hope to be a home buyer at some point in time so these rules would affect me also somewhere in the hazy future. I came to know through the media that Maharashtra Govt. recently introduced draft rules for RERA Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 . I hope to impress upon you that these proposed Rules and Regulations need to be thoroughly revised and new draft rules shared with the public at large with proper announcement in all newspapers and proper time ( more than a month ) to study and give replies on the said matter. My suggestions and complaints are as under a. The first complaint and suggestion is that the date between the draft regulations and suggestions being invited by members of public is and was too little 12 December 2016 23 December 2016 (only 11 days) for almost 90 pages of Government rules and regulations which needs multiple rounds of re-reading to understand the implications of the draft rules . Add to that unlike the Central Building Legislation, Model Agreement which was prepared by Centre and also given wide publicity, the Maharashtra Govt. didn t do any such publicity to bring it to the
notice of the people. b. I ask where was the hurry to publish these draft rules now when everybody is suffering through the result of cash-crunch on top of other things. If the said draft rules were put up in January 2017, I am sure more people would have responded to the draft rules. Ir raises suspicion in the mind of everybody the timing of sharing the draft rules and the limited time given to people to respond. E.g. When TRAI (Telephone Regulatory Authority of India) asked for suggestion it gives more than a month, and something like housing which is an existential question for everybody, i.e. the poor, the middle and the rich, you have given pretty less time. While I could change my telephone service providers at a moment s notice without huge loss, the same cannot be said either for a house owner (in case of builder) or a tenant as well. This is just not done. c. The documents are at https://housing.maharashtra.gov.in/sitemap/housing/Rera_rules.htm under different sub-headings while the correct structure of the documents can be found at nared s site
http://naredco.in/notifications.asp . At the very least, the documents should have been in proper order. Coming to some of the salient points raised both in the media and elsewhere 1. On page 6 of Part IV-A Ext1.pdf you have written Explanation.-The registration of a real estate project shall not be required,- (i) for the purpose of any renovations or repair or redevelopment which does not involve marketing, advertisement, selling or new allotment of any apartment , plot or building as the case may be under
the real estate project; RERA draft rules What it means is that the house owner and by the same stroke the tenant would have absolutely no voice to oppose any changes made to the structure at any point of time after the building is built. This means the builder is free to build 12-14-16 even 20 stories building when the original plans were for 6-8-10. This rule gives the builder to do free for all till the building doesn t get converted into a society, a process which does and can take years to happen. 2. A builder has to take innumerable permissions from different authorities at each and every stage till possession of a said property isn t handed over to a home buyer and by its extension to the tenant. Now any one of these authorities could sit on the papers and there is no accountability of by when papers would be passed under a competent authority s desk. There was a wide belief that there would be some
rules and regulations framed in this regard but the draft rules are silent on the subject matter. 3. In Draft rule 5. page 8 of Part IV-A Ext1.pdf you write Withdrawal of amounts deposited in separate account.-(1) With regard to the withdrawal of amounts deposited under sub-clause (D) of clause (l) of sub-section (2) of section 4, the following provisions shall apply:- (i) For new projects which will be registered after commencement. Deposit in the escrow account is from now onwards. So what happens to the projects which are ongoing at the moment, either at the registration stage or at building stage, thousands of potential house owners would be left to fend for themselves. There needs to be some recourse for them as well. 3b. Another suggestion is that the house-owners are duly informed when promoters/builders are taking money from the bank and should have the authority to see that proper documents and procedure was followed. It is possible that unscrupulous elements may either bypass it or give some different documents which are not in knowledge of the house-owner, thus defeating the purpose of the escrow account itself. 4. On page 44 of Pt.IV-A Ext.161 in the Model Agreement to be entered
between the Promoter and the Alottee you have mentioned (i)The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee one Apartment No. .. of the type .. of carpet area admeasuring .. sq. metres on floor in the building __________along with (hereinafter referred to as the Apartment ) as shown in the Floor plan thereof hereto annexed and marked Annexures C
for the consideration of Rs. . including Rs. . being the proportionate price of the common areas and facilities appurtenant to the premises, the nature, extent and description of the common/limited common areas and facilities which are more particularly described in the Second Schedule annexed herewith. (the price of the Apartment including the proportionate price of the limited common areas and facilities and parking spaces should be shown separately). (ii) The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee garage bearing Nos ____ situated at _______ Basement and/or stilt and /or ____podium being
constructed in the layout for the consideration of Rs. ____________/- (iii) The Allottee hereby agrees to purchase from the Promoter and the Promoter hereby agrees to sell to the Allottee Car parking spaces bearing Nos ____ situated at _______ Basement and/or stilt and /or ____podium and/or open parking space, being constructed in the layout for the
consideration of Rs. ____________/-. The total aggregate consideration amount for the apartment including garages/car parking spaces is
thus Rs.______/- Draft rules. What has been done here is the parking space has been divorced from sale of the flat . It is against natural justice, logic, common sense as well-known precedents in jurisprudence (i.e. law) In September 2010, the bench of Justices R M Lodha and A K Patnaik had ruled in a judgement stating developers cannot sell parking spaces as independent real-estate units. The court ruled that parking areas are common areas and facilities . This was on behalf of a precedent in Mumbai High Court as well. http://www.reinventingparking.org/2010/09/important-parking-ruling-by-indias.html This has been reiterated again and again in courts as well as consumer
forums http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Cant-charge-flat-buyer-extra-for-parking-slot/articleshow/22475233.cms and has been the norm in several Apartment Acts over multiple states http://apartmentadda.com/blog/2015/02/19/rules-pertaining-to-parking-spaces-in-apartment-complexes/ 5. In case of dispute, the case will high court which is inundated by huge number of pending cases. As recently as August 2016 there was a news item in Indian Express which talks about the spike in pending cases. Putting a case in the high court will weigh heavily on the homeowner, financially and
mentally http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/more-cases-and-increased-staff-strength-putting-pressure-on-bombay-high-court-building-2964796/ It may be better to use the services of National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission'(NCDRC) where there is possibility of quicker justice and quick resolution. There is possibility of group actions taking place which will reduce duplicity of work on behalf of the petitioners. 6. There is neither any clarity, incentive or punitive action against the promoter/builder if s/he delay conveyance to the society in order to get any future developmental and FSI rights. To delay handing over conveyance, the builders delay completion of the last building in a said project. there should be both a compensatory and punitive actions taken against the builder if he is unable to prove any genuine cause for the same. 7. There needs to be the provision with regard to need for developers to make public disclosures pertaining to building approvals. This while I had shared above needs to be explicitly mentioned so house-owners know the promoter/builder are on the right path. 8. There needs to be a provision that prohibits refusal to sell property to any person on the basis of his/her religion, marital status or dietary preferences. 9. There is lot of ambiguity if criminal proceedings can be initiated against a promoter/developer if s/he fails to deliver the flat on time. The developer should be criminally liable if he doesn t give the flat with all the amenities, fixtures and anything which was on agreement signed by both parties and for which the payment has been given in
full at time of possession of a flat. 10. Penalties for the promoter/builder is capped at 10% in case of any wrong-doing. Apart from proving the charge, the onus of which would lie on the house-owner, capping it at 10% is similar to A teacher telling a naughty student, do whatever you want to do, I am only going to hit you 5 times. Such a drafting encourages the Promoter/builder to play mischief. The builder knows his exposure is pretty limited. Liability is limited so he will try to get with whatever he can. Having a high penalty clause will deter him. 11. There was talk and shown in the Center s model agreement the precedent of providing names, addresses and contact details of other allot-tees or home-owners of a building that would have multiple dwelling units . This is nowhere either in the agreement or mentioned anywhere else in the four documents. 12. An addition to the above would be that the details provided should be correct and updated as per the records maintained by the Promoter/builder. 13. Today, there is no way for a potential house-owner to know if the builder had broken any norms or has any cases in court pending against him. There should be a way for the potential house-owner to find out. 14. A builder can terminate a flat purchase agreement by giving just a week s notice on email to the buyer who defaults on an instalment. But the developer can refund the money without interest to the
purchaser at leisure, within six months.Under MOFA (the earlier rules), the developer could cancel the agreement after giving a 15 days notice, and the builder could resell the flat only after refunding money to the original buyer. Under the new draft rules, a builder can immediately sell the flat after terminating the agreement. 15. The new draft rules say a buyer must pay 30% of the total cost while signing the agreement and 45% when the plinth of the building is constructed. The earlier state law stipulated 20% payment when the
agreement is signed with the developer. 16. The Central model agreement and rules proposed a fee of INR Rs 1,000 for filing complaints before housing authority; the state draft has proposed to hike this fee to Rs INR Rs. 10,000/- 17. Reading the Central Model Agreement, key disclosures under Section 4 (2)and Rule 3 (2) of the Central Model Rules have been excluded to be put up on the website of the Authority. These included carpet area of flat, encumbrance certificate (this would have disclosed encumbrances in respect of the land where the real estate project is proposed to be undertaken), copy of the legal title report and sanctioned plan of the building. Due to this house-owner would always be in dark and assume that everything is alright. There have been multiple instances of this over years Some examples http://www.deccanchronicle.com/140920/nation-current-affairs/article/builder-encroaches-%E2%80%98raja-kaluve%E2%80%99 http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/surat-builder-grabs-tribal-land-using-fake-documents/ http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/bangalore/bmtf-books-exmayor-wife-for-grabbing-ca-site/article7397062.ece http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thane/24-acre-ambernath-plot-usurped-with-fake-docus/articleshow/55654139.cms 18. The Central rule requires a builder to submit an annual report including profit and loss account, balance sheet, cash flow statement, directors report and auditors report for the preceding three financial years, among other things. However, the Maharashtra draft rules are silent on such a requirement. While the above is what I could perceive in the limited amount I came to know. This should be enough to convince that more needs to be done from the house-owner s side. Update Just saw Quint s Op-Ed goes in more detail.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Draft Rules for Real Estate Rules and Regulation (2016), #hurry, #Name, #Response, Amrapali Group, Contact details of other hom-owners in a scheme., M.S. Dhoni