This post is the second and final part of my Malaysia-Thailand trip. Feel free to check out the Malaysia part here if you haven t already. Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok is around 1500 km by road, and so I took a Malaysian Airlines flight to travel to Bangkok. The flight staff at the Kuala Lumpur only asked me for a return/onward flight and Thailand immigration asked a few questions but did not check any documents (obviously they checked and stamped my passport ;)). The currency of Thailand is the Thai baht, and 1 Thai baht = 2.5 Indian Rupees. The Thailand time is 1.5 hours ahead of Indian time (For example, if it is 12 noon in India, it will be 13:30 in Thailand).
I landed in Bangkok at around 3 PM local time. Fletcher was in Bangkok that time, leaving for Pattaya and we had booked the same hostel. So I took a bus to Pattaya from the airport. The next bus for which the tickets were available was at 7 PM, so I took tickets for that one. The bus ticket cost was 143 Thai Baht. I didn t buy SIM at the airport, thinking there must be better deals in the city. As a consequence, there was no way to contact Fletcher through internet. Although I had a few minutes call remaining out of my international roaming pack.
A welcome sign at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport.
Bus from Suvarnabhumi Airport to Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.
Our accommodation was near Jomtien beach, so I got off at the last stop, as the bus terminates at the Jomtien beach. Then I decided to walk towards my accommodation. I was using OsmAnd for navigation. However, the place was not marked on OpenStreetMap, and it turned out I missed the street my hostel was on and walked around 1 km further as I was chasing a similarly named incorrect hostel on OpenStreetMap. Then I asked for help from two men sitting at a caf . One of them said he will help me find the street my hostel is on. So, I walked with him, and he told me he lives in Thailand for many years, but he is from Kuwait. He also gave me valuable information. Like, he told me about shared hail-and-ride songthaews which run along the Jomtien Second Road and charge 10 Baht for any distance on their route. This tip significantly reduced our expenses. Further, he suggested me 7-Eleven shops for buying a local SIM. Like Malaysia, Thailand has 24/7 7-Eleven convenience stores, a lot of them not even 100 m apart.
The Kuwaiti person dropped me at the address where my hostel was. I tried searching for a person in-charge of that hostel, and soon I realized there was no reception. After asking for help from locals for some time, I bumped into Fletcher, who also came to this address and was searching for the same. After finding a friend, I felt a sigh of relief. Adjacent to the property, there was a hairdresser shop. We went there and asked about this property. The woman called the owner, and she also told us the required passcodes to go inside. Our accommodation was in a room on the second floor, which required us to put a passcode for opening. We entered the passcode and entered the room. So, we stayed at this hostel which had no reception. Due to this, it took 2 hours to find our room and enter. It reminded me of a difficult experience I had in Albania, where me and Akshat were not able to find our apartment in one of the hottest days and the owner didn t know our language.
Traveling from the place where the bus dropped me to the hostel, I saw streets were filled with bars and massage parlors, which was expected. Prostitutes were everywhere. We went out at night towards the beach and also roamed around in 7-Elevens to buy a SIM card for myself. I got a SIM for 7 day unlimited internet for 399 baht. Turns out that the rates of SIM cards at the airport were not so different from inside the city.
Road near Jomtien beach in Pattaya
Photo of a songthaew in Pattaya. There are shared songthaews which run along Jomtien Second road and takes 10 bath to anywhere on the route.
Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.
In terms of speaking English, locals didn t know English at all in both Pattaya and Bangkok. I normally don t expect locals to know English in a non-English speaking country, but the fact that Bangkok is one of the most visited places by tourists made me expect locals to know some English. Talking to locals is an integral part of travel for me, which I couldn t do a lot in Thailand. This aspect is much more important for me than going to touristy places.
So, we were in Pattaya. Next morning, Fletcher and I went to Tiger park using shared songthaew. After that, we planned to visit Pattaya Floating market which is near the Tiger Park, but we felt the ticket prices were higher than it was worth. Fletcher had to leave for Bangkok on that day. I suggested him to go to Suvarnabhumi Airport from the Jomtien beach bus terminal (this was the route I took the last day in opposite direction) to avoid traffic congestion inside Bangkok, as he can follow up with metro once he reaches the airport. From the floating market, we were walking in sweltering heat to reach the Jomtien beach. I tried asking for a lift and eventually got successful as a scooty stopped, and surprisingly the person gave a ride to both of us. He was from Delhi, so maybe that s the reason he stopped for us. Then we took a songthaew to the bus terminal and after having lunch, Fletcher left for Bangkok.
A welcome sign at Pattaya Floating market.
This Korean Vegetasty noodles pack was yummy and was available at many 7-Eleven stores.
Next day I went to Bangkok, but Fletcher already left for Kuala Lumpur. Here I had booked a private room in a hotel (instead of a hostel) for four nights, mainly because of my luggage. This costed 5600 INR for four nights. It was 2 km from the metro station, which I used to walk both sides. In Bangkok, I visited Sukhumvit and Siam by metro. Going to some areas require crossing the Chao Phraya river. For this, I took Chao Phraya Express Boat for going to places like Khao San road and Wat Arun. I would recommend taking the boat ride as it had very good views. In Bangkok, I met a person from Pakistan staying in my hotel and so here also I got some company. But by the time I met him, my days were almost over. So, we went to a random restaurant selling Indian food where we ate some paneer dish with naan and that restaurant person was from Myanmar.
Wat Arun temple stamps your hand upon entry
Wat Arun temple
Khao San Road
A food stall at Khao San Road
Chao Phraya Express Boat
For eating, I mainly relied on fruits and convenience stores. Bananas were very tasty. This was the first time I saw banana flesh being yellow. Mangoes were delicious and pineapples were smaller and flavorful. I also ate Rose Apple, which I never had before. I had Chhole Kulche once in Sukhumvit. That was a little expensive as it costed 164 baht. I also used to buy premix coffee packets from 7-Eleven convenience stores and prepare them inside the stores.
Banana with yellow flesh
Fruits at a stall in Bangkok
Trimmed pineapples from Thailand.
Corn in Bangkok.
A board showing coffee menu at a 7-Eleven store along with rates in Pattaya.
In this section of 7-Eleven, you can buy a premix coffee and mix it with hot water provided at the store to prepare.
My booking from Bangkok to Delhi was in Air India flight, and they were serving alcohol in the flight. I chose red wine, and this was my first time having alcohol in a flight.
Red wine being served in Air India
Notes
In this whole trip spanning two weeks, I did not pay for drinking water (except for once in Pattaya which was 9 baht) and toilets. Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur have plenty of malls where you should find a free-of-cost toilet nearby. For drinking water, I relied mainly on my accommodation providing refillable water for my bottle.
Thailand seemed more expensive than Malaysia on average. Malaysia had discounted price due to the Chinese New year.
I liked Pattaya more than Bangkok. Maybe because Pattaya has beach and Bangkok doesn t. Pattaya seemed more lively, and I could meet and talk to a few people as opposed to Bangkok.
Chao Phraya River express boat costs 150 baht for one day where you can hop on and off to any boat.
I ended 2022 with a musical retrospective and very much enjoyed writing
that blog post. As such, I have decided to do the same for 2023! From now on,
this will probably be an annual thing :)
Albums
In 2023, I added 73 new albums to my collection nearly 2 albums every three
weeks! I listed them below in the order in which I acquired them.
I purchased most of these albums when I could and borrowed the rest at
libraries. If you want to browse though, I added links to the album covers
pointing either to websites where you can buy them or to Discogs when digital
copies weren't available.
Once again this year, it seems that Punk (mostly O !) and Metal dominate my
list, mostly fueled by Angry Metal Guy and the amazing Montr al
Skinhead/Punk concert scene.
Concerts
A trend I started in 2022 was to go to as many concerts of artists I like as
possible. I'm happy to report I went to around 80% more concerts in 2023 than
in 2022! Looking back at my list, April was quite a busy month...
Here are the concerts I went to in 2023:
March 8th: Godspeed You! Black Emperor
April 11th: Alexandra Str liski
April 12th: Bikini Kill
April 21th: Brigada Flores Magon, Union Thugs
April 28th: Komintern Sect, The Outcasts, Violent Way, Ultra Razzia, Over the
Hill
May 3rd: First Fragment
May 12th: Rhapsody of Fire, Wind Rose
May 13th: Aeternam
June 2nd: Mortier, La Gachette
June 17th: Ultra Razzia, Total Nada, BLEMISH
June 30th: Avishai Cohen Trio
July 9th: Richard Galliano
August 18th: Gojira, Mastodon, Lorna Shore
September 14th: Jinjer
September 22nd: CUIR, Salvaje Punk, Hysteric Polemix, Perestroika, Ultra Razzia, Ilusion, Over the Hill, Asbestos
October 6th: Rancoeur, Street Code, Tenaz, Mortimer, Guernica, High Anxiety
Although metalfinder continues to work as intended, I'm very glad to have
discovered the Montr al underground scene has departed from Facebook/Instagram
and adopted en masseGancio, a FOSS community agenda that supports
ActivityPub. Our local instance, askapunk.net
is pretty much all I could ask for :)
That's it for 2023!
It s that time of year already! We have hit our first freeze of the year. While the kitties keep warm by the wood burning stove, I have been busy with many updates and fixes in a variety of projects.
KDE neon:
It s true, Neon unstable has been very unstable. Due to a few factors including a builder being out of space, timed with a new Qt release. There is a cost with living in unstable land with bleeding edge releases. It takes time and finesse to get everything happy, especially with major transitions such as Qt. The drive issue was just bad timing. We worked night and day ( quite literally with people spanning from the US, Europe and Australia ) to get everything happy again. I know it s frustrating when things are broken, but please keep in mind, most of us are volunteers. I am happy to report, it is once again stable. If you continue to experience issues please report them on https://bugs.kde.org there have been a few cases where there were rogue apt sources lists creating issues. We also have the User edition which is much more stable!
KDE Snaps:
The big move to snapcraft files per repo continues. With that comes a new version 23.08.2. This big win this week was Audiotube! I have finally got this snap working. With a combination of snappy-debug and snap run gdb audiotube I was able to find all the hidden dependencies such as yt-dlp needed to be built with ffmpeg support and it needed a newer ytmusicapi as the version it called for was broken with gettext translations. I also had to fix the dbus name as it was not the standard org.kde.app. The final fix was it required the alsa plug and layouts adjusted to point to the snap alsa libraries ( which fixed the very important sound feature ). Who says you can t teach an old dog new tricks. Unfortunately, it still requires devmode to run, as it has one last network issue even with all the network plugs. I have to set it aside for now, as I have many more snaps to migrate. However, if you want to enjoy youtube music with this super awesome app you can, just append devmode when installing. Enjoy!
The following apps have now migrated to their respective KDE repos and have the snap recipes in launchpad for automated builds:
Blinken
Bovo
Calindori
Dragon
Dolphin ( still needs work )
Digikam ( still needs work )
Elisa ( Working on new qml issue )
Falkon
Filelight
GCompris
Granatier
Ghostwriter
Gwenview ( working on missing dependency )
Haruna ( still needs work )
isoimagewriter ( working on gpg support )
Itinerary
Juk
K3b ( still needs work )
A new content pack with the latest Frameworks 5.110 and Qt 5.15.11 is complete and the neon extension update will follow after the required global autoconnect is approved from the store.
Debian:
I have caught up on my dashboard with new releases, fixed test failures, and FTBFS on the more obscure arches. The following debian packages have been uploaded to unstable:
If you have made it this far, thank you! As you can see I am quite busy and there is still much to do. If you can possibly spare a donation so I can continue my efforts in KDE neon / KDE Snaps / and Debian, it would be so appreciated. I enjoy doing this work and I hope it benefits someone out there. Have a lovely day and thanks for stopping by.
Donatehttps://gofund.me/b8b69e54
There is a bit of context that needs to be shared before I get to this and would be a long one. For reasons known and unknown, I have a lot of sudden electricity outages. Not just me, all those who are on my line. A discussion with a lineman revealed that around 200+ families and businesses are on the same line and when for whatever reason the electricity goes for all. Even some of the traffic lights don t work. This affects software more than hardware or in some cases, both. And more specifically HDD s are vulnerable. I had bought an APC unit several years for precisely this, but over period of time it just couldn t function and trips also when the electricity goes out. It s been 6-7 years so can t even ask customer service to fix the issue and from whatever discussions I have had with APC personnel, the only meaningful difference is to buy a new unit but even then not sure this is an issue that can be resolved, even with that.
That comes to the issue that happens once in a while where the system fsck is unable to repair /home and you need to use an external pen drive for the same. This is my how my hdd stacks up / is on dev/sda7 /boot is on /dev/sda6, /boot/efi is on /dev/sda2 and /home is on /dev/sda8 so theoretically, if /home for some reason doesn t work I should be able drop down on /dev/sda7, unmount /dev/sda8, run fsck and carry on with my work. I tried it number of times but it didn t work. I was dropping down on tty1 and attempting the same, no dice as root/superuser getting the barest x-term. So first I tried asking couple of friends who live nearby me. Unfortunately, both are MS-Windows users and both use what are called as company-owned laptops . Surfing on those systems were a nightmare. Especially the number of pop-ups of ads that the web has become. And to think about how much harassment ublock origin has saved me over the years. One of the more interesting bits from both their devices were showing all and any downloads from fosshub was showing up as malware. I dunno how much of that is true or not as haven t had to use it as most software we get through debian archives or if needed, download from github or wherever and run/install it and you are in business. Some of them even get compiled into a good .deb package but that s outside the conversation atm. My only experience with fosshub was few years before the pandemic and that was good. I dunno if fosshub really has malware or malwarebytes was giving false positives. It also isn t easy to upload a 600 MB+ ISO file somewhere to see whether it really has malware or not. I used to know of a site or two where you could upload a suspicious file and almost 20-30 famous and known antivirus and anti-malware engines would check it and tell you the result. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the URL and seeing things from MS-Windows perspective, things have gotten way worse than before.
So left with no choice, I turned to the local LUG for help. Fortunately, my mobile does have e-mail and I could use gmail to solicit help. While there could have been any number of live CD s that could have helped but one of my first experiences with GNU/Linux was that of Knoppix that I had got from Linux For You (now known as OSFY) sometime in 2003. IIRC, had read an interview of Mr. Klaus Knopper as well and was impressed by it. In those days, Debian wasn t accessible to non-technical users then and Knoppix was a good tool to see it. In fact, think he was the first to come up with the idea of a Live CD and run with it while Canonical/Ubuntu took another 2 years to do it. I think both the CD and the interview by distrowatch was shared by LFY in those early days. Of course, later the story changes after he got married, but I think that is more about Adriane rather than Knoppix. So Vishal Rao helped me out. I got an HP USB 3.2 32GB Type C OTG Flash Drive x5600c (Grey & Black) from a local hardware dealer around similar price point. The dealer is a big one and has almost 200+ people scattered around the city doing channel sales who in turn sell to end users. Asking one of the representatives about their opinion on stopping electronic imports (apparently more things were added later to the list including all sorts of sundry items from digital cameras to shavers and whatnot.) The gentleman replied that he hopes that it would not happen otherwise more than 90% would have to leave their jobs. They already have started into lighting fixtures (LED bulbs, tubelights etc.) but even those would come in the same ban
The main argument as have shared before is that Indian Govt. thinks we need our home grown CPU and while I have no issues with that, as shared before except for RISC-V there is no other space where India could look into doing that. Especially after the Chip Act, Biden has made that any new fabs or any new thing in chip fabrication will only be shared with Five Eyes only. Also, while India is looking to generate about 2000 GW by 2030 by solar, China has an ambitious 20,000 GW generation capacity by the end of this year and the Chinese are the ones who are actually driving down the module prices. The Chinese are also automating their factories as if there s no tomorrow. The end result of both is that China will continue to be the world s factory floor for the foreseeable future and whoever may try whatever policies, it probably is gonna be difficult to compete with them on prices of electronic products. That s the reason the U.S. has been trying so that China doesn t get the latest technology but that perhaps is a story for another day.
HP USB 3.2 Type C OTG Flash Drive x5600c
For people who have had read this blog they know that most of the flash drives today are MLC Drives and do not have the longevity of the SLC Drives. For those who maybe are new, this short brochure/explainer from Kingston should enhance your understanding. SLC Drives are rare and expensive. There are also a huge number of counterfeit flash drives available in the market and almost all the companies efforts whether it s Kingston, HP or any other manufacturer, they have been like a drop in the bucket. Coming back to the topic at hand. While there are some tools that can help you to figure out whether a pen drive is genuine or not. While there are products that can tell you whether they are genuine or not (basically by probing the memory controller and the info. you get from that.) that probably is a discussion left for another day. It took me couple of days and finally I was able to find time to go Vishal s place. The journey of back and forth lasted almost 6 hours, with crazy traffic jams. Tells you why Pune or specifically the Swargate, Hadapsar patch really needs a Metro. While an in-principle nod has been given, it probably is more than 5-7 years or more before we actually have a functioning metro. Even the current route the Metro has was supposed to be done almost 5 years to the date and even the modified plan was of 3 years ago. And even now, most of the Stations still need a lot of work to be done. PMC, Deccan as examples etc. still have loads to be done. Even PMT (Pune Muncipal Transport) that that is supposed to do the last mile connections via its buses has been putting half-hearted attempts
Vishal Rao
While Vishal had apparently seen me and perhaps we had also interacted, this was my first memory of him although we have been on a few boards now and then including stackexchange. He was genuine and warm and shared 4-5 distros with me, including Knoppix and System Rescue as shared by Arun Khan. While this is and was the first time I had heard about Ventoy apparently Vishal has been using it for couple of years now. It s a simple shell script that you need to download and run on your pen drive and then just dump all the .iso images. The easiest way to explain ventoy is that it looks and feels like Grub. Which also reminds me an interaction I had with Vishal on mobile. While troubleshooting the issue, I was unsure whether it was filesystem that was the issue or also systemd was corrupted. Vishal reminded me of putting fastboot to the kernel parameters to see if I m able to boot without fscking and get into userspace i.e. /home. Although journalctl and systemctl were responding even on tty1 still was a bit apprehensive. Using fastboot was able to mount the whole thing and get into userspace and that told me that it s only some of the inodes that need clearing and there probably are some orphaned inodes. While Vishal had got a mini-pc he uses that a server, downloads stuff to it and then downloads stuff from it. From both privacy, backup etc. it is a better way to do things but then you need to laptop to access it. I am sure he probably uses it for virtualization and other ways as well but we just didn t have time for that discussion. Also a mini-pc can set you back anywhere from 25 to 40k depending on the mini-pc and the RAM and the SSD. And you need either a lappy or an Raspberry Pi with some kinda visual display to interact with the mini-pc. While he did share some of the things, there probably could have been a far longer interaction just on that but probably best left for another day.
Now at my end, the system I had bought is about 5-6 years old. At that time it only had 6 USB 2.0 drives and 2 USB 3.0 (A) drives.
The above image does tell of the various form factors. One of the other things is that I found the pendrive and its connectors to be extremely fiddly. It took me number of times fiddling around with it when I was finally able to put in and able to access the pen drive partitions. Unfortunately, was unable to see/use systemrescue but Knoppix booted up fine. I mounted the partitions briefly to see where is what and sure enough /dev/sda8 showed my /home files and folders. Unmounted it, then used $fsck -y /dev/sda8 and back in business.
This concludes what happened.
Updates Quite a bit was left out on the original post, part of which I didn t know and partly stuff which is interesting and perhaps need a blog post of their own. It s sad I won t be part of debconf otherwise who knows what else I would have come to know.
One of the interesting bits that I came to know about last week is the Alibaba T-Head T-Head TH1520 RISC-V CPU and saw it first being demoed on a laptop and then a standalone tablet. The laptop is an interesting proposition considering Alibaba opened up it s chip thing only couple of years ago. To have an SOC within 18 months and then under production for lappies and tablets is practically unheard of especially of a newbie/startup. Even AMD took 3-4 years for its first chip.It seems they (Alibaba) would be parceling them out by quarter end 2023 and another 1000 pieces/Units first quarter next year, while the scale is nothing compared to the behemoths, I think this would be more as a matter of getting feedback on both the hardware and software. The value proposition is much better than what most of us get, at least in India. For example, they are doing a warranty for 5 years and also giving spare parts. RISC-V has been having a lot of resurgence in China in part as its an open standard and partly development will be far cheaper and faster than trying x86 or x86-64. If you look into both the manufacturers, due to monopoly, both of them now give 5-8% increment per year, and if you look back in history, you would find that when more chips were in competition, they used to give 15-20% performance increment per year.
2. While Vishal did share with me what he used and the various ways he uses the mini-pc, I did have a fun speculating on what he could use it. As shared by Romane as his case has shared, the first thing to my mind was backups. Filesystems are notorious in the sense they can be corrupted or can be prone to be corrupted very easily as can be seen above . Backups certainly make a lot of sense, especially rsync.
The other thing that came to my mind was having some sort of A.I. and chat server. IIRC, somebody has put quite a bit of open source public domain data in debian servers that could be used to run either a chatbot or an A.I. or both and use that similar to how chatGPT but with much limited scope than what chatgpt uses. I was also thinking a media server which Vishal did share he does. I may probably visit him sometime to see what choices he did and what he learned in the process, if anything.
Another thing that could be done is just take a dump of any of commodity markets or any markets and have some sort of predictive A.I. or whatever. A whole bunch of people have scammed thousands of Indian users on this, but if you do it on your own and for your own purposes to aid you buy and sell stocks or whatever commodity you may fancy. After all, nowadays markets themselves are virtual.
While Vishal s mini-pc doesn t have any graphics, if it was an AMD APU mini-pc, something like this he could have hosted games in the way of thick server, thin client where all graphics processing happens on the server rather than the client. With virtual reality I think the case for the same case could be made or much more. The only problem with VR/AR is that we don t really have mass-market googles, eye pieces or headset. The only notable project that Google has/had in that place is the Google VR Cardboard headset and the experience is not that great or at least was not that great few years back when I could hear and experience the same. Most of the VR headsets say for example the Meta Quest 2 is for around INR 44k/- while Quest 3 is INR 50k+ and officially not available. As have shared before, the holy grail of VR would be when it falls below INR 10k/- so it becomes just another accessory, not something you really have to save for. There also isn t much content on that but then that is also the whole chicken or egg situation. This again is a non-stop discussion as so much has been happening in that space it needs its own blog post/article whatever.
Till later.
Here s my (thirty-seventh) monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 46th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/
There s a bunch of things I do, both, technical and non-technical. Here are the things I did this month:
Debian Uploads
ruby-espeak (1.1.0-1) - New upstream version, v1.1.0.
Ubuntu
This was my 21st month of actively contributing to Ubuntu.
Now that I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/
I mostly worked on different things, I guess.
I was too lazy to maintain a list of things I worked on so there s
no concrete list atm. Maybe I ll get back to this section later or
will start to list stuff from the fall, as I was doing before. :D
Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support).
This was my thirty-seventh month as a Debian LTS and twenty-eighth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I worked for 35.00 hours for LTS and 25.00 hours for ELTS.
Uploaded dropbear to fix CVE-2021-36369 in buster. Waiting for ELTS upload to issue the DLA. But will do soon now.
src:joblib is a bit painful - having to backport patches to Py2. :/
Started to look at other set of packages.
ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
Issued ELA 715-1, fixing CVE-2022-43680, for expat.
For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2.2.0-2+deb9u7.
For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 2.1.0-6+deb8u10.
Here s my (thirty-sixth) monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 45th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/
There s a bunch of things I do, both, technical and non-technical. Here are the things I did this month:
Debian Uploads
rails (2:6.1.6.1+dfsg-2) - Add patch to allow Symbols in YAML columns, fixes #1018934.
rails (2:6.1.6.1+dfsg-3) - Add patch to remove active_record.yaml initializers.
rails (2:6.1.6.1+dfsg-4) - Add patch to allow Date, Time, ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess in YAML columns.
ruby-arbre (1.4.0-2) - Add patch to use selector to detect authenticity token input.
Ubuntu
This was my 20th month of actively contributing to Ubuntu.
Now that I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/
I mostly worked on different things, I guess.
I was too lazy to maintain a list of things I worked on so there s
no concrete list atm. Maybe I ll get back to this section later or
will start to list stuff from the fall, as I was doing before. :D
Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support).
This was my thirty-sixth month as a Debian LTS and twenty-seventh month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I worked for 38.00 hours for LTS and 27.00 hours for ELTS.
Looked at src:mbedtls which has about 18 CVEs opened in buster (including no-dsa).
Also, spoke to the maintainer - they said they d be uncomfortable doing or reviewing the backport (although they initially said they d be happy to help).
Fixed src:rails regression via 2:6.1.6.1+dfsg-2, 2:6.1.6.1+dfsg-3, and 2:6.1.6.1+dfsg-4 for sid.
CVE-2022-32224 broke the entire world. :)
Helped Abhijith figure out the regression fix for CVE-2022-32224.
Also got that verified by the people who reported regression, Raphael, Sven, and Jude. The whole thread is on debian-lts@.
ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
Rolled out announcemnet for src:ruby-tzinfo.
Rolled out announcemnet for src:grubt.
Issued ELA 682-1, fixing CVE-2022-31676, for open-vm-tools.
For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 2:10.1.5-5055683-4+deb9u3.
Issued ELA 691-1, fixing CVE-2020-21365, for wkhtmltopdf.
For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 0.12.1-2+deb8u1.
For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 0.12.3.2-3+deb9u1.
Issued ELA 692-1, fixing CVE-2022-37452, for exim4.
For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 4.84.2-2+deb8u9.
For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 4.89-2+deb9u9.
Started to look at src:tiff again. Has a lot of open issues. Haven t claimed the package officially yet, though. :)
Here s my (thirty-first) monthly but brief update about the activities I ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Debian
This was my 40th month of actively contributing to Debian.
I became a DM in late March 2019 and a DD on Christmas 19! \o/
There s a bunch of things I did this month but mostly non-technical, now that DC22 is around the corner. Here are the things I did:
Debian Uploads
Helped Andrius w/ FTBFS for php-text-captcha, reported via #977403.
I fixed the samed in Ubuntu a couple of months ago and they copied over the patch here.
Other $things:
Volunteering for DC22 Content team.
Leading the Bursary team w/ Paulo.
Answering a bunch of questions of referees and attendees around bursary.
Ubuntu
This was my 15th month of actively contributing to Ubuntu.
Now that I joined Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time, there s a bunch of things I do! \o/
I mostly worked on different things, I guess.
I was too lazy to maintain a list of things I worked on so there s
no concrete list atm. Maybe I ll get back to this section later or
will start to list stuff from the fall, as I was doing before. :D
Debian (E)LTS
Debian Long Term Support (LTS) is a project to extend the lifetime of all Debian stable releases to (at least) 5 years. Debian LTS is not handled by the Debian security team, but by a separate group of volunteers and companies interested in making it a success.
And Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) is its sister project, extending support to the Jessie release (+2 years after LTS support).
This was my thirty-first month as a Debian LTS and twentieth month as a Debian ELTS paid contributor.
I worked for 23.25 hours for LTS and 20.00 hours for ELTS.
LTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
Issued DLA 2976-1, fixing CVE-2022-1271, for gzip.
For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 1.6-5+deb9u1.
Issued DLA 2977-1, fixing CVE-2022-1271, for xz-utils.
For Debian 9 stretch, these problems have been fixed in version 5.2.2-1.2+deb9u1.
Working on src:tiff and src:mbedtls to fix the issues, still waiting for more issues to be reported, though.
Looking at src:mutt CVEs. Haven t had the time to complete but shall roll out next month.
ELTS CVE Fixes and Announcements:
Issued ELA 593-1, fixing CVE-2022-1271, for gzip.
For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 1.6-4+deb8u1.
Issued ELA 594-1, fixing CVE-2022-1271, for xz-utils.
For Debian 8 jessie, these problems have been fixed in version 5.1.1alpha+20120614-2+deb8u1.
Working on src:tiff and src:beep to fix the issues, still waiting for more issues to be reported for src:tiff and src:beep is a bit of a PITA, though. :)
The Freedom Phone advertises itself as a "Free speech and privacy first focused phone". As documented on the features page, it runs ClearOS, an Android-based OS produced by Clear United (or maybe one of the bewildering array of associated companies, we'll come back to that later). It's advertised as including Signal, but what's shipped is not the version available from the Signal website or any official app store - instead it's this fork called "ClearSignal".
The first thing to note about ClearSignal is that the privacy policy link from that page 404s, which is not a great start. The second thing is that it has a version number of 5.8.14, which is strange because upstream went from 5.8.10 to 5.9.0. The third is that, despite Signal being GPL 3, there's no source code available. So, I grabbed jadx and started looking for differences between ClearSignal and the upstream 5.8.10 release. The results were, uh, surprising.
First up is that they seem to have integrated ACRA, a crash reporting framework. This feels a little odd - in the absence of a privacy policy, it's unclear what information this gathers or how it'll be stored. Having a piece of privacy software automatically uploading information about what you were doing in the event of a crash with no notification other than a toast that appears saying "Crash Report" feels a little dubious.
Next is that Signal (for fairly obvious reasons) warns you if your version is out of date and eventually refuses to work unless you upgrade. ClearSignal has dealt with this problem by, uh, simply removing that code. The MacOS version of the desktop app they provide for download seems to be derived from a release from last September, which for an Electron-based app feels like a pretty terrible idea. Weirdly, for Windows they link to an official binary release from February 2021, and for Linux they tell you how to use the upstream repo properly. I have no idea what's going on here.
They've also added support for network backups of your Signal data. This involves the backups being pushed to an S3 bucket using credentials that are statically available in the app. It's ok, though, each upload has some sort of nominally unique identifier associated with it, so it's not trivial to just download other people's backups. But, uh, where does this identifier come from? It turns out that Clear Center, another of the Clear family of companies, employs a bunch of people to work on a ClearID[1], some sort of decentralised something or other that seems to be based on KERI. There's an overview slide deck here which didn't really answer any of my questions and as far as I can tell this is entirely lacking any sort of peer review, but hey it's only the one thing that stops anyone on the internet being able to grab your Signal backups so how important can it be.
The final thing, though? They've extended Signal's invitation support to encourage users to get others to sign up for Clear United. There's an exposed API endpoint called "get_user_email_by_mobile_number" which does exactly what you'd expect - if you give it a registered phone number, it gives you back the associated email address. This requires no authentication. But it gets better! The API to generate a referral link to send to others sends the name and phone number of everyone in your phone's contact list. There does not appear to be any indication that this is going to happen.
So, from a privacy perspective, going to go with things being some distance from ideal. But what's going on with all these Clear companies anyway? They all seem to be related to Michael Proper, who founded the Clear Foundation in 2009. They are, perhaps unsurprisingly, heavily invested in blockchain stuff, while Clear United also appears to be some sort of multi-level marketing scheme which has a membership agreement that includes the somewhat astonishing claim that:
Specifically, the initial focus of the Association will provide members with supplements and technologies for:
9a. Frequency Evaluation, Scans, Reports;
9b. Remote Frequency Health Tuning through Quantum Entanglement;
9c. General and Customized Frequency Optimizations;
- there's more discussion of this and other weirdness here. Clear Center, meanwhile, has a Chief Physics Officer? I have a lot of questions.
Anyway. We have a company that seems to be combining blockchain and MLM, has some opinions about Quantum Entanglement, bases the security of its platform on a set of novel cryptographic primitives that seem to have had no external review, has implemented an API that just hands out personal information without any authentication and an app that appears more than happy to upload all your contact details without telling you first, has failed to update this app to keep up with upstream security updates, and is violating the upstream license. If this is their idea of "privacy first", I really hate to think what their code looks like when privacy comes further down the list.
Leonardo and I are thrilled to announce the first CRAN release of dtts. The dtts package builds on top of both our nanotime package and the well-loved and widely-used data.table package by Matt, Arun, Jan, and numerous collaborators.
In a very rough nutshell, you can think of dtts as combining both these potent ingredients to produce something not-entirely-unlike the venerable xts package by our friends Jeff and Josh but using highest-precision nanosecond increments rather than not-quite-microseconds or dates.
The package is still somewhat rare and bare: it is mostly just alignment operators. But because of the power and genius of data.table not all that much more is needed because data.table gets us fifteen years of highly refined, tuned and tested code for data slicing, dicing, and aggregation. To which we now humbly add nanosecond-resolution indexing and alignment.
The package had been simmering for some time, and does of course take advantage of (a lot of) earlier work by Leonardo on his ztsdb project. We look forward to user feedback and suggestions at the GitHub repo.
If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.
The Population Issue and its many facets
Another couple of weeks passed. A Lot of things happening, lots of anger and depression in folks due to handling in pandemic, but instead of blaming they are willing to blame everybody else including the population. Many of them want forced sterilization like what Sanjay Gandhi did during the Emergency (1975). I had to share So Long, My son . A very moving tale of two families of what happened to them during the one-child policy in China. I was so moved by it and couldn t believe that the Chinese censors allowed it to be produced, shot, edited, and then shared worldwide. It also won a couple of awards at the 69th Berlin Film Festival, silver bear for the best actor and the actress in that category. But more than the award, the theme, and the concept as well as the length of the movie which was astonishing. Over a 3 hr. something it paints a moving picture of love, loss, shame, relief, anger, and asking for forgiveness. All of which can be identified by any rational person with feelings worldwide.
Girl child
What was also interesting though was what it couldn t or wasn t able to talk about and that is the Chinese leftover men. In fact, a similar situation exists here in India, only it has been suppressed. This has been more pronounced more in Asia than in other places. One big thing in this is human trafficking and mostly women trafficking. For the Chinese male, that was happening on a large scale from all neighboring countries including India. This has been shared in media and everybody knows about it and yet people are silent. But this is not limited to just the Chinese, even Indians have been doing it. Even yesteryear actress Rupa Ganguly was caught red-handed but then later let off after formal questioning as she is from the ruling party. So much for justice.
What is and has been surprising at least for me is Rwanda which is in the top 10 of some of the best places in equal gender. It, along with other African countries have also been in news for putting quite a significant amount of percentage of GDP into public healthcare (between 20-10%), but that is a story for a bit later. People forget or want to forget that it was in Satara, a city in my own state where 220 girls changed their name from nakusha or unwanted to something else and that had become a piece of global news. One would think that after so many years, things would have changed, the only change that has happened is that now we have two ministries, The Ministry of Women and Child Development (MoWCD) and The Ministry of Health and Welfare (MoHFW). Sadly, in both cases, the ministries have been found wanting, Whether it was the high-profile Hathras case or even the routine cries of help which given by women on the twitter helpline. Sadly, neither of these ministries talks about POSH guidelines which came up after the 2012 gangrape case. For both these ministries, it should have been a pinned tweet. There is also the 1994 PCPNDT Act which although made in 1994, actually functioned in 2006, although what happens underground even today nobody knows .
On the global stage, about a decade ago, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt argued in their book Freakonomics how legalized abortion both made the coming population explosion as well as expected crime rates to be reduced. There was a huge pushback on the same from the conservatives and has become a matter of debate, perhaps something that the Conservatives wanted. Interestingly, it hasn t made them go back but go forward as can be seen from the Freakonomics site.
Climate Change
Another topic that came up for discussion was repeatedly climate change, but when I share Shell s own 1998 Confidential report titled Greenhouse effect all become strangely silent. The silence here is of two parts, there probably is a large swathe of Indians who haven t read the report and there may be a minority who have read it and know what already has been shared with U.S. Congress. The Conservative s argument has been for it is jobs and a weak we need to research more . There was a partial debunk of it on the TBD podcast by Matt Farell and his brother Sean Farell as to how quickly the energy companies are taking to the coming change.
Health Budget
Before going to Covid stories. I first wanted to talk about Health Budgets. From the last 7 years the Center s allocation for health has been between 0.34 to 0.8% per year. That amount barely covers the salaries to the staff, let alone any money for equipment or anything else. And here by allocation I mean, what is actually spent, not the one that is shared by GOI as part of budget proposal. In fact, an article on Wire gives a good breakdown of the numbers. Even those who are on the path of free markets describe India s health business model as a flawed one. See the Bloomberg Quint story on that. Now let me come to Rwanda. Why did I chose Rwanda, I could have chosen South Africa where I went for Debconf 2016, I chose because Rwanda s story is that much more inspiring. In many ways much more inspiring than that South Africa in many ways. Here is a country which for decades had one war or the other, culminating into the Rwanda Civil War which ended in 1994. And coincidentally, they gained independence on a similar timeline as South Africa ending Apartheid in 1994. What does the country do, when it gains its independence, it first puts most of its resources in the healthcare sector. The first few years at 20% of GDP, later than at 10% of GDP till everybody has universal medical coverage.
Coming back to the Bloomberg article I shared, the story does not go into the depth of beyond-expiry date medicines, spurious medicines and whatnot. Sadly, most media in India does not cover the deaths happening in rural areas and this I am talking about normal times. Today what is happening in rural areas is just pure madness. For last couple of days have been talking with people who are and have been covering rural areas. In many of those communities, there is vaccine hesitancy and why, because there have been whatsapp forwards sharing that if you go to a hospital you will die and your kidney or some other part of the body will be taken by the doctor. This does two things, it scares people into not going and getting vaccinated, at the same time they are prejudiced against science. This is politics of the lowest kind. And they do it so that they will be forced to go to temples or babas and what not and ask for solutions. And whether they work or not is immaterial, they get fixed and property and money is seized. Sadly, there are not many Indian movies of North which have tried to show it except for oh my god but even here it doesn t go the distance. A much more honest approach was done in Trance . I have never understood how the South Indian movies are able to do a more honest job of story-telling than what is done in Bollywood even though they do in 1/10th the budget that is needed in Bollywood. Although, have to say with OTT, some baggage has been shed but with the whole film certification rearing its ugly head through MEITY orders, it seems two steps backward instead of forward. The idea being simply to infantilize the citizens even more. That is a whole different ball-game which probably will require its own space.
Vaccine issues
One good news though is that Vaccination has started. But it has been a long story full of greed by none other than GOI (Government of India) or the ruling party BJP. Where should I start with. I probably should start with this excellent article done by Priyanka Pulla. It is interesting and fascinating to know how vaccines are made, at least one way which she shared. She also shared about the Cutter Incident which happened in the late 50 s. The response was on expected lines, character assassination of her and the newspaper they published but could not critique any of the points made by her. Not a single point that she didn t think about x or y. Interestingly enough, in January 2021 Bharati Biotech was supposed to be share phase 3 trial data but hasn t been put up in public domain till May 2021. In fact, there have been a few threads raised by both well-meaning Indians as well as others globally especially on twitter to which GOI/ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research) is silent. Another interesting point to note is that Russia did say in its press release that it is possible that their vaccine may not be standard (read inactivation on their vaccines and another way is possible but would take time, again Brazil has objected, but India hasn t till date.)
What also has been interesting is the homegrown B.1.617 lineage or known as double mutant . This was first discovered from my own state, Maharashtra and then transported around the world. There is also B.1.618 which was found in West Bengal and is same or supposed to be similar to the one found in South Africa. This one is known as Triple mutant . About B.1.618 we don t know much other than knowing that it is much more easily transferable, much more infectious. Most countries have banned flights from India and I cannot fault them anyway. Hell, when even our diplomats do not care for procedures to be followed during the pandemic then how a common man is supposed to do. Of course, now for next month, Mr. Modi was supposed to go and now will not attend the G7 meeting. Whether, it is because he would have to face the press (the only Prime Minister and the only Indian Prime Minister who never has faced free press.) or because the Indian delegation has been disinvited, we would never know.
A good article which shares lots of lows with how things have been done in India has been an article by Arundhati Roy. And while the article in itself is excellent and shares a bit of the bitter truth but is still incomplete as so much has been happening. The problem is that the issue manifests in so many ways, it is difficult to hold on. As Arundhati shared, should we just look at figures and numbers and hold on, or should we look at individual ones, for e.g. the one shared in Outlook India. Or the one shared by Dr. Dipshika Ghosh who works in Covid ICU in some hospital
Dr. Dipika Ghosh sharing an incident in Covid Ward
Interestingly as well, while in the vaccine issue, Brazil Anvisa doesn t know what they are doing or the regulator just isn t knowledgeable etc. (statements by various people in GOI, when it comes to testing kits, the same is an approver.)
ICMR/DGCI approving internationally validated kits, Press release.
Twitter
In the midst of all this, one thing that many people have forgotten and seem to have forgotten that Twitter and other tools are used by only the elite. The reason why the whole thing has become serious now than in the first phase is because the elite of India have also fallen sick and dying which was not the case so much in the first phase. The population on Twitter is estimated to be around 30-34 million and people who are everyday around 20 odd million or so, which is what 2% of the Indian population which is estimated to be around 1.34 billion. The other 98% don t even know that there is something like twitter on which you can ask help. Twitter itself is exclusionary in many ways, with both the emoticons, the language and all sorts of things. There is a small subset who does use Twitter in regional languages, but they are too small to write anything about. The main language is English which does become a hindrance to lot of people.
Censorship
Censorship of Indians critical of Govt. mishandling has been non-stop. Even U.S. which usually doesn t interfere into India s internal politics was forced to make an exception. But of course, this has been on deaf ears. There is and was a good thread on Twitter by Gaurav Sabnis, a friend, fellow Puneite now settled in U.S. as a professor.
Gaurav on Trump-Biden on vaccination of their own citizens
Now just to surmise what has been happened in India and what has been happening in most of the countries around the world. Most of the countries have done centralization purchasing of the vaccine and then is distributed by the States, this is what we understand as co-operative federalism. While last year, GOI took a lot of money under the shady PM Cares fund for vaccine purchase, donations from well-meaning Indians as well as Industries and trade bodies. Then later, GOI said it would leave the states hanging and it is they who would have to buy vaccines from the manufacturers. This is again cheap politics. The idea behind it is simple, GOI knows that almost all the states are strapped for cash. This is not new news, this I have shared a couple of months back. The problem has been that for the last 6-8 months no GST meeting has taken place as shared by Punjab s Finance Minister Amarinder Singh. What will happen is that all the states will fight in-between themselves for the vaccine and most of them are now non-BJP Governments. The idea is let the states fight and somehow be on top. So, the pandemic, instead of being a public health issue has become something of on which politics has to played. The news on whatsapp by RW media is it s ok even if a million or two also die, as it is India is heavily populated. Although that argument vanishes for those who lose their dear and near ones. But that just isn t the issue, the issue goes much more deeper than that
Oxygen:12% Remedisivir:12% Sanitiser:12% Ventilator:12% PPE:18% Ambulances 28%
Now all the products above are essential medical equipment and should be declared as essential medical equipment and should have price controls on which GST is levied. In times of pandemic, should the center be profiting on those. States want to let go and even want the center to let go so that some relief is there to the public, while at the same time make them as essential medical equipment with price controls. But GOI doesn t want to. Leaders of opposition parties wrote open letters but no effect. What is sad to me is how Ambulances are being taxed at 28%. Are they luxury items or sin goods ? This also reminds of the recent discovery shared by Mr. Pappu Yadav in Bihar. You can see the color of ambulances as shared by Mr. Yadav, and the same news being shared by India TV news showing other ambulances. Also, the weak argument being made of not having enough drivers. Ideally, you should have 2-3 people, both 9-1-1 and Chicago Fire show 2 people in ambulance but a few times they have also shown to be flipped over. European seems to have three people in ambulance, also they are also much more disciplined as drivers, at least an opinion shared by an American expat.
Pappu Yadav, President Jan Adhikar Party, Bihar May 11, 2021
What is also interesting to note is GOI plays this game of Health is State subject and health is Central subject depending on its convenience. Last year, when it invoked the Epidemic and DMA Act it was a Central subject, now when bodies are flowing down the Ganges and pyres being lit everywhere, it becomes a State subject. But when and where money is involved, it again becomes a Central subject. The States are also understanding it, but they are fighting on too many fronts.
Snippets from Karnataka High Court hearing today, 13th March 2021
One of the good things is most of the High Courts have woken up. Many of the people on the RW think that the Courts are doing Judicial activism . And while there may be an iota of truth in it, the bitter truth is that many judges or relatives or their helpers have diagnosed and some have even died due to Covid. In face of the inevitable, what can they do. They are hauling up local Governments to make sure they are accountable while at the same time making sure that they get access to medical facilities. And I as a citizen don t see any wrong in that even if they are doing it for selfish reasons. Because, even if justice is being done for selfish reasons, if it does improve medical delivery systems for the masses, it is cool. If it means that the poor and everybody else are able to get vaccinations, oxygen and whatever they need, it is cool. Of course, we are still seeing reports of patients spending in the region of INR 50k and more for each day spent in hospital. But as there are no price controls, judges cannot do anything unless they want to make an enemy of the medical lobby in the country. A good story on medicines and what happens in rural areas, see no further than Laakhon mein ek.
Allahabad High Court hauling Uttar Pradesh Govt. for lack of Oxygen is equal to genocide, May 11, 2021
The censorship is not just related to takedown requests on twitter but nowadays also any articles which are critical of the GOI s handling. I have been seeing many articles which have shared facts and have been critical of GOI being taken down. Previously, we used to see 404 errors happen 7-10 years down the line and that was reasonable. Now we see that happen, days weeks or months. India seems to be turning more into China and North Korea and become more anti-science day-by-day
Fake websites
Before going into fake websites, let me start with a fake newspaper which was started by none other than the Gujarat CM Mr. Modi in 2005 .
Gujarat Satya Samachar 2005 launched by Mr. Modi.
And if this wasn t enough than on Feb 8, 2005, he had invoked Official Secrets Act
Mr. Modi invoking Official Secrets Act, Feb 8 2005 Gujarat Samachar
The headlines were In Modi s regime press freedom is in peril-Down with Modi s dictatorship. So this was a tried and tested technique. The above information was shared by Mr. Urvish Kothari, who incidentally also has his own youtube channel.
Now cut to 2021, and we have a slew of fake websites being done by the same party. In fact, it seems they started this right from 2011. A good article on BBC itself tells the story. Hell, Disinfo.eu which basically combats disinformation in EU has a whole pdf chronicling how BJP has been doing it. Some of the sites it shared are
Times of New York Manchester Times Times of Los Angeles Manhattan Post Washington Herald and many more.
The idea being take any site name which sounds similar to a brand name recognized by Indians and make fool of them. Of course, those of who use whois and other such tools can easily know what is happening. Two more were added to the list yesterday, Daily Guardian and Australia Today. There are of course, many features which tell them apart from genuine websites. Most of these are on shared hosting rather than dedicated hosting, most of these are bought either from Godaddy and Bluehost. While Bluehost used to be a class act once upon a time, both the above will do anything as long as they get money. Don t care whether it s a fake website or true. Capitalism at its finest or worst depending upon how you look at it. But most of these details are lost on people who do not know web servers, at all and instead think see it is from an exotic site, a foreign site and it chooses to have same ideas as me. Those who are corrupt or see politics as a tool to win at any cost will not see it as evil. And as a gentleman Raghav shared with me, it is so easy to fool us. An example he shared which I had forgotten. Peter England which used to be an Irish brand was bought by Aditya Birla group way back in 2000. But even today, when you go for Peter England, the way the packaging is done, the way the prices are, more often than not, people believe they are buying the Irish brand. While sharing this, there is so much of Naom Chomsky which comes to my mind again and again
Caste Issues
I had written about caste issues a few times on this blog. This again came to the fore as news came that a Hindu sect used forced labor from Dalit community to make a temple. This was also shared by the hill. In both, Mr. Joshi doesn t tell that if they were volunteers then why their passports have been taken forcibly, also I looked at both minimum wage prevailing in New Jersey as a state as well as wage given to those who are in the construction Industry. Even in minimum wage, they were giving $1 when the prevailing minimum wage for unskilled work is $12.00 and as Mr. Joshi shared that they are specialized artisans, then they should be paid between $23 $30 per hour. If this isn t exploitation, then I don t know what is.
And this is not the first instance, the first instance was perhaps the case against Cisco which was done by John Doe. While I had been busy with other things, it seems Cisco had put up both a demurrer petition and a petition to strike which the Court stayed. This seemed to all over again a type of apartheid practice, only this time applied to caste. The good thing is that the court stayed the petition.
Dr. Ambedkar s statement if Hindus migrate to other regions on earth, Indian caste would become a world problem given at Columbia University in 1916, seems to be proven right in today s time and sadly has aged well. But this is not just something which is there only in U.S. this is there in India even today, just couple of days back, a popular actress Munmun Dutta used a casteist slur and then later apologized giving the excuse that she didn t know Hindi. And this is patently false as she has been in the Bollywood industry for almost now 16-17 years. This again, was not an isolated incident. Seema Singh, a lecturer in IIT-Kharagpur abused students from SC, ST backgrounds and was later suspended. There is an SC/ST Atrocities Act but that has been diluted by this Govt. A bit on the background of Dr. Ambedkar can be found at a blog on Columbia website. As I have shared and asked before, how do we think, for what reason the Age of Englightenment or the Age of Reason happened. If I were a fat monk or a priest who was privileges, would I have let Age of Enlightenment happen. It broke religion or rather Church which was most powerful to not so powerful and that power was more distributed among all sort of thinkers, philosophers, tinkers, inventors and so on and so forth.
Situation going forward
I believe things are going to be far more complex and deadly before they get better. I had to share another term called Comorbidities which fortunately or unfortunately has also become part of twitter lexicon. While I have shared what it means, it simply means when you have an existing ailment or condition and then Coronavirus attacks you. The Virus will weaken you. The Vaccine in the best case just stops the damage, but the damage already done can t be reversed. There are people who advise and people who are taking steroids but that again has its own side-effects. And this is now, when we are in summer. I am afraid for those who have recovered, what will happen to them during the Monsoons. We know that the Virus attacks most the lungs and their quality of life will be affected. Even the immune system may have issues. We also know about the inflammation. And the grant that has been given to University of Dundee also has signs of worry, both for people like me (obese) as well as those who have heart issues already. In other news, my city which has been under partial lockdown since a month, has been extended for another couple of weeks. There are rumors that the same may continue till the year-end even if it means economics goes out of the window.There is possibility that in the next few months something like 2 million odd Indians could die
The above is a conversation between Karan Thapar and an Oxford Mathematician Dr. Murad Banaji who has shared that the under-counting of cases in India is huge. Even BBC shared an article on the scope of under-counting. Of course, those on the RW call of the evidence including the deaths and obituaries in newspapers as a narrative . And when asked that when deaths used to be in the 20 s or 30 s which has jumped to 200-300 deaths and this is just the middle class and above. The poor don t have the money to get wood and that is the reason you are seeing the bodies in Ganges whether in Buxar Bihar or Gajipur, Uttar Pradesh. The sights and visuals makes for sorry reading Pandit Ranjan Mishra son on his father s death due to unavailability of oxygen, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, 11th May 2021.
For those who don t know Pandit Ranjan Mishra was a renowned classical singer. More importantly, he was the first person to suggest Mr. Modi s name as a Prime Ministerial Candidate. If they couldn t fulfil his oxygen needs, then what can be expected for the normal public.
Conclusion
Sadly, this time I have no humorous piece to share, I can however share a documentary which was shared on Feluda . I have shared about Feluda or Prodosh Chandra Mitter a few times on this blog. He has been the answer of James Bond from India. I have shared previously about The Golden Fortress . An amazing piece of art by Satyajit Ray. I watched that documentary two-three times. I thought, mistakenly that I am the only fool or fan of Feluda in Pune to find out that there are people who are even more than me. There were so many facets both about Feluda and master craftsman Satyajit Ray that I was unaware about. I was just simply amazed. I even shared few of the tidbits with mum as well, although now she has been truly hooked to Korean dramas. The only solace from all the surrounding madness. So, if you have nothing to do, you can look up his books, read them and then see the movies. And my first recommendation would be the Golden Fortress. The only thing I would say, do not have high hopes. The movie is beautiful. It starts slow and then picks up speed, just like a train. So, till later.
Update The Mass surveillance part I could not do justice do hence removed it at the last moment. It actually needs its whole space, article. There is so much that the Govt. is doing under the guise of the pandemic that it is difficult to share it all in one article. As it is, the article is big
So many good books, so little reading time.
Jairus Banaji A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism
(nonfiction)
Steven Brust The Baron of Magister Valley (sff)
Micaiah Johnson The Space Between Worlds (sff)
Ian McDonald Luna: New Moon (sff)
Elizabeth Moon Trading in Danger (sff)
Tamsyn Muir Harrow the Ninth (sff)
Suzanne Palmer Finder (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Shame (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Control (sff)
Kit Rocha Beyond Pain (sff)
Arundhati Roy Azadi (nonfiction)
Jeff VanderMeer Authority (sff)
Jeff VanderMeer Acceptance (sff)
K.B. Wagers Behind the Throne (sff)
Jarrett Walker Human Transit (nonfiction)
I took advantage of a few sales to get books I know I'm going to want to
read eventually for a buck or two.
Sorry for not being on blog for sometime, the last few months have been brutal. While I am externally ok, because of the lockdown I sensed major hearing loss. First, I thought it may be a hallucination or something but as it persisted for days, I got myself checked and found out that I got 80% hearing loss in my right ear. How and why I don t know. Is this NIHL or some other kind of hearing loss is yet to be ascertained. I do live what is and used to be one of the busiest roads in the city, now for last few months not so much. On top of it, you have various other noises.
Tinnitus
I also experienced Tinnitus which again I perceived to be a hallucination but found it s not. I have no clue if my eiplepsy has anything to do with hearing loss or both are different. I did discover that while today we know that something like Tinnitus exists, just 10-15 years back, people might mistake it for madness. In a way it is madness because you are constantly hearing sound, music etc. 24 7 , that is enough to drive anybody mad.
During this brief period, did learn what an Otoscope is . I did get audiometry tests done but need to get at least a second or if possible also a third opinion but those will have to wait as the audio clinics are about 8-10 kms. away. In the open-close-open-close environment just makes it impossible to figure out the time, date and get it done. After that is done then probably get a hearing device, probably a Siemens Signia hearing aid. The hearing aids are damn expensive, almost 50k per piece and they probably have a lifetime of about 5-6 years, so it s a bit of a expensive proposition. I also need a second or/and third opinion on the audiometry profile so I know things are correct. All of these things are gonna take time.
Pandemic Situation in India and Testing
Coincidentally, was talking to couple of people about this. It is sad to see that we have the third highest number of covid cases at 1/10th the tests we are doing vis-a-vis U.S.A. According to statistical site ourworldindata , we seem to be testing 0.22 per thousand people compared to 2.28 people per thousand done by United States. Sadly it doesn t give the breakup of the tests, from what I read the PCR tests are better than the antibody tests, a primer shares the difference between the two tests. IIRC, the antibody tests are far cheaper than the swab tests but swab tests are far more accurate as it looks for the virus s genetic material (RNA) . Anyways coming to the numbers, U.S. has a population of roughly 35 crores taking a little bit liberty from numbers given at popclock . India meanwhile has 135 crore or almost four times the population of U.S. and the amount of testing done is 1/10th as shared above. Just goes to share where the GOI priorities lie . We are running out of beds, ventilators and whatever else there is. Whatever resources are there are being used for covid patients and they are being charged a bomb. I have couple of hospitals near my place and the cost of a bed in an isolation ward is upward of INR 100k and if you need a ventilator then add another 50k . And in moment of rarity, the differences between charges of private and public are zero. Meaning there is immense profiteering happening it seems in the medical world. Heck, even the Govt. is on the act where they are charging 18% GST on sanitizers. If this is not looting then I dunno what is.
Example of Medical Bills people have to pay.
China, Nepal & Diplomacy
While everybody today knows how China has intruded and captured quite a part of Ladakh, this wasn t the case when they started in April. That time Ajai Shukla had shared this with the top defence personnel but nothing came of it. Then on May 30th he broke/shared the news with the rest of the world and was immediately branded anti-national, person on Chinese payroll and what not. This is when he and Pravin Sawnhey of Force Magazine had both been warning of the same from last year itself. Pravin, has a youtube channel and had been warning India against Chinese intentions from 2015 and even before that. He had warned repeatedly that our obsession with the Pakistan border meant that we were taking eyes of the border with China which spans almost 2300 odd kms. going all the way to Arunachal Pradesh. A good map which shows the conflict can be found at dw.com which I am sharing/reproducing below India-China Border Areas Copyright DW.com 2020
Note:- I am sharing a neutral party s rendering of the border disputes or somebody who doesn t have much at stake as the two countries have so that things could be looked at little objectively.
The Prime Minister on the other hand, made the comment which made galvanising a made-up word into verb . It means to go without coming in. In fact, several news sites shared the statement told by the Prime Minister and the majority of people were shocked. In fact, there had been reports that he gave the current CDS, General Rawat, a person of his own choosing, a peace of his mind. But what lead to this confrontation in the first place ? I think many pieces are part of that puzzle, one of the pieces are surely the cutting of defense budget for the last 6 years, Even this year, if you look at the budget slashes done in the earlier part of the year when he shared how HAL had to raise loans from the market to pay salaries of its own people. Later he shared how the Govt. was planning to slash the defence budget. Interestingly, he had also shared some of the reasons which reaffirm that it is the only the Govt. which can solve some of the issues/conundrum
First, it must recognize that our firms competing for global orders are up against rivals that are being supported by their home governments with tax and export incentives and infrastructure that almost invariably surpasses India s. Our government must provide its aerospace firms with a level playing field, if not a competitive advantage. The greatest deterrent to growth our companies face is the high cost of capital and lack of access to funds. In several cases, Indian MSMEs have had to turn down offers to build components and assemblies for global OEM supply chains simply because the cost of capital to create the shop floor and train the personnel was too high. This resulted in a loss of business and a missed opportunity for creating jobs and skills. To overcome this, the government could create a sector specific A&D Fund to provide low cost capital quickly to enable our MSMEs to grab fleeting business opportunities. Ajai Shukla, blogpost 13th March 2020 .
And then reporting on 11th May 2020 itself, CDS Gen. Rawat himself commented on saving the budget, they were in poor taste but still he shared what he thought about it. So, at the end of it one part of the story. The other part of the story probably lies in India s relations with its neighbors and lack of numbers in diplomats and diplomacy. So let me cover both the things one by one .
Diplomats, lack of numbers and hence the hands we are dealth with
When Mr. Modi started his first term, he used the term Maximum Governance, Minimum Government but sadly cut those places where it indeed needs more people, one of which is diplomacy. A slightly dated 2012 article/opinion shared writes that India needs to engage with the rest of the world and do with higher number. Cut to 2020 and the numbers more or less remain the same . What Mr. Modi tried to do is instead of using diplomats, he tried to use his charm and hugopolicy for lack of a better term. 6 years later, here we are. After 200 trips abroad, not a single trade agreement to show what he done. I could go on but both time and energy are not on my side hence now switching to Nepal
Nepal, once friend, now enemy ?
Nepal had been a friend of India for 70 odd years, what changed in the last few years that it changed from friend to enemy ? There had been two incidents in recent memory that changed the status quo. The first is the 2015 Nepal blockade . Now one could argue it either way but the truth is that Nepal understood that it is heavily dependent on India hence as any sovereign country would do in its interest it also started courting China for imports so there is some balance.
The second one though is one of our own making. On December 16, 2014 RBI allowed Nepali citizens to have cash upto INR 25,000/- . Then in 2016 when demonetization was announced, they said that people could exchange only upto INR 4,500/- which was far below the limit shared above. And btw, before people start blaming just RBI for the decision, FEMA decisions are taken jointly by the finance ministry (FE) as well as ministry of external affairs (MEA) . So without them knowing the decision could not have been taken when announcing it. The result of lowering of demonetization is what made Nepal move more into Chinese hands and this has been shared by number of people in numerous articles in different websites. The wire interview with the vice-chairman of Niti Ayog is pretty interesting. The argument that Nepal show give an estimate of how much old money is there falls flat when in demonetization itself, it was thought of that around 30-40% was black money and would not be returned but by RBI s own admissions all 99.3% of the money was returned. Perhaps they should have consulted Prof. Arun Kumar of JNU who has extensivelywritten and studied the topic before doing that fool-hardy step. It is the reason that since then, an economy which was searing at 9% has been contracting ever since, I could give a dozen articles stating that, but for the moment, just one will suffice. The slowing economy and the sharp divisions between people based on either outlook, religion or whatever also encouraged China to attack us. This year is not good for India. The only thing I hope Indians and people all over do is just maintain physical distances, masks and somehow survive till middle of next year without getting infected when probably most of the vaccine candidates have been trialed, results are in and we have a ready vaccine. I do hope that at least for once, ICMR shares data even after the vaccine is approved, whichever vaccine. Till later.
I was gonna use this blog post to share about the migrant worker woes as there has been multiple stories doing the rounds. For e.g. a story which caught the idea of few people but most of us, i.e. middle-class people are so much into our own thing that we care a fig leaf about what happens to migrants. This should not be a story coming from a humane society but it seems India is no different than any other country of the world and in not a good way. Allow me to share
Or for those who don t like youtube, here s an alternative link
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=JGEgZq_1jmc
Now the above two editorial shares two stories, one of Trump retaliatory threat to India in the Q&A of the journalist. In fact, Trump has upped the ante on visa sanctions as India buckled so easily under pressure.
There have been other stories doing the rounds how people who have illnesses who need HCQ in India are either dying or are close to death because of unavailability of HCQ in the medicine shop. There have been reports in Pune as well as South Mumbai (one of the poshest localities in Mumbai/Bombay) that medicine shops are running empty or emptier. There have been so many stories on that, with reporters going to shops and asking owners of the medicine shops and shop-owners being clueless.
I think the best article which vividly describes the Government of India (GOI) response to the pandemic is the free-to-read article shared by Arundhati Roy in Financial Times. It has reduced so much of my work or sharing that it s unbelievable. And she has shared it with pictures and all so I can share other aspects of how the pandemic has been affecting India and bringing the worst out in the Government in its our of need. In fact, not surprisingly though, apparently there was also a pro-Israel similar thing which happened in Africa too . As India has too few friends now globally, hence it decided to give a free pass to them.
Government of India, news agencies and paid News
One of the attempts the state tried to do, although very late IMHO is that it tried to reach out to the opposition i.e. Congress party and the others. Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, who is the Congress president asked that the Government should not run any of its ads on private television channels for a period of two years. There had been plenty of articles, both by medianama and others who have alleged that at least from the last 6 odd years, Government ads. comprise of almost 50-60% advertising budget of a channel advertising budget. This has been discussed also in medianama s roundtable on online content which happened few months back. While an edited version is out there on YT, this was full two day s event which happened across two different cities.
or the alternative to youtube
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=c1PhWR1-Urs
It was as if the roundtable discussions were not enough, Mrs. Gandhi clarion call was answered by News Broadcaster s Association (NBA) and this is what they had to say
News Broadcasters Association reply to Mrs. Gandhi
To put it simply, NBA deplored the suggestion by Mrs. Gandhi and even called the economy in recession and all they had were the Government s own advertising budget to justify their existence. The statements in themselves are highly pregnant and reveal both the relationship that the media, print or mainstream news channels have with the Government of India. Now if you see that, doesn t it make sense that media always slants the story from the Government s perspective rather than remaining neutral. If my bread basket were on the onus of me siding with the Govt. that is what most sane persons would do, otherwise they would resign and leave which many reporters who had a conscience did.
Interestingly enough, the NBA statement didn t just end there but also used the word recession , this is the term that Government of India (GOI) hates and has in turn has been maintaining the word, terminology slowdown . While from a layman s perspective the two terms may seem to be similar, if India has indeed been in recession then the tools and the decisions that should have been taken by GOI should have been much different than what they took. Interestingly, enough GOI has refrained from saying anything on the matter which only reveals their own interests in the matter. Also if an association head is making the statement, it is more than likely that he consulted a lawyer or two and used application of mind while drafting the response. In other words, or put more simply, this was a very carefully drafted letter because they know that tomorrow the opposition party may come into power so they don t want to upset the power dynamics too much.
Privacy issues arising due to the Pandemic
On the same Financial Times, two stories which dealt with the possible privacy violations due to the Pandemic have been doing the rounds. The first one, by Yuval Noah Harari is more exploratory by nature and makes some very good points without going far too deep into specific instances of recent times but rather goes into history and past instances where Governments have used the pandemics to exert more control over their populace and drive their agenda. I especially liked the last few lines which he shared in his op-ed
Even if the current administration eventually changes tack and comes up with a global plan of action, few would follow a leader who never takes responsibility, who never admits mistakes, and who routinely takes all the credit for himself while leaving all the blame to others. Yuval Noah Harari . The whole statement could right fit onto the American President which he was talking about while at the same time, fits right into the current Indian Prime Minister, Boris Johnson of UK and perhaps Jair Bolsanaro of Brazil. All these three-four individuals have in common is that most of them belong to right-wing and hence cater only to the rich industrialist s agenda. While I don t know about Jair Bolsanaro much, at least three out of four had to turn to socialism and had to give some bailout packages to the public at large, even though continuing to undermine their own actions. More on this probably a bit down the line.
The second story shared by Nic Fildes and Javier Espinoza who broke the story of various surveillance attempts and the privacy concerns that people have. Even the Indian PMO has asked this data and because there was no protest by the civil society, a token protest was done by COAI (Cellular Operator Association of India) but beyond that nothing, I am guessing because the civil society didn t make much noise as everybody is busy with their own concerns of safety and things going on, it s possible that such data may have gone to the Government. There is not much new here that people who had been working on the privacy issues know, it s just how easy Governments are finding to do it. The part of informed consent is really a misnomer . Governments lie all the time, for e.g. in the UK, did the leave party and people take informed consent, no they pushed their own agenda. This is and will be similar in many countries of the world.
False Socialism by RW parties
In at least the three countries I have observing, simply due to available time, that lot of false promises are being made by our leaders and more often than not, the bailouts will be given to already rich industrialists. An op-ed by Vivek Kaul, who initially went by his handle which means somebody who is educated but unemployed. While Vivek has been one-man army in revealing most of the Government s mischiefs especially as fudging numbers are concerned among other things, there have been others too. As far as the US is concerned, an e-zine called free press (literally) has been sharing Trump s hollowness and proclamations for U.S. . Far more interestingly, I found New York times investigated and found a cache of e-mails starting from early January, which they are calling Red Dawn . The cache is undeniable proof that medical personnel in the U.S. were very much concerned since January 2020 but it was only after other countries started lock-down that U.S. had to follow suit. I am sure Indian medical professionals may have done similar mail exchanges but we will never know as the Indian media isn t independent enough.
Domestic violence and Patriarchy
There have been numerous reports of domestic violence against women going up, in fact two prominentpublications have shared pieces about how domestic violence has gone up in India since the lockdown but the mainstream press is busy with its own tropes, the reasons already stated above. In fact, interestingly enough, most women can t wear loose fitting clothes inside the house because of the near ones being there 24 7 . This was being shared as India is going through summer where heat waves are common and most families do not have access to A/C s and rely on either a fan or just ventilation to help them out. I can t write more about this as simply I m not a woman so I haven t had to face the pressures that they have to every day. Interestingly though, there was a piece shared by arre. Interestingly, also arre whose content I have shared a few times on my blog has gone from light, funny to be much darker and more serious tone. Whether this is due to the times we live in is something that a social scientist or a social anthropologist may look into in the times to come.
One of the good things though, there hasn t been any grid failures as no industrial activity is happening (at all). In fact SEB s (State Electricity Boards) has shown a de-growth in electricity uptake as no industrial activity has been taken. While they haven t reduced any prices (which they ideally should have) as everybody is suffering.
Loot and price rise
Again, don t think it is an Indian issue but perhaps may be the same globally. Because of broken supply chains, there are both real and artificial shortages happening which is leading to reasonable and unreasonable price hikes in the market. Fresh veggies which were normally between INR 10/- to INR 20/- for 250 gm have reached INR 40/- 50/- and even above. Many of the things that we have to become depend upon are not there anymore. The shortage of plastic bottles being case in point.
Aryan Plastic bottle
This and many others like these pictures have been shared on social media but it seems the Government is busy doing something else. The only thing we know for sure is that the lock-down period is only gonna increase, no word about PPE s (Personal Protection Equipment) or face masks or anything else. While India has ordered some, those orders are being diverted to US or EU. In fact, many doctors who have asked for the same have been arrested, sacked or suspended for asking such inconvenient questions, although whether in BJP ruled states or otherwise. In fact, the Centre has suspended MPLADS funds , members of parliament get funds which they can use to provide relief work or whatever they think the money is best to spend upon.
Conditions of Labor in the Pandemic
Another sort of depressing story has been how the Supreme Court CJI Justice SA Bobde has made statements and refrained from playing any role in directing the Center to provide relief to the daily wage laborers. In fact, Mr. Bobde made statements such as why they need salaries if they are getting food. This was shared by barandbench, a site curated by lawyers and reporters alike. Both livelaw as well as barandbench have worked to enhance people s awareness about the legal happenings in our High Courts and Supreme Court. And while sadly, they cannot cover all, they at least do attempt to cover a bit of what s hot atm.
The Chief Justice who draws a salary of INR 250,000 per month besides other perks is perhaps unaware or doesn t care about fate of millions of casual workers, 400 460 million workers who will face abject poverty and by extension even if there are 4 members of the family so probably 1.2 billion people will fall below the poverty line. Three, four major sectors are going to be severely impacted, namely Agriculture, Construction and then MSME (Micro, small and medium enterprises) which cover everything from autos, industrial components, FMCG, electronics, you name it, it s done by the MSME sector. We know that the Rabi crop, even though it was gonna be a bumper crop this year will rot away in the fields. Even the Kharif crop whose window for sowing is at the most 2-3 weeks will not be able to get it done in time. In fact, with the extended lockdown of another 21 days, people will probably return home after 2 months by which time they would have nothing to do there as well as here in the cities. Another good report was done by the wire, the mainstream media has already left the station.
Ministry of Public Health
There was an article penned by Dr. Edmond Fernandes which he published last year. The low salary along with the complexities that Indian doctors are and may face in the near future are just mind-boggling.
The Loss
Losses have already started pouring in. Just today Air Deccan has ceased all its operations. I had loved Mr. Gopinath s airline which was started in the early 2000 s. While I won t bore you with the history, most of it can be seen from simplify Deccan . This I believe is just the start and it s only after the few months after the lock-down has been lifted would we really know the true extent of losses everywhere. And the more lenghthier the lockdown, the more difficult it would be businesses to ramp back. People have already diagnosed at the very least 15-20 sectors of the economy which would be hit and another similar or more number of sectors which will have first and second-order of losses and ramp-downs. While some guesses are being made, many are wildly optimistic and many are wildly pessimistic, as shared we would only know the results when the lockdown is opened up.
Predictions for the future
While things are very much in the air, some predictions can be made or rationally deduced. For instance, investments made in automation and IT would remain and perhaps even accelerate a little. Logistics models would need to be re-worked and maybe, just maybe there would be talk and action in making local supply chains a bit more robust. Financing is going to be a huge issue for at least 6 months to a year. Infrastructure projects which require huge amount of cash upfront will either have to be re-worked or delayed, how they will affect projects like Pune Metro and other such projects only time will tell.
Raghuram Rajan
Raghuram Rajan was recently asked if he would come back and let bygones be bygones. Raghuram in his own roundabout way said no. He is right now with Chicago Booth doing the work that he always love. Why would he leave that and be right in the middle of the messes other people have made. He probably gets more money, more freedom and probably has a class full of potential future economists.
Immigration Control, Conferences and thought experiment
There are so many clueless people out there, who don t know why it takes so long for any visa to be processed. From what little I know, it is to verify who you say you are and you have valid reason to enter the country. The people from home ministry verify credentials, as well as probably check with lists of known criminals and their networks world-wide. They probably have programs for such scenarios and are part and parcel of their everyday work. The same applies to immigration control at Airports. there has been a huge gap at immigration counters and the numbers of passengers who were flying internationally to and fro from India. While in India, we call them as Ministry of Home Affairs, in U.S. it s Department of Homeland security, other countries using similar jargons.
Now even before this pandemic happened, the number of people who are supposed to do border control and check people was way less and there have been scenes of Air rage especially in Indian airports after people came after a long-distance flight.
Now there are couple of thought experiments, just day before yesterday scientists discovered six new coronaviruses in bats and scientists in Iceland found 40 odd mutations of the virus on people. Now are countries going to ban people from Iceland as in time the icelandic people probably would have anti-bodies on all the forty odd mutations. Now if and when they come in contact onto others who have not, what would happen ? And this is not specifically about one space or ethnicity or whatever, microbes and viruses have been longer on earth than we have. In our greed we have made viruses resistant to antibiotics. While Mr. Trump says as he discovered it today, this has been known to the medical fraternity since tht 1950 s. CDC s own chart shows it. We cannot live in fear of a virus, the only way we can beat it is by understanding it and using science. Jon Cohen shared some of the incredible ways science is looking to beat this thing
or as again an alternative to youtube
https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=MPVG_n3w_vM
One of the most troubling question is how the differently-abled communities which don t have media coverage at the best of times, haven t had any media coverage at all during the pandemic. What are their stories and what they are experiencing ? How are they coping ? Are there anyways we could help each other ? By not having those stories, we perhaps have left them more vulnerable than we intend. And what does that speak about us, as people or as a community or a society ?
Silver Linings
While there is not a lot to be positive about, one interesting project I came about is openbreath.tech . This is an idea, venture started by IISER (Indian Institute of Science Education and Research) , IUCAA (Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics). They are collaborating with octogeneraian Capt (Retd) Rustom Barucha from Barucha Instrumentation and Control, besides IndoGenius, New Delhi, and King s College, London. The first two institutes are from my home town, Pune. While I don t know much of the specifics of this idea other than that there is an existing Barucha ventilator which they hope to open-source and make it easier for people to produce their own. While I have more questions than answers at this point, this is something hopefully to watch out for in the coming days and weeks.
The other jolly bit of good news has come from Punjab where after several decades, people in Northern Punjab are finally able to see the Himalayas or the Himalayan mountain range.
Dhauladhar range Northern Punjab Copyright CNN.Com
There you have it, What I have covered is barely scratching the surface. As a large section of the media only focuses on one narrative, other stories and narratives are lost. Be safe, till later.
Dear all,
This would be a longish blog post (as most of mine are) compiled over days but as there is so short a time and so much to share.
I had previously thought to share beautiful photographs of Ganesh mandals taking out the procession at time of immersion of the idol or the last day of Durga Puja recent events around do not make my mood to share photos at this point in time. I may share some of them in a future blog post or two .
Before going further, I would like to offer my sympathies and condolences to people hurt and dislocated in Hurricane Irma , the 2017 Central Mexico Earthquake and lastly the most recent Las Vegas shooting as well as Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico . I am somewhat nonplussed as to why Americans always want to name, especially hurricanes which destroy people s lives and livelihood built over generations and why most of the hurricanes are named after women. A look at weather.com site unveiled the answer to the mystery.
Ironically (or not) I saw some of the best science coverage about Earthquakes or anything scientific reporting and analysis after a long time in mainstream newspapers in India.
On another note, I don t understand or even expect to understand why the gunman did what he did 2 days back. Country music AFAIK is one of the most chilled-out kind of music, in some ways very similar to classical Indian singing although they are worlds apart in style of singing, renditions, artists, the way they emote etc. I seriously wish that the gunman had not been shot but caught and reasons were sought about what he did, he did. While this is certainly armchair thinking as was not at the scene of crime, but if a Mumbai Police constable could do it around a decade ago armed only with a lathi could do it, why couldn t the American cops who probably are trained in innumerable ways to subdue people without killing them, did. While investigations are on, I suspect if he were caught just like Ajmal Kasab was caught then lot of revelations might have come up. From what is known, the gentleman was upwardly mobile i.e. he was white, rich and apparently had no reason to have beef with anybody especially a crowd swaying to some nice music, all of which makes absolutely no sense.
Indian Economy Slowdown
Anyways, back to one of the main reasons of writing this blog post. Few days back, an ex-finance Minister of India Yashwant Sinha wrote what was felt by probably millions of Indians, an Indian Express article called I need to speak up now
While there have been many, many arguments made since then by various people. A simple search of I need to speak up would lead to lead to many a result besides the one I have shared above. The only exception I have with the article is the line Forty leading companies of the country are already facing bankruptcy proceedings. Many more are likely to follow suit. I would not bore you but you ask any entrepreneur trying to set up shop in India i.e. ones who actually go through the processes of getting all the licenses for setting up even a small businesses as to the numerous hurdles they have to overcome and laid-back corrupt bureaucracy which they have to overcome. I could have interviewed some of my friends who had the conviction and the courage to set up shop and spent more than half a decade getting all the necessary licenses and approval to set up but it probably would be too specific for one industry or the other and would lead to the same result.
Co-incidentally, a new restaurant, leaf opened in my vicinity few weeks before. From the looks it looked like a high-brow, high-priced restaurant hence like many others I did not venture in. After a few days, they introduced south-Indian delicacies like Masala Dosa, Uttapam at prices similar to other restaurants around. So I ventured in and bought some south Indian food to consume between mum and me.
Few days later, I became friends with the owner/franchisee and I suggested (in a friendly tone) that why he doesn t make it like a CCD play where many people including yours truly use the service to share, strategize and meet with clients.
The CCD joints usually serve coffee and snacks (which are over-priced but still run out pretty fast) but people come as they have chilled-out atmosphere and Wi-Fi access which people need for their smartphones, although the Wi-Fi part may soon become redundant With Reliance Jio making a big play.
I also shared why he doesn t add more variety and time (the south Indian items are time-limited) as I see/saw many empty chairs there.
Anyways, the shop-owner/franchisee shared his gross costs including salary, stocking, electricity, rent and it doesn t pan out to be serving Rs.80/- dish (roughly a 1US dollar and 25 cents) then serving INR Rs. 400/- a dish (around 6 $USD). One round of INR 400/- + dishes make his costs for the day, around 12 tables were there. It s when they have two full rounds of dishes costing INR 400/- or more that he actually has profits and he is predicting loss for at least 6 months to a year before he makes a rebound. He needs steady customers rather than just walk-ins that will make his business work/click. Currently his family is bearing the costs. He didn t mention the taxes although I know apart from GST there are still some local body taxes that they will have to pay and comply with.
There are a multitude of problems for shutting a shop legally as well as they have to again renavigate the bureaucracy for the same. I have seen more than a few retailers downing their shutters for 6-8 months and then either sell it to new management, let go of the lease or simply sell the property to a competitor. The Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code is probably the first proper exit policy for large companies. So the 40 odd companies that Mr. Sinha were talking about were probably sick for a long time.
In India, there is also an additional shame of being a failed entrepreneur unlike in the west where Entrepreneurs start on their next venture. As seen from Retailing In India only 3.3% of the population or at the most 4% of the population is directly or indirectly linked with the retail trade. Most of the economy still derives its wealth from the agrarian sector which is still reeling under the pressure from demonetization which happened last year. Al jazeera surprisingly portrayed a truer picture of the effects demonetization had on common citizen than many Indian newspapers did at the time. Because of the South African Debconf, I had to resort to debit cards and hence was able to escape standing in long lines in which many an old and women perished.
It is only yesterday that the Government has acknowledged which many prominent Indians have been saying for months now, that we are in a slowdown . Be aware of the terms being used for effect by the Prime Minister. There are twoarticles which outlines the troubles India is in atm. The only bright spot has been e-commerce which so far has eluded GST although the Govt. has claimed regulations to put it in check.
Indian Education System
Interestingly, Ravish Kumar has started a series on NDTV where he is showcasing how Indian education sector, especially public colleges have been left to teachers on contract basis, see the first four episodes on NDTV channel starting with the first one I have shared as a hyperlink. I apologize as the series is in Hindi as the channel is meant for Indians and is mostly limited to Northern areas of the Country (mostly) although he has been honest that it is because they lack resources to tackle the amount of information flowing to them. Ravish started the series with sharing information about the U.S. where the things are similar with some teachers needing to sleep in cars because of high-cost of living to some needing to turn to sex-work . I was shocked when I read the guardian article, that is no way to treat our teachers.I went on to read How the American University was Killed following the breadcrumbs along the way. Reading that it seems Indians have been following the American system playbook from the 1980 s itself. The article talks about HMO as well and that seems to have followed here as well with my own experience of hospital fees and drugs which I had to entail a few weeks/month ago.
Few years ago, when me and some of my friends had the teaching bug and we started teaching in a nearby municipal school, couple of teachers had shared that they were doing 2-3 jobs to make ends meet. I don t know about others in my group, at least I was cynical because I thought all the teachers were permanent and they make good money only to realize now that the person was probably speaking the truth. When you have to do three jobs to make ends meet from where do you bring the passion to teach young people and that too outside the syllabus ?
Also, with this new knowledge in hindsight, I take back all my comments I made last year and the year before for the pathetic education being put up by the State. With teachers being paid pathetically/underpaid and almost 60% teachers being ad-hoc/adjunct teachers they have to find ways to have some sense of security. Most teachers are bachelors as they are poor and cannot offer any security (either male or female) and for women, after marriage it actually makes no sense for them to continue in this profession. I salute all the professors who are ad-hoc in nature and probably will never get a permanent position in their life.
I think in some way, thanx to him, that the government has chosen to give 7th pay commisson salary to teachers. While the numbers may appear be large, there are a lot of questions as to how many people will actually get paid. There needs to be lot of vacancies which need to be filled quickly but don t see any solution in the next 2-3 years as well. The Government has taken a position to use/re-hire retired teachers rather than have new young teachers as an unwritten policy. In this Digital India context how are retired teachers supposed to understand and then pass on digital concepts is beyond me when at few teacher trainings I have seen they lack even the most basic knowledge that I learnt at least a decade or two ago, the difference is that vast. I just don t know what to say to that. My own experience with my own mother who had pretty good education in her time and probably would have made a fine business-woman if she knew that she will have a child that she would have to raise by herself alone (along with maternal grand-parents) is testimonial to the fact how hard it is for older people to grasp technology and here I m talking just using the interface as a consumer rather than a producer or someone in-between who has the idea of how companies and governments profit from whatever data is shared one way or the other.
After watching the series/episodes and discussing the issue with my mother it was revealed that both her and my late maternal grandfather were on casual/ad-hoc basis till 20-25 years in their service in the defense sector. If Ravish were to do a series on the defense sector he probably would find the same thing there. To add to that, the defense sector is a vital component to a country s security. If 60% of the defense staff in all defense establishments have temporary staff how do you ensure the loyalty of the people working therein. That brings to my mind Ignorance is bliss .
Software development and deployment
There is another worry that all are skirting around, the present dispensation/government s mantra is minimum government-maximum governance with digital technologies having all solutions which is leading to massive unemployment. Also from most of the stories/incidents I read in the newspapers, mainstream media and elsewhere it seems most software deployments done in India are done without having any system of internal checks and balances. There is no lintian for software to be implemented. Contracts seem to be given to big companies and there is no mention of what prerequisites or conditions were laid down by the Government for software development and deployment and if any checks were done to ensure that the software being developed was in according to government specifications or not. Ideally this should all be in public domain so that questions can be asked and responsibility fixed if things go haywire, as currently they do not.
Software issues
As my health been not that great, I have been taking a bit more time and depth while filing bugs. #877638 is a good example. I suspect though that part of the problem might be that mate has moved to gtk3 while guake still has gtk-2 bindings. I also reported the issue upstream both in mate-panel as well as guake . I haven t received any response from either or/and upstreams .
I also have been fiddling around with gdb to better understand the tool so I can exploit/use this tool in a better way. There are some commands within the gdb interface which seem to be interesting and hopefully I ll try how the commands perform over days, weeks to a month. I hope we see more action on the mate-panel/guake bug as well as move of guake to gtk+3 but that what seemingly seemed like wait for eternity seems to have done by somebody in last couple of days. As shared in the ticket there are lots of things still to do but it seems the heavy lifting has been done but seems merging will be tricky as two developers have been trying to update to gtk+3 although aichingm seems to have a leg up with his 3! branch.
Another interesting thing I saw is the below picture.
The firefox version I was using to test the site/wordpress-wp-admin was Mozilla Firefox 52.4.0 which AFAIK is a pretty recentish one and people using Debian stretch would probably be using the same version (firefox stable/LTS) rather than the more recent versions. I went to the link it linked to and it gave no indication as to why it thought my browser is out-of-date and what functionality was/is missing. I have found that wordpress support has declined quite a bit and people don t seem to use the forums as much as they used to before.
I also filed a few bugs for qalculate. #877716 where a supposedly transitional package removes the actual application, #877717 as the software has moved its repo. to github.com as well as tickets and other things in process and lastly #877733. I had been searching for a calculator which can do currency calculations on the fly (say for e.g. doing personal budgeting for Taiwan debconf) without needing to manually enter the conversion rates and losing something in the middle. While the current version has support for some limited currencies, the new versions promise more as other people probably have more diverse needs for currency conversions (people who do long or short on oil, stocks overseas is just one example, I am sure there are many others) than simplistic mine. Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #American Education System, #bug-filing, #Climate change, #Dignity, #e-commerce, #gtk+3, #gtk2, #Indian Economy 'Slowdown', #Indian Education System, #Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, #Las Vegas shooting, #Modern Retail in India, #planet-debian, #qalculate, Ad-hoc and Adjunct Professors, wordpress.com
This year, for the first time, I attended FOSDEM.
There I met...
People
... including:
friends that I don't see very often;
old friends that I didn't expect to see there, some of whom decided to travel
from far away in the last minute;
met people in person for the first time, which previously I had known only
though the internet -- one of whom is a protagonist in a previous blog entry,
about the Debian port for
OpenRISC;
I met new people in:
bars/pubs,
restaurants,
breakfast tables at lodgings,
and public transport.
... from the first hour to the last hour of my stay in Brussels.
In summary, lots of people around.
I also hoped to meet or spend some (more) time with a few people, but in the end
I didn't catch them, our could not spend as much time with them as I would wish.
For somebody like me who enjoys quiet time by itsef, it was a bit too intensive
in terms of interacting with people. But overall it was a nice winter break,
definitely worth to attend, and even a much better experience than what I had
expected.
Talks / Events
Of course, I also attended a few talks, some of which were very interesting;
although the event is so (sometimes uncomfortably) crowded that the rooms were
full more often than not, in which case it was not possible to enter (the doors
were closed) or there were very long queues for waiting.
And with so many talks crammed into a weekend, I had so many schedule clashes
with the talks that I had pre-selected as interesting, that I ended up missing
most of them.
In terms of technical stuff, I have specially enjoyed the talk by Arun Thomas
RISC-V -- Open Hardware for Your Open Source
Software, and some conversations
related with toolchain stuff and other upstream stuff, as well as on the Debian
port for RISC-V.
The talk Resurrecting dinosaurs, what can possibly go wrong? -- How
Containerised Applications could eat our
users, by Richard Brown, was
also very good.
ChaosKey
Apart from that, I have witnessed a shady cash transaction in a bus from the
city centre to FOSDEM in exchange for hardware, not very unlike what I had read
about only days before.
So I could not help but to get involved in a subsequent transaction myself, to
get my hands laid upon a ChaosKey.
Statutory warning It s a long read.
I start by sharing I regret, I did not hold onto the Budget and Economics 101 blog post for one more day. I had been holding/thinking on to it for almost couple of weeks before posting, if I had just waited a day more, I would have been able to share an Indian Express story . While I thought that the work for the budget starts around 3 months before the budget, I came to learn from that article that it takes 6 months. As can be seen in the article, it is somewhat of a wasted opportunity, part of it probably due to the Government (irrespective of any political party, dynasty etc.) mismanagement.
What has not been stated in the article is what I had shared earlier, reading between the lines, it seems that the Government isn t able to trust what it hears from its advisers and man on the street. Unlike Chanakya and many wise people before him who are credited with advising about good governance, that a good king is one who goes out in disguise, learns how his/er subjects are surviving, seeing what ills them and taking or even not taking corrective steps after seeing the problem from various angles. Of course it s easier said then done, though lot of Indian kings did try and ran successful provinces. There were also some who were more interested in gambling, women and threw/frittered away their kingdoms.
The 6-month things while not being said in the Express article is probably more about checking and re-checking figures and sources to make sure they are able to read whatever pattern the various Big Businesses, Industry, Social Welfare schemes and people are saying I guess. And unless mass digitalization as well as overhaul of procedures, Right to Information (RTI) happens, don t see any improvement in the way the information is collected, interpreted and shared with the public at large.
It would also require people who are able to figure out how things work sharing the inferences (right or wrong) through various media so there is discussion about figures and policy-making. Such researchers and their findings are sadly missing in Indian public discourses and only found in glossy coffee table books :(.
One of the most basic question for instance is, How much of any policy should be based on facts and figures and how much giving fillip to products and services needed in short to medium term ?
Also how much morality should play a part in Public Policy ?
Surprisingly, or probably not, most Indian budgets are populist by nature with some scientific basis but most of the times there is no dialog about how the FM came to some conclusion or Policy-making. I am guessing a huge part of that has also to do with basic illiteracy as well as Economic and Financial Illiteracy.
Just to share a well-known world-over example, one of the policies where the Government of India has been somewhat lethargic is wired broadband penetration. As have shared umpteen times, while superficially broadband penetration is happening, most of the penetration is the unreliable and more expensive mobile broadband penetration.
While this may come as a shock to many of the users of technology, BSNL, a Government company who provides broadband for almost 70-80% of the ADSL wired broadband subscribers gives 50:1 contention ratio to its customers.
One can now understand the pathetic speeds along with very old copper wiring (20 odd years) on which the network is running. The idea/idiom of running network using duct-tape seems pretty apt in here
Now, the Government couple of years ago introduced FFTH Fiber-to-the-home but because the charges are so high, it s not going anywhere. The Government could say 10% discount in your Income Tax rates if you get FFTH. This would force people to get FFTH and would also force BSNL to clean up its act. It has been documented that a percentage increase in broadband equals a similar percentage rise in GDP.
Having higher speeds of broadband would mean better quality of streaming video as well as all sorts of remote teaching and sharing of ideas which will give a lot of fillip to all sorts of IT peripherals in short, medium and long-term as well. Not to mention, all the software that will be invented/coded to take benefit of all that speed.
Although, realistically speaking I am cynical that the Government would bring something like this
Moving on
Another interesting story which I had shared was a bit about World History
Now the Economist sort of confirmed how things are in Pakistan. What is and was interesting that the article is made by a politically left-leaning magazine which is for globalization, business among other things .
So, there seem to be only three options, either I and the magazine are correct or we both are reading it wrong.
The third and last option is that the United States realize that Pakistan can no longer be trusted as Pakistan is siding more and more with Chinese and Russians, hence the article. Atlhough it seems a somewhat far-fetched idea as I don t see the magazine getting any brownie points with President Trump. Unless, The Economist becomes more hawkish, more right-wingish due to the new establishment.
I can t claim to have any major political understanding or expertise but it does seem that Pakistan is losing friends. Even UAE have been cautiously building bridges with us. Now how this will play out in the medium to long-term depends much on the personal equations of the two heads of state, happenings in geopolitics around the world and the two countries, decisions they take, it is a welcome opportunity as far they (the Saudis) have funds they want to invest and India can use those investments to make new infrastructure.
Now, I need a bit of help of Java and VCS (Version control system) experts . There is a small game project called Mars-Sim. I asked probably a few more questions than I should have and the result was that I was made a member of the game team even though I had shared with them that I m a non-coder.
I think such a game is important as it s foss. Both the game itself is foss as well as its build-tools with a basic wiki. Such a game would be useful not only to Debian but all free software distributions.
Journeying into the game
Unfortunately, the game as it is currently, doesn t work with openjdk8 but private conversations with the devs. have shared they will work on getting it to work on OpenJDK 9 which though is sometime away.
Now as it is a game, I knew it would have multiple multimedia assets. It took me quite sometime to figure out where most of the multimedia assets are.
I was shocked to find that there aren t any tool/s in Debian as well a GNU/Linux to know about types of content is there inside a directory and its sub-directories.
I framed it in a query and found a script as an answer . I renamed the script to file-extension-information.sh (for lack of imagination of better name).
After that, I downloaded a snapshot of the head of the project from https://sourceforge.net/p/mars-sim/code/HEAD/tree/ where it shows a link to download the snapshot.
https://sourceforge.net/code-snapshots/svn/m/ma/mars-sim/code/mars-sim-code-3847-trunk.zip
unzipped it and then ran the script on it
[$] bash file-extension-information.sh mars-sim-code-3846-trunk
theme: 1770
dtd: 31915
py: 10815
project: 5627
JPG: 762476
fxml: 59490
vm: 876
dat: 15841044
java: 13052271
store: 1343
gitignore: 8
jpg: 3473416
md: 5156
lua: 57
gz: 1447
desktop: 281
wav: 83278
1: 2340
css: 323739
frag: 471
svg: 8948591
launch: 9404
index: 11520
iml: 27186
png: 3268773
json: 1217
ttf: 2861016
vert: 712
ogg: 12394801
prefs: 11541
properties: 186731
gradle: 611
classpath: 8538
pro: 687
groovy: 2711
form: 5780
txt: 50274
xml: 794365
js: 1465072
dll: 2268672
html: 1676452
gif: 38399
sum: 23040
(none): 1124
jsx: 32070
It gave me some idea of what sort of file were under the repository. I do wish the script defaulted to showing file-sizes in KB if not MB to better assess how the directory is made up but not a big loss .
The above listing told me that at the very least theme, JPG, dat, wav, png, ogg and lastly gif files.
For lack of better tools and to get an overview of where those multimedia assets used ncdu
[shirish@debian] - [~/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk] - [10210]
[$] ncdu mars-sim/--- /home/shirish/games/mars-sim-code-3846-trunk/mars-sim --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
46.2 MiB [##########] /mars-sim-ui
15.2 MiB [### ] /mars-sim-mapdata
8.3 MiB [# ] /mars-sim-core
2.1 MiB [ ] /mars-sim-service
500.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-main
188.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-android
72.0 KiB [ ] /mars-sim-network
16.0 KiB [ ] pom.xml
12.0 KiB [ ] /.settings
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.store
4.0 KiB [ ] mars-sim.iml
4.0 KiB [ ] .project
I found that all the media is distributed randomly and posted a ticket about it. As I m not even a java newbie, could somebody look at mokun s comment and help out please ?
On the same project, there has been talk of migrating to github.com
Now whatever little I know of git, it makes a copy of the whole repository under .git/ folder/directory so having multimedia assets under git is a bad, bad idea, as each multimedia binary format file would be unique and no possibility of diff. between two binary files even though they may be the same file with some addition or subtraction from earlier version.
I did file a question but am unhappy with the answers given. Can anybody give some definitive answers if they have been able to do how I am proposing , if yes, how did they go about it ?
And lastly
America was founded by immigrants. Everybody knows the story about American Indians, the originals of the land were over-powered by the European settlers. So any claim, then and now that immigration did not help United States is just a lie.
This came due to a conversation on #debconf by andrewsh
[18:37:06] I d be more than happy myself to apply for an US tourist not transit visa when I really need it, as a transit visa isn t really useful, is just as costly as a tourist visa, and nearly as difficult to get as a tourist visa
[18:37:40] I m not entirely sure I wish to transit through the US in its Trumplandia incarnation either
[18:38:07] likely to be more difficult and unfun
FWIW I am in complete agreement with Andrew s assessment of how it might be with foreigners. It has been on my mind and thoughts for quite some time although andrewsh put it eloquently.
But as always I m getting ahead of myself.
The conversation is because debconf this year would be in Canada. For many a cheap flight, one of the likely layovers/stopover can be the United States.
I actually would have gone one step further, even if it was cheap transit visa, it would equally be unfun as it would discriminate.
About couple of years back, a friend of mine while explaining what visa is, put it rather succinctly
the visa officer looks at only 3 things
a. Your financial position something which tells that you can take care of your financial needs if things go south
b. You are not looking to settle there unlawfully
c. You are not a criminal.
While costs do matter, what is disturbing more is the form of extremism being displayed therein. While Indians from the South Asian continent in US have been largely successful, love to be in peace (one-off incidents do and will happen anywhere) if I had to take a transit or tourist visa in this atmosphere, it would leave a bad taste in the mouth.
When one of my best friends is a Muslim, 20% of the population in India is made of Muslims and 99% of the time both of us co-exist in peace I simply can t take any alternative ideology. Even in Freakonomics 2.0 the authors when they shared that it s less than 0.1 percent of Muslims who are engaged in terrorist activities, if they were even 1 percent than all the world s armed forces couldn t fight them and couldn t keep anyone safe. Which simply means that 99.99% of even all Muslims are good.
This resonates strongly with me for number of reasons. One of my uncles in early to late 80 s had an opportunity for work to visit Russia for official work. He went there and there were Secret Police after him all the time. While he didn t know it, I later read it, that it was SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) when all and any foreigners came visiting the country, and not just foreigners, they had spies for their own citizens. Russka a book I read several years ago explained the paranoia beautifully.
While U.S. in those days was a more welcoming place for him.
I am thankful as well as find it strange that Canada and States have such different visa procedures. While Canada would simply look at the above things, probably discreetly inquire about you if you have been a bad boy/girl in any way and then make a decision which is fine. For United States, even for a transit visa I probably would have to go to Interview where my world view would probably be in conflict with the current American world view.
Interestingly, while I was looking at conversations on the web and one thing that is missing there is that nobody has talked about intelligence community. What Mr. Trump is saying in not so many words is that our intelligence even with all the e-mails we monitor and everything we do, we still can t catch you. It almost seems like giving a back-handed compliment to the extremists saying you do a better job than our intelligence community.
This doesn t mean that States doesn t have interesting things to give to the world, Star Trek conventions, Grand Canyon (which probably would require me more than a month or more to explore even a little part), NASA, Intel, AMD, SpaceX, CES (when it s held) and LPC (Linux Plumber s conference where whose who come to think of roadmap for GNU/Linux). What I wouldn t give to be a fly in the wall when LPC, CES happens in the States.
What I actually found very interesting is that in the current Canadian Government, if what I read and heard is true, then Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada made 50 of his cabinet female. Just like in the article, studies even in Indian parliament have shown that when women are in power, questions about social justice, equality, common good get asked and policies made. If I do get the opportunity to be part of debconf, I would like to see, hear, watch, learn how the women cabinet is doing things. I am assuming that reporting and analysis standards of whatever decisions are more transparent and more people are engaged in the political process to know what their elected representatives are doing.
One another interesting point I came to know is that Canada is home to bicycling paths. While I stopped bicycling years ago as it has been becoming more and more dangerous to bicycle here in Pune as there is no demarcation for cyclists, I am sure lot of Canadians must be using this opportunity fully.
Lastly, on the debconf preparation stage, things have started becoming a bit more urgent and hectic. From a monthly IRC meet, it has now become a weekly meet. Both the wiki and the website are slowly taking up shape. http://deb.li/dc17kbp is a nice way to know/see progress of the activities happening .
One important decision that would be taken today is where people would stay during debconf. There are options between on-site and two places around the venue, one 1.9 km around, the other 5 km. mark. Each has its own good and bad points. It would be interesting to see which place gets selected and why. Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #budget, #Canada, #debconf organization, #discrimination, #Equal Opportunity, #Fiber, #svn, #United States, #Version Control, Broadband, Git, Pakistan, Subversion
A welcome sign at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi airport.
Bus from Suvarnabhumi Airport to Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.
Road near Jomtien beach in Pattaya
Photo of a songthaew in Pattaya. There are shared songthaews which run along Jomtien Second road and takes 10 bath to anywhere on the route.
Jomtien Beach in Pattaya.
A welcome sign at Pattaya Floating market.
This Korean Vegetasty noodles pack was yummy and was available at many 7-Eleven stores.
Wat Arun temple stamps your hand upon entry
Wat Arun temple
Khao San Road
A food stall at Khao San Road
Chao Phraya Express Boat
Banana with yellow flesh
Fruits at a stall in Bangkok
Trimmed pineapples from Thailand.
Corn in Bangkok.
A board showing coffee menu at a 7-Eleven store along with rates in Pattaya.
In this section of 7-Eleven, you can buy a premix coffee and mix it with hot water provided at the store to prepare.
Red wine being served in Air India
There is a bit of context that needs to be shared before I get to this and would be a long one. For reasons known and unknown, I have a lot of sudden electricity outages. Not just me, all those who are on my line. A discussion with a lineman revealed that around 200+ families and businesses are on the same line and when for whatever reason the electricity goes for all. Even some of the traffic lights don t work. This affects software more than hardware or in some cases, both. And more specifically HDD s are vulnerable. I had bought an APC unit several years for precisely this, but over period of time it just couldn t function and trips also when the electricity goes out. It s been 6-7 years so can t even ask customer service to fix the issue and from whatever discussions I have had with APC personnel, the only meaningful difference is to buy a new unit but even then not sure this is an issue that can be resolved, even with that.
That comes to the issue that happens once in a while where the system fsck is unable to repair /home and you need to use an external pen drive for the same. This is my how my hdd stacks up 
The main argument as have shared before is that Indian Govt. thinks we need our home grown CPU and while I have no issues with that, as shared before except for RISC-V there is no other space where India could look into doing that. Especially after the Chip Act, Biden has made that any new fabs or any new thing in chip fabrication will only be shared with 
. Backups certainly make a lot of sense, especially 
KDE Krita snap
KDE Parley snap
KDE Kate snap
KDE Okular snap
KDE Haruna snap
KDE Granatier snap
KDE Gwenview snap
KDE Gcompris snap
KDE Bomber snap
KDE Falkon snap
KDE Ark snap
KDE Blinken snap
KDE Bovo Snap
KDE Atikulate snap
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
The 
Pappu Yadav, President Jan Adhikar Party, Bihar May 11, 2021
Example of Medical Bills people have to pay. 
India-China Border Areas Copyright DW.com 2020 
Dhauladhar range Northern Punjab Copyright CNN.Com 
The firefox version I was using to test the site/wordpress-wp-admin was Mozilla Firefox 52.4.0 which AFAIK is a pretty recentish one and people using Debian stretch would probably be using the same version (firefox stable/LTS) rather than the more recent versions. I went to the link it linked 
Statutory warning It s a long read.
I start by sharing I regret, I did not hold onto the
Another interesting story which I had shared was a bit about 
America was 
One another interesting point I came to know is that Canada is home to bicycling 
