RISC -V Motherboard, SBC While I didn t want to, a part of me is hyped about this motherboard. This would probably be launched somewhere in November. There are obvious issues in this, the first being unlike regular motherboards you wouldn t be upgrade as you would do.You can t upgrade your memory, can t upgrade the CPU (although new versions of instructions could be uploaded, similar to BIOS updates) but as the hardware is integrated (the quad-core SiFive Performance P550 core complex) it would really depend. If the final pricing is around INR 4-5k then it may be able to sell handsomely provided there are people to push and provide support around it. A 500 GB or 1 TB SSD coupled with it and a cheap display unit and you could use it anywhere although as the name says it s more for tinkering as the name suggests. Another board that could perhaps be of more immediate use would be the beagleboard. They launched the same couple of days back and called it Beagle V-Ahead. Again, costs are going to be a concern. Just a year before the pandemic the Beagleboard Black (BB) used to cost in the sub 4k range, today it costs 8k+ for the end user, more than twice the price. How much Brexit is to be blamed for this and how much the Indian customs we would never know. The RS Group that is behind that shop is head-quartered in the UK. As said before, we do not know the price of either board as it probably will take few months for v-ahead to worm its way in the Indian market, maybe another 6 months or so. Even so, with the limited info. on both the boards, I am tilting more towards the other HiFive one. We should come to know about the boards say in 3-5 months of time.

CHIPS Act I had shared about the Chips Act a few times here as well as on SM. Two articles do tell how the CHIPS Act 2023 is more of a political tool, an industrial defence policy rather than just business as most people tend to think.

Cancelation of Books, Books Burning etc. Almost 2400 years ago, Plato released his work called Plato s Republic and one of the seminal works within it is perhaps one of the most famous works was the Allegory of the Cave. That is used again and again in a myriad ways, mostly in science-fiction though and mostly to do with utopian, dystopian movies, webseries etc. I did share how books are being canceled in the States, also a bit here. But the most damning thing has happened throughout history, huge quantities of books burned almost all for politics But part of it has been neglect as well as this time article shares. What we have lost and continue to lose is just priceless. Every book has a grain of truth in it, some more, some less but equally enjoyable. Most harmful is the neglect towards books and is more true today than any other time in history. Kids today have a wide variety of tools to keep themselves happy or occupied, from anime, VR, gaming the list goes on and on. In that scenario, how the humble books can compete. People think of Kindle but most e-readers like Kindle are nothing but obsolescence by design. I have tried out Kindle a few times but find it a bit on the flimsy side. Books are much better IMHO or call me old-school. While there are many advantages, one of the things that I like about books is that you can easily put yourself in either the protagonist or the antagonist or somewhere in the middle and think of the possible scenarios wherever you are in a particular book. I could go on but it will be a blog post or two in itself. Till later. Happy Reading.

Update:Manipur Extremely horrifying visuals, articles and statements continue to emanate from Manipur. Today, 19th July 2023, just couple of hours back, a video surfaced showing two Kuki women were shown as stripped, naked and Meitei men touching their private parts. Later on, we came to know that this was in response of a disinformation news spread by the Meitis of few women being raped although no documentary evidence of the same surfaced, no names nothing. While I don t want to share the video I will however share the statement shared by the Kuki-Zo tribal community on that. The print gives a bit more context to what has been going on.

Update, Few hours later : The Print also shared more of a context about six days ago. The reason we saw the video now was that for the last 2.5 months Manipur was in Internet shutdown so those videos got uploaded now. There was huge backlash from the Twitter community and GOI ordered the Manipur Police to issue this Press Release yesterday night or just few hours before with yesterday s time-stamp.

IndianExpress shared an article that does state that while an FIR had been registered immediately no arrests so far and this is when you can see the faces of all the accused. Not one of them tried to hide their face behind a mask or something. So, if the police wanted, they could have easily identified who they are. They know which community the accused belong to, they even know from where they came. If they wanted to, they could have easily used mobile data and triangulation to find the accused and their helpers. So, it does seem to be attempt to whitewash and protect a certain community while letting it prey on the other. Another news that did come in, is because of the furious reaction on Twitter, Youtube has constantly been taking down the video as some people are getting a sort of high more so from the majoritarian community and making lewd remarks. Twitter has been somewhat quick when people are making lewd remarks against the two girl/women. Quite a bit of the above seems like a cover-up. Lastly, apparently GOI has agreed to having a conversation about it in Lok Sabha but without any voting or passing any resolutions as of right now. Would update as an when things change. Update: Smriti Irani, the Child and Development Minister gave the weakest statement possible

As can be noticed, she said sexual assault rather than rape. The women were under police custody for safety when they were whisked away by the mob. No mention of that. She spoke to the Chief Minister who has been publicly known as one of the provocateurs or instigators for the whole thing. The CM had publicly called the Kukus and Nagas as foreigners although both of them claim to be residing for thousands of years and they apparently have documentary evidence of the same . Also not clear who is doing the condemning here. No word of support for the women, no offer of intervention, why is she the Minister of Child and Women Development (CDW) if she can t use harsh words or give support to the women who have gone and going through horrific things Update : CM Biren Singh s Statement after the video surfaced

This tweet is contradictory to the statements made by Mr. Singh couple of months ago. At that point in time, Mr. Singh had said that NIA, State Intelligence Departments etc. were giving him minute to minute report on the ground station. The Police itself has suo-moto (on its own) powers to investigate and apprehend criminals for any crime. In fact, the Police can call for questioning of anybody in any relation to any crime and question them for upto 48 hours before charging them. In fact, many cases have been lodged where innocent persons have been framed or they have served much more in the jail than the crime they are alleged to have been committed. For e.g. just a few days before there was a media report of a boy who has been in jail for 3 years. His alleged crime, stealing mere INR 200/- to feed himself. Court doesn t have time to listen to him yet. And there are millions like him. The quint eloquently shares the tale where it tells how both the State and the Centre have been explicitly complicit in the incidents ravaging Manipur. In fact, what has been shared in the article has been very true as far as greed for land is concerned. Just couple of weeks back there have been a ton of floods emanating from Uttarakhand and others. Just before the flooding began, what was the CM doing can be seen here. Apart from the newspapers I have shared and the online resources, most of the mainstream media has been silent on the above. In fact, they have been silent on the Manipur issue until the said video didn t come into limelight. Just now, in Lok Sabha everybody is present except the Prime Minister and the Home Minister. The PM did say that the law will take its own course, but that s about it. Again no support for the women concerned. Update: CJI (Chief Justice of India) has taken suo-moto cognizance and has warned both the State and Centre to move quickly otherwise they will take the matter in their own hand.

Update: Within 2 hours of the CJI taking suo-moto cognizance, they have arrested one of the main accused Heera Das

The above tells you why the ban on Internet was put in the first place. They wanted to cover it all up. Of all the celebs, only one could find a bit of spine, a bit of backbone to speak about it, all the rest mum

Just imagine, one of the women is around my age while the young one could have been a daughter if I had married on time or a younger sister for sure. If ever I came face to face with them, I just wouldn t be able to look them in the eye. Even their whole whataboutery is built on sham. From their view Kukis are from Burma or Burmese descent. All of which could be easily proved by DNA of all. But let s leave that for a sec. Let s take their own argument that they are Burmese. Their idea of Akhand Bharat stretches all the way to Burma (now called Myanmar). They want all the land but no idea with what to do with the citizens living on it. Even after the video, the whataboutery isn t stopping, that shows how much hatred is there. And not knowing that they too will be victim of the same venom one or the other day Update: Opposition was told there would be a debate on Manipur. The whole day went by, no debate. That s the shamelessness of this Govt. Update 20th July 19:25 Center may act or not act against the perpetrators but they will act against Twitter who showed the crime. Talk about shooting the messenger

We are now in the last stage. In 2014, we were at 6

PLIO I have been looking for an image viewer that can view images via modification date by default. The newer, the better. Alas, most of the image viewers do not do that. Even feh somehow fails. What I need is default listing of images as thumbnails by modification date. I put it up on Unix Stackexchange couple of years ago. Somebody shared ristretto but that just gives listing and doesn t give the way I want it. To be more illustrative, maybe this may serve as a guide to what I mean.

There is an RFP for it. While playing with it, I also discovered another benefit of the viewer, a sort of side-benefit, it tells you if any images have gone corrupt or whatever and you get that info. on the CLI so you can try viewing that image with the path using another viewer or viewers before deleting them. One of the issues is there doesn t seem to be a magnify option by default. While the documentation says use the ^ key to maximize it, it doesn t maximize. Took me a while to find it as that isn t a key that I use most of the time. Ironically, that is the key used on the mobile quite a bit. Anyways, so that needs to be fixed. Sadly, it doesn t have creation date or modification date sort, although the documentation does say it does (at least the modification date) but it doesn t show at my end. I also got Warning: UNKNOWN command detected! but that doesn t tell me enough as to what the issue is. Hopefully the developer will fix the issues and it will become part of Debian as many such projects are. Compiling was dead easy even with gcc-12 once I got freeimage-dev.

Mum s first death anniversary I do not know where the year went by or how. The day went in a sort of suspended animation. The only thing I did was eat and sleep that day, didn t feel like doing anything. Old memories, even dreams of fighting with her only to realize in the dream itself it s fake, she isn t there anymore Something that can never be fixed

Debconf Kochi I should have shared it few days ago but somehow slipped my mind. While it s too late for most people to ask for bursary for Debconf Kochi, if you are anywhere near Kochi in the month of September between the dates. September 3 to September 17 nearby Infopark, Kochi you could walk in and talk to people. This would be for people who either have an interest in free software, FOSS or Debian specific. For those who may not know, while Debian is a Linux Distribution having ports to other kernels as well as well as hardware. While I may not be able to provide the list of all the various flavors as well as hardware, can say it is quite a bit. For e.g. there is a port to RISC-V that was done few years back (2018). Why that is needed will be shared below. There is always something new to look forward in a Debconf.

Pressure Cooker and Potatoes This was asked to me in the last Debconf (2016) by few people. So as people are coming to India, it probably is a good time to sort of reignite the topic :). So a Pressure Cooker boils your veggies and whatnot while still preserving the nutrients. While there are quite a number of brands I would suggest either Prestige or Hawkins, I have had good experience with both. There are also some new pressure cookers that have come that are somewhat in the design of the Thai Wok. So if that is something that you are either comfortable with or looking for, you could look at that. One of the things that you have to be sort of aware of and be most particular is the pressure safety valve. Just putting up pressure cooker safety valve in your favorite search-engine should show you different makes and whatnot. While they are relatively cheap, you need to see it is not cracked, used or whatever. The other thing is the Pressure Cooker whistle as well. The easiest thing to cook are mashed potatoes in a pressure cooker. A pressure Cooker comes in Litres, from 1 Ltr. to 20 Ltr. The larger ones are obviously for hotels or whatnot. General rule of using Pressure cooker is have water 1/4th, whatever vegetable or non-veg you want to boil 1/2 and let the remaining part for the steam. Now the easiest thing to do is have wash the potatoes and put 1/4th water of the pressure cooker. Then put 1/2 or less or little bit more of the veggies, in this instance just Potatoes. You can put salt to or that can be done later. The taste will be different. Also, there are various salts so won t really go into it as spices is a rabbit hole. Anyways, after making sure that there is enough space for the steam to be built, Put the handle on the cooker and basically wait for 5-10 minutes for the pressure to be built. You will hear a whistling sound, wait for around 5 minutes or a bit more (depends on many factors, kind of potatoes, weather etc.) and then just let it cool off naturally. After 5-10 minutes or a bit more, the pressure will be off. Your mashed potatoes are ready for either consumption or for further processing. I am assuming gas, induction cooking will have its own temperature, have no idea about it, hence not sharing that. Pressure Cooker, first put on the heaviest settings, once it starts to whistle, put it on medium for 5-10 minutes and then let it cool off. The first time I had tried that, I burned the cooker. You understand things via trial and error.

Poha recipe This is a nice low-cost healthy and fulfilling breakfast called Poha that can be made anytime and requires at the most 10-15 minutes to prepare with minimal fuss. The main ingredient is Poha or flattened rice. So how is it prepared. I won t go into the details of quantity as that is upto how hungry people are. There are various kinds of flattened rice available in the market, what you are looking for is called thick Poha or zhad Poha (in Marathi). The first step is the trickiest. What do you want to do is put water on Poha but not to let it be soggy. There is an accessory similar to tea filter but forgot the name, it basically drains all the extra moisture and you want Poha to be a bit fluffy and not soggy. The Poha should breathe for about 5 minutes before being cooked. To cook, use a heavy bottomed skillet, put some oil in it, depends on what oil you like, again lot of variations, you can use ground nut or whatever oil you prefer. Then use single mustard seeds to check temperature of the oil. Once the mustard seeds starts to pop, it means it s ready for things. So put mustard seeds in, finely chopped onion, finely chopped coriander leaves, a little bit of lemon juice, if you want potatoes, then potatoes too. Be aware that Potatoes will soak oil like anything, so if you are going to have potatoes than the oil should be a bit more. Some people love curry leaves, others don t. I like them quite a bit, it gives a slightly different taste. So the order is

1. Oil
2. Mustard seeds (1-2 teaspoon)
3. Curry leaves 5-10
4. Onion (2-3 medium onions finely chopped, onion can also be used as garnish.)
5. Potatoes (2-3 medium ones, mashed)
6. Small green chillies or 1-2 Red chillies (if you want)
7. Coriander Leaves (one bunch finely chopped)
8. Peanuts (half a glass)

Make sure that you are stirring them quite a bit. On a good warm skillet, this should hardly take 5 minutes. Once the onions are slighly brown, you are ready to put Poha in. So put the poha, add turmeric, salt, and sugar. Again depends on number of people. If I made for myself and mum, usually did 1 teaspoon of salt, not even one fourth of turmeric, just a hint, it is for the color, 1 to 2 teapoons of sugar and mix them all well at medium flame. Poha used to be two or three glasses. If you don t want potato, you can fry them a bit separately and garnish with it, along with coriander, coconut and whatnot. In Kerala, there is possibility that people might have it one day or all days. It serves as a snack at anytime, breakfast, lunch, tea time or even dinner if people don t want to be heavy. The first few times I did, I did manage to do everything wrong. So, if things go wrong, let it be. After a while, you will find your own place. And again, this is just one way, I m sure this can be made as elaborate a meal as you want. This is just something you can do if you don t want noodles or are bored with it. The timing is similar. While I don t claim to be an expert in cooking in anyway or form, if people have questions feel free to ask. If you are single or two people, 2 Ltr. Pressure cooker is enough for most Indians, Westerners may take a slightly bit larger Pressure Cooker, maybe a 3 Ltr. one may be good for you. Happy Cooking and Experimenting I have had the pleasure to have Poha in many ways. One of my favorite ones is when people have actually put tadka on top of Poha. You do everything else but in a slight reverse order. The tadka has all the spices mixed and is concentrated and is put on top of Poha and then mixed. Done right, it tastes out of this world. For those who might not have had the Indian culinary experience, most of which is actually borrowed from the Mughals, you are in for a treat. One of the other things I would suggest to people is to ask people where there can get five types of rice. This is a specialty of South India and a sort of street food. I know where you can get it Hyderabad, Bangalore, Chennai but not in Kerala, although am dead sure there is, just somehow have missed it. If asked, am sure the Kerala team should be able to guide. That s all for now, feeling hungry, having dinner as have been sharing about cooking.

RISC-V There has been lot of conversations about how India could be in the microprocesor spacee. The x86 and x86-64 is all tied up in Intel and AMD so that s a no go area. Let me elaborate a bit why I say that. While most of the people know that IBM was the first producers of transistors as well as microprocessors. Coincidentally, AMD and Intel story are similar in some aspects but not in others. For a long time Intel was a market leader and by hook or crook it remained a market leader. One of the more interesting companies in the 1980s was Cyrix which sold lot of low-end microprocessors. A lot of that technology also went into Via which became a sort of spiritual successor of Cyrix. It is because of Cyrix and Via that Intel was forced to launch the Celeron model of microprocessors.

Lawsuits, European Regulation For those who have been there in the 1990s may have heard the term Wintel that basically meant Microsoft Windows and Intel and they had a sort of monopoly power. While the Americans were sorta ok with it, the Europeans were not and time and time again they forced both Microsoft as well as Intel to provide alternatives. The pushback from the regulators was so great that Intel funded AMD to remain solvent for few years. The successes that we see today from AMD is Lisa Su s but there is a whole lot of history as well as bad blood between the two companies. Lot of lawsuits and whatnot. Lot of cross-licensing agreements between them as well. So for any new country it would need lot of cash just for licensing all the patents there are and it s just not feasible for any newcomer to come in this market as they would have to fork the cash for the design apart from manufacturing fab.

ARM Most of the mobiles today sport an ARM processor. At one time it meant Advanced RISC Machines but now goes by Arm Ltd. Arm itself licenses its designs and while there are lot of customers, you are depending on ARM and they can change any of the conditions anytime they want. You are also hoping that ARM does not steal your design or do anything else with it. And while people trust ARM, it is still a risk if you are a company.

RISC and Shakti There is not much to say about RISC other than this article at Register. While India does have large ambitions, executing it is far trickier than most people believe as well as complex and highly capital intensive. The RISC way could be a game-changer provided India moves deftly ahead. FWIW, Debian did a RISC port in 2018. From what I can tell, you can install it on a VM/QEMU and do stuff. And while RISC has its own niches, you never know what happens next.One can speculate a lot and there is certainly a lot of momentum behind RISC. From what little experience I have had, where India has failed time and time again, whether in software or hardware is support. Support is the key, unless that is not fixed, it will remain a dream On a slightly sad note, Foxconn is withdrawing from the joint venture it had with Vedanta.

Motherboard Battery You know you have become too old when you get stumped and the solution is simple and fixed by the vendor. About a week back, I was getting CPU Fan Error. It s a 6 year old desktop so I figured that the fan or the ball bearings on the fan must have worn out. I opened up the cabinet and I could see both the on cpu fan was working coolly as well as the side fan was working without an issue. So I couldn t figure out what was the issue. I had updated the BIOS/UEFI number of years ago so that couldn t be an issue. I fiddled with the boot menu and was able to boot into Linux but it was a pain that I had to do every damn time. As it is, it takes almost 2-3 minutes for the whole desktop to be ready and this extra step was annoying. I had bought a Mid-tower cabinet while the motherboard so there were alternate connectors I could try but still the issue persisted. And this workaround was heart-breaking as you boot the BIOS/UEFI and fix the boot menu each time even though it had Debian Boot Launcher and couple of virtual ones provided by the vendor (Asus) and they were hardwired. So failing all, went to my vendor/support and asked if he could find out what the issue is. It costed me $10, he did all the same things I did but one thing more, he changed the battery (cost less than 1USD) and presto all was right with the world again. I felt like a fool but a deal is a deal so paid the gentleman for his services. Now can again use the desktop and at least know about what s happening in the outside world.

Framework Laptops I have been seeing quite a few teardowns of Framework Laptops on Youtube and love it. More so, now that they have AMD in their arsenal. I do hope they work on their pricing and logistics and soon we have it here competing with others. If the pricing isn t substantial then definitely would be one of the first ones to order. India is and remains a very cost-conscious market and more so with the runaway prices that we have been seeing. In fact, the last 3 years have been pretty bad for the overall PC market declining 30% YoY for the last 3 years while prices have gone through the roof. Apart from the pricing from the vendors, taxation has been another hit as the current Govt. has been taxing anywhere from 30-100% taxes on various PC, desktop and laptop components. Think have shared Graphic cards for instance have 100% Duty apart from other taxes. I don t see the market picking up at least in the 24 to 36 months. Most of this year and next year, both AMD and Intel are doing refreshes so while there would be some improvements (probably 10-15%) not earth-shattering for the wider market to sit up and take notice. Intel has proposed a 64-bit architecture (only) about couple of months back, more on that later. As far as the Indian market is concerned, if you want the masses, then have lappies at around 40-50k ($600 USD) and there would be a mass takeup, if you want to be a Lenovo or something like that, then around a lakh or INR 100k ($1200 USD) or be an Apple which is around 150k INR or around 2000 USD. There are some clues as to what their plans but for that you have to trawl their forums and the knowledgebase. Seems some people are using freight forwarders to get around the hurdles but Framework doesn t want to do any shortcuts for the same. Everybody seems to be working on Vertical stacking of chips, whether it is the Chinese, or Belgian s or even AMD and Intel who have their own spins to it, but most of these technologies are at least 3-4 years out in the future (or more). India is a big laggard in this space with having knowledge of 45nm which in Aviation speak one could say India knows how to build 707 (one of the first Boeing commercial passenger carrying aircraft) while today it is Boeing 777x or Airbus 350. I have shared in the past how the Tata s have been trying to collaborate with the Japanese and get at least their 25nm chip technology but nothing has come of it to date. The only somewhat o.k. news has been the chip testing and packaging plant by Micron to be made in Gujarat. It doesn t do anything for us although we would be footing almost 70% of the plant s capital expenditure and the maximum India will get 4k jobs. Most of these plants are highly automated as dust is their mortal enemy so even the 4k jobs announced seem far-fetched. It would probably be less than half once production starts if it happens but that is probably a story for another time. Just as a parting shot, even memory vendors are going highly automated factory lines.

VR Headsets I was stuck by how similar or where VR is when I was watching Made in Finland. I don t want to delve much into the series but it is a fascinating one. I was very much taken by the character of Kari Kairamo or the actor who played the character of him and was very much disappointed with the sad ending the gentleman got. It is implicated in the series that the banks implicitly forced him to commit suicide. There is also a lot of chaos as is normal in a big company having many divisions. It s only when Jorma Olila takes over, the company sheds a lot of dead weight was cut off with mobiles having the most funding which they didn t have before. I was also fascinated when I experienced pride when Nokia shows off its 1011 mobile phone when at that time phones were actually like bricks. My first Nokia was number of years later, Nokia 1800 and have to say those phones outlasted a long time than today s Samsung s. If only Nokia had read the tea leaves right Back to the topic though, I have been wearing glasses since the age of 5 year old. They weigh less than 10 grams and you still get a nose dent. And I know enough people, times etc. when people have got headaches and whatnot from glasses. Unless the VR headsets become that size and don t cost an arm and leg (or a kidney or a liver) it would have niche use. While 5G and 6G would certainly push more ppl to get it it probably would take a few more years before we have something that is simple and doesn t need too much to get it rolling. The series I mentioned above is already over it s first season but would highly recommend it. I do hope the second season happens quickly and we do come to know why and how Nokia missed the Android train and their curious turn to get to Microsoft which sorta sealed their fate

Steam I have been following Steam, Luthris and plenty of other launchers on Debian. There also seems to some sort of an idea that once MESA 23.1.x or later comes into Debian at some point we may get Steam 64-bit and some people are hopeful that we may get it by year-end. There are a plethora of statistics that can be used to find status of Gaming on Linux. This is perhaps the best one I got so far. Valve also has its own share of stats that it shows here. I am not going to go into much detail except the fact that lutris has been there on Debian sometime now. And as and when Steam does go fully 64-bit, whole lot of multilib issues could be finally put to rest. Interestingly, Intel has quietly also shared details of only a 64-bit architecture PC. From what I could tell, it simply boots into 16-bit and then goes into 64-bit bypassing the 32-bit. In theory, it should remove whole lot code, make it safer as well as faster. If rival AMD was to play along things could move much faster. Now don t get me wrong, 32-bit was good, but for it s time. I m sure at some point in time even 64-bit would have its demise, and we would jump to 128-bit. Of course, in reality we aren t anywhere close to even 48-bit, leave alone 64-bit. Superuser gives a good answer on that. We may be a decade or more before we exhaust that but for sure there will be need for better, faster hardware especially as we use more and more of AI for good and bad things. I am curious to see how it pans out and how it will affect (or not) FOSS gaming. FWIW, I used to peruse freegamer.blogspot.com which kinda ended in 2021 and now use Lee Reilly blog posts to know what is happening in github as far as FOSS games are concerned. There is also a whole thing about handhelds and gaming but that probably would require its own blog post or two. There are just too many while at the same time too few (legally purchasable in India) to have its own blog post, maybe sometime in Future. Best way to escape the world. Till later.

Ayisha After a long time I saw a movie that I enjoyed wholeheartedly. And it unexpectedly touched my heart. The name of the movie is Ayisha. The first frame of the movie itself sets the pace where we see Ayisha (Manju Warrier) who decides to help out a gang as lot of women were being hassled. So she agrees to hoodwink cops and help launder some money. Then she is shown to work as a maid for an elite Arab family. To portray a Muslim character in these polarized times really shows guts especially when the othering of the Muslim has been happening 24 7. In fact, just few days back I was shocked to learn that Muslim homes were being marked as Jews homes had been marked in the 1930 s. Not just homes but also businesses too. And after few days in a total hypocritical fashion one of the judges says that you cannot push people to buy or not buy from a shop. This is after systemically doing the whole hate campaign for almost 2 weeks. What value the judge s statements are after 2 weeks ??? The poison has already seeped in But I m drifting from the topic/movie.

The real fun of the movie is the beautiful relationship that happens between Ayisha and Mama, she is the biggest maternal figure in the house and in fact, her command is what goes in the house. The house or palace which is the perfect description is shown as being opulent but not as rich as both Mama and Ayisha are, spiritually and emotionally both giving and sharing of each other. Almost a mother daughter relationship, although with others she is shown as having a bit of an iron hand. Halfway through the movie we come to know that Ayisha was also a dramatist and an actress having worked in early Malayalam movies. I do not want to go through all the ups and downs as that is the beauty of the movie and it needs to be seen for that aspect. I am always sort of in two worlds where should I promote a book or series or movie or not because most of the time it is the unexpected that works. When we have expectation it doesn t. Avatar, the Way of the Water is an exception, not many movies I can recall like that where I had expectations and still the movie surpassed it. So maybe go with no expectations at all

Manju Warrier Manju Warrier should actually be called Manju Warrior as she chose to be with the survivor rather than the sexism that is prevalent in the Malayalam film industry which actually is more or less a mirror of Bollywood and society as whole. These three links should give enough background knowledge as to what has been happening although I m sure my Malayalam friends would more than add to that knowledge whatever may be missing. In quite a few movies, the women are making inroads without significant male strength. Especially Manju s movies have no male lead for the last few movies. Whether that is deliberate part on Manju or an obstacle being put in front of her. Anyone knows that having a male lead and a female lead enriches the value of a movie quite a bit. This doesn t mean one is better than the other but having both enriches the end product, as simple as that. This is sadly not happening. Having POSH training and having an ICC is something that each organization should look forward for. It s kind of mandatory need of hour, especially when we have young people all around us. I am hopeful that people who are from Kerala would shed some more background light on what has been happening.

Books I haven t yet submitted an application for Debconf. But my idea is irrespective of whether or not I m there, I do hope we can have a library where people can donate books and people can take away books as well. A kind of circular marketplace/library where just somebody notes what books are available. Even if 100 odd people are coming to Debconf that easily means 100 books of various languages. That in itself would be interesting and to see what people are reading, wanting to discuss etc. We could even have readings. IIRC, in 2016 we had a children s area, maybe we could do some readings from some books to children which fuels their imagination. Even people like me who are deaf would be willing to look at excerpts and be charmed by them. For instance, in all my forays of fantasy literature except for Babylon Steel I haven t read one book that has a female lead character and I have read probably around 100 odd fantasy books till date. Not a lot but still to my mind, is a big gap as far as literature is concerned. How would more women write fantasy if they don t have heroes to look forward to :(. Or maybe I may be missing some authors and characters that others know and I do not. Do others feel the same or this question hasn t even been asked ??? Dunno. Please let me know.

Debutsav So apparently Debutsav is happening 2 days from now. While I did come to know about it few days back I had to think whether I want to apply for this or apply for Debconf as I physically, emotionally can t do justice to both even though they are a few months apart. I wish all the best for the attendees as well as presenters sharing all the projects and hopefully somebody shares at least some of the projects that are presented there so we may know what new projects or softwares to follow or whatever. Till later.

Debian v12 with codename bookworm was released as new stable release on 10th of June 2023. Similar to what we had with #newinbullseye and previous releases, now it s time for #newinbookworm! I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for bookworm. As usual with major upgrades, there are some things to be aware of, and hereby I m starting my public notes on bookworm that might be worth also for other folks. My focus is primarily on server systems and looking at things from a sysadmin perspective. Further readings As usual start at the official Debian release notes, make sure to especially go through What s new in Debian 12 + Issues to be aware of for bookworm. Package versions As a starting point, let s look at some selected packages and their versions in bullseye vs. bookworm as of 2023-02-10 (mainly having amd64 in mind):

Package	bullseye/v11	bookworm/v12
ansible	2.10.7	2.14.3
apache	2.4.56	2.4.57
apt	2.2.4	2.6.1
bash	5.1	5.2.15
ceph	14.2.21	16.2.11
docker	20.10.5	20.10.24
dovecot	2.3.13	2.3.19
dpkg	1.20.12	1.21.22
emacs	27.1	28.2
gcc	10.2.1	12.2.0
git	2.30.2	2.39.2
golang	1.15	1.19
libc	2.31	2.36
linux kernel	5.10	6.1
llvm	11.0	14.0
lxc	4.0.6	5.0.2
mariadb	10.5	10.11
nginx	1.18.0	1.22.1
nodejs	12.22	18.13
openjdk	11.0.18 + 17.0.6	17.0.6
openssh	8.4p1	9.2p1
openssl	1.1.1n	3.0.8-1
perl	5.32.1	5.36.0
php	7.4+76	8.2+93
podman	3.0.1	4.3.1
postfix	3.5.18	3.7.5
postgres	13	15
puppet	5.5.22	7.23.0
python2	2.7.18	(gone!)
python3	3.9.2	3.11.2
qemu/kvm	5.2	7.2
ruby	2.7+2	3.1
rust	1.48.0	1.63.0
samba	4.13.13	4.17.8
systemd	247.3	252.6
unattended-upgrades	2.8	2.9.1
util-linux	2.36.1	2.38.1
vagrant	2.2.14	2.3.4
vim	8.2.2434	9.0.1378
zsh	5.8	5.9

Linux Kernel The bookworm release ships a Linux kernel based on version 6.1, whereas bullseye shipped kernel 5.10. As usual there are plenty of changes in the kernel area, including better hardware support, and this might warrant a separate blog entry, but to highlight some changes:

• a.out support is gone
• initial support for Rust
• lots of io_uring related improvements
• lots of BPF improvements
• support for Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX)
• ID mapping for mounted filesystems
• unprivileged overlayfs mounts and ID mapping in overlayfs
• NFS re-exporting support
• eager NFS writes with new writes=lazy/eager/wait mount options
• Landlock security module
• initial support for Apple M2
• new misc cgroup and new cgroup.kill file
• new memfd_secret(2) system call
• new NTFS file system implementation
• file system monitoring with fanotify
• lots of improvements around perf, including the new daemon, kwork and iostat commands, and JSON output option for stat

See Kernelnewbies.org for further changes between kernel versions. Configuration management puppet s upstream sadly still doesn t provide packages for bookworm (see PA-4995), though Debian provides puppet-agent and puppetserver packages, and even puppetdb is back again, see release notes for further information. ansible is also available and made it with version 2.14 into bookworm. Prometheus stack Prometheus server was updated from v2.24.1 to v2.42.0 and all the exporters that got shipped with bullseye are still around (in more recent versions of course). Virtualization docker (v20.10.24), ganeti (v3.0.2-3), libvirt (v9.0.0-4), lxc (v5.0.2-1), podman (v4.3.1), openstack (Zed), qemu/kvm (v7.2), xen (v4.17.1) are all still around. Vagrant is available in version 2.3.4, also Vagrant upstream provides their packages for bookworm already. If you re relying on VirtualBox, be aware that upstream doesn t provide packages for bookworm yet (see ticket 21524), but thankfully version 7.0.8-dfsg-2 is available from Debian/unstable (as of 2023-06-10) (VirtualBox isn t shipped with stable releases since quite some time due to lack of cooperation from upstream on security support for older releases, see #794466). rsync rsync was updated from v3.2.3 to v3.2.7, and we got a few new options:

• --fsync: fsync every written file
• --old-dirs: works like dirs when talking to old rsync
• --old-args: disable the modern arg-protection idiom
• --secluded-args, -s: use the protocol to safely send the args (replaces protect-args option)
• --trust-sender: trust the remote sender s file list

OpenSSH OpenSSH was updated from v8.4p1 to v9.2p1, so if you re interested in all the changes, check out the release notes between those version (8.5, 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9, 9.0, 9.1 + 9.2). Let s highlight some notable new features:

• new system for restricting forwarding and use of keys added to ssh-agent(1), see SSH agent restriction for details)
• switched scp(1) from using the legacy scp/rcp protocol to using the SFTP protocol by default (see release notes for v9.0 for details
• ssh(1): when prompting the user to accept a new hostkey, display any other host names/addresses already associated with the key
• ssh(1): allow UserKnownHostsFile=none to indicate that no known_hosts file should be used to identify host keys
• ssh(1): add a ssh_config KnownHostsCommand option that allows the client to obtain known_hosts data from a command in addition to the usual files
• ssh(1), sshd(8): add a RequiredRSASize directive to set a minimum RSA key length
• ssh(1): add a host line to the output of ssh -G showing the original hostname argument
• ssh-keygen -A (generate all default host key types) will no longer generate DSA keys
• ssh-keyscan(1): allow scanning of complete CIDR address ranges, e.g. ssh-keyscan 192.168.0.0/24

One important change you might wanna be aware of is that as of OpenSSH v8.8, RSA signatures using the SHA-1 hash algorithm got disabled by default, but RSA/SHA-256/512 AKA RSA-SHA2 gets used instead. OpenSSH has supported RFC8332 RSA/SHA-256/512 signatures since release 7.2 and existing ssh-rsa keys will automatically use the stronger algorithm where possible. A good overview is also available at SSH: Signature Algorithm ssh-rsa Error. Now tools/libraries not supporting RSA-SHA2 fail to connect to OpenSSH as present in bookworm. For example python3-paramiko v2.7.2-1 as present in bullseye doesn t support RSA-SHA2. It tries to connect using the deprecated RSA-SHA-1, which is no longer offered by default with OpenSSH as present in bookworm, and then fails. Support for RSA/SHA-256/512 signatures in Paramiko was requested e.g. at #1734, and eventually got added to Paramiko and in the end the change made it into Paramiko versions >=2.9.0. Paramiko in bookworm works fine, and a backport by rebuilding the python3-paramiko package from bookworm for bullseye solves the problem (BTDT). Misc unsorted

• new non-free-firmware component/repository (see Debian Wiki for details)
• support only the merged-usr root filesystem layout (see Debian Wiki for details)
• the asterisk package didn t make it into bookworm (see #1031046)
• e2fsprogs: the breaking change related to metadata_csum_seed and orphan_file (see #1031325) was reverted with v1.47.0-2 for bookworm (also see #1031622 + #1030939)
• rsnapshot is back again (see #986709)
• crmadmin of pacemaker no longer interprets the timeout option (-t/ timeout) in milliseconds (as it used to be until v2.0.5), but as of v2.1.0 (and v2.1.5 is present in bookworm) it now interprets the argument as second by default

Thanks to everyone involved in the release, happy upgrading to bookworm, and let s continue with working towards Debian/trixie. :)

Just a few days back we came to know about the horrific Train Crash that happened in Odisha (Orissa). There are some things that are known and somethings that can be inferred by observance. Sadly, it seems the incident is going to be covered up . Some of the facts that have not been contested in the public domain are that there were three lines. One loop line on which the Goods Train was standing and there was an up and a down line. So three lines were there. Apparently, the signalling system and the inter-locking system had issues as highlighted by an official about a month back. That letter, thankfully is in the public domain and I have downloaded it as well. It s a letter that goes to 4 pages. The RW is incensed that the letter got leaked and is in public domain. They are blaming everyone and espousing conspiracy theories rather than taking the minister to task. Incidentally, the Minister has three ministries that he currently holds. Ministry of Communication, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEIT), and Railways Ministry. Each Ministry in itself is important and has revenues of more than 6 lakh crore rupees. How he is able to do justice to all the three ministries is beyond me The other thing is funds both for safety and relaying of tracks has been either not sanctioned or unutilized. In fact, CAG and the Railway Brass had shared how derailments have increased and unfulfilled vacancies but they were given no importance In fact, not talking about safety in the recently held Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session) tells you how much the Govt. is serious about safety. In fact, most of the programme was on high speed rail which is a white elephant. I have shared a whitepaper done by RW in the U.S. that tells how high-speed rail doesn t make economic sense. And that is an economy that is 20 times + the Indian Economy. Even the Chinese are stopping with HSR as it doesn t make economic sense. Incidentally, Air Fares again went up 200% yesterday. Somebody shared in the region of 20k + for an Air ticket from their place to Bangalore Coming back to the story itself. the Goods Train was on the loopline. Some say it was a little bit on the outer, some say otherwise, but it is established that it was on the loopline. This is standard behavior on and around Railway Stations around the world. Whether it was in the Inner or Outer doesn t make much of a difference with what happened next. The first train that collided with the goods train was the 12864 (SMVB-HWH) Yashwantpur Howrah Express and got derailed on to the next track where from the opposite direction 12841 (Shalimar- Bangalore) Coramandel Express was coming. Now they have said that around 300 people have died and that seems to be part of the cover-up. Both the trains are long trains, having between 23 odd coaches each. Even if you have reserved tickets you have 80 odd people in a coach and usually in most of these trains, it is at least double of that. Lot of money goes to TC and then above (Corruption). The Railway fares have gone up enormously but that s a question for perhaps another time . So at the very least, we could be looking at more than 1000 people having died. The numbers are being under-reported so that nobody has to take responsibility. The Railways itself has told that it is unable to identify 80% of the people who have died. This means that 80% were unreserved ticket holders or a majority of them. There have been disturbing images as how bodies have been flung over on tractors and whatnot to be either buried or cremated without a thought. We are in peak summer season so bodies will start to rot within 24-48 hours No arrangements made to cool the bodies and take some information and identifying marks or whatever. The whole thing being done in a very callous manner, not giving dignity to even those who have died for no fault of their own. The dissent note also tells that a cover-up is also in the picture. Apparently, India doesn t have nor does it feel to have a need for something like the NTSB that the U.S. used when it hauled both the plane manufacturer (Boeing) and the FAA when the 737 Max went down due to improper data collection and sharing of data with pilots. And with no accountability being fixed to Minister or any of the senior staff, a small junior staff person may be fired. Perhaps the same official that actually told them about the signal failures almost 3 months back There were and are also some reports that some jugaadu /temporary fixes were applied to signalling and inter-locking just before this incident happened. I do not know nor confirm one way or the other if the above happened. I can however point out that if such a thing happened, then usually a traffic block is announced and all traffic on those lines are stopped. This has been the thing I know for decades. Traveling between Mumbai and Pune multiple times over the years am aware about traffic block. If some repair work was going on and it wasn t able to complete the work within the time-frame then that may well have contributed to the accident. There is also a bit muddying of the waters where it is being said that one of the trains was 4 hours late, which one is conflicting stories. On top of the whole thing, they have put the case to be investigated by CBI and hinting at sabotage. They also tried to paint a religious structure as mosque, later turned out to be a temple. The RW says done by Muslims as it was Friday not taking into account as shared before that most Railway maintenance works are usually done between Friday Monday. This is a practice followed not just in India but world over. There has been also move over a decade to remove wooden sleepers and have concrete sleepers. Unlike the wooden ones they do not expand and contract as much and their life is much more longer than the wooden ones. Funds had been marked (although lower than last few years) but not yet spent. As we know in case of any accident, it is when all the holes in cheese line up it happens. Fukushima is a great example of that, no sea wall even though Japan is no stranger to Tsunamis. External power at the same level as the plant. (10 meters above sea-level), no training for cascading failures scenarios which is what happened. The Days mini-series shares some but not all the faults that happened at Fukushima and the Govt. response to it. There is a difference though, the Japanese Prime Minister resigned on moral grounds. Here, nor the PM, nor the Minister would be resigning on moral grounds or otherwise :(. Zero accountability and that was partly a natural disaster, here it s man-made. In fact, both the Minister and the Prime Minister arrived with their entourages, did a PR blitzkrieg showing how concerned they are. Within 50 hours, the lines were cleared. The part-time Railway Minister shared that he knows the root cause and then few hours later has given the case to CBI. All are saying, wait for the inquiry report. To date, none of the accidents even in this Govt. has produced an investigation report. And even if it did, I am sure it will whitewash as it did in case of Adani as I had shared before in the previous blog post. Incidentally, it is reported that Adani paid off some of its debt, but when questioned as to where they got the money, complete silence on that part :(. As can be seen cover-up after cover-up FWIW, the Coramandel Express is known as the Migrant train so has a huge number of passengers, the other one which was collided with is known as sick train as huge number of cancer patients use it to travel to Chennai and come back

Demonetization 2.0 Few days back, India announced demonetization 2.0. Surprised, don t be. Apparently, INR 2k/- is being used for corruption and Mr. Modi is unhappy about it. He actually didn t like the INR 2k/- note but was told that it was needed, who told him we are unaware to date. At that time the RBI Governor was Mr. Urjit Patel who didn t say about INR 2k/- he had said that INR 1k/- note redesigned would come in the market. That has yet to happen. What has happened is that just like INR 500/- and INR 1k/- note is concerned, RBI will no longer honor the INR 2k/- note. Obviously, this has made our neighbors angry, namely Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan etc. who do some trading with us. 2 Deccan herald columns share the limelight on it. Apparently, India wants to be the world s currency reserve but doesn t want to play by the rules for everyone else. It was pointed out that both the U.S. and Singapore had retired their currencies but they will honor that promise even today. The Singapore example being a bit closer (as it s in Asia) is perhaps a bit more relevant than the U.S. one. Singapore retired the SGD $10,000 as of 2014 but even in 2022, it remains as legal tender. They also retired the SGD $1,000 in 2020 but still remains legal tender.

So let s have a fictitious example to illustrate what is meant by what Singapore has done. Let s say I go to Singapore, rent a flat, and find a $1000 note in that house somewhere. Both practically and theoretically, I could go down to any of the banks, get the amount transferred to my wallet, bank account etc. and nobody will question. Because they have promised the same. Interestingly, the Singapore Dollar has been pretty resilient against the USD for quite a number of years vis-a-vis other Asian currencies. Most of the INR 2k/- notes were also found and exchanged in Gujarat in just a few days (The PM and HM s state.). I am sure you are looking into the mental gymnastics that the RW indulge in :(. What is sadder that most of the people who try to defend can t make sense one way or the other and start to name-call and get personal as they have nothing else

Disability questions dropped in NHFS-6 Just came to know today that in the upcoming National Family Health Survey-6 disability questions are being dropped. Why is this important. To put it simply, if you don t have numbers, you won t and can t make policies for them. India is one of the worst countries to live if you are disabled. The easiest way to share to draw attention is most Railway platforms are not at level with people. Just as Mick Lynch shares in the UK, the same is pretty much true for India too. Meanwhile in Europe, they do make an effort to be level so even disabled people have some dignity. If your public transport is sorted, then people would want much more and you will be obligated to provide for them as they are citizens. Here, we have had many reports of women being sexually molested when being transferred from platform to coach irrespective of their age or whatnot The main takeaway is if you do not have their voice, you won t make policies for them. They won t go away but you will make life hell for them. One thing to keep in mind that most people assume that most people are disabled from birth. This may or may not be true. For e.g. in the above triple Railways accidents, there are bound to be disabled people or newly disabled people who were healthy before the accident. The most common accident is road accidents, some involving pedestrians and vehicles or both, the easiest is Ministry of Road Transport data that says 4,00,000 people sustained injuries in 2021 alone in road mishaps. And this is in a country where even accidents are highly under-reported, for more than one reason. The biggest reason especially in 2 and 4 wheeler is the increased premium they would have to pay if in an accident, so they usually compromise with the other and pay off the Traffic Inspector. Sadly, I haven t read a new book, although there are a few books I m looking forward to have. People living in India and neighbors please be careful as more heat waves are expected. Till later.

Pearls of Luthra Pearls of Luthra is the first book by Brian Jacques and I think I am going to be a fan of his work. This particular book you have to be wary of. While it is a beautiful book with quite a few illustrations, I have to warn that if you are somebody who feels hungry at the very mention of food, then you will be hungry throughout the book. There isn t a single page where food isn t mentioned and not just any kind of food, the kind of food that is geared towards sweet tooth. So if you fancy tarts or chocolates or anything sweet you will right at home. The book also touches upon various teas and wines and various liquors but food is where it shines in literally. The tale is very much like a Harry Potter adventure but isn t as dark as HP was. In fact, apart from one death and one ear missing rest of our heroes and heroines and there are quite a few. I don t want to give too much away as it s a book to be treasured.

Dahaad Dahaad (the roar) is Sonakshi Sinha s entry in OTT/Web Series. The stage is set somewhere in North India while the exploits are based on a real life person called Cyanide Mohan who killed 20 women between 2005-2009. In the web series however, the antagonist s crimes are done over a period of 12 years and has 29 women as his victims. Apart from that it s pretty much a copy of what was done by the person above. It s a melting pot of a series which quite a few stories enmeshed along with the main one. The main onus and plot of the movie is about women from lower economic and caste order whose families want them to be wed but cannot due to huge demands for dowry. Now in such a situation, if a person were to give them a bit of attention, promise marriage and ask them to steal a bit and come with him and whatever, they will do it. The same modus operandi was done by Cynaide Mohan. He had a car that was not actually is but used it show off that he s from a richer background, entice the women, have sex, promise marriage and in the morning after pill there will be cynaide which the women unwittingly will consume. This is also framed by the protagonist Sonakshi Sinha to her mother as her mother is also forcing her to get married as she is becoming older. She shows some of the photographs of the victims and says that while the perpetrator is guilty but so is the overall society that puts women in such vulnerable positions. AFAIK, that is still the state of things. In fact, there is a series called Indian Matchmaking that has all the snobbishness that you want. How many people could have a lifestyle like the ones shown in that, less than 2% of the population. It s actually shows like the above that make the whole thing even more precarious Apart from it, the show also shows prejudice about caste and background. I wouldn t go much into it as it s worth seeing and experiencing.

Tetris Tetris in many a ways is a story of greed. It s also a story of a lone inventor who had to wait almost 20 odd years to profit from his invention. Forbes does a marvelous job of giving some more background and foreground info. about Tetris, the inventor and the producer that went to strike it rich. It also does share about copyright misrepresentation happens but does nothing to address it. Could talk a whole lot but better to see the movie and draw your own conclusions. For me it was 4/5.

Discord Discord became Discord 2.0 and is a blank to me. A blank page. Can t do anything. First I thought it was a bug. Waited for a few days as sometimes webservices do fix themselves. But two weeks on and it still wasn t fixed then decided to look under. One of the tools in Firefox is Web Developer Tools ( CTRL+Shift+I) that tells you if an element of a page is not appearing or at least gives you a hint. To me it gave me the following
Content Security Policy: Ignoring 'unsafe-inline' within script-src or style-src: nonce-source or hash-source specified
Content Security Policy: The page s settings blocked the loading of a resource at data:text/css,%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%2 ( style-src ). data:44:30
Content Security Policy: Ignoring 'unsafe-inline' within script-src or style-src: nonce-source or hash-source specified
TypeError: AudioContext is not a constructor 138875 https://discord.com/assets/cbf3a75da6e6b6a4202e.js:262 l https://discord.com/assets/f5f0b113e28d4d12ba16.js:1ed46a18578285e5c048b.js:241:118 What is being done is dom.webaudio.enabled being disabled in Firefox. Then on a hunch, searched on reddit and saw the following. Be careful while visiting the link as it s labelled NSFW although to my mind there wasn t anything remotely NSFW about it. They do mention using another tool AudioContext Fingerprint Defender which supposedly fakes or spoofs an id. As this add-on isn t tracked by Firefox privacy team it s hard for me to say anything positive or negative. So, in the end I stopped using discord as the alternative was being tracked by them Last but not the least, saw this about a week back. Sooner or later this had to happen as Elon tries to make money off Twitter.

India Press Freedom Just about a week back, India again slipped in the Freedom index, this time falling to 161 out of 180 countries. The RW again made lot of noise as they cannot fathom why it has been happening so. A recent news story gives some idea. Every year NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) puts out its statistics of crimes happening across the country. The report is in public domain. Now according to report shared, around 40k women from Gujarat alone disappeared in the last five years. This is a state where BJP has been ruling for the last 30 odd years. When this report became viral, almost all national newspapers the news was censored/blacked out. For e.g. check out newindianexpress.com, likewise TOI and other newspapers, the news has been 404. The only place that you can get that news is in minority papers like siasat. But the story didn t remain till there. While the NCW (National Commission of Women) pointed out similar stuff happening in J&K, Gujarat Police claimed they got almost 39k women back. Now ideally, it should have been in NCRB data as an addendum as the report can be challenged. But as this news was made viral, nobody knows the truth or false in the above. What BJP has been doing is whenever they get questioned, they try to muddy the waters like that. And most of the time, such news doesn t make to court so the party gets a freebie in a sort as they are not legally challenged. Even if somebody asks why didn t Gujarat Police do it as NCRB report is jointly made with the help of all states, and especially with BJP both in Center and States, they cannot give any excuse. The only excuse you see or hear is whataboutism unfortunately

Profiteering on I.T. Hardware I was chatting with a friend yesterday who is an enthusiast like me but has been more alert about what has been happening in the CPU, motherboard, RAM world. I was simply shocked to hear the prices of motherboards which are three years old, even a middling motherboard. For e.g. the last time I bought a mobo, I spent about 6k but that was for an ATX motherboard. Most ITX motherboards usually sold for around INR 4k/- or even lower. I remember Via especially as their mobos were even cheaper around INR 1.5-2k/-. Even before pandemic, many motherboard manufacturers had closed down shop leaving only a few in the market. As only a few remained, prices started going higher. The pandemic turned it to a seller s market overnight as most people were stuck at home and needed good rigs for either work or leisure or both. The manufacturers of CPU, motherboards, GPU s, Powersupply (SMPS) named their prices and people bought it. So in 2023, high prices remained while warranty periods started coming down. Governments also upped customs and various other duties. So all are in hand in glove in the situation. So as shared before, what I have been offered is a 4 year motherboard with a CPU of that time. I haven t bought it nor do I intend to in short-term future but extremely disappointed with the state of affairs

AMD Issues It s just been couple of hard weeks apparently for AMD. The first has been the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) issue that was shown by couple of security researchers. From what is known, apparently with $200 worth of tools and with sometime you can hack into somebody machine if you have physical access. Ironically, MS made a huge show about TPM and also made it sort of a requirement if a person wanted to have Windows 11. I remember Matthew Garett sharing about TPM and issues with Lenovo laptops. While AMD has acknowledged the issue, its response has been somewhat wishy-washy. But this is not the only issue that has been plaguing AMD. There have been reports of AMD chips literally exploding and again AMD issuing a somewhat wishy-washy response. Asus though made some changes but is it for Zen4 or only 5 parts, not known. Most people are expecting a recession in I.T. hardware this year as well as next year due to high prices. No idea if things will change, if ever

CAT-6 patch cord & ONU Few months back I was offered a fibre service. Most of the service offering has been using Chinese infrastructure including the ONU (Optical Network Unit). Wikipedia doesn t have a good page on ONU hence had to rely on third-party sites. FS (a name I don t really know) has some (good basic info. on ONU and how it s part and parcel of the whole infrastructure. I also got an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) but it seems to be very basic and mostly dumb. I used the old CAT-6 cable ( a decade old) to connect them and it worked for couple of months. Had to change it, first went to know if a higher cable solution offered themselves. CAT-7 is there but not backward compatible. CAT-8 is the next higher version but apparently it s expensive and also not easily bought. I did quite a few tests on CAT-6 and the ONU and it conks out at best 1 mbps which is still far better than what I am used to. CAT-8 are either not available or simply too expensive for home applications atm. A good summary of CAT-8 and what they stand for can be found here. The networking part is hopeless as most consumer facing CPU s and motherboards don t even offer 10 mbps, so asking anything more is just overkill without any benefit. Which does bring me to the next question, something that I may do in a few months or a year down the road. Just to clarify they may say it is 100 mbps or even 1 Gbps but that s plain wrong.

AMD APU, Asus Motherboard & Dealerships I had been thinking of an AMD APU, could wait a while but sooner or later would have to get one. I got quoted an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G with an Asus A320 Motherboard for around 14k which kinda looked steep to me. Quite a few hardware dealers whom I had traded, consulted over years simply shut down. While there are new people, it s much more harder now to make relationships (due to deafness) rather than before. The easiest to share which was also online was pcpartpicker.com that had an Indian domain now no longer available. The number of offline brick and mortar PC business has also closed quite a bit. There are a few new ones but it takes time and the big guys have made more of a killing. I was shocked quite a bit. Came home and browsed a bit and was hit by this. Both AMD and Intel PC business has taken a beating. AMD a bit more as Intel still holds part of the business segment as traditionally been theirs. There have been proofs and allegations of bribing in the past (do remember the EU Antitrust case against Intel for monopoly) but Intel s own cutting corners with the Spectre and Meltdown flaws hasn t helped its case, nor the suits themselves. AMD on the other hand under expertise of Lisa Su has simply grown strength by strength. Inflation and Profiteering by other big companies has made the outlook for both AMD and Intel a bit lackluster. AMD is supposed to show Zen5 chips in a few days time and the rumor mill has been ongoing. Correction Not few days but 2025. Personally, I would be happy with maybe a Ryzen 5600G with an Asus motherboard. My main motive whenever I buy an APU is not to hit beyond 65 TDP. It s kinda middle of the road. As far as what I could read this year and next year we could have AM4+ or something like those updates, AM5 APU s, CPU s and boards are slated to be launched in 2025. I did see pcpricetracker and it does give idea of various APU prices although have to say pcpartpicker was much intuitive to work with than the above. I just had my system cleaned couple of months so touchwood I should be able to use it for another couple of years or more before I have to get one of these APU s and do hope they are worth it. My idea is to use that not only for testing various softwares but also delve a bit into VR if that s possible. I did read a bit about deafness and VR as well. A good summary can be found here. I am hopeful that there may be few people in the community who may look and respond to that. It s crucial.

TRAI-caller, Privacy 101& Element. While most of us in Debian and FOSS communities do engage in privacy, lots of times it s frustrating. I m always looking for videos that seek to share that view why Privacy is needed by individuals and why Governments and other parties hate it. There are a couple of basic Youtube Videos that does explain the same quite practically.

Now why am I sharing the above. It isn t that people do not privacy and how we hold it dear. I share it because GOI just today blocked Element. While it may be trivial for us to workaround the issues, it does tell what GOI is doing. And it still acts as if surprised why it s press ranking is going to pits. Even our Women Wrestlers have been protesting for a week to just file an FIR (First Information Report) . And these are women who have got medals for the country. More than half of these organizations, specifically the women wrestling team don t have POSH which is a mandatory body supposed to be in every organization. POSH stands for Prevention of Sexual Harassment at Workplace. The gentleman concerned is a known rowdy/Goon hence it took almost a week of protest to do the needful I do try not to report because right now every other day we see somewhere or the other the Govt. curtailing our rights and most people are mute Signing out, till later

Cory Doctorow has an insightful article Gig Work is the Opposite of Steampunk [1] about the horrors that companies like Amazon are forcing on their employees. Valerie Aurora and Leigh Honeywell wrote an insightful article about the al Capone theory of sexual harassment [2]. Why people who sexually harass others usually perform other anti-social activity that is also easier to prosecute. The IEEE has an interesting article about using ML for parts of the CPU design process, both the technical issues and the controversy about competing ideas which is probably caused by sexism [3]. Love and taxes are forever my heart is a line from an anime dating sim game that prepares US taxes [4]. Unfortunately it was removed from Steam. The existence of the game is a weird social commentary and removing the game because you can t have an anime hottie do taxes is bizarre but also understandable given liability issues. There s no mention in the review of whether male hotties are available for people who prefer dating guys. As an aside my accountant looks like he is allergic to exercise The Killdozer Book web site (which has an invalid SSL certificate so you have to click on advanced in Chrome to get to the content) has an insightful article debunking some of the stories about the Killdozer [5]. He wasn t some sort of hero of freedom, he was just a jerk who reneged on a deal hoping to get more money, thought that laws shouldn t apply to him, and killed himself because of it. Apparently some big tech companies are knowingly hiring people to not work unlike the usual large corporate case of unknowingly hiring people to not work [6]. Silicon Valley is a good TV show, and it s apparently realistic. Ron Garrett wrote in insightful blog post about theoretical attacks on Bitcoin and how Bitcoin could be used [7]. The conclusion is not good for Bitcoin. Compiler Explorer is a program that shows how various C++ compilers produce assembly code for various architectures, this site hosts the main active instance [8]. There are other instances, here is an instance that produces code for the Ruzzian Elbrus architecture [9]. The Elbrus Wikipedia page is interesting [10]. Apparently the Ruzzians don t want this information to be spread, LOL. The Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article about pet parrots being taught to video call each other [11]. Apparently parrots are social animals and can develop psychological problems if kept alone, so the video calls can be good for them. Also the owners had to monitor the chats to ensure that they played nicely together, just like play-dates for kids! Phoronix has an amusing article about the drama regarding the AMD Spectral Chicken bit in the Linux kernel source [12]. This page listing bad free software licenses is amusing [13]. The ACS has an interesting article about how Samsung fakes photos of the moon and presumably could fake other photos of notable objects that don t change [14]. The way that they proved the forgery was interesting.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2fer3f5j
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2q4wgc26
• [3] https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-design-controversy
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2mslyfcv
• [5] https://killdozerbook.com/2018/07/fake-news/
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/25qtqyn4
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/2dhq5qrx
• [8] https://godbolt.org/
• [9] https://ce.mentality.rip/
• [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S
• [11] https://tinyurl.com/2bktn42p
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/24pqhlf6
• [13] https://github.com/ErikMcClure/bad-licenses
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/2eo65py7

In my day job someone today took the time in the team daily to explain his research why some of our configuration is wrong. He spent quite some time on his own to look at the history in git and how everything was setup initially, and ended up in the current - wrong - way. That triggered me to validate that quickly, another 5min of work. So we agreed to change it. A one line change, nothing spectacular, but lifetime was invested to figure out why it should've a different value. When the pull request got opened a few minutes later there was nothing of that story in the commit message. Zero, nada, nothing. I'm really puzzled why someone invests lifetime to dig into company internal history to try get something right, do a lengthy explanation to the whole team, use the time of others, even mention that there was no explanation of why it's not the default value anymore it should be, and repeat the same mistake by not writing down anything in the commit message. For the current company I'm inclined to propose a commit message validator. For a potential future company I might join, I guess I ask for real world git logs from repositories I should contribute to. Seems that this is another valuable source of information to qualify the company culture. Next up to the existence of whiteboards in the office. I'm really happy that at least a majority of the people contributing to Debian writes somewhat decent commit messages and changelogs. Let that be a reminder to myself to improve in that area the next time I've to change something.

Gray Mountain John Grisham I have been perusing John Grisham s books, some read and some re-read again. Almost all of the books that Mr. Grisham wrote are relevant even today. The Gray Mountain talks about how mountain top removal was done in Applachia, the U.S. (South). In fact NASA made a summary which either was borrowed from this book or the author borrowed from NASA, either could be true although seems it might be the former. And this is when GOI just made a new Forest Conservation Bill 2023 which does the opposite. There are many examples of the same, the latest from my own city as an e.g. Vetal Tekdi is and was a haven for people animals, birds all kinds of ecosystem and is a vital lung of the city, one of the few remaining green spaces in the city but BJP wants to commercialize it as it has been doing for everything, I haven t been to the Himalayas since 4-5 years back as I hear the rape of the land daily. Even after Joshimath tragedy, if people are not opening the eyes what can I do The more I say, the more depressed I will become so will leave it for now. In many ways the destruction seems similar to the destruction that happened in Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro. So as can be seen from what I have shared this book was mostly about environment and punitive damages and also how punitive damages have been ceiling in America (South). This was done via lobbying by the coal groups and apparently destroyed people s lives, communities, even whole villages. It also shared how most people called black lung and how those claims had been denied by Coal Companies all the time. And there are hardly any unions. While the book itself is a fiction piece, there is a large amount of truth in it. And that is one of the reasons people write a fiction book. You could write about reality using fictional names and nobody can sue you while you set the reality as it is. In many ways, it is a tell-all.

The Testament John Grisham One of the things I have loved about John Grisham is he understands human condition. In this book it starts with an eccentric billionaire who makes a will which leaves all his property to an illegitimate child who coincidentally also lives in Brazil, she is a missionary. The whole book is about human failings as well as about finding the heir. I am not going to give much detail as the book itself is fun.

The Appeal John Grisham In this, we are introduced to a company that does a chemical spill for decades and how that leads to lobbying and funding Judicial elections. It does go into quite a bit of length how private money coming from Big business does all kind of shady things to get their person elected to the Supreme Court. Sadly, this seems to happen all the time, for e.g. two weeks ago. This piece from the Atlantic also says the same. Again, won t tell as there is a bit of irony at the end of the book.

The Rainmaker John Grisham This in short is about how Insurance Companies stiff people. It s a wonderful story that has all people in grey including our hero. An engaging book that sorta tells how the Insurance Industry plays the game. In India, the companies are safe as they ask for continuance for years together and their object is to delay the hearings till the grandchildren are not alive unlike in the U.S. or UK. It also does tell how more lawyers are there then required. Both of which are the same in my country.

The Litigators John Grisham This one is about Product Liability, both medicines as well as toys for young kids. What I do find funny a bit is how the law in States allows people to file cases but doesn t protect people while in EU they try their best that if there is any controversy behind any medicine or product, they will simply ban it. Huge difference between the two cultures.

Evolution no longer part of Indian Education A few days ago, NCERT (one of the major bodies) that looks into Indian Education due to BJP influence has removed Darwin s Theory of Evolution. You can t even debate because the people do not understand adaptability. So the only conclusion is that Man suddenly appeared out of nowhere. If that is so, then we are the true aliens. They discard the notion that we and Chimpanzees are similar. Then they also have to discard this finding that genetically we are 96% similar.

This post serves as a report from my attendance to Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2023 Europe that took place in Amsterdam in April 2023. It was my second time physically attending this conference, the first one was in Austin, Texas (USA) in 2017. I also attended once in a virtual fashion. The content here is mostly generated for the sake of my own recollection and learnings, and is written from the notes I took during the event. The very first session was the opening keynote, which reunited the whole crowd to bootstrap the event and share the excitement about the days ahead. Some astonishing numbers were announced: there were more than 10.000 people attending, and apparently it could confidently be said that it was the largest open source technology conference taking place in Europe in recent times. It was also communicated that the next couple iteration of the event will be run in China in September 2023 and Paris in March 2024. More numbers, the CNCF was hosting about 159 projects, involving 1300 maintainers and about 200.000 contributors. The cloud-native community is ever-increasing, and there seems to be a strong trend in the industry for cloud-native technology adoption and all-things related to PaaS and IaaS. The event program had different tracks, and in each one there was an interesting mix of low-level and higher level talks for a variety of audience. On many occasions I found that reading the talk title alone was not enough to know in advance if a talk was a 101 kind of thing or for experienced engineers. But unlike in previous editions, I didn t have the feeling that the purpose of the conference was to try selling me anything. Obviously, speakers would make sure to mention, or highlight in a subtle way, the involvement of a given company in a given solution or piece of the ecosystem. But it was non-invasive and fair enough for me. On a different note, I found the breakout rooms to be often small. I think there were only a couple of rooms that could accommodate more than 500 people, which is a fairly small allowance for 10k attendees. I realized with frustration that the more interesting talks were immediately fully booked, with people waiting in line some 45 minutes before the session time. Because of this, I missed a few important sessions that I ll hopefully watch online later. Finally, on a more technical side, I ve learned many things, that instead of grouping by session I ll group by topic, given how some subjects were mentioned in several talks. On gitops and CI/CD pipelines Most of the mentions went to FluxCD and ArgoCD. At that point there were no doubts that gitops was a mature approach and both flux and argoCD could do an excellent job. ArgoCD seemed a bit more over-engineered to be a more general purpose CD pipeline, and flux felt a bit more tailored for simpler gitops setups. I discovered that both have nice web user interfaces that I wasn t previously familiar with. However, in two different talks I got the impression that the initial setup of them was simple, but migrating your current workflow to gitops could result in a bumpy ride. This is, the challenge is not deploying flux/argo itself, but moving everything into a state that both humans and flux/argo can understand. I also saw some curious mentions to the config drifts that can happen in some cases, even if the goal of gitops is precisely for that to never happen. Such mentions were usually accompanied by some hints on how to operate the situation by hand. Worth mentioning, I missed any practical information about one of the key pieces to this whole gitops story: building container images. Most of the showcased scenarios were using pre-built container images, so in that sense they were simple. Building and pushing to an image registry is one of the two key points we would need to solve in Toolforge Kubernetes if adopting gitops. In general, even if gitops were already in our radar for Toolforge Kubernetes, I think it climbed a few steps in my priority list after the conference. Another learning was this site: https://opengitops.dev/. On etcd, performance and resource management I attended a talk focused on etcd performance tuning that was very encouraging. They were basically talking about the exact same problems we have had in Toolforge Kubernetes, like api-server and etcd failure modes, and how sensitive etcd is to disk latency, IO pressure and network throughput. Even though Toolforge Kubernetes scale is small compared to other Kubernetes deployments out there, I found it very interesting to see other s approaches to the same set of challenges. I learned how most Kubernetes components and apps can overload the api-server. Because even the api-server talks to itself. Simple things like kubectl may have a completely different impact on the API depending on usage, for example when listing the whole list of objects (very expensive) vs a single object. The conclusion was to try avoiding hitting the api-server with LIST calls, and use ResourceVersion which avoids full-dumps from etcd (which, by the way, is the default when using bare kubectl get calls). I already knew some of this, and for example the jobs-framework-emailer was already making use of this ResourceVersion functionality. There have been a lot of improvements in the performance side of Kubernetes in recent times, or more specifically, in how resources are managed and used by the system. I saw a review of resource management from the perspective of the container runtime and kubelet, and plans to support fancy things like topology-aware scheduling decisions and dynamic resource claims (changing the pod resource claims without re-defining/re-starting the pods). On cluster management, bootstrapping and multi-tenancy I attended a couple of talks that mentioned kubeadm, and one in particular was from the maintainers themselves. This was of interest to me because as of today we use it for Toolforge. They shared all the latest developments and improvements, and the plans and roadmap for the future, with a special mention to something they called kubeadm operator , apparently capable of auto-upgrading the cluster, auto-renewing certificates and such. I also saw a comparison between the different cluster bootstrappers, which to me confirmed that kubeadm was the best, from the point of view of being a well established and well-known workflow, plus having a very active contributor base. The kubeadm developers invited the audience to submit feature requests, so I did. The different talks confirmed that the basic unit for multi-tenancy in kubernetes is the namespace. Any serious multi-tenant usage should leverage this. There were some ongoing conversations, in official sessions and in the hallway, about the right tool to implement K8s-whitin-K8s, and vcluster was mentioned enough times for me to be convinced it was the right candidate. This was despite of my impression that multiclusters / multicloud are regarded as hard topics in the general community. I definitely would like to play with it sometime down the road. On networking I attended a couple of basic sessions that served really well to understand how Kubernetes instrumented the network to achieve its goal. The conference program had sessions to cover topics ranging from network debugging recommendations, CNI implementations, to IPv6 support. Also, one of the keynote sessions had a reference to how kube-proxy is not able to perform NAT for SIP connections, which is interesting because I believe Netfilter Conntrack could do it if properly configured. One of the conclusions on the CNI front was that Calico has a massive community adoption (in Netfilter mode), which is reassuring, especially considering it is the one we use for Toolforge Kubernetes. On jobs I attended a couple of talks that were related to HPC/grid-like usages of Kubernetes. I was truly impressed by some folks out there who were using Kubernetes Jobs on massive scales, such as to train machine learning models and other fancy AI projects. It is acknowledged in the community that the early implementation of things like Jobs and CronJobs had some limitations that are now gone, or at least greatly improved. Some new functionalities have been added as well. Indexed Jobs, for example, enables each Job to have a number (index) and process a chunk of a larger batch of data based on that index. It would allow for full grid-like features like sequential (or again, indexed) processing, coordination between Job and more graceful Job restarts. My first reaction was: Is that something we would like to enable in Toolforge Jobs Framework? On policy and security A surprisingly good amount of sessions covered interesting topics related to policy and security. It was nice to learn two realities:

1. kubernetes is capable of doing pretty much anything security-wise and create greatly secured environments.
2. it does not by default. The defaults are not security-strict on purpose.

It kind of made sense to me: Kubernetes was used for a wide range of use cases, and developers didn t know beforehand to which particular setup they should accommodate the default security levels. One session in particular covered the most basic security features that should be enabled for any Kubernetes system that would get exposed to random end users. In my opinion, the Toolforge Kubernetes setup was already doing a good job in that regard. To my joy, some sessions referred to the Pod Security Admission mechanism, which is one of the key security features we re about to adopt (when migrating away from Pod Security Policy). I also learned a bit more about Secret resources, their current implementation and how to leverage a combo of CSI and RBAC for a more secure usage of external secrets. Finally, one of the major takeaways from the conference was learning about kyverno and kubeaudit. I was previously aware of the OPA Gatekeeper. From the several demos I saw, it was to me that kyverno should help us make Toolforge Kubernetes more sustainable by replacing all of our custom admission controllers with it. I already opened a ticket to track this idea, which I ll be proposing to my team soon. Final notes In general, I believe I learned many things, and perhaps even more importantly I re-learned some stuff I had forgotten because of lack of daily exposure. I m really happy that the cloud native way of thinking was reinforced in me, which I still need because most of my muscle memory to approach systems architecture and engineering is from the old pre-cloud days. List of sessions I attended on the first day:

• Keynote
• Node Resource Management: The Big Picture - Sascha Grunert & Swati Sehgal, Red Hat; Alexander Kanevskiy, Intel; Evan Lezar, NVIDIA; David Porter, Google.
• How We Securely Scaled Multi-Tenancy with VCluster, Crossplane, and Argo CD - Ilia Medvedev & Kostis Kapelonis, Codefresh. (Couldn t really attend, room full)
• Flux Beyond Git: Harnessing the Power of OCI - Stefan Prodan & Hidde Beydals, Weaveworks. (Couldn t really attend, room full)
• Tutorial: Measure Twice, Cut Once: Dive Into Network Foundations the Right Way! - Marino Wijay & Jason Skrzypek, Solo.io
• Argo CD Core - A Pure GitOps Agent for Kubernetes - Alexander Matyushentsev, Akuity & Leonardo Luz Almeida, Intuit
• Kubeadm Deep Dive - Rohit Anand, NEC & Paco Xu, Dao
• Cloud Operate Multi-Tenancy Service Mesh with ArgoCD in Production - Lin Sun, Solo.io & Faseela K, Ericsson Software Technology

List of sessions I attended on the second day:

• Keynote
• Setting up Etcd with Kubernetes to Host Clusters with Thousands of Nodes - Marcel Zi ba, Isovalent & Laurent Bernaille, Datadog
• Container Is the New VM: The Paradigm Change No One Explained to You - Marga Manterola, Isovalent & Rodrigo Campos Catelin, Microsoft
• Ephemeral Clusters as a Service with ClusterAPI and GitOps - Alessandro Vozza, Solo.io & Joaquin Rodriguez, Microsoft
• Automating Configuration and Permissions Testing for GitOps with OPA Conftest - Eve Ben Ezra & Michael Hume, The New York Times
• Across Kubernetes Namespace Boundaries: Your Volumes Can Be Shared Now! - Masaki Kimura & Takafumi Takahashi, Hitachi

List of sessions I attended on third day:

• Keynote
• Prevent Embarrassing Cluster Takeovers with This One Simple Trick! - Daniele de Araujo dos Santos & Shane Lawrence, Shopify
• Hacking and Defending Kubernetes Clusters: We ll Do It LIVE!!! - Fabian Kammel & James Cleverley-Prance, ControlPlane
• Painless Multi-Cloud to the Edge Powered by NATS & Kubernetes - Tomasz Pietrek & David Gee, Synadia
• Demystifing IPv6 Kubernetes - Antonio Jose Ojea Garcia, Google & Fernando Gont, Yalo
• Open Policy Agent. (OPA) Intro & Deep Dive - Charlie Egan, Styra, Inc. (Couldn t really attend, room full)
• Practical Challenges with Pod Security Admission - V K rbes & Christian Schlotter, VMware
• Enabling HPC and ML Workloads with the Latest Kubernetes Job Features - Micha Wo niak, Google & Vanessa Sochat, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Can You Keep a Secret? on Secret Management in Kubernetes - Liav Yona & Gal Cohen, Firefly

The videos have been published on Youtube.

PHILIPS PHL 221S8L Those who have been reading this blog for a long time would perhaps know that I had bought a Viewsonic 19 almost 12 years ago. The Monitor was functioning well till last week. I had thought to change it to a 24 monitor almost 3-4 years ago when 24 LCD Monitors were going for around 4k/- or thereabouts. But the monitor kept on functioning and I didn t have space (nor do) to have a dual-monitor setup. It just didn t make sense. Apart from higher electricity charges it would have also have made more demands on my old system which somehow is still functioning even after all those years. Then last week, it started to dim and after couple of days completely conked out. I had wanted to buy a new monitor in front of mum so she could watch movies or whatever but this was not to be. Sp I had to buy an LCD Monitor as Government raised taxes enormously after pandemic. Same/similar monitor that used to cost INR 4k/- today costed me almost INR 7k/- almost double the price. Hooking it to Debian I got the following

$ sudo hwinfo --monitor grep Model Model: "PHILIPS PHL 221S8L" FWIW hwinfo is the latest version

~$ sudo hwinfo --version21.82 I did see couple of movies before starting to write this blog post. Not an exceptional monitor but better than before. I had option from three brands, Dell (most expensive), Philips (middle) and & LG (lowest in prices). Interestingly, Viewsonic disappeared from the market about 5 years back and made a comeback just couple of years ago. Even Philips which had exited the PC Monitor almost a decade back re-entered the market. Apart from the branding, it doesn t make much of a difference as almost all the products including the above monitors are produced in China. I did remember her a lot while buying the monitor as I m sure she would have enjoyed it far more than me but that was not to be

1984 During last week when I didn t have the monitor I re-read 1984. To be completely honest, I had read the above book when I was in the 20 s and I had no context. The protagonist seemed like a whiner and for the life of me I couldn t understand why he didn t try to escape. Re-reading after almost 2 decades and a bit more I shat a number of times because now the context is pretty near and pretty real. I can see why the Republicans in the U.S. banned it. I also realized why the protagnist didn t attempt to run away because wherever he would run away it would be the same thing. It probably is one of the most depressing books I have ever read. To willfully accept what is false after all that torture. What was also interesting to me is to find that George Orwell was also a soldier just like Tolkien was. Both took part and wrote such different stories. While Mr. Tolkien writes and shares the pendulum between hope and despair, Mr. Orwell is decidedly dark. Not grey but dark. I am not sure if I would like to read Animal Farm anytime soon.

The Reaper Man Terry Pratchett It is by sheer coincidence or perhaps I needed something to fill me up when I got The Reaper Man from Terry Pratchett. It was practically like a breath of fresh air. And I love Mr. Pratchett for the inclusivity he brings in. We think about skin color, and what not and here Mr. Pratchett writes about an undead gentleman who s extremely polite as he was a wizard. I won t talk more as I don t really want to spoil the surprise but rest assured everybody is gonna love it. I also read Long Utopia but this is for those who believe and think of multiverses long before it became a buzzword that it is today.

The Firm John Grisham Now I don t know what I should write about this book as there aren t many John Grisham books where a rookie wins against more than one party opposite him. I wouldn t go much into depth but simply say it was worth a read. I am currently reading Gray Mountain. It very much shows how the coal Industry is corrupt and what all it does. It also brings to mind the amount of mining that is done in which Iron is the mostly sought after and done. Now if we are mining 94% Iron then wouldn t it make sense to ask to have a circular economy around Iron but we don t even hear a word about it. Even with all the imagined projections of lithium mining, it would hardly be 10% . I could go on but will finish for now, till later.

While I am not the biggest fan of Docker, I must admit it has quite some reach across various service providers and can often be seen as an API for running things in isolated environments. One such service provider is GitHub when it comes to their Actions service. I have no idea what isolation technology GitHub uses on the outside of Actions, but inside you just get an Ubuntu system and can run whatever you want via Docker as that comes pre-installed and pre-configured. This especially means you can run things inside vanilla Debian containers, that are free from any GitHub or Canonical modifications one might not want ;-) So, if you want to run, say, lintian from sid, you can define a job to do so: This will run on Ubuntu (latest right now means 22.04 for GitHub), but then use Docker to run the debian:sid container and execute all further steps inside it. Pretty short and straight forward, right? Now lintian does static analysis of the package, it doesn't need to install it. What if we want to run autopkgtest that performs tests on an actually installed package? autopkgtest comes with various "virt servers", which are providing isolation of the testbed, so that it does not interfere with the host system. The simplest available virt server, autopkgtest-virt-null doesn't actually provide any isolation, as it runs things directly on the host system. This might seem fine when executed inside an ephemeral container in an CI environment, but it also means that multiple tests have the potential to influence each other as there is no way to revert the testbed to a clean state. For that, there are other, "real", virt servers available: chroot, lxc, qemu, docker and many more. They all have one in common: to use them, one needs to somehow provide an "image" (a prepared chroot, a tarball of a chroot, a vm disk, a container, , you get it) to operate on and most either bring a tool to create such an "image" or rely on a "registry" (online repository) to provide them. Most users of autopkgtest on GitHub (that I could find with their terrible search) are using either the null or the lxd virt servers. Probably because these are dead simple to set up (null) or the most "native" (lxd) in the Ubuntu environment. As I wanted to execute multiple tests that for sure would interfere with each other, the null virt server was out of the discussion pretty quickly. The lxd one also felt odd, as that meant I'd need to set up lxd (can be done in a few commands, but still) and it would need to download stuff from Canonical, incurring costs (which I couldn't care less about) and taking time which I do care about!). Enter autopkgtest-virt-docker, which recently was added to autopkgtest! No need to set things up, as GitHub already did all the Docker setup for me, and almost no waiting time to download the containers, as GitHub does heavy caching of stuff coming from Docker Hub (or at least it feels like that). The only drawback? It was added in autopkgtest 5.23, which Ubuntu 22.04 doesn't have. "We need to go deeper" and run autopkgtest from a sid container! With this idea, our current job definition would look like this: (--setup-commands="apt-get update" is needed as the container comes with an empty apt cache and wouldn't be able to find dependencies of the tested package) However, this will fail: Running the same thing locally of course works, so there has to be something special about the setup at GitHub. But what?! A bit of digging revealed that autopkgtest-virt-docker tries to use a shared directory (using Dockers --volume) to exchange things with the testbed (for the downtmp-host capability). As my autopkgtest is running inside a container itself, nothing it tells the Docker deamon to mount will be actually visible to it. In retrospect this makes total sense and autopkgtest-virt-docker has a switch to "fix" the issue: --remote as the Docker deamon is technically remote when viewed from the place autopkgtest runs at. I'd argue this is not a bug in autopkgtest(-virt-docker), as the situation is actually cared for. There is even some auto-detection of "remote" daemons in the code, but that doesn't "know" how to detect the case where the daemon socket is mounted (vs being set as an environment variable). I've opened an MR (assume remote docker when running inside docker) which should detect the case of running inside a Docker container which kind of implies the daemon is remote. Not sure the patch will be accepted (it is a band-aid after all), but in the meantime I am quite happy with using --remote and so could you ;-)

I have been extremely busy the last 2 weeks churning out KDE snaps! All of the have been tested and released on AMD64 and Arm64 architectures. If you run into any problems please file bugs @ http://bugs.kde.org and feel free to assign me. Thanks!

KDE Krita snap

Krita Version 5.1.5 https://apps.kde.org/krita/

KDE Parley snap

Parley Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/parley/

KDE Kate snap

Kate Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/kate/

KDE Okular snap

Okular Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/okular/

KDE Haruna snap

Haruna Version 0.10.3 https://apps.kde.org/haruna/

KDE Granatier snap

Granatier Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/granatier/

KDE Gwenview snap

Gwenview Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/gwenview/

KDE Gcompris snap

GCompris-qt Version 3.2 https://apps.kde.org/gcompris/

KDE Bomber snap

Bomber Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/bomber/

KDE Falkon snap

Falkon Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/falkon/

KDE Ark snap

Ark Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/ark/

KDE Blinken snap

Blinken Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/blinken/

KDE Bovo Snap

Bovo Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/bovo/

KDE Atikulate snap

Artikulate Version 22.12.3 https://apps.kde.org/artikulate/ There are many more snaps coming your way! As usual, I hate to ask, but if you can spare anything we appreciate it, even if they are just kind words, thank you! https://gofund.me/d73342c3

Three Ancient Civilizations I have been reading books for a long time but somehow I don t know how or when I realized that there are three medieval civilizations that time and again seem to fascinate the authors, either American or European. The three civilizations that do get mentioned every now and then are Egyptian, Greece and Roman and I have no clue as to why. Another two civilizations closely follow them, Mesopotian and Sumerian Civilizations. Why most of the authors irrespective of genre are mystified by these 5 civilizations is beyond me but they also conjure lot of imagination. Now if I was on the right side of 40, maybe 22-25 onwards and had the means or the opportunity or both, I would have gone and tried to learn as much as I can about these various civilizations. There is still a lot of enigma attached and it seems that the official explanations of how these various civilizations ended seems too good to be true or whatever. One of the more interesting points has been how Greece mythology were subverted and flipped to make Roman mythology. Apparently, many Greek gods have a Roman aspect and the qualities are opposite to the Greek aspect. I haven t learned the reason why it is so, yet. Apart from the Iziko Natural Museum in South Africa which did have its share of wonders (the whole South African experience was surreal) nowhere I have witnessed stuff from the above other than in Africa. The whole thing seemed just surreal. I could go on but as I don t know what is real and what is mythology when it comes to various cultures including whatever little I experienced in Africa.

Recent History Having said the above, I also find that many Indians somehow do not either know or are not interested in understanding recent history. I am talking of the time between 1800s and 1950 s. British apologist Mr. William Dalrymple in his book Anarchy has shared how the East Indian Company looted India and gave less than half back to the British. So where did the rest of the money go ? It basically went to the tax free havens around UK. That tale is very much similar as to how the Axis gold was used to have an entity called Switzerland from scratch. There have been books as well as couple of miniseries or two that document that fact. But for me this is not the real story, this is more of a side dish per-se. The real story perhaps is how the EU peace project was born. Because of Hitler s rise and the way World War 2 happened, the Allies knew that they couldn t subjugate Germany through another humiliation as they had after World War 1, who knows another Hitler might come. So while they did fine the Germans, they also helped them via the Marshall plan. Germany also realized that it had been warring with other European countries for over a thousand years as well as quite a few other countries. The first sort of treaty immediately in that regard was the Western Union Alliance . While on the face of it, it was a defense treaty between sovereign powers. Interestingly, as can be seen UK at that point in time wanted more countries to be part of the Treaty of Dunkirk. This was quickly followed 2 years later by the Treaty of London which made way for the Council of Europe to be formed. The reason I am sharing is because a lot of Indians whom I meet on SM do not know that UK was instrumental front and center for the formation of European Union (EU). Also they perhaps don t realize that after World War 2, UK was greatly diminished both financially and militarily. That is the reason it gave back its erstwhile colonies including India and other countries. If UK hadn t become a part of EU they would have been called the poor man of Europe as they had been called few hundred years ago. In fact, after Brexit, UK has been the only nation that has fallen on the dire times as much as it has. They have practically no food, supermarkets running out of veggies and whatnot. electricity sky-high as they don t want to curtail profits of the gas companies which in turn donate money to Tory coffers. Sadly, most of my brethen do not know that hence I have had to share it. The EU became a power in its own right due to Gravity model of trade. The U.S. is attempting the same thing and calls it near off-shoring.

Tesla, Investor Day Presentation, Toyota and Free Software The above brings it nicely about the Tesla Investor Day that happened couple of weeks back. The biggest news though was broken just 24 hours earlier when the governor of Monterrey] shared how Giga New Mexico would be happening and shared some site photographs. There have been bits of news on that off-and-on since then. Toyota meanwhile has been putting lot of anti-EV posters and whatnot. In fact, India seems to be mirroring Japan in a lot of ways, the only difference is Japan is still superior economically than India. I do sincerely hope that at least Japan can get out of its lost decades. I have asked privately if any of the Japanese translators would be willing to translate the anti-EV poster so we may all know.

Anti-EV poster by Toyota

Urinal outside UK Embassy About a week back few people chanting Khalistan entered the Indian Embassy and showed the flags. This was in the UK. Now in a retaliatory move against a friendly nation, we want to make a Urinal. after making a security downgrade for the Embassy. The pettiness being shown by Indian Govt. especially when it has very few friends. There are also plans to do the same for the U.S. and other embassies as well. I do not know when we will get common sense.

Holi Just a few weeks back, Holi happened. It used to be a sweet and innocent festival. But from the last few years, I have been hearing and seeing sexual harassment on the rise. In fact, saw quite a few lewd posts written to women on Holi or verge of Holi and also videos of the same. One of the most shameful incidents occurred with a Japanese tourist. She was not only sexually molested but also terrorized that if she were to report then she could be raped and murdered. She promptly left Delhi. Once it was reported in mass media, Delhi Police tried to show it was doing something. FWIW, Delhi s crime against women stats have been at record high and conviction at record low.

Ecommerce Rules being changed, logistics gonna be tough. Just today there have been changes in Ecommerce rules (again) and this is gonna be a pain for almost all companies big and small with the exception of Adani and Ambani. Almost all players including the Tatas have called them out. Of course, all such laws have been passed without debate. In such a scenario, small startups like these cannot hope to grow their business.

Inertial Measurement Unit or Full Body Tracking with cheap hardware. Apparently, a whole host of companies are looking at 3-D tracking using cheap hardware apparently known as IMU sensors. Sooner than later cheap 3-D glasses and IMU sensors should explode the 3-D market worldwide. There is a huge potential and upside to it and will probably overtake smartphones as well. But then the danger will be of our thoughts, ideas, nightmares etc. to be shared without our consent. The more we tap into a virtual world, what stops anybody from tapping into our brain and practically stealing our identity in more than one way. I dunno if there are any Debian people or FSF projects working on the above. Even Laws can only do so much, until and unless there are alternative places and ways it would be difficult to say the least

Review: Thief of Time, by Terry Pratchett

Series:	Discworld #26
Publisher:	Harper
Copyright:	May 2001
Printing:	August 2014
ISBN:	0-06-230739-8
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	420

Thief of Time is the 26th Discworld novel and the last Death novel, although he still appears in subsequent books. It's the third book starring Susan Sto Helit, so I don't recommend starting here. Mort is the best starting point for the Death subseries, and Reaper Man provides a useful introduction to the villains. Jeremy Clockson was an orphan raised by the Guild of Clockmakers. He is very good at making clocks. He's not very good at anything else, particularly people, but his clocks are the most accurate in Ankh-Morpork. He is therefore the logical choice to receive a commission by a mysterious noblewoman who wants him to make the most accurate possible clock: a clock that can measure the tick of the universe, one that a fairy tale says had been nearly made before. The commission is followed by a surprise delivery of an Igor, to help with the clock-making. People who live in places with lots of fields become farmers. People who live where there is lots of iron and coal become blacksmiths. And people who live in the mountains near the Hub, near the gods and full of magic, become monks. In the highest valley are the History Monks, founded by Wen the Eternally Surprised. Like most monks, they take apprentices with certain talents and train them in their discipline. But Lobsang Ludd, an orphan discovered in the Thieves Guild in Ankh-Morpork, is proving a challenge. The monks decide to apprentice him to Lu-Tze the sweeper; perhaps that will solve multiple problems at once. Since Hogfather, Susan has moved from being a governess to a schoolteacher. She brings to that job the same firm patience, total disregard for rules that apply to other people, and impressive talent for managing children. She is by far the most popular teacher among the kids, and not only because she transports her class all over the Disc so that they can see things in person. It is a job that she likes and understands, and one that she's quite irate to have interrupted by a summons from her grandfather. But the Auditors are up to something, and Susan may be able to act in ways that Death cannot. This was great. Susan has quickly become one of my favorite Discworld characters, and this time around there is no (or, well, not much) unbelievable romance or permanently queasy god to distract. The clock-making portions of the book quickly start to focus on Igor, who is a delightful perspective through whom to watch events unfold. And the History Monks! The metaphysics of what they are actually doing (which I won't spoil, since discovering it slowly is a delight) is perhaps my favorite bit of Discworld world building to date. I am a sucker for stories that focus on some process that everyone thinks happens automatically and investigate the hidden work behind it. I do want to add a caveat here that the monks are in part a parody of Himalayan Buddhist monasteries, Lu-Tze is rather obviously a parody of Laozi and Daoism in general, and Pratchett's parodies of non-western cultures are rather ham-handed. This is not quite the insulting mess that the Chinese parody in Interesting Times was, but it's heavy on the stereotypes. It does not, thankfully, rely on the stereotypes; the characters are great fun on their own terms, with the perfect (for me) balance of irreverence and thoughtfulness. Lu-Tze refusing to be anything other than a sweeper and being irritatingly casual about all the rules of the order is a classic bit that Pratchett does very well. But I also have the luxury of ignoring stereotypes of a culture that isn't mine, and I think Pratchett is on somewhat thin ice. As one specific example, having Lu-Tze's treasured sayings be a collection of banal aphorisms from a random Ankh-Morpork woman is both hilarious and also arguably rather condescending, and I'm not sure where I landed. It's a spot-on bit of parody of how a lot of people who get very into "eastern religions" sound, but it's also equating the Dao De Jing with advice from the Discworld equivalent of a English housewife. I think the generous reading is that Lu-Tze made the homilies profound by looking at them in an entirely different way than the woman saying them, and that's not completely unlike Daoism and works surprisingly well. But that's reading somewhat against the grain; Pratchett is clearly making fun of philosophical koans, and while anything is fair game for some friendly poking, it still feels a bit weird. That isn't the part of the History Monks that I loved, though. Their actual role in the story doesn't come out of the parody. It's something entirely native to Discworld, and it's an absolute delight. The scene with Lobsang and the procrastinators is perhaps my favorite Discworld set piece to date. Everything about the technology of the History Monks, even the Bond parody, is so good. I grew up reading the Marvel Comics universe, and Thief of Time reminds me of a classic John Byrne or Jim Starlin story, where the heroes are dumped into the middle of vast interdimensional conflicts involving barely-anthropomorphized cosmic powers and the universe is revealed to work in ever more intricate ways at vastly expanding scales. The Auditors are villains in exactly that tradition, and just like the best of those stories, the fulcrum of the plot is questions about what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, and the surprising alliances these non-human powers make with humans or semi-humans. I devoured this kind of story as a kid, and it turns out I still love it. The one complaint I have about the plot is that the best part of this book is the middle, and the end didn't entirely work for me. Ronnie Soak is at his best as a supporting character about three quarters of the way through the book, and I found the ending of his subplot much less interesting. The cosmic confrontation was oddly disappointing, and there's a whole extended sequence involving chocolate that I think was funnier in Pratchett's head than it was in mine. The ending isn't bad, but the middle of this book is my favorite bit of Discworld writing yet, and I wish the story had carried that momentum through to the end. I had so much fun with this book. The Discworld novels are clearly getting better. None of them have yet vaulted into the ranks of my all-time favorite books there's always some lingering quibble or sagging bit but it feels like they've gone from reliably good books to more reliably great books. The acid test is coming, though: the next book is a Rincewind book, which are usually the weak spots. Followed by The Last Hero in publication order. There is no direct thematic sequel. Rating: 8 out of 10

A new release 0.2.7 of our RcppSMC package arrived at CRAN earlier today. It contains several extensions added by team member (and former GSoC student) Ilya Zarubin since the last release. We were a little slow to release those but one of those CRAN emails forced our hand for a release now. The updated uninitialized variable messages in clang++-16 have found a fan in Brian Ripley, and so he sent us a note. And as the issue was trivially reproducible with clang++-15 here too I had it fixed in no time. And both changes taken together form the incremental 0.2.7 release. RcppSMC provides Rcpp-based bindings to R for the Sequential Monte Carlo Template Classes (SMCTC) by Adam Johansen described in his JSS article. Sequential Monte Carlo is also referred to as Particle Filter in some contexts. The package now also features the Google Summer of Code work by Leah South in 2017, and by Ilya Zarubin in 2021. The release is summarized below.

Changes in RcppSMC version 0.2.7 (2023-03-22)

• Extensive extensions for conditional SMC and resample, updated hello_world example, added skeleton function for easier package creation (Ilya in #67,#72)
• Small package updates (Dirk in #75 fixing #74)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report for this release. More information is on the RcppSMC page. Issues and bugreports should go to the GitHub issue tracker. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

For those who can t see the above poster says the following A handful of retired Supreme Court judges who are part of Anti-India and are trying to make Indian judiciary play role of the Opposition party. Law Minister Kiren Rijiju. Now, just to give bit more of a context, the above has happened as the CJI (Chief Justice has not been listening or toeing their line) The above is a statement given by CJI DY Chandrachud. He says and I quote Democracy needs truth to survive. Democracy and truth go hand in hand. Speaking truth to power is a right of every citizen in a democracy. It is equally a duty.

Another quote by him. I am personally averse to sealed covers. There has to be transparency in Court. This is about implementing the orders. What can be secrecy here. Now I need to again give context of the various statements given. The law minister who gave this statement, his name incidentally came first under the radar sometime in 2013-2014 in a list given/shared by Union Home Secretary R K Singh (then in UPA, now in BJP) as an anti-India China sympathizer. Of course today all sorts of thugs use the brand nationalism he is one of them. Now as far as the CJI is concerned, AFAIK I know he bent over backwards for them but they were not pleased with him. The latest sealed cover statement is because BJP wanted to put a sealed cover in the ongoing Udhav Thackeray vs Eknath Shinde case where BJP or the Eknath Shinde faction tried to give a sealed cover. The problem with sealed cover is for any defence there is nothing to fight against it. It could be a blank paper, it could be whole lot of gossip or innuendo, unless it s out in the open the prosecution in this case i.e. Udhav Thackeray team could not effectively fight as they do not know the contents of the said sealed cover. This goes against all judicial norms. The U.S. tried with sealed cover and ended the practise only after couple of cases. Even in the OROP case (One Rank One Pension) the Govt. tried the same trick. As I have shared before, this actually comes Senator Joseph Mccarthy who started this whole thing in 1950 s, a bit of background on him. I probably had shared about him before but it bears to know and remember again and again. The same is what Mr. Trump has done time and again. It s a similar script. Bully your opponents and use sealed cover as no questions can be asked about it. The good news though is that the views of CJI have been changing. So, yes they would like to change the CJI, they actually have been trying to have their own man have keys to the judiciary but without success so far, soon though this bastion would also fall, if not today then tomorrow. The EC (Election Commission) has been thoroughly compromised. Would not share more as that EC s bending acts would use a whole blog post or two to share the numerous instances where BJP has been given all rights. In fact, via RTI it came to be known that many of the BJP leaders had given false statements about their education in the EC affidavit. That alone should have been grounds for throwing out the legislators but in their wisdom they see fit to remain blind. The latest case is of Mr. Nishikant Dubey. Of course, even with the legal documents shared in public domain and EC having powers to verify such documents, they are choosing to remain silent. If one has lied about one thing in an affidavit, what or how many lies he has shared in that same document. And how are you supposed to trust anything that comes out of his mouth. This is the state of not just Mr. Dubey but a whole lot of people who are in BJP today. And EC as an institution seems to be let down. There was a time when it was lead by T.N. Seshan who was courageous, fearless and fair. He later went to become Speaker but even then he was harsh but fair. Perhaps people thought we will always have people like him. Hence instead of strong institutions having strong rules, we based our trust on people and hence we are where we are There is much to share but some other day, Till later.