New release! In case you haven t seen it yet, there s a new GNOME release 3.24! The release is the result of 6 months work by the GNOME community. The new release is a major step forward for us, with new features and improvements, and some exciting developments in how we build applications. You can read more about it in the announcement and release notes. As always, this release was made possible partially thanks to the Friends of GNOME project. In particular, it helped us provide a Core apps hackfest in Berlin last November, which had a direct impact on this release. Conferences GTK+ hackfest I ve just come back from the GTK+ hackfest in London thanks to RedHat and Endless for sponsoring the venues! It was great to meet a load of people who are involved with GNOME and GTK, and some great discussions were had about Flatpak and the creation of a FlatHub somewhere that people can get all their latest Flatpaks from. LibrePlanet As I m writing this, I m sitting on a train going to Heathrow, for my flight to LibrePlanet 2017! If you re going to be there, come and say hi. I ve a load of new stickers that have been produced as well so these can brighten up your laptop.

Couple of weeks ago, either on some mailing list, on IRC or somewhere else, somebody mentioned that people always put higher amount of airline expenditure for self when asking for sponsorship. Now last year, between sending the application and getting the approval for sponsorship, there was 3 months of difference between the two. Now if you put up an application for sponsorship like I did last year, I had added 10% to the cost of flight tickets of the cheapest prevailing prices at that point in time on skyscanner or any of the meta-search-engines were showing me at that point in time. I was sceptical whether the amount that I had put for the to and fro tickets would be enough or not. Strangely, I was lucky enough to get my ticket around the new estimated price. I would have to mention though that there were only 2 tickets left at the new price and if I had waited just a few hours more, those tickets would have gone too and all other tickets were around 25% more than before. The only reasons I could fathom are a. Luck, pure and simple. b. Going at the end of the tourism season This was evident as I was able to book my extended stay at any hostel just 2 days before my stay at UCT (University of Cape Town) was over. Was corroborated by hostel staff, shop-owners as well as whatever info. I found on the web before and during my stay in SA. c. South Africa being more lenient than probably Canada is giving and processing visas. While looking at the third point, thought I better check world tourism rankings and saw the Wikipedia page for it. Interestingly, South Africa seems to have a slight edge over Canada when it comes to statistics and hence strengthens my assumptions that probably more people apply for SA than Canada as they know the possibility of more people making through visa processing. It would stand to be logical that more people would apply for a tourist or similar short-term resident visas if they know they have a good chance going through. While researching on the topic I also came across/ hunted to find the hardest places to get a Visa for and was surprised to find India being lasted therein.Coincidentally, that site also has a UK domain.It does burst the bubble in Incredible India a little bit. As a newbie who had no clue I knew I was probably a victim of Information Asymmetry where the airlines have much more information about travel trends, ongoing trends at Airports, Politics and Economics of Countries, Price of Crude Oil, Profit, Competition and probably many more factors that I haven t taken into account which decide fares. While researching on the topic, one of the interesting finds I had while trying to figure the above is that Airlines didn t pass on fuel savings to their customers. Now I don t know whether this was the same around the world or was this only in UK. I am shocked that British (and by definition EU, as UK was part of EU at that time) travellers or consumer groups didn t file a suit in the court of law as reading the above smells of anticompetitive behaviour. The most shocking statement was this Average fares to Spain rose by 10 per cent over the same period. Telegraph, UK. In order to lessen this information asymmetry a bit, I used google flights and its data of the past 2 months to see how the fares have been changing to have some insight of where the fares might end up. I know google is hated by one and all, but in this instance I couldn t find any comparable site which does this kind of thing. As can be seen in the graph, the tickets had started relatively cheap from around INR 65k ish to around 80k ish at this point in time. That is a jump of around 30% in the last couple of months. All of these flights have a layover somewhere in Europe and taking a second flight from there to Canada. The one which didn t show much of action is the direct plan between BOM YUL and back but then this seems to be a premium service . Taking a direct flight from BOM YUL is north of INR 90k/- which doesn t make much sense unless one is fond of spending 13+ hours in flight. Definitely not my cup of tea. With layovers it makes the experience a bit more bearable. While the real action is probably 3 or bit more months away, its interesting to see how things are panning out at least on airline price tickets and the dynamics involved therein. Even with all the above attempts at finding the answer, I m no closer to figuring out to estimate airline ticket prices when window is largish 3 months in making. Any ideas anybody? If the previous jump is any indication, then 10-15% escalation bit might not hack this time around. Any strategies that people could advise while trying to put a ball-park figure.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #air-travel, #Airfares, #Competition, #Price Estimation, #Sponsorship

I am boarding my flight to Brussels to attend FOSDEM. The Desktops DevRoom will be a blast again this year. While I have been in charge of it for 6? years already, the last two (since my twins) were born I had organized remotely and local duties were carried on by the Desktops DevRoom team (thank you Christophe Fergeau, Philippe Caseiro and others!). I am anxious at meeting old friends again. I will be at the beer event today. Video streaming will be available thanks to the Video Team. If you want to help, please contact us in the desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org mailing list, or directly at the devroom. Also, this year will be the first for me using the job corner to recruit: my company (everis) is recruiting globally for many open positions. Drop us a mail at fosdem@everis.com with your CV, desired position and location (we have direct presence in 13 countries and indirect in 40 countries) and I will make sure it reaches the right inbox.

Statutory warning It s a long read. I start by sharing I regret, I did not hold onto the Budget and Economics 101 blog post for one more day. I had been holding/thinking on to it for almost couple of weeks before posting, if I had just waited a day more, I would have been able to share an Indian Express story . While I thought that the work for the budget starts around 3 months before the budget, I came to learn from that article that it takes 6 months. As can be seen in the article, it is somewhat of a wasted opportunity, part of it probably due to the Government (irrespective of any political party, dynasty etc.) mismanagement. What has not been stated in the article is what I had shared earlier, reading between the lines, it seems that the Government isn t able to trust what it hears from its advisers and man on the street. Unlike Chanakya and many wise people before him who are credited with advising about good governance, that a good king is one who goes out in disguise, learns how his/er subjects are surviving, seeing what ills them and taking or even not taking corrective steps after seeing the problem from various angles. Of course it s easier said then done, though lot of Indian kings did try and ran successful provinces. There were also some who were more interested in gambling, women and threw/frittered away their kingdoms. The 6-month things while not being said in the Express article is probably more about checking and re-checking figures and sources to make sure they are able to read whatever pattern the various Big Businesses, Industry, Social Welfare schemes and people are saying I guess. And unless mass digitalization as well as overhaul of procedures, Right to Information (RTI) happens, don t see any improvement in the way the information is collected, interpreted and shared with the public at large. It would also require people who are able to figure out how things work sharing the inferences (right or wrong) through various media so there is discussion about figures and policy-making. Such researchers and their findings are sadly missing in Indian public discourses and only found in glossy coffee table books :(. One of the most basic question for instance is, How much of any policy should be based on facts and figures and how much giving fillip to products and services needed in short to medium term ? Also how much morality should play a part in Public Policy ? Surprisingly, or probably not, most Indian budgets are populist by nature with some scientific basis but most of the times there is no dialog about how the FM came to some conclusion or Policy-making. I am guessing a huge part of that has also to do with basic illiteracy as well as Economic and Financial Illiteracy. Just to share a well-known world-over example, one of the policies where the Government of India has been somewhat lethargic is wired broadband penetration. As have shared umpteen times, while superficially broadband penetration is happening, most of the penetration is the unreliable and more expensive mobile broadband penetration. While this may come as a shock to many of the users of technology, BSNL, a Government company who provides broadband for almost 70-80% of the ADSL wired broadband subscribers gives 50:1 contention ratio to its customers. One can now understand the pathetic speeds along with very old copper wiring (20 odd years) on which the network is running. The idea/idiom of running network using duct-tape seems pretty apt in here Now, the Government couple of years ago introduced FFTH Fiber-to-the-home but because the charges are so high, it s not going anywhere. The Government could say 10% discount in your Income Tax rates if you get FFTH. This would force people to get FFTH and would also force BSNL to clean up its act. It has been documented that a percentage increase in broadband equals a similar percentage rise in GDP. Having higher speeds of broadband would mean better quality of streaming video as well as all sorts of remote teaching and sharing of ideas which will give a lot of fillip to all sorts of IT peripherals in short, medium and long-term as well. Not to mention, all the software that will be invented/coded to take benefit of all that speed. Although, realistically speaking I am cynical that the Government would bring something like this Moving on Another interesting story which I had shared was a bit about World History Now the Economist sort of confirmed how things are in Pakistan. What is and was interesting that the article is made by a politically left-leaning magazine which is for globalization, business among other things . So, there seem to be only three options, either I and the magazine are correct or we both are reading it wrong. The third and last option is that the United States realize that Pakistan can no longer be trusted as Pakistan is siding more and more with Chinese and Russians, hence the article. Atlhough it seems a somewhat far-fetched idea as I don t see the magazine getting any brownie points with President Trump. Unless, The Economist becomes more hawkish, more right-wingish due to the new establishment. I can t claim to have any major political understanding or expertise but it does seem that Pakistan is losing friends. Even UAE have been cautiously building bridges with us. Now how this will play out in the medium to long-term depends much on the personal equations of the two heads of state, happenings in geopolitics around the world and the two countries, decisions they take, it is a welcome opportunity as far they (the Saudis) have funds they want to invest and India can use those investments to make new infrastructure. Now, I need a bit of help of Java and VCS (Version control system) experts . There is a small game project called Mars-Sim. I asked probably a few more questions than I should have and the result was that I was made a member of the game team even though I had shared with them that I m a non-coder. I think such a game is important as it s foss. Both the game itself is foss as well as its build-tools with a basic wiki. Such a game would be useful not only to Debian but all free software distributions. Journeying into the game Unfortunately, the game as it is currently, doesn t work with openjdk8 but private conversations with the devs. have shared they will work on getting it to work on OpenJDK 9 which though is sometime away. Now as it is a game, I knew it would have multiple multimedia assets. It took me quite sometime to figure out where most of the multimedia assets are. I was shocked to find that there aren t any tool/s in Debian as well a GNU/Linux to know about types of content is there inside a directory and its sub-directories. I framed it in a query and found a script as an answer . I renamed the script to file-extension-information.sh (for lack of imagination of better name). After that, I downloaded a snapshot of the head of the project from https://sourceforge.net/p/mars-sim/code/HEAD/tree/ where it shows a link to download the snapshot. https://sourceforge.net/code-snapshots/svn/m/ma/mars-sim/code/mars-sim-code-3847-trunk.zip unzipped it and then ran the script on it [$] bash file-extension-information.sh mars-sim-code-3846-trunk
theme: 1770
dtd: 31915
py: 10815
project: 5627
JPG: 762476
fxml: 59490
vm: 876
dat: 15841044
java: 13052271
store: 1343
gitignore: 8
jpg: 3473416
md: 5156
lua: 57
gz: 1447
desktop: 281
wav: 83278
1: 2340
css: 323739
frag: 471
svg: 8948591
launch: 9404
index: 11520
iml: 27186
png: 3268773
json: 1217
ttf: 2861016
vert: 712
ogg: 12394801
prefs: 11541
properties: 186731
gradle: 611
classpath: 8538
pro: 687
groovy: 2711
form: 5780
txt: 50274
xml: 794365
js: 1465072
dll: 2268672
html: 1676452
gif: 38399
sum: 23040
(none): 1124
jsx: 32070 It gave me some idea of what sort of file were under the repository. I do wish the script defaulted to showing file-sizes in KB if not MB to better assess how the directory is made up but not a big loss . The above listing told me that at the very least theme, JPG, dat, wav, png, ogg and lastly gif files. For lack of better tools and to get an overview of where those multimedia assets used ncdu [shirish@debian] - [~/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk] - [10210]
[$] ncdu mars-sim/ --- /home/shirish/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk/mars-sim --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
46.2 MiB [##########] /mars-sim-ui
15.2 MiB [### ] /mars-sim-mapdata
8.3 MiB [# ] /mars-sim-core
2.1 MiB [ ] /mars-sim-service
500.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-main
188.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-android
72.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-network
16.0 KiB [ ] pom.xml
12.0 KiB [ ] /.settings
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.store
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.iml
4.0 KiB [ ] .project
I found that all the media is distributed randomly and posted a ticket about it. As I m not even a java newbie, could somebody look at mokun s comment and help out please ? On the same project, there has been talk of migrating to github.com Now whatever little I know of git, it makes a copy of the whole repository under .git/ folder/directory so having multimedia assets under git is a bad, bad idea, as each multimedia binary format file would be unique and no possibility of diff. between two binary files even though they may be the same file with some addition or subtraction from earlier version. I did file a question but am unhappy with the answers given. Can anybody give some definitive answers if they have been able to do how I am proposing , if yes, how did they go about it ? And lastly America was founded by immigrants. Everybody knows the story about American Indians, the originals of the land were over-powered by the European settlers. So any claim, then and now that immigration did not help United States is just a lie. This came due to a conversation on #debconf by andrewsh

[18:37:06] I d be more than happy myself to apply for an US tourist not transit visa when I really need it, as a transit visa isn t really useful, is just as costly as a tourist visa, and nearly as difficult to get as a tourist visa
[18:37:40] I m not entirely sure I wish to transit through the US in its Trumplandia incarnation either
[18:38:07] likely to be more difficult and unfun

FWIW I am in complete agreement with Andrew s assessment of how it might be with foreigners. It has been on my mind and thoughts for quite some time although andrewsh put it eloquently. But as always I m getting ahead of myself. The conversation is because debconf this year would be in Canada. For many a cheap flight, one of the likely layovers/stopover can be the United States. I actually would have gone one step further, even if it was cheap transit visa, it would equally be unfun as it would discriminate. About couple of years back, a friend of mine while explaining what visa is, put it rather succinctly the visa officer looks at only 3 things a. Your financial position something which tells that you can take care of your financial needs if things go south b. You are not looking to settle there unlawfully c. You are not a criminal. While costs do matter, what is disturbing more is the form of extremism being displayed therein. While Indians from the South Asian continent in US have been largely successful, love to be in peace (one-off incidents do and will happen anywhere) if I had to take a transit or tourist visa in this atmosphere, it would leave a bad taste in the mouth. When one of my best friends is a Muslim, 20% of the population in India is made of Muslims and 99% of the time both of us co-exist in peace I simply can t take any alternative ideology. Even in Freakonomics 2.0 the authors when they shared that it s less than 0.1 percent of Muslims who are engaged in terrorist activities, if they were even 1 percent than all the world s armed forces couldn t fight them and couldn t keep anyone safe. Which simply means that 99.99% of even all Muslims are good. This resonates strongly with me for number of reasons. One of my uncles in early to late 80 s had an opportunity for work to visit Russia for official work. He went there and there were Secret Police after him all the time. While he didn t know it, I later read it, that it was SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) when all and any foreigners came visiting the country, and not just foreigners, they had spies for their own citizens. Russka a book I read several years ago explained the paranoia beautifully. While U.S. in those days was a more welcoming place for him. I am thankful as well as find it strange that Canada and States have such different visa procedures. While Canada would simply look at the above things, probably discreetly inquire about you if you have been a bad boy/girl in any way and then make a decision which is fine. For United States, even for a transit visa I probably would have to go to Interview where my world view would probably be in conflict with the current American world view. Interestingly, while I was looking at conversations on the web and one thing that is missing there is that nobody has talked about intelligence community. What Mr. Trump is saying in not so many words is that our intelligence even with all the e-mails we monitor and everything we do, we still can t catch you. It almost seems like giving a back-handed compliment to the extremists saying you do a better job than our intelligence community. This doesn t mean that States doesn t have interesting things to give to the world, Star Trek conventions, Grand Canyon (which probably would require me more than a month or more to explore even a little part), NASA, Intel, AMD, SpaceX, CES (when it s held) and LPC (Linux Plumber s conference where whose who come to think of roadmap for GNU/Linux). What I wouldn t give to be a fly in the wall when LPC, CES happens in the States. What I actually found very interesting is that in the current Canadian Government, if what I read and heard is true, then Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada made 50 of his cabinet female. Just like in the article, studies even in Indian parliament have shown that when women are in power, questions about social justice, equality, common good get asked and policies made. If I do get the opportunity to be part of debconf, I would like to see, hear, watch, learn how the women cabinet is doing things. I am assuming that reporting and analysis standards of whatever decisions are more transparent and more people are engaged in the political process to know what their elected representatives are doing. One another interesting point I came to know is that Canada is home to bicycling paths. While I stopped bicycling years ago as it has been becoming more and more dangerous to bicycle here in Pune as there is no demarcation for cyclists, I am sure lot of Canadians must be using this opportunity fully. Lastly, on the debconf preparation stage, things have started becoming a bit more urgent and hectic. From a monthly IRC meet, it has now become a weekly meet. Both the wiki and the website are slowly taking up shape. http://deb.li/dc17kbp is a nice way to know/see progress of the activities happening . One important decision that would be taken today is where people would stay during debconf. There are options between on-site and two places around the venue, one 1.9 km around, the other 5 km. mark. Each has its own good and bad points. It would be interesting to see which place gets selected and why.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #budget, #Canada, #debconf organization, #discrimination, #Equal Opportunity, #Fiber, #svn, #United States, #Version Control, Broadband, Git, Pakistan, Subversion

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

This is an extension to last month s article/sharing where I had shared the changes that had transpired in the last 2-3 months. Now am in a position to share the kind of issues a user can go through in case he is looking for support from IRCTC to help him/her go cashless. If you a new user to use IRCTC services you wouldn t go through this trouble. For those who might have TL;DR issues it s about how hard it can become to get digital credentials fixed in IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) a. 2 months back Indian Prime Minister gave a call incentivizing people to use digital means to do any commercial activities. One of the big organizations which took/takes part is IRCTC which handles the responsibility for e-ticketing millions of Rail tickets for common people. In India, a massive percentage moves by train as it s cheaper than going by Air. A typical fare from say Pune Delhi (capital of India) by second class sleeper would be INR 645/- for a distance of roughly 1600 odd kms and these are monopoly rates, there are no private trains and I m not suggesting anything of that sort, just making sure that people know. An economy class ticket by Air for the same distance would be anywhere between INR 2500-3500/- for a 2 hour flight between different airlines. Last I checked there are around 8 mainstream airlines including flag-carrier Air India. About 30% of the population live on less than a dollar and a half a day which would come around INR 100/-. There was a comment some six months back on getting more people out of the poverty line. But as there are lots of manipulations in numbers for who and what denotes above poor and below poor in India and lot of it has to do with politics it s not something which would be easily fixable. There are lots to be said in that arena but this article is not an appropriate blog-post for that. All in all, it s only 3-5% of the population at the most who can travel via Air if situation demands and around 1-2% who might be frequent, business or leisure travellers. Now while I can thankfully afford an Air Ticket if the situation so demands, my mother gets motion sickness so while together we can only travel by train. b. With the above background, I had registered with IRCTC few years ago with another number (dual-SIM) I had purchased and was thinking that I would be using this long-term (seems to my first big mistake, hindsight 50:50) . This was somewhere in 2006/2007. c. Few months later I found that the other service provider wasn t giving good service or was not upto mark. I was using IDEA (the main mobile operator) throughout those times. d. As I didn t need the service that much, didn t think to inform them that I want to change to another service provider at that point in time (possibly the biggest mistake, hindsight 50:50) e. In July 2016 itself IRCTC cut service fees, f. This was shared as a NEW news item/policy decision at November-end 2016 . g. While I have done all that has been asked by irctc-care haven t still got the issues resolved IRCTC s e-mail id care@irctc.co.in Now in detail This is my first e-mail sent to IRCTC in June 2016

Dear Customer care, I had applied and got username and password sometime back . The
number I had used to register with IRCTC was xxxxxxxxxx (BSNL mobile number not used anymore) . My mobile was lost and along with that the number was also lost. I had filed a complaint with the police and stopped that number as well. Now I have an another mobile number but have forgotten both the password and the security answer that I had given when I had registered . I do have all the conversations I had both with the ticketadmn@irctc.co.in as well as care@irctc.co.in if needed to prove my identity. The new number I want to tie it with is xxxxxxxxxx (IDEA number in-use for last 10 years) I see two options :- a. Tie the other number with my e-mail address b. Take out the e-mail address from the database so that I can fill in
as a new applicant. Looking forward to hear from you.

There was lot of back and forth with various individuals on IRCTC and after a lot of back and forth, this is the final e-mail I got from them somewhere in August 2016, he writes

Dear Customer, We request you to send mobile bill of your mobile number if it is post paid or if it is prepaid then contact to your service provider and they will give you valid proof of your mobile number or they will give you in written on company head letter so that we may update your mobile number to update so that you may reset your password through mobile OTP.
and Kindly inform you that you can update your profile by yourself also. 1.login on IRCTC website
2.after login successfully move courser on my profile tab.
3.then click on update profile
4.re-enter your password then you can update your profile
5.click on user-profile then email id.
6. click on update. Still you face any problem related to update profile please revert to us with the screen shots of error message which you will get at the time of update profile . Thanks & Regards Parivesh Patel
Executive, Customer Care
care@irctc.co.in
http://www.irctc.co.in
[#3730034]

IRCTC s response seemed responsible, valid and thought it would be a cake-walk as private providers are supposed to be much more efficient than public ones. The experience proved how wrong was I trust them with doing the right thing 1. First I tried the twitter handle to see how IDEA uses their twitter handle. 2. The idea customer care twitter handle was mild in its response. 3. After sometime I realized that the only way out of this quagmire would perhaps be to go to a brick-mortar shop and get it resolved face-to-face. I went twice or thrice but each time something or the other would happen. On the fourth and final time, I was able to get to the big Official shop only to be told they can t do anything about this and I would have to the appellate body to get the reply. The e-mail address which they shared (and I found it later) was wrong. I sent a somewhat longish e-mail sharing all the details and got bounce-backs. The correct e-mail address for the IDEA Maharashtra appellate body is appellette.mh@idea.aditybirla.com I searched online and after a bit of hit and miss finally got the relevant address. Then finally on 30th December, 2016 wrote a short email to the service provider as follows

Dear Sir,
I have been using prepaid mobile connection number xxxxxxx taken from IDEA for last 10 odd years. I want to register myself with IRCTC for online railway booking using
my IDEA mobile number. Earlier, I was having a BSNL connection which I discontinued 4 years back, For re-registering myself with IRCTC, I have to fulfill their latest
requirements as shown in the email below . It is requested that I please be issued a letter confirming my
credentials with your esteemed firm. I contacted your local office at corner of Law College Road and
Bhandarkar Road, Pune (reference number Q1 84786060793) who
refused to provide me any letter and have advised me to contact on the
above e-mail address, hence this request is being forwarded to you. Please do the needful at your earliest.

Few days later I got this short e-mail from them

Dear Customer, Greetings for the day! This is with reference to your email regarding services. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience caused to you and delay in response. We regret to inform you that we are unable to provide demographic details from our end as provision for same is not available with us. Should you need any further assistance, please call our Customer Service help line number 9822012345 or email us at customercare@idea.adityabirla.com by mentioning ten digit Idea mobile number in subject line. Thanks & Regards, Javed Khan Customer Service Team IDEA Cellular Limited- Maharashtra & Goa Circle.

Now I was at almost my wit s end. Few days before, I had re-affirmed my e-mail address to IDEA . I went to the IDEA care site, registered with my credentials. While the https connection to the page is weak, but let s not dwell on that atm. I logged into the site, I went through all the drop-down menus and came across My Account > Raise a request link which I clicked on . This came to a page where I could raise requests for various things. One of the options given there was Bill Delivery. As I wasn t a postpaid user but a prepaid user didn t know if that would work or not I still clicked on it. It said it would take 4 days for that to happen. I absently filed it away as I was somewhat sure that nothing would happen from my previous experience with IDEA. But this time the IDEA support staff came through and shared a toll-free SMS number and message format that I could use to generate call details from the last 6 months. The toll-free number from IDEA is 12345 and the message format is EBILL MON (short-form for month so if it s January would be jan, so on and so forth). After gathering all the required credentials, sent my last mail to IRCTC about a week, 10 days back

Dear Mr. Parivesh Patel, I was out-of-town and couldn t do the needful so sorry for the delay.
Now that I m back in town, I have been able to put together my prepaid
bills of last 6 months which should make it easy to establish my
identity. As had shared before, I don t remember my old password and the old
mobile number (BSNL number) is no longer accessible so can t go
through that route. Please let me know the next steps in correcting the existing IRCTC
account (which I haven t operated ever) so I can start using it to
book my tickets. Look forward to hearing from you.

Haven t heard anything them from them, apart from a generated token number, each time you send a reply happens. This time it was #4763548 The whole sequence of events throws a lot of troubling questions a. Could IRCTC done a better job of articulating their need to me instead of the run-around I was given ? b. Shouldn t there be a time limit to accounts from which no transactions have been done ? I hadn t done a single transaction since registering. When cell service providers including BSNL takes number out after a year of not using a number, why is that account active for so long ? c. As that account didn t have OTP at registration, dunno if it s being used for illegal activities or something. Update This doesn t seem to be a unique thing at all. Just sampling some of the tweets by people at @IRCTC_LTD https://twitter.com/praveen4al/status/775614978258718721 https://twitter.com/vis_nov25/status/786062572390932480 https://twitter.com/ShubhamDevadiya/status/794241443950948352 https://twitter.com/rajeshhindustan/status/798028633759584256 https://twitter.com/ameetsangita/status/810081624343908352 https://twitter.com/grkisback/status/813733835213078528 https://twitter.com/gbalaji_/status/804230235625394177 https://twitter.com/chandhu_nr/status/800675627384721409 , all of this just goes to show how un-unique the situation really is.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #customer-service, #demonetization, #IDEA-aditya birla, #IRCTC, #web-services, rant

Some of the content may be NSFW. viewer discretion advised. I have had a life-long fascination with trains. One of my first memories was that of 5-7 year old, clutching my mother or grandmother s hand seeing the steam engine lumbering down whistling and smoking at the same time. I was both afraid and strangely drawn to the iron beast and the first time I knew and then slowly understood that if we come with luggage and the steam-engine comes, it means we are going to travel. I have travelled some, but there are lots to explore still and I do hope that I cover some more of it during my lifetime. The reason I am writing about trains is an article which caught my eye couple of days. Besides seeing the changing geography, the variety of food one can get on train and in stations is one of the primary reasons that Indians love to travel by trains. It is one place where you could have incredible conversations over cup of tea or favourite food and unlike air travel and the famed IFE (In-flight entertainment) people are actually pretty social even with all the gadgets. For those who are wondering, the author was travelling between Jamshedpur, Gujarat to Kolkatta, a train ride which has now gone on my bucket list for the delectable items the author has described To add to the above, it is still cheaper than air travel, although that is changing a bit as Indian Railways seeks to modernize Railways and make it into world-class bullet trains. Indian Railways has a long, rich culture and some of the most interesting nuggets you learn over time adds to the fascination of the Railways. For instance I m sharing this letter which I read first in book and then saw in the New Delhi Railway Museum. The letter I am sharing below was written by a certain Shri Okhil Chandra Sen to the Sahibganj Railway Office in year 1909, almost 38 years before India became independent. I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefore went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I am fall over and expose all my shocking to man and female women on plateform. I am got leaved at Ahmedpur station. This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train five minutes for him. I am therefore pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report! to papers. If it were not for Mr. Okhil Chandra Sen we would still be running with water bottle (improvement) and jeans/shorts/whatever (again improvement) while the possibility of falling over would always be omnipresent in a hurry. Now we do have toilets and some of the better trains even have Bio-toilets which should make things better as well.(/NSFW) For the plane bit, most of my flights have been domestic flying. Some of my most memorable flights is when flying from Mumbai on a clear sky overlooking the Queen s necklace, loving it and landing in Bangalore during mist or rain or both. Delhi is also good as airports go but nothing much adventurous about it. It was only with the experience of my first international flight, I realized the same feeling again, nervousness and sense of adventure as you meet new people. Nowadays every week I do try and broaden my horizon by seeking and learning a bit about International Travel. In this I came across an article on National Geographic site which also evoked similar feelings. While I can t go back to the past and even if I did (in distant past before I was born), I wouldn t want to improve my financial situation at all (as otherwise I would hit the Grandfather Paradox or/and the Butterfly effect (essentially saying there s no free lunch), it still makes you wonder about a time when people had lot more adventure and lot more moving parts. I do wish they had a much bigger snapshot of that plane so I could really see how people sat in the old aircraft. The low-resolution picture doesn t do justice to the poster and the idea of that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder for an implementation of Butterfly effect. The Grandfather Paradox has been seen plenty of times in fantasy movies like the Back to the Future, Planet of the Apes and many others so will not go there. For the average joe today, s/he has to navigate security,check bags, get her/imself processed through passport control, get boarding pass, get to the gate on-time, get to the aircraft via bridge or bus, get to the seat, somehow make it through the ascent and use your IFE and get snacks and meals till it s time to touch-down and re-do the whole drill again as many times you are connecting. I really admire Gunnar Wolf for the tenacity he showed for the x number of connections he made both ways. While leafing through the interweb today, came across an article . While you can slice and dice the report anyway you want, for me if ever I get a chance again for an International Travel, I would try to see I get a layover at these three airports in order of preference (this is on the basis that none of these airports need a transit visa for the activities shared) a. Changi International Airport It is supposed to have shower amenities, has a movie theatre (+1), free tour of the city (+1) and of course as many Indians do go to Singapore as a destination in itself would have multiple vegetarian options (+2) so would be nice if I need to layover. b. Zurich Airport (ZRH) For passengers with an extended layover, Zurich Airport offers bicycle and inline-skate rentals and excursions to the Swiss Museum of Transport Lucerne. From business-insider.com. While I m not much of a bicycle and inline-skating freak, if the Swiss Museum of Transport Lucerne is anything to the scale of Isiko Museum which I shared in a blog post sometime before, it would be worth by itself. I haven t tried to find the site but can imagine, for e.g. if it has a full-scale model of a submarine or train engine, either steam-engines or ones like SNCF or any of the other bullet-trains and early aircraft, it would just blow my mind. When you are talking about transport, there is so much science, business, logistics etc. that I m sure I ll overload with information, photos and any trinkets they have to buy. c. Central Japan International Airport (NGO) It has a 1,000-foot-long sky deck where passengers can watch ships sail into Nagoya Port. There s also a traditional Japanese bathhouse where you can have a relaxing soak while watching the sunset over the bay. BusinessInsider.com Not a bad place to be if you need a layover. Just sink yourself in the bathhouse and see the bay and ships coming in. Luxury indeed. Honourable mention d. Munich Airport (MUC) A nearby visitors park features mini golf and a display of historic aircraft. Business-Insider.com . Now this would have made my list but I guess one would need a Schengen visa to access the visitors park but then if you have that, then why just stay in the Airport itself, could travel through Europe itself and have a longish stop-over. So all in all, it s indeed a fascinating time to be alive, dreaming and just being. Till later. Update I had forgotten to share one more reason why I was writing this article. Although somewhat of a cynic, am hopeful that Pune metro happens. Also, if I had just waited a day, would have been able to add couple of wonderful articles that would make people wanderlust more
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Best Airports, #Central Japan International Airport, #Changi International Airport, #Food, #Loo, #Nostalgia, #NSFW, #Planes, #Steam Engine, #Trains, #Zurich Airport, Indian Railways, memories

Before starting, have to say hindsight as they say is always 20/20. I was moaning about my 6/7 hour trip few blog posts back but now came to know about the 17.5 hr. flights (17.5x800km/hr=14000 km.) which are happening around me. I would say I was whining about nothing seeing those flights. I can t even imagine how people would feel in those flights. Six hours were too much in the tin-can, thankfully though I was in the aisle seat. In 14 hours most people would probably give to Air rage . I just saw an excellent article on the subject. I also came to know that seat-selection and food on a long-haul flights are a luxury, hence that changes the equation quite a bit as well. So on these facts, it seems Qatar Airways treated me quite well as I was able to use both those options. Disclaimer My knowledge about birds/avian is almost non-existent, Hence feel free to correct me if I do go wrong anywhere. Coming back to earth literally , I will have to share a bit of South Africa as that is part and parcel of what I m going to share next. Also many of the pictures shared in this particular blog post belong to KK who has shared them with me with permission to share it with the rest of the world. When I was in South Africa, in the first couple of days as well as what little reading of South African History I had read before travelling, had known that the Europeans, specifically the Dutch ruled on South Africa for many years. What was shared to me in the first day or two that Afrikaans is mostly spoken by Europeans still living in South Africa, some spoken by the coloured people as well. This tied in with the literature I had already read. The Wikipedia page shares which language is spoken by whom and how the demographics play out if people are interested to know that. One of the words or part of the word for places we came to know is bosch as is used in many a places. Bosch means wood or forest. After this we came to know about many places which were known as somethingbosch which signified to us that area is or was a forest. On the second/third day Chirayu (pictured, extreme left) shared the idea of going to Eagle Encounters. Other people pictured in the picture are yours truly, some of the people from GSOC, KK is in the middle, the driver Leonard something who took us to Eagle Encounters on the right (pictured extreme right). Update I was informed that it was a joint plan between Chirayu and KK. They also had some other options planned which later got dropped by the wayside. It was supposed to be somewhat near, (Spier, Stellenbosch). While I was not able to able to see/figure out where Eagle Encounters is on Openstreetmap, somebody named Firefishy added Spier to OSM few years back. So thank you for that Firefishy so I can at least pin-point a closer place. I didn t see/know/try to figure out about the place as Chirayu said it s a zoo . I wasn t enthusiastic as much as I had been depressed by most zoos in India, while you do have national reserves/Parks in India where you see animals in their full glory. I have been lucky to been able to seen Tadoba and Ranthambore National parks and spend some quality time (about a week) to have some idea as to what can/happens in forests and people living in the buffer-zones but those stories are for a different day altogether. I have to say I do hope to be part of the Ranthambore experience again somewhere in the future, it really is a beautiful place for flora and fauna and fortunately or unfortunately this is the best time apart from spring, as you have the game of mist/fog and animals . North India this time of the year is something to be experienced. I wasn t much enthused as zoos in India are claustrophobic for animals and people both. There are small cages and you see and smell the shit/piss of the animals, generally not a good feeling. Chirayu shared with us also the possibility of being able to ride of Segways and range of bicycles which relieved me so that in case we didn t enjoy the zoo we would enjoy the Segway at least and have a good time (although it would have different expenses than the ones at Eagle Encounters). My whole education about what a zoo could be was turned around at Eagle Encounters as it seems to be somewhere between a zoo and what I know as national parks where animals roam free. We purchased the tickets and went in, the first event/happening was Eagle Encounters itself. Our introduction to the place started by two beautiful volunteer/trainers who were in charge of all the birds in the Eagle Encounters vicinity. The introduction started by every one of us who came for the Eagle Encounter show to wear a glove and to have/hold one of the pair of snowy owls to sit on the glove. That picture is of a family who was part of our show. Before my turn came, I was a little apprehensive/worried about holding a Owl -period. To my surprise, they were so soft and easy-going, I could hardly feel the weight on my hand. While the trainer/volunteers were constantly feeding them earthworm-bits (I didn t ask, just guessing) and we were all happy as they along with the visitors were constantly playing and interacting with the birds, sharing with us the life-cycle of the snowy Owl. It s only then I understood why in the Harry Potter Universe, the owl plays such an important part. They seem to be a nice, curious, easy-going, proud creatures which fits perfectly in the HP Universe. In hind-sight I should have videod the whole experience as the trainer/volunteer showed a battery of owls, eagles, vultures, Hawks (different birds of prey) what have you. I have to confess my knowledge of birds is and was non-existent. Vulture, One of the larger birds we saw at the Eagle Encounters show. Some of the birds could be dangerous, especially in the wild. That was the other Volunteer-Trainer who was showing off the birds. I especially liked the t-shirt she was wearing. The shop at Eagle Encounters had whole lot of them, they were a bit expensive and just not my size Tidbit Just a few years ago, it was a shocker to me to know/realize that what commonly goes/known in the country as a parrot by most people is actually a Parakeet. As can be seen in the article linked, they are widely distributed in India. While I was young, I used to see the rose-ringed parakeets quite a bit around but nowadays due to probably pollution and other factors, they are noticeably less. They are popular as pets in India. I don t know what Pollito would think about that, don t think he would think good. As I cannot differentiate between Hawk, Vulture, Eagle, etc. I would safely say a Bird of Prey as that was what he was holding. This photo was taken after the event was over where we all were curious to know about the volunteer/trainer, their day job and what it meant for them to be taking care of these birds. Update KK has shared with me what those specific birds are called, so in case the names or species are wrong, please take the truck with her and not me. While I don t remember the name of the trainer/volunteer, among other things it was shared that the volunteers/trainers aren t paid enough and they never have enough funds to take care of all the birds who come to them. Where the picture was shot (both this and earlier) was sort of open-office. If you look closely, you will see that there are names of the birds, for instance, people who loved LOTR would easily see Gandalf . that board lists how much food (probably in grams) did the bird eat in a day and week. While it was not shared, I m sure there would be a lot of paperwork, studies to get the birds as well as possible. From a computer science perspective, there seemed to be lot of potential for avian and big-data professionals to do lot of computer modelling and analysis and give more insight into the rehabilitation efforts so the process could be more fine-tuned, efficient and economic perhaps. This is how we saw the majority of the birds. Most of them had a metal/plastic string which was tied to small artificial branches as the one above. I forgot to share a very important point. Eagle Encounters is not a zoo but a Rehabilitation Centre. While the cynic/skeptic part of me tried to not feel or see the before and after pictures of the birds bought to the rehabilitation centre, the caring part was moved to see most of the birds being treated with love and affection. From our conversations with the Volunteer-Trainer it emerged that every week they had to turn away lots of birds due to space constraints. It is only the most serious/life-threatening cases for which they could provide care in a sustainable way they would keep. Some of the birds who were in the cages were large, airy. I wouldn t say clean as what little I read before as well later is that birds shit enormously so cleaning cages is quite an effort. Most of the cages and near those artificial branches there were placards of people who were sponsoring a bird or two to look after them. From what was shared, many of the birds who came had been abused in many ways. Some of them had their bones crushed or/and other cruel ways. As I had shared that I had been wonderfully surprised by seeing birds come so close to me and most of my friends, I felt rage about those who had treated the birds in such evil, bad ways. What was shared with us that while they try to heal the birds as much as possible, it is always suspect how well the birds would survive on their own in nature, hence many of these birds would go to the sponsor or to some other place when they are well. If you look at the picture closely, maybe look at the higher resolution photo in the gallery, you will see that both the birds have been adopted by two different couples. The birds as the name tag shows are called Secretaries . The Secretaries make a typical sound which is similar to the sound made by old typewriters. Just as woodpeckers make Morse Code noises when they are pecking with their beaks on trees, something similar to the sound of keys emitted by Old Remington typewriters when clicked on was done by the Secretaries. This is one of the birds in one of the few cages. If you see a higher-resolution picture of the earlier picture, the one which has Secretaries . Also as can be seen in the picture, there is wood-working happening and they are trying to expand the Rehabilitation Centre. All in all, an excursion which was supposed to be for just an hour, extended to something like 3 odd hours. KK shot more than a 1000 odd pictures while trying to teach/converse in Malyalam to some of the birds. She shot well over 1000 photos which would have filled something like 30 odd traditional photo albums. Jaminy (KK s partner-in-crime) used her selfie stick to desired effect, taking pictures with most of the birds as one does with celebrities. I had also taken some but most of them were over-exposed as was new to mobile photography at that time, still am but mostly it works. That is the lake we discovered/saw after coming back from Eagle Encounters. We had good times. Lastly, a virtual prize distribution ceremony a. Chirayu and KK A platinum trophy for actually thinking and pitching the place in the first place. b. Shirish and Deven Bansod Metal cups for not taking more than 10 minutes to freshen up and be back after hearing the plan to go to Eagle Encounters. c. All the girls/women Spoons for actually making it to the day. All the girls took quite sometime to freshen up, otherwise it might have been possible to also experience the Segways, who knows. All-in-all an enjoyable day spent in being part of Eagle Encounters .
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Birds of Prey, #Debconf16, #Eagle Encounters, #Rehabilitation, #South African History, #Stellenbosch

The post continues from the last post shared. Let me get some interesting tit-bits not related to the day-trip out-of-the-way first I don t know whether we had full access to see all parts of fuller hall or not. Couple of days I was wondering around Fuller Hall, specifically next to where clothes were pressed. Came to know of the laundry service pretty late but still was useful. Umm next to where the ladies/gentleman pressed our clothes, there is a stairway which goes down. In fact even on the opposite side there is a stairway which goes down. I dunno if other people explored them or not. I was surprised and shocked to see bars in each room as well as connecting walkways etc. I felt a bit sad, confused and curious and went on to find more places like that. After a while I came up to the ground-level and enquired with some of the ladies therein. I was shocked to know that UCT some years ago (they were not specific) was a jail for people. I couldn t imagine that a place which has so much warmth (in people, not climate) could be evil in a sense. I was not able to get much information out of them about the nature of jail it was, maybe it is a dark past that nobody wants to open up, dunno. There were also two *important* aspects of UCT which Bernelle either forgot, didn t share or I just came to know via the Wikipedia page then but nothing else. 1. MeerKAT Apparently quite a bit of the technology was built-in UCT itself. This would have been interesting for geeks and wanna-be geeks like me 2. The OpenContent Initiative by UCT This would have been also something worth exploring. One more interesting thing which I saw was the French council in Cape Town from outside I would urge to look at the picture in the gallery as the picture I shared doesn t really show all the details. For e.g. the typical large french windows which are the hall-mark of French architecture doesn t show its glory but if you look at 1306 2322 original picture instead of the 202 360 reproduction you will see that. You will also the insignia of the French Imperial Eagle whose history I came to know only after I looked it up on the Wikipedia page on that day. It seemed fascinating and probably would have the same pride as the State Emblem of India has for Indians with the four Asiatic Lions standing in a circle protecting each other. I also like the palm tree and the way the French Council seemed little and yet had character around all the big buildings. What also was interesting that there wasn t any scare/fear-build and we could take photos from outside unlike what I had seen and experienced in Doha, Qatar as far as photography near Western Embassies/Councils were concerned. One of the very eye-opening moments for me was also while I was researching flights from India to South Africa. While perhaps unconsciously I might have known that Middle East is close to India, in reality, it was only during the search I became aware that most places in Middle East by flight are only an hour or two away. This was shocking as there is virtually no mention of one of our neighbours when they are source of large-scale remittances every year. I mean this should have been in our history and geography books but most do not dwell on the subject. It was only during and after that I could understand Mr. Modi s interactions and trade policies with the Middle East. Another interesting bit was seeing a bar in a Sprinbok bus While admittedly it is not the best picture of the bar, I was surprised to find a bar at the back of a bus. By bar I mean a machine which can serve anything from juices to alcoholic drinks depending upon what is stocked. What was also interesting in the same bus is that the bus also had a middle entrance-and-exit. This is something I hadn t seen in most Indian buses. Some of the Volvo buses have but it is rarely used (only except emergencies) . An exhaustive showcase of local buses can be seen here . I find the hand-drawn/cad depictions of all the buses by Amit Pense near to the T. This is also something which I have not observed in Indian inter-city buses (axe to break the window in case of accident and breakable glass which doesn t hurt anyone I presume), whether they are State-Transport or the high-end Volvo s . Either it s part of South African Roads Regulations or something that Springbok buses do for their customers. All of these queries about the different facets I wanted to ask the bus-driver and the attendant/controller but in the excitement of seeing, recording new things couldn t ask In fact one of the more interesting things I looked at and could look day and night is the variety of vehicles on display in Cape Town. In hindsight, I should have bought a couple of 128 GB MMC cards for my mobile rather than the 64 GB one. It was just plain inadequate to capture all that was new and interesting. This truck I had seen about some 100 metres near the Auditorium on Upper Campus. The truck s design, paint was something I had never seen before. It is/was similar to casket trucks seen in movies but the way it was painted and everything made it special. What was interesting is to see the gamut of different vehicles. For instance, there were no bicycles that I saw in most places. There were mostly Japanese/Italian bikes and all sorts of trucks. If I had known before, I would definitely have bought an SD specifically to take snaps of all the different types of trucks, cars etc. that I saw therein. The adage/phrase I should stop in any one place and the whole world will pass me by seemed true on quite a few South African Roads. While the roads were on par or a shade better than India, many of those were wide roads. Seeing those, I was left imagining how the Autobahn in Germany and other high-speed Expressways would look n feel. India has also been doing that with the Pune-Mumbai Expressway and projects like Yamuna Expressway and now the extension Agra Lucknow Expressway but doing this all over India would take probably a decade or more. We have been doing it since a decade and a half. NHDP and PMGSY are two projects which are still ongoing to better the roads. We have been having issues as to should we have toll or no toll issues but that is a discussion for some other time. One of the more interesting sights I saw was the high-arched gothic-styled church from outside. This is near Longstreet as well. I have seen something similar in Goa, Pondicherry but not such high-arches. I did try couple of times to gain entry but one time it was closed, the other time some repairing/construction work was going on or something. I would loved to see it from inside and hopefully they would have had an organ (music) as well. I could imagine to some extent the sort of music that would have come out. Now that Goa has come in the conversation I can t help but state that Seafood enthusiasts/lover/aficionado, or/and Pescatarianism would have a ball of a time in Goa. Goa is on the Konkan coast and while I m eggie, ones who enjoy seafood really have a ball of a time in Goa. Fouthama s Festival which happens in February is particularly attractive as Goan homes are thrown open for people to come and sample their food, exchange recipes and alike. This happens around 2 weeks before the Goan Carnival and is very much a part of the mish-mashed Konkani-Bengali-Parsi-Portugese culture. I better stop here about the Goa otherwise I ll get into reminiscing mode. To put the story and event back on track from where we left of (no fiction hereon), Nicholas was in constant communication with base, i.e. UCT as well as another group who was hiking from UCT to Table Mountain. We waited for the other group to join us till 13:00 hrs. We came to know that they were lost and were trying to come up and hence would take more time. As Bernelle was with them, who was a local and she had two dogs who knew the hills quite well, it was decided to go ahead without them. We came down the same cable-car and then ventured on towards Houtbay. Houtbay has it all, a fisherman s wharf, actual boats with tough-mean looking men with tattoos working on boats puffing cigars/pipes, gaggle of sea-gulls, the whole scene. Sharing a few pictures of the way in-between. I just now had a quick look at the restaurant and it seems they had options for veggies too. Unfortunately, the rating leaves a bit to be desired but then dunno as Indian flavoring is something that takes time to get used too. Zomato doesn t give any idea of from when a restaurant is in business and has too few reviews so not easy to know how the experience would have been. Notice the pattern, the pattern of small houses I saw all the way till Houtbay and back. I do vaguely remember starting a discussion about it on the bus but don t really remember. I have seen (on TV) cities like Miami, Dubai or/and Hong Kong who have big buildings on the beach but both in Konkan as well as Houtbay there were small buildings. I guess a combination of zoning regulations, feel of community, fear of being flooded all play into beaches being the way they are. Also, this probably is good as less stress on the environment. The above picture is taken from Wikipedia from the article Miami Beach, Florida for comparison. The Audi rare car to be seen in India. This car has been associated with Ravi Shastri when he won it in 1985. I was young but still get goosebumps remembering those days. First glance of Houtbay beach and pier. Notice how clean and white the beach is. You can see the wharf grill restaurant in the distance (side-view), see the back of the hop on and hop off bus (a concept which was unknown to me till then). Once I came back and explored on the web came to know this concept is prevalent in many a touristy places around the world. Umm also By sheer happenchance also captured a beautiful looking Indian female . In Hindi, we would call this picture virodabhas or contradiction . this is in afternoon, around 1430 hrs. You have the sun, the clouds, the Mountains, the x number of boats, the pier, the houses, the cars, the shops. It was all crazy and beautiful at the same time. The Biggest Contradiction is seeing the Mountain, the beach and the Sea in the same Picture. Baffled the mind. Konkan though is a bit similar there as well. You have all the three things in some places but that s a different experience altogether as ours is a more tropical weather although is one of the most romantic places in the rains. We were supposed to go on a short cruise to seal/dolphin island but as we were late (as had been waiting for the other group) didn t go and instead just loitered there. IIRC the lookout bar is situated just next to Houtbay Search and Rescue. Although was curious if the Lookout tower was used in case of disappearance. lost people, boats etc. Seal jumping over water, what a miracle ! It looked like the boat we could have been on. I clicked as I especially liked the name Calypso and Calypso . I shared the two links as the mythologies, interpretation differ a bit between Greek and Hollywood culture Can see few Debian folks in the foreground, next to the Pole and the area around. Also can see a bit of the area around. I don t know anything about water sports and after sometime he came out. I was left wondering though, how safe he was in that water. While he was close to the pier and he was just paddling, there weren t big waves still felt a bit of concern. While the act was not to the level we see in the movies, still for the time I hung around, I saw him showing attitude for his younger audiences, eating out of their hands, making funny sounds. Btw he farted a few times, whether that was a put-on or not can t really say but produced a few guffaws from his audience. I dunno why the birds came down for. Mr. Seal was being fed oily small fish parts, dunno if the oil was secreted by the fish themselves or whatever, it just looked oily from distance. There wasn t much activity on the time we went. It probably would have been different on sunrise and would be on sunset. The only activity I saw was on this boat where they were busy fixing and disentangling the lines. I came up with 5-15 different ideas for a story but rejected them as a. Probably all of them have been tried. People have been fishing since the beginning of time and modern fishing probably 200 odd years or so. I have read accounts of fishing companies in early 1800s onwards, so probably all must have been tried. b. More dangerous one, if there is a unique idea, then it becomes more dangerous as writing is an all-consuming process. Writing a blog post (bad or good) takes lots of time. I constantly read, re-read, try and improvise till I can or my patience loses out. In book you simply can t have such luxuries. No parking/tow zone in/near the Houtbay search and rescue. Probably to take out emergency vehicles once something untoward happens. Saved 54 lives, boats towed 154 Salut! Houtbay sea rescue. The only small criticism is for Houtbay there wasn t a single public toilet. We had to ask favor at kraal kraft to use their toilets and there could have been accidents, it wasn t lighted well and water was spilled around. For us, because we were late we missed both the boat-cruise as well as some street shops selling trinkets. Other than that it was all well. We should have stayed till sunset, I am sure the view would have been breath-taking but we hadn t booked the bus till evening. Overall it was an interesting day as we had explored part of Table Mountain, seen the somewhat outrageously priced trinkets there as well as explored Houtbay sea-side as well.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #Audi, #Cape Town, #Cruises, #Debconf16, #French Council, #Geography, #Houtbay Sea Rescue, #Jail, #Middle East, #Springbok Atlas, #Vehicles

Disclaimer This is an attempt at humor and hence entirely fictional in nature. While some incidents depicted are true, the context and the story woven around them are by yours truly. None of the Mascots of Debian were hurt during the blog post. I also disavow any responsibility for any hurt (real or imagined) to any past, current and future mascots. The attempt should not be looked upon as demeaning people who are accused of false crimes, tortured and confessions eked out of them as this happens quite a lot (In India for sure, but guess it s the same world over in various degrees). The idea is loosely inspired by Chocolate:Deep Dark Secrets. (2005) On a more positive note, let s start Being a Sunday morning woke up late to find incessant knocking on the door, incidentally mum was not at home. Opening the door, found two official looking gentleman. They asked my name, asked my credentials, tortured and arrested me for Group conspiracy of Malicious Mischief in second and third degrees . The torture was done by means of making me forcefully watch endless reruns of Norbit . While I do love Eddie Murphy, this was one of his movies he could have done without. I guess for many people watching it once was torture enough. I *think* they were nominated for razzie awards dunno if they won it or not, but this is beside the point. Unlike the 20 years it takes for a typical case to reach to its conclusion even in the smallest court in India, due to the torture, I was made to confess (due to endless torture) and was given summary judgement. The judgement was/is as follows a. Do 100 hours of Community service in Debian in 2017. This could be done via blog posts, raising tickets in the Debian BTS or in whichever way I could be helpful to Debian. b. Write a confessional with some photographic evidence sharing/detailing some of the other members who were part of the conspiracy in view of the reduced sentence. So now, have been forced to write this confession As you all know, I won a bursary this year for debconf16. What is not known by most people is that I also got an innocuous looking e-mail titled Pollito for DPL . While I can t name all the names as investigation is still ongoing about how far-reaching the conspiracy is . The email was purportedly written by members of cabal within cabal which are in Debian. I looked at the email header to see if this was genuine and I could trace the origin but was left none the wiser, as obviously these people are far more technically advanced than to fall in simple tricks like this Anyways, secretly happy that I have been invited to be part of these elites, I did the visa thing, packed my bags and came to Debconf16. At this point in juncture, I had no idea whether it was real or I had imagined the whole thing. Then to my surprise saw this Just like the Illuminati the conspiracy was for all to see those who knew about it. Most people were thinking of it as a joke, but those like me who had got e-mails knew better. I knew that the thing is real, now I only needed to bide my time and knew that the opportunity would present itself. And few days later, sure enough, there was a trip planned for Table Mountain, Cape Town . Few people planned to hike to the mountain, while few chose to take the cable car till up the mountain. Quite a few people came along with us and bought tickets for the to and fro to the mountain and back. Incidentally, I was thinking if the South African Govt. were getting the tax or not. If you look at the ticket, there is just a bar-code. In India as well as the U.S. there is TIN Tax Identification Number Few links to share what it is all about . While these should be on all invoices, need to specially check when taking high-value items. In India as shared in the article the awareness, knowledge leaves a bit to be desired. While I m drifting from the incident, it would be nice if somebody from SA could share how things work there. Moving on, we boarded the cable car. It was quite spacious cable car with I guess around 30-40 people or some more who were able to see everything along with the controller. It was a pleasant cacophony of almost two dozen or more nationalities on this 360 degrees moving chamber. I was a little worried though as it essentially is a bucket and there is always a possibility that a severe wind could damage it. Later somebody did share that some frightful incidents had occurred not too long ago on the cable car. It took about 20-25 odd minutes to get to the top of table mountain and we were presented with views such as below The picture I am sharing is actually when we were going down as all the pictures of going up via the cable car were over-exposed. Also, it was pretty crowded on the way up then on the way down so handling the mobile camera was not so comfortable. Once we reached up, the wind was blowing at incredible speeds. Even with my jacket and everything I was feeling cold. Most of the group around 10-12 people looked around if we could find a place to have some refreshments and get some of the energy in the body. So we all ventured to a place and placed our orders I was introduced to Irish Coffee few years back and have had some incredible Irish Coffees in Pune and elsewhere. I do hope to be able to make Irish Coffee at home if and when I have my own house. This is hotter than brandy and is perfect if you are suffering from cold etc if done right, really needs some skills. This is the only drink which I wanted in SA which I never got right . As South Africa was freezing for me, this would have been the perfect antidote but the one there as well as elsewhere were all bleh. What was interesting though, was the coffee caller besides it. It looked like a simple circuit mounted on a PCB board with lights, vibrations and RFID and it worked exactly like that. I am guessing as and when the order is ready, there is an interrupt signal sent via radio waves which causes the buzzer to light and vibrate. Here s the back panel if somebody wants to take inspiration and try it as a fun project Once we were somewhat strengthened by the snacks, chai, coffee etc. we made our move to seeing the mountain. The only way to describe it is that it s similar to Raigad Fort but the plateau seemed to be bigger. The wikipedia page of Table Mountain attempts to share but I guess it s more clearly envisioned by one of the pictures shared therein. I have to say while Table Mountain is beautiful and haunting as it has scenes like these There is something there which pulls you, which reminds you of a long lost past. I could have simply sat there for hours together but as was part of the group had to keep with them. Not that I minded. The moment I was watching this, I was transported to some memories of the Himalayas about 20 odd years or so. In that previous life, I had the opportunity to be with some of the most beautiful women and also been in the most happening places, the Himalayas. I had shared years before some of my experiences I had in the Himalayas. I discontinued it as I didn t have a decent camera at that point in time. While I don t wanna digress, I would challenge anybody to experience the Himalayas and then compare. It is just something inexplicable. The beauty and the rawness that Himalayas shows makes you feel insignificant and yet part of the whole cosmos. What Paulo Cohello expressed in The Valkyries is something that could be felt in the Himalayas. Leh, Ladakh, Himachal , Garwhal, Kumaon. The list will go on forever as there are so many places, each more beautiful than the other. Most places are also extremely backpacker-friendly so if you ask around you can get some awesome deals if you want to spend more than a few days in one place. Moving on, while making small talk @olasd or Nicolas Dandrimont , the headmaster of our trip made small talk to each of us and eked out from all of us that we wanted to have Pollito as our DPL (Debian Project Leader) for 2017. Few pictures being shared below as supporting evidence as well While I do not know who further up than Nicolas was on the coup which would take place. The idea was this If the current DPL steps down, we would take all and any necessary actions to make Pollito our DPL. This has been taken from Pollito s adventure Being a responsible journalist, I also enquired about Pollito s true history as it would not have been complete without one. This is the e-mail I got from Gunnar Wolf, a friend and DD from Mexico

Turns out, Valessio has just spent a week staying at my house And
in any case, if somebody in Debian knows about Pollito s
childhood That is me. Pollito came to our lives when we went to Congreso Internacional de
Software Libre (CISOL) in Zacatecas city. I was strolling around the
very beautiful city with my wife Regina and our friend Alejandro
Miranda, and at a shop at either Ram n L pez Velarde or Vicente
Guerrero, we found a flock of pollitos. http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/22.77111/-102.57145 Even if this was comparable to a slave market, we bought one from
them, and adopted it as our own. Back then, we were a young couple Well, we were not that young
anymore. I mean, we didn t have children. Anyway, we took Pollito with
us on several road trips, such as the only time I have crossed an
international border driving: We went to Encuentro Centroamericano de
Software Libre at Guatemala city in 2012 (again with Alejandro), and
you can see several Pollito pics at: http://gwolf.org/album/road-trip-ecsl-2012-guatemala-0 Pollito likes travelling. Of course, when we were to Nicaragua for
DebConf, Pollito tagged along. It was his first flight as a passenger
(we never asked about his previous life in slavery; remember, Pollito
trust no one). Pollito felt much welcome with the DebConf crowd. Of course, as
Pollito is a free spirit, we never even thought about forcing him to
come back with us. Pollito went to Switzerland, and we agreed to meet
again every year or two. It s always nice to have a chat with him. Hugs!

So with that backdrop I would urge fellow Debianities to take up the slogans LONG LIVE THE DPL ! LONG LIVE POLLITO ! LONG LIVE POLLITO THE DPL ! The first step to make Pollito the DPL is to ensure he has a @debian.org (pollito@debian.org) We also need him to be made a DD because only then can he become a DPL. In solidarity and in peace
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #caller, #confession, #Debconf16, #debian, #Fiction, #history, #Pollito, #Pollito as DPL, #Table Mountain, Cabal, memories, south africa

Confession time first I am not a frequent flyer at all. My first flight was in early late 2006. It was a 2 hour flight from Bombay (BOM) to Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore, BLG) . I still remember the trepidation, the nervousness and excitement the first time I took to air. I still remember the flight very vividly, It was a typical humid day for Bombay/Mumbai and we (me and a friend) had gone to Sahar (the domestic airport) to take the flight in the evening. Before starting the sky had turned golden-orange and I was wondering how I would feel once I would be in air.We started at around 20:00 hours in the evening and as it was a clear night were able to see the Queen s necklace (Marine Drive) in all her glory. The photographs on the wikipedia page don t really do justice to how beautiful the whole boulevard looks at night, especially how it looks from up there. While we were seeing, it seemed the pilot had actually banked at 45 degrees angle so we can have the best view of the necklace OR maybe the pilot wanted to take a photo OR ME being in overdrive (like Robin Williams, the Russian immigrant in Moscow on the Hudson experiences the first time he goes to the mall ;)) In either way, this would be an experience I would never forget till the rest of my life. I remember I didn t move an inch (even to go the loo) as I didn t want to let go of the whole experience. While I came back after 3-4 days, I still remember re-experiencing/re-imagining the flights for a whole month each time I went to sleep. While I can t say it has become routinised, but have been lucky to have the opportunity to fly domestic around the country primarily for work. After the initial romanticism wears off, you try and understand the various aspects of the flight which are happening around you. These experiences are what lead to file/share today s blog post. Yesterday, Ms. Mamata Banerjee, one of the leaders of the Opposition cried wolf because the Aircraft was circling the Airport. Because she is the Chief Minister she feels she should have got precedent or at least that seems to be the way the story unfolded on TV. I have been about 15-20 times on flight in the last decade for work or leisure. Almost all the flights I have been, it has been routine that the flights fly around the Airport for 15-20 minutes before landing. This is routine . I have seen Airlines being stacked (remember the scene from Die Hard 2 where Holly Mclane, John Mclane s wife looks at different aircraft at different altitudes from her window seat) this is what an Airport has to do when it doesn t have enough runaways. In fact just read few days back MIAL is going for an emergency expansion as they weren t expecting as many passengers as they did this year as well as last. In fact the same day there was a near-miss between two aircraft in Mumbai airport itself. Because of Ms. Mamata s belligerence, this story didn t even get a mention in the TV mainstream media. The point I wanna underscore is that this is a fact of life and not just in India, world-over it seems hubs are being busier than ever, for instance Heathrow has been also a busy bee and they will to rework air operations as per a recent article . In India, Kolkata is also one of the busier airports . If anything, I hope it teaches her the issues that plague most Indian airports and she works with the Government in Center so the Airport can expand more. They just got a new terminal three years back. It is for these issues that the Indian Government has come with the Regional Connectivity Scheme . Lastly, a bit of welcome news to people thinking to visit India, the Govt. of the day is facilitating easier visa norms to increase tourism and trade to India. Hope this is beneficial to all and any Debian Developers who wanna come visit India I do hope that we also do get reciprocity from those countries as well.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: # Domestic Flights, #Air Congestion, #Airport Expansion, #Kolkata, #near-miss, #Visa for tourists

This is an extension of part 1 which I shared few days ago. This would be a longish one so please bear. First of all somebody emailed me this link so in the future a layover at Doha Airport will be a bit expensive from before, approx INR 700/- added to the ticket costs Moving on, Let me share an experience I shared one of the last few days I had while I was in Cape Town I had booked a place near Long Street, Cape Town using Bernelle s help. What I had not known at that time that near Long Street there are free walking tours every couple of hours. I took part in all the tours and those were nice experiences. Where they start the walk, there was the gentleman pictured above. I was amazed by this gentleman s rich voice. He strummed lot of classics from the 60 s, 70 s till the 90 s . I had two coffees and thought I was at a premium rock concert. It was a bitter-sweet experience for me because I could see that he has such prodigious talent and still he had to struggle to survive to make ends meet. I did my 2 bit but wish I could have done something more. Side note Before I forget there is one trick of feh which I use to view images without it getting very high-resolution (especially on my low-end systems) [shirish@debian] - [/run/user/1000/gvfs/mtp:host=%5Busb%3A001%2C006%5D/Card/DCIM/Camera] - [4621]
[$] feh -g 1350x1000 .
This actually makes it far far easier to traverse through the 1000 odd photos of the trip that I have in my personal archive without doing any sort of conversion methodology. Btw, it took me time but finally was able to create an album at gallery.debconf.org . Haven t been able to upload photos as came across an error which I have shared at https://lists.debconf.org/lurker/message/20161113.215659.fce58823.en.html Moving on, here s the funny story/experience I wanted to share What happened was this. This is from the Doha Airport. I had seen big buggies (ones similar to golf carts) which was ferrying people from end of the concourse to the other. I had been walking the whole day and even with the horizontal escalators and everything, it takes a toll. I was half-tired, half-sleepy and saw a buggy stationed. From behind it looked like the buggies I had seen. As there was no place to park my behind there, I entered into the buggy and sat there. Around 15-20 minutes later a Doha cop in another buggy came to me and asked me if something had happened ? I had no clue what he was talking about. He told/shared/asked me in friendly tone whether I had committed a crime or wanted to report a crime. When I replied in negative to both, he asked then why I was sitting there. I replied it was for stretching my legs and it was the buggy which was being used to transport people from A. to B. He gently told me I had entered into the wrong one and it was actually a cop buggy. I couldn t believe it. He did go his own way as he saw I was dead-tired. After 10-15 minutes, half-believingly I came out of the buggy and to my shock the gentleman was right. There was nothing to do but solder on to find a spot in this big airport. I shared this with few friends and family and managed to elicit few laughs hence sharing. The somewhat sad one was I had met a couple with a baby. Now as shared before, Most Airports including the Doha Airport is Air-Conditioned/Climate-Controlled and is probably in mid-20 s so it was more than cold for me. The couples with the baby were from Asian sub-continent. From their clothes and the way they were, they were not very well off. I do remember them sharing that they had a death in the family and hence were going. I didn t know at that point in time that there was something called bereavement fares and if they were able to take opportunity of those tickets. But this is besides the point . The issue was that their baby had been running a high-fever and the A/C was making matters worse. I had seen a pharmacy but no clinic in the airport. It was much later I came across http://dohahamadairport.com/airport-guide/facilities-services/medical-emergencies but as can be seen on the web-page it doesn t tell whether the services are chargeable or not. I assume it would be paid, although in some of the developed/industrialized countries it is rumoured not to be for simple ailments such as the baby was going through. Have no idea if that s true or not. I also don t know how it equates with travel insurance as well as most travel insurance is also supposed to help you in situations like these. I was concerned as it was a baby and babies as all know are very very fragile. If anybody has an idea or had similar experience would like to know specifically related to International Airport environment as it has transit issues unlike in domestic airports where I don t think it would be a bit more easy. Now coming to my own inadequacies/lack of foresight which I had mentioned I will share, I had asked/queried and got to lead a Debian-installation workshop on the Open Debian Day. I had done a few earlier and had installed it a few times on my system and for my friends, relatives and some clients. The only bad experiences I had were to do with UEFI but even those in the jessie releases had got resolved quite a bit, so was pretty confident. The day before the Installfest was to happen, Mensah Nyarko Yaa Dufie (one full name) of Ghana approached me to install Debian on her system. I had some older version of the Debian DVD either 8.1 or 8.3 and had known that 8.5 had been released just a few days back. Had seen pretty fast internet (as far as downloading Debian DVD) is concerned hence asked her to wait a bit while I downloaded the newest image. I sha256summed it to make sure that the image was bit-to-bit perfect. Now I hadn t bought a pen drive/disk from India as I was under the impression that in such conferences, pen drives should not be an issue. I had asked Bernelle privately before via e-mail as well and she had assured me that some pen-drives would be available. She gave me a handful of HP pen drives. The pen drives as we came know during our usage were somewhat flaky. It would pop out/lose connection even with the slightest nudge to the lappy. Somehow I was able to transfer the image to the usb disk. As people say hindsight is 50:50 maybe it was not such a smart move on my part to download the big DVD image and maybe I should have got the netinstall iso . Be careful, the link I have just shared is of the old version, if you have good web link and want to try the newest stable netinstall head to cdimage.debian.org . Apart from that goof-up I dunno (still) of anyway to know if a copy from an .iso image to usb was successful or not and did it do correctly I did the following command sudo dd if=/path_to/debian-dvd.iso of=/dev/usb-mount-point which is usually /dev/sdb on all of my systems . Her system was a brand new HP (don t remember the model details) which she had bought just a few weeks/months before debconf. We tried a few times but it failed at installing the boot-loader stage. I asked Ritesh Raj Saraff (a friend and DD) and while he had some ideas, none of them worked. Ritesh later pointed out Steve McIntyre and shared he is part of the Debian-Installer team. At that point in time, I had no clue who Steve McIntyre was otherwise I probably would not have approached him. He quickly acquiesced to my request and shared that he would be there for the workshop. With load of my mind little bit, I apologized to mensah and asked her to be at the workshop the following day. I had no clue what was wrong at this point in time, whether it was the iso image in the usb disk or a UEFI issue. This also wasn t good for my confidence but as somebody from the Debian-Installer team was there, I was somewhat relaxed. Next day, some more people came for the Installfest. While I had made 2-3 copies, clearly it was not enough as more people came. I was in a frenzy and asked Deven Bansod, Keerthana Krishnan, Prabaharan Jaminy (the whole GSOC and Outreachy attendees) to volunteer to help out in making more iso images on usb disks. I introduced mensah to Steve McIntyre and we tried 2-3 times to get debian installed on the system but it didn t move from the same place. Ritesh shared that dd had a memory leak and hence cat was a better way to do it. So we did

$ cat debian.iso > /dev/sdb and soon other machines had debian sporting on their desktops. But mensa s lappy wouldn t get move from the boot-loader stage. Suddenly Steve had the bright idea (light bulb moment) that maybe the .iso is corrupted/usb disk is bad or something is incomplete. We started on another usb disk. Now this is where I have a query While I don t want to compare, in Ubuntu there was an image self-checking mechanism where probably behind the scenes (backend) the checksums published in a file are compared with checksums generated by apps. which are on the .iso image. While it does extend your time, the end result is you know if there is some issue on the decompressed image on the usb disk. AFAIK we don t have anything similar. The only two things I know is the wiki page and of course the various checksums of the image as shared at http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/8.6.0/amd64/iso-cd/ or http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/8.6.0/amd64/iso-dvd/ If anybody knows of any movement or a bug in the BTS which I can follow for the above issue please let me know. This time Steve was able to install it without any issues. I asked him whether he had to make some specific FAT/Ex-FAT/NTFS partitions as some new UEFI-based lappies need one or more but he replied in the negative. While mensa did get her debian install, the GUI didn t come while command-prompt was available. Then Steve added backports to the sources.list, got the new kernel, new Intel/Nvidia drivers (think it was one of those hybrid models IIRC) and she was able to boot into GNOME-Debian. I didn t saw any bug-reports about checksumming state of the applications before installation but did couple of reports about badblocks support and memory checking and from action on both bug-reports it is also need of the hour (although the earlier one has been marked as won t fix :(). In this whole thing, I liked/appreciated the way Steve handled things, I intuitively understood/knew that he wasn t just part of the Debian-installer team but someone better. I can t explain it but it was there. A little investigation in the evening and it turned out that he had been Debian Project Leader for two consecutive years (2008 and 2009) . In hindsight it probably was a good thing I didn t know that before otherwise I probably wouldn t have interacted with him and it would have been my loss. To have been the DPL and still being so humble while technically being so proficient, I was amazed and didn t know what to make of it. Here i.e. in India, if somebody wins even the mohalla elections (neighbourhood elections) the person carries a big chip on her/is shoulder not just till he is on the seat but even beyond, and here was an example of a previous DPL asking time from one of the developers in a video if it s possible in the next couple of days. Lastly,last week have able to report 2 bugs upstream. The first one is of youtube-dl . It s somewhat complicated hence will not go there atm. The second and more surprising one was from nano our esteemed text-editor- Hopefully the bug will be fixed once a new version comes.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #buggy, #cop, #Debconf16, #doha airport, #Installfest, #nano, #singer, #youtube-dl, travel

This is morning. Time to fly. Two boys, happy to open the hangar door and get the plane ready. It s been a year since I passed the FAA exam and became a pilot. Memories like these are my favorite reminders why I did. It is such fun to see people s faces light up with the joy of flying a few thousand feet above ground, of the beauty and freedom and peace of the skies. I ve flown 14 different passengers in that time; almost every flight I ve taken has been with people, which I enjoy. I ve heard wow or beautiful so many times, and said it myself even more times. I ve landed in two state parks, visited any number of wonderful small towns, seen historic sites and placid lakes, ascended magically over forests and plains. I ve landed at 31 airports in 10 states, flying over 13,000 miles. Not once have I encountered anyone other than friendly, kind, and outgoing. And why not? After all, we re working around magic flying carpet machines, right? (That s my brother before a flight with me, by the way) Some weeks it is easy to be glum. This week has been that way for many, myself included. But then, whether you are in the air or on the ground, if you pay attention, you realize we still live in a beautiful world with many wonderful people. And, in fact, I got a reminder of that this week. Not long after the election, I got in a plane, pushed in the throttle, and started the takeoff roll down a runway in the midst of an Indiana forest. The skies were the best kind of clear blue, and pretty soon I lifted off and could see for miles. Off in the distance, I could see the last cottony remnants of the morning s fog, lying still in the valleys, surrounding the little farms and houses as if to give them a loving hug. Wow. Sometimes the flight is bumpy. Sometimes the weather doesn t cooperate, and it doesn t happen at all. Sometimes you can fly across four large states and it feels as smooth as glass the whole way. Whatever happens, at the end of the day, the magic flying carpet machine gets locked up again. We go home, rest our heads on our soft pillows, and if we so choose, remember the beauty we experienced that day. Really, this post is not about being a pilot. This post is a reminder to pay attention to all that is beautiful in this world. It surrounds us; the smell of pine trees in the forest, the delight in the faces of children, the gentle breeze in our hair, the kind word from a stranger, the very sunrise. I hope that more of us will pay attention to the moments of clear skies and wind at our back. Even at those moments when we pull the hangar door shut.

I was going to put a technical post but saw the discussion of one of the meetings of the debconf meets and decided to share a novice s travel experience. Before I start here s the discussion log http://meetbot.debian.net/debconf-team/2016/debconf-team.2016-10-20-20.01.log.html and specifically this part which hit me (using fake names for discussion as haven t taken permission from the folks to cite them by name.)

20:36:52 abcd: $100 CAD is a lot for some, but you d only need it if you won t sleep in sponsored accom, which arguably is acceptable.
20:37:04 it would, efgh, fixed sponsorship sum for everybody and allocation of rooms completely decoupled. Hotel gets the money from everybody and the base fee from DebConf.
20:37:15 people who can t afford also have special needs and may be uncomfortable in sharing rooms. That s quite frequently in our community. Managing each case will be much more complicated.
20:37:31 hijk: we could set aside budget for such special needs, for sure.
20:37:43 I m talking about managing each case
20:37:46 hijk: yes, but we ll have the special cases no matter what.
20:37:48 yes, and the special cases need to be catered for regardless of how everybody else is housed
20:38:06 hijk: room allocation already includes this.
20:38:19 people having to expose their personal problems to have us permitting them staying in the hotel
20:38:23 that s just too weird

It just goes on. I dunno whether I m weird or not or the experience I would share is just normal, this I would leave for you to decide. As have shared before, some friends of mine from the free software community had cajoled me last year to apply for debconf bursary (debconf15), which surprisingly got approved, but as it was late and my pre-conceived myths/notions of visas taking a looooong time decided not to go further. Many things take a long time to happen in the Indian bureaucratic maze. For instance have been in a civil case for almost a decade now among other things so know and accept that things take their own sweet time otherwise known as Indian patience Did the application and again, surprise, surprise this time too I was approved. Luckily, had done the application for bursary early so was a bit positive on the visa-front. There was a goof-up at the embassay but thanks to people at travel.stackexchange.com where I asked quite a few questions, I was a bit informed and travel was relatively hassle-free. Internally though, I was nervous as hell. I had been feeling like a conman or a fraud or being an imposter because I knew before-hand that the project is so huge and had done the mistake of putting up a talk and a workshop where the big guns would be, which again was accepted (not good). The only thing I was thinking of as a saving grace is that there might be some newbies who don t know about the project at all (on Open Day) and hopefully I could help with that but as you will see, even there I was fully inadequate. I live in Pune which is around 3.5 hours from Mumbai (BOM) from where international flights take off. While Pune has an Airport, due to defence considerations, there cannot be much improvement either for domestic or International carriers. There have been attempts to have an exclusive civilian Airport for a long time (almost a decade) and would still take a decade or more. Hence had decided to take an early morning train from Pune to Mumbai, change couple of locals and finally land up at the Mumbai International Airport. Hind-sight as they say is 50:50, while I do have friends in Mumbai, I also found about a homestay which is closer to the Airport and still relatively budget-friendly. Anyways, met few friends but as was paranoid about missing connections found myself in front of the Airport at 20:00 hrs. with about 7 hours + to go before my flight. While there is nothing to do around the airport rather than hanging around, just hung around outside the airport as knew that inside the airport will be chilling and once you go in, you cannot come out or at least it s an inconvenience to the security therein. The International Airport in on three levels, the basement is for vehicles, the first level to receive International and Domestic passengers and the upper-most level exclusively for people flying internationally. This again, came to know when I tried to enter into the ones meant for Domestic and International Passengers coming into the city. Came to the check-in counter at around 02:00 hrs, did the security thing and just had to wait as the flight was of 0400 hrs (from my limited search experience, the cheapest flights are at such times when nobody else (i.e.civilized people) wants to fly). Entered Doha around 5:15 Doha time and saw a much much bigger airport than either the Mumbai International Airport or/and the Delhi International Airport . While I have written some negative stuff about Doha, there were two positives that I am sure, I had forgotten to share a. There were no transit Visa Fees that I had to pay. Most countries and airports I researched have something called transit visa and that can really get expensive, so saved money on that. b. The free ride into the city and back with voluntary tipping the driver or/and guide (approx. 3-4 hours) While the second from what I could tell/know is a gimmick, this is something I wish other countries and airports emulate. There are hotels in the airport and I could have had hotel accommodation if I had booked a slightly more expensive ticket, roughly INR 5k/- each way which would have given me a bit more legroom as well as stay as my layover was more than 24 hours. But this information was known at last minute. Qatar Airways has just a toll-free number and trying more than a few times gave up. They don t have an office in the city. When I reached the check-in counter they said if I had upgraded to Y class I would have had the hotel thing. Changing tickets at the last moment was too expensive and anyways for hotel accommodation for layovers they required at least 24 hours notice. Had to make do with recliners and chairs which are not really comfortable. There were only a couple of waiting rooms on air-side which had a view of the aircraft and hence were a bit more pleasing than those which were on the land-side and were fully blocked without a view. I wish there was a map of the Airport from within the Airport as even with the single terminal it is really easy to get lost. Somehow the day and night went by and took my second flight and reached Cape Town, South Africa. Throughout the journey had been stressed as had to be awake at all times and make sure that nothing gets stolen. Having attendants at toilets were also good so that there is no possibility of any violence there. So it had been 2 days, no shower and no sleep. Later also came to know about Airport Sleeping Pods and shower stalls but these also seem to be less in number, at few airports and there always be a bit of premium attached to them as airports are a monopoly business. Anyways, reached the venue. Throughout the travel there was quite a bit of unnamed fear which I later came to know after seeing Dr. Ramanujan s The Man who knew Infinity . It was/is the fear or unknown, while in the movie it is articulated as fear of crossing seven seas, symbolically it is the fear or unknown. Now while I was dead tired, I still pushed myself as I didn t want to have the effects of jet lag interfere with the normal sleeping and waking patterns. I did freshen myself but didn t allow myself the luxury of the bath-tub as I knew that if I went in, I would not come out that day. Met all the people, learnt who s who, where things are happening etc. and slowly night came. Night came and I was so-looking forward to sleep but sleep was not to be. I later learnt it could be either of the two reasons, it could either have been travel-induced insomnia or/and what is known as the first night effect . It was only on the second day when I was in bath-tub for about 2/3 hours I could feel the tension leaving my body. I finally realized that I am in Cape Town, South Africa and could enjoy and be surprised at seeing birds within few feet of me . Now I don t know whether I m the only weird/paranoid one, I do know that it would not have been easier for me at least for the first night as I was turning and twisting throughout the night. I opened the lights, read for some time hoping for sleep to take over but that didn t work. Tried quite a few things but sleep didn t come. If I had been sleeping with other people I dunno how they would have reacted. I myself am a light sleeper (most of the time) and if I had sleep coming and somebody else acted or been the way I was, I wouldn t been able to sleep. However much you try, whatever is the natural reaction is, will be. There are still some bits to share but that would be in part 2.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #air-travel, #Debconf16, #paranoia, #sleep

I m at an airport, about to board the first of three flights across the world, from timezone +8 to timezone -8. I ll be in transit 27 hours to get to Seattle, Washington state. I m leaving my wife and two young children behind. My work has given me a days worth of leave under the Corporate Social Responsibility program, and I m taking three days annual leave, to do this. 27 hours each way in transit, for 3 days on the ground. Why? Backstory I started playing in technology as a kid in the 1980s; my first PC was a clone (as they were called) 286 running MS-DOS. It was clunky, and the most I could do to extend it was to write batch scripts. As a child I had no funds for commercial compilers, no network connections (this was pre Internet in Australia), no access to documentation, and no idea where to start programming properly. It was a closed world. I hit university in the summer of 1994 to study Computer Science and French. I d heard of Linux, and soon found myself installing the Linux distributions of the day. The Freedom of the licensing, the encouragement to use, modify, share, was in stark contrast to the world of consumer PCs of the late 1980 s. It was there at the UCC at UWA I discovered Debian. Some of the kind network/system admins at the University maintained a Debian mirror on the campus LAN, updated regularly and always online. It was fast, and more importantly, free for me to access. Back in the 1990s, bandwidth in Australia was incredibly expensive. The vast distances of the country mean that bandwidth was scarce. Telcos were in races to put fiber between Perth and the Eastern States, and without that in place, IP connectivity was constrained, and thus costly. Over many long days and nights I huddled down, learning window managers, protocols, programming and scripting languages. I became a system/network administrator, web developer, dev ops engineer, etc. My official degree workload, algorithmic complexity, protocol stacks, were interesting, but fiddling with Linux based implementations was practical. Volunteer After years of consuming the output of Debian and running many services with it I decided to put my hand up and volunteer as a Debian Developer: it was time to give back. I had benefited from Debian, and I saw others benefit from it as well. As the 2000 s started, I had my PGP key in the Debian key ring. I had adopted a package and was maintaining it load balancing Apache web servers. The web was yet to expand to the traffic levels you see today; most web sites were served from one physical web server. Site Reliability Engineering was a term not yet dreamed of. What became more apparent was the applicability of Linux, Open Source, and in my line-of-sight Debian to a wider community beyond myself and my university peers. Debain was being used to revive recycled computers that were being donated to charities; in some cases, unable to transfer commercial software licenses with the hardware that was no longer required by organisations that had upgraded. It appeared that Debian was being used as a baseline above which society in general had access to fundamental capability of computing and network services. The removal of subscriptions, registrations, and the encouragement of distribution meant this occurred at rates that could never be tracked, and more importantly, the consensus was that it should not be automatically tracked. The privacy of the user is paramount more important than some statistics for the Developer to ponder. When the Bosnia-Herzegovina war ended in 1995, I recall an email from academics there, having found some connectivity, writing to ask if they would be able to use Debian as part of their re-deployment of services for the Tertiary institutions in the region. This was an unnecessary request as Debian GNU/Linux is freely available, but it was a reminder that, for the country to have tried to procure commercial solutions at that time would have been difficult. Instead, those that could do the task just got on with it. There s been many similar project where the grass-roots organisations non profits, NGOs, and even just loose collectives of individuals have turned to Linux, Open Source, and sometimes Debian to solve their problems. Many fine projects have been established to make technology accessible to all, regardless of race, gender, nationality, class, or any other label society has used to divide humans. Big hat tip to Humanitarian Open Street Map, Serval Project. I ve always loved Debian s position on being the Universal operating system. Its vast range of packages and wide range of computing architectures supported means that quite often a litmus test of is project X a good project? was met with is it packaged for Debian? . That wide range of architectures has meant that administrators of systems had fewer surprises and a faster adoption cycle when changing platforms, such as the switch from x86 32 bit to x86 64 bit. Enter the Cloud I first laid eyes on the AWS Cloud in 2008. It was nothing like the rich environment you see today. The first thing I looked for was my favourite operating system, so that what I already knew and was familiar with was available in this environment to minimise the learning curve. However there were no official images, which was disconcerting. In 2012 I joined AWS as an employee. Living in Australia they hired me into the field sales team as a Solution Architect a sort of pre-sales tech with a customer focused depth in security. It was a wonderful opportunity, and I learnt a great deal. It also made sense (to me, at least) to do something about getting Debian s images blessed. It turned out, that I had to almost define what that was: images endorsed by a Debian Developer, handed to the AWS Marketplace team. And so since 2013 I have done so, keeping track of Debian s releases across the AWS regions, collaborating with other Debian folk on other cloud platforms to attempt a unified approach to generating and maintaining these images. This included (for a stint) generating them into the AWS GovCloud Region, and still into the AWS China (Beijing) Region the other side of the so-called Great Firewall of China. So why the trip? We ve had focus groups at the Debconf (Debian conference) around the world, but its often difficult to get the right group of people in the same rooms at the same time. So the proposal was to hold a focused Debian Cloud Sprint. Google was good enough to host this, for all the volunteers across all the cloud providers. Furthermore, donated funds were found to secure the travel for a set of people to attend who otherwise could not. I was lucky enough to be given a flight. So here I am, in the terminal in Australia: my kids are tucked up in bed, dreaming of the candy they just collected for Halloween. It will be a draining week I am sure, but if it helps set and improve the state of Debian then its worth it.

Today marks the 13th anniversary since the last passenger flight from New York arrived in the UK. Every seat was filled, a feat that had become increasingly rare for a plane that was a technological marvel but a commercial flop .

• Only 20 aircraft were ever built despite 100 orders, most of them cancelled in the early 1970s.
• Taxiing to the runway consumed 2 tons of fuel.
• The white colour scheme was specified to reduce the outer temperature by about 10 C.
• In a promotional deal with Pepsi, F-BTSD was temporarily painted blue. Due to the change of colour, Air France were advised to remain at Mach 2 for no more than 20 minutes at a time.
• At supersonic speed the fuselage would heat up and expand by as much as 30cm. The most obvious manifestation of this was a gap that opened up on the flight deck between the flight engineer's console and the bulkhead. On some aircraft conducting a retiring supersonic flight, the flight engineers placed their caps in this expanded gap, permanently wedging the cap as it shrank again.
• At Concorde's altitude a breach of cabin integrity would result in a loss of pressure so severe that passengers would quickly suffer from hypoxia despite application of emergency oxygen. Concorde was thus built with smaller windows to reduce the rate of loss in such a breach.
• The high cruising altitude meant passengers received almost twice the amount of radiation as a conventional long-haul flight. To prevent excessive exposure, the flight deck comprised of a radiometer; if the radiation level became too high, pilots would descend below 45,000 feet.
• BA's service had a greater number of passengers who booked a flight and then failed to appear than any other aircraft in their fleet.
• Market research later in Concorde's life revealed that customers thought Concorde was more expensive than it actually was. Ticket prices were progressively raised to match these perceptions.
• The fastest transatlantic airliner flight was from New York JFK to London Heathrow on 7 February 1996 by British Airways' G-BOAD in 2 hours, 52 minutes, 59 seconds from takeoff to touchdown. It was aided by a 175 mph tailwind.

See also: A Rocket to Nowhere.

This post is long past due, but I figured it is better late than never. At the start of the year, I set a goal to get more involved with attending and speaking at conferences. Through work, I was able to attend the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) in Pasadena, CA in January. I also got to give a talk at O'Relly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Austin, TX in May. However, I really wanted to give a talk about my experience contributing in the Ubuntu community. Jos Antonio Rey encouraged me to submit the talk to FOSSCON. While I've been aware of FOSSCON for years thanks to my involvement with the freenode IRC network (which has had a reference to FOSSCON in the /motd for years), I had never actually attended it before. I also wasn't quite sure how I would handle traveling from San Francisco, CA to Philadelphia, PA. Regardless, I decided to go ahead and apply. Fast forward a few weeks, and imagine my surprise when I woke up to an email saying that my talk proposal was accepted. People were actually interested in me and what I had to say. I immediately began researching flights. While they weren't crazy expensive, they were still more money than I was comfortable spending. Luckily, Jos had a solution to this problem as well; he suggested applying for funding through the Ubuntu Community Donations fund. While I've been an Ubuntu Member for over 8 years, I've never used this resource before. However, I was happy when I received a very quick approval. The conference itself was smaller than I was expecting. However, it was packed with lots of friendly and familiar faces of people I've interacted with online and in person over the years at various Open Source events. I started off the day by learning from Jos how to use Juju to quickly setup applications in the cloud. While Juju has definitely come a long way over the last couple of years, and it appears t be quite easy to learn and use, it still appears to be lacking some of the features needed to take full control over how the underlying applications interact with each other. However, I look forward to continuing to watch it grow and mature. Net up, we had a lunch break. There was no catered lunch at this conference, so we decided to get some cheesesteak at Abner's (is any trip to Philadelphia complete without cheesesteak?). Following lunch, I took some time to make a few last minute changes to my presentation and rehearse a bit. Finally, it was time. I got up in front of the audience and gave my presentation. Overall, I was quite pleased. It was not perfect, but for the first time giving the talk, I thought it went pretty well. I will work hard to make it even better for next tme. Following my talk was a series of brief lightning talks prior to the closing keynote. Another long time friend of mine, Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph, was giving the keynote about listening to the needs of your global open source community. While I have seen her speak on several other occassions, I really enjoyed this particular talk. It was full of great examples and anecdotes that were easy for the audience to relate to and start applying to their own communities. After the conference, a few of us went off and played tourist, paying the Liberty Bell a visit before concluding our trip in Philadelpha. Overall, I had a great time as FOSSCON. It was great being re-united with so many friends. A big thank you to Jos for his constant support and encouragement and to Canonical and the Ubuntu Community for helping to make it possible for me to attend this conference. Finally, thanks to the terrific FOSSCON staff for volunteering so much time to put on this great event.