Culture, Books, Friends

Culture

Just before I start, I would like to point out that this post may or would probably be NSFW. Again, what is SFW (Safe at Work) and NSFW that so much depends on culture and perception of culture from wherever we are or wherever we take birth? But still, to be on the safe side I have put it as NSFW. Now there have been a few statements and ideas that gave me a pause. This will be a sort of chaotic blog post as I am in such a phase today.

For e.g. while I do not know which culture or which country this comes from, somebody shared that in some cultures one can talk/comment ‘May your poop be easy’ and with a straight face. I dunno which culture is this but if somebody asked me that I would just die from laughing or maybe poop there itself. While I can understand if it is a constipated person, but a whole culture? Until and unless their DNA is really screwed, I don’t think so but then what do I know? I do know that we shit when we have extreme reactions of either joy or fear. And IIRC, this comes from mammal response when they were in dangerous situations and we got the same as humans evolved. I would really be interested to know which culture is that. I did come to know that the Japanese do wish that you may not experience hard work or something to that effect while ironically they themselves are becoming extinct due to hard work and not enough relaxation, toxic workplace is common in Japan according to social scientists and population experts.

Another term that I couldn’t figure out is ‘The Florida Man Strikes again’ and this term is usually used when somebody does something stupid or something weird. While it is exclusively used in the American context, I am curious to know how that came about. Why does Florida have such people or is it an exaggeration? I have heard the term e.g. ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas ‘. Think it is also called Sin city although why just Vegas is beyond me?

Omicron-8712 Blood pressure machine

I felt so stupid. I found another site or e-commerce site called Wellness Forever. They had the blood pressure machine I wanted, an Omron-8172. I bought it online and they delivered the same within half an hour. Amazon took six days and in the end, didn’t deliver it at all.

I tried taking measurements from it yesterday. I have yet to figure out what it all means but I did get measurements of 109 SYS, 88 DIA and Pulse is 72. As far as the pulse is concerned, guess that is normal, the others just don’t know. If only I had known this couple of months ago. I was able to register the product as well as download and use the Omron Connect app. For roughly INR 2.5k you have a sort of health monitoring system. It isn’t Star Trek Tricorder in any shape or form but it will have to do while the tricorder gets invented. And while we are on the subject let’s not forget Elizabeth Holmes and the scam called Theranos. It really is something to see How Elizabeth Holmes modeled so much of herself on Steve Jobs mimicking how he left college/education halfway. A part of me is sad that Theranos is not real. Joe Scott just a few days ago shared some perspectives on the same just a few days ago. The idea in itself is pretty seductive, to say the least, and that is the reason the scam went on for more than a decade and perhaps would have been longer if some people hadn’t gotten the truth out.

I do see potentially, something like that coming on as A.I. takes a bigger role in automating testing. Half a decade to a decade from now, who knows if there is an algorithm that is able to do what is needed? If such a product were to come to the marketplace at a decent price, it would revolutionize medicine, especially in countries like India, South Africa, and all sorts of remote places. Especially, with all sorts of off-grid technologies coming and maturing in the marketplace. Before I forget, there is a game called ‘Cell’ on Android that tells or shares about the evolution of life on earth. It also shares credence to the idea that life has come 6 times on Earth and has been destroyed multiple times by asteroids. It is in the idle sort of game format, so you can see the humble beginnings from the primordial soup to various kinds of cells and bacteria to finally a mammal. This is where I am and a long way to go.

Indian Bureaucracy

One of the few things that Britishers gave to India, is the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy tests us in myriad ways. It would be full 2 months on 5th September and I haven’t yet got a death certificate. And I need that for a sundry number of things. The same goes for a disability certificate. What is and was interesting is my trip to the local big hospital called Sassoon Hospital. My mum had shared incidents that occurred in the 1950s when she and the family had come to Pune. According to her, when she was alive, while Sassoon was the place to be, it was big and chaotic and you never knew where you are going. That was in 1950, I had the same experience in 2022. The term/adage ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’ seems to be held true for Sassoon Hospital.

Btw, those of you who think the Devil exists, he is totally a fallacy. There is a popular myth that the devil comes to deal that he/she/they come to deal with you when somebody close to you passes, I was waiting desperately for him when mum passed. Any deal that he/she/they would have offered me I would have gladly taken, but all my wait was all for nothing. While I believe evil exists, that is manifested by humans and nobody else. The whole idea and story of the devil is just to control young children and nothing beyond that 😦

Debconf 2023, friends, JPEGOptim, and EV’s

Quite a number of friends had gone to Albania this year as India won the right to host Debconf for the year 2023. While I did lurk on the Debconf orga IRC channel, I’m not sure how helpful I would be currently. One news that warmed my heart is some people would be coming to India to check the site way before and make sure things go smoothly. Nothing like having more eyes (in this case bodies) to throw at a problem and hopefully it will be sorted. While I have not been working for the last couple of years, one of the things that I had to do and have been doing is moving a lot of stuff online. This is in part due to the Government’s own intention of having everything on the cloud. One of the things I probably may have shared it more than enough times is that the storage most of these sites give is like the 1990s. I tried jpegoptim and while it works, it degrades the quality of the image quite a bit. The whole thing seems backward, especially as newer and newer smartphones are capturing more data per picture (megapixel resolution), case in point Samsung Galaxy A04 that is being introduced. But this is not only about newer phones, even my earlier phone, Samsung J-5/500 which I bought in 2016 took images at 5 MB. So it is not a new issue but a continuous issue. And almost all Govt. sites have the upper band fixed at 1 MB. But this is not limited to Govt. sites alone, most sites in India are somewhat frozen in the 1990s. And it isn’t as if resources for designing web pages using HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Python, or Java aren’t available. If worse comes to worst, one can even use amp to make his, her or their point. But this is if they want to do stuff. I would be sharing a few photos with commentary, there are still places where I can put photos apart from social media 🙂

Friends

Last week, Saturday suddenly all the friends decided to show up. I have no clue one way or the other why but am glad they showed up.

Mahendra, Akshat, Shirish and Sagar Sukhose (Mangesh’s friend) at Bal Gandharva..

Electric scooter as shared by Akshat seen in Albania

Somebody making a real-life replica of Wall Street on F.C. Road (Commercial, all glass)

Ganesh Idol near my house

Wearing new clothes

I will have to be a bit rapid about what I am sharing above so here goes nothing –

1. The first picture shows Mahendra, Akshat, me, and Sagar Sukhose (Mangesh’s friend). The picture was taken by Mangesh Diwate. We talked quite a bit of various things that could be done in Debian. A few of the things that I shared were (bringing more stuff from BSD to Debian, I am sure there’s still quite a lot of security software that could be advantageous to have in Debian.) The best person to talk to or guide about this would undoubtedly be Paul Wise or as he is affectionally called Pabs. He is one of the shy ones and yet knows so much about how things work. The one and only time I met him is 2016. The other thing that we talked about is porting Debian to one of the phones. This has been done in the past and done by a Puneitie some 4-5 years back. While I don’t recollect the gentleman’s name, I remember that the porting was done on a Motorola phone as that was the easiest to do. He had tried some other mobile but that didn’t work. Making Debian available on phone is hard work. Just to have an idea, I went to the xda developers forum and found out that while M51 has been added, my specific phone model is not there. A Samsung Galaxy M52G Android (samsung; SM-M526B; lahaina; arm64-v8a) v12 . You look at the chat and you understand how difficult the process might be. One of the other ideas that Akshat pitched was Debian Astro, this is something that is close to the heart of many, including me. I also proposed to have some kind of web app or something where we can find and share about the various astronomy and related projects done by various agencies. While there is a NASA app, nothing comes close to JSR and that site just shares stuff, no speculation. There are so many projects taken or being done by the EU, JAXA, ISRO, and even middle-east countries are trying but other than people who are following some of the developments, we hear almost nothing. Even the Chinese have made some long strides but most people know nothing about the same. And it’s sad to know that those developments are not being known, shared, or even speculated about as much as say NASA or SpaceX is. How do we go about it and how do we get people to contribute or ask questions around it would be interesting.

2. The second picture was something that was shared by Akshat. Akshat was sharing how in Albania people are moving on these electric ‘scooters’. I dunno if that is the right word for it or what. I had heard from a couple of friends who had gone to Vietnam a few years ago how most people in Vietnam had modified their scooters and they were snaking lines of electric wires charging scooters. I have no clue whether they were closer to Vespa or something like above. In India, the Govt. is in partnership with the oil, gas, and coal mafia just as it was in Australia (the new Govt. in Australia is making changes) the same thing is here. With the humongous profits that the oil sector provides the petro states and others, Corruption is bound to happen. We talk and that’s the extent of things.

3. The third picture is from a nearby area called F.C. Road or Fergusson College Road. The area has come up quite sharply (commercially) in the last few years. Apparently, Mr. Kushal is making a real-life replica of Wall Street which would be given to commercial tenants. Right now the real estate market is tight in India, we will know how things pan out in the next few years.

4. Number four is an image of a Ganesh idol near my house. There is a 10-day festival of the elephant god that people used to celebrate every year. For the last couple of years because of the pandemic, people were unable to celebrate the festival as it is meant to celebrate. This time some people are going overboard while others are cautious and rightfully so.

5. Last and not least, one of the things that people do at this celebration is to have new clothes, so I shared a photo of a gentleman who had bought and was wearing new clothes. While most countries around the world are similar, Latin America is very similar to India in many ways, perhaps Gunnar can share. especially about religious activities. The elephant god is known for his penchant for sweets and that can be seen from his rounded stomach, that is also how he is celebrated. He is known to make problems disappear or that is supposed to be his thing. We do have something like 4 billion gods, so each one has to be given some work or quality to justify the same 😉

PC desktop build, Intel, spectre issues etc.

This is and would be a longish one.

I have been using desktop computers for around couple of decades now. My first two systems were an Intel Pentium III and then a Pentium Dual-core, the first one on kobian/mercury motherboard. The motherboards were actually called Mercury and was a brand which was later sold to Kobian which kept the brand-name. The motherboards and the CPU/processor used to be cheap. One could set up a decentish low-end system with display for around INR 40k/- which seemed to be decent as a country we had just come out of non-alignment movement and also chose to come out of isolationist tendencies (technology and otherwise as well). Most middle-class income families got their first taste of computers after y2k. There were quite a few y2k incomes which prompted the Government to lose duties further.

One of the highlights during 1991 when satellite TV came was shown by CNN (probably CNN International) was the coming down of the Berlin Wall. There were many of us who were completely ignorant of world politics or what is/was happening in other parts of the world.

Computer systems at those times were considered a luxury item and duties were sky-high ( between 1992-2001). The launch of Mars Pathfinder, its subsequent successful landing on the Martian surface also catapulted people’s imagination about PCs and micro-processors.

I can still recall the excitement that was among young people of my age first seeing the liftoff from Cape Canaveral and then later the processed images of Spirits cameras showing images of a desolate desert-type land. We also witnessed the beginnings of ‘International Space Station‘ (ISS) .

Me and few of my friends had drunk lot of Carl Sagan and many other sci-fi coolaids/stories. Star Trek, the movies and the universal values held/shared by them was a major influence to all our lives.

People came to know about citizen based science or projects/distributed science projects, y2k fear appeared to be unfounded all these factors and probably a few more prompted the Government of India to reduce duties on motherboards, processors, components as well as taking Computers out of the restricted list which lead to competition and finally the common man being able to dream of a system sooner than later. Y2K also kick-started the beginnings of Indian software industry which is the bread and butter of many a middle class men-women who are in the service industry using technology directly or indirectly.

In 2002 I bought my first system, an Intel Pentium III, i810 chipset (integrated graphics) with 256 MB of SDRAM which was supposed to be sufficient for the tasks it was being used for, Some light gaming, some web-mails, seeing movies,etc running on a mercury board. I don’t remember the code-name partly because the code-names are/were really weird and partly because it is just too long ago. I remember using Windows ’98 and trying to install one of the early GNU/Linux variants on that machine. Ir memory serves right, you had to flick a jumper (like a switch) to use the extended memory.

I do not know/remember what happened but I think somewhere in a year or two in that time-frame Mercury India filed for bankruptcy and the name, manufacturing was sold to Kobian. After Kobian took over the ownership, it said it would neither honor the 3/5 year warranty or even repairs on the motherboards Mercury had sold, it created a lot of bad will against the company and relegated itself to the bottom of the pile for both experienced and new system-builders. Also mercury motherboards weren’t reputed/known to have a long life although the one I had gave me quite a decent life.

The next machine I purchased was a Pentium Dual-core, (around 2009/2010) LGA a Williamnette which had out-of-order execution, the bug meltdown which is making news nowadays has history this far back. I think I bought it in 45nm which was a huge jump from the previous version although still secure in the mATX package. Again the board was from mercury. (Intel 845 chipset, DDR2 2 GB RAM and SATA came to stay).

So meltdown has been in existence for 10-12 odd years and is in everything which either uses Intel or ARM processors.

As you can probably make-out most systems came stretched out 2-3 years later than when they were launched in American or/and European markets. Also business or tourism travel was neither so easy, smooth or transparent as is today. All of which added to delay in getting new products in India.

Sadly, the Indian market is similar to other countries where Intel is used in more than 90% machines. I know of few institutions (though pretty much rare) who insisted and got AMD solutions.

That was the time when gigabyte came onto the scene which formed the basis of the Wolfdale-3M 45nm system which was in the same price range as the earlier models, and offered a weeny tiny bit of additional graphics performance.To the best of my knowledge, it was perhaps the first motherboard which had solid state capacitors being offered/put in a budget motherboard. The mobo-processor bundle used to be in the range of INR 7/8k excluding RAM. cabinet etc, I had a Philips 17″ CRT display which ran a good decade or so, so just had to get the new cabinet, motherboard, CPU, RAM and was good to go.

Few months later at a hardware exhibition held in the city I was invited to an Asus party which was just putting a toe-hold in the Indian market. I went to the do, enjoyed myself. They had a small competition where they asked some questions and asked if people had queries. To my surprise, I found that most people who were there were hardware vendors and for one reason or the other they chose to remain silent. Hence I got an AMD Asus board. This is different from winning another Gigabyte motherboard which I also won in the same year in another competition as well in the same time-frame. Both were mid-range motherboards (ATX build).

As I had just bought a Gigabyte (mATX) motherboard and had made the build, I had to give both the motherboards away, one to a friend and one to my uncle and both were pleased with the AMD-based mobos which they somehow paired with AMD processors. At that time AMD had one-upped Intel in both graphics and even bare computing especially at the middle level and they were striving to push into new markets.

Apart from the initial system bought, most of my systems when being changed were in the INR 20-25k/- budget including all and any accessories I bought later.

The only real expensive parts I purchased have been external hdd ( 1 TB WD passport) and then a Viewsonic 17″ LCD which together sent me back by around INR 10k/- but both seem to give me adequate performance (both have outlived the warranty years) with the monitor being used almost 24×7 over 6 years or so, of course over GNU/Linux specifically Debian. Both have been extremely well value for the money.

As I had been exposed to both the motherboards I had been following those and other motherboards as well. What was and has been interesting to observe what Asus did later was to focus more on the high-end gaming market while Gigabyte continued to dilute it energy both in the mid and high-end motherboards.

Cut to 2017 and had seen quite a few reports –

http://www.pcstats.com/NewsView.cfm?NewsID=131618

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20170904PD207.html

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/asus-has-the-largest-high-end-intel-motherboard-share.html

All of which points to the fact that Asus had cornered a large percentage of the market and specifically the gaming market . While there are no formal numbers as both Asus and Gigabyte choose to releases only APAC numbers rather than a country-wide split which would have made for some interesting reading.

Just so that people do not presume anything, there are about 4-5 motherboard vendors in the Indian market. There is Asus at the top (I believe) followed by Gigabyte, Intel at a distant 3rd place (because it’s too expensive). There are also pockets of Asrock and MSI and I know of people who follow them religiously although their mobos are supposed to be somewhat pensive than the two above. Asus and Gigabyte do try to fight out with each other but each has its core competency I believe with Asus being used by heavy gamers, overclockers more than Gigabyte.

Anyway come October 2017 and my main desktop died and am left as they say up the creek without the paddle. I didn’t even have Net access for about 3 weeks due to BSNL or PMC’s foolishness and then later small riots breaking out due to Koregaon Bhima conflict.

This led to a situation where I had to buy/build a system with oldish/half knowledge. I was open to having an AMD system but both datacare and even Rashi peripherals, Pune both of whom used to deal in AMD systems shared they had stopped dealing in AMD stuff sometime back. While datacare had AMD mobos, getting processors were an issue. Both the vendors are near to my home so if I buy from them getting support becomes an non-issue. I could have gone out of my way to get an AMD processor but getting support could have been an issue as would have had to travel and I do not know the vendors enough. Hence fell back to the Intel platform.

I asked around quite a few PC retailers and distributors around and found the Asus Prime Z270-P was the only mid-range motherboard available at that time. I did come to know a bit later of other motherboards in the z270 series but most vendors didn’t/don’t stock them as there is capital, interest and stock cost.

History – Historically, there has also been huge time lag in getting motherboards, processors etc. between worldwide announcements, and then announcements of sale in India and actually getting hands-on to the newest motherboards and processors as seen above. This had led to quite a bit of frustration to many a users. I have known of many a soul visiting Lamington Road, Mumbai to get the latest motherboard, processor. Even to-date this system flourishes as Mumbai has an International Airport and there is always a demand and people willing to pay a premium for the newest processor/motherboard even before any reviews are in.

I was highly surprised to know recently that Prime Z370-P motherboards are already selling (just 3 months late) with the Intel 8th generation processors although these are still as samples rather than a torrent some of the other motherboard-combo might be.

At the end I bought an Intel I7400 chip and an Asus Prime Z270-P motherboard with 2400 mhz Corsair 8 GB and a 4 TB WD Green (5400) HDD with a Circle 545 cabinet and (with the almost criminal 400 Watts SMPS). Later came to know that it’s not really even 400 Watts, but around 20-25% less . The whole package costed me north of INR 50k/- with still need to spend on a better SMPS (probably a Cosair or Coolermaster 80 600/650 SMPS) with a few accessories I still need to complete the system.

I will be changing the PSU most probably next week.

Disclosure – The neatness you see is not me. I was unsure if I would be able to put the heatsink on the CPU properly as that is the most sensitive part while building a system. A bent pin on the CPU could play havoc as well as void the warranty on the CPU or motherboard or both. The new thing I saw were the knobs that can be seen on the heatsink fan is something which I hadn’t seen before. The vendor did the fixing of the processor on the mobo for me as well as tied up the remaining power cables without asking for which I am and was grateful and would definitely provide him with more business as and when I need components.

Future – While it’s ok for now, I’m still using a pretty old 2 speaker setup which I hope to upgrade to either a 2.1/3.1 speaker setup, have full 64 GB 2400 Mhz Kingston Razor/G.Skill/Corsair memory, an M.2 512 MB SSD .

If I do get the Taiwan Debconf bursary I do hope to buy some or all of the above plus a Samsung or some other Android/Replicant/Librem smartphone. I have been also looking for a vastly simplified smartphone for my mum with big letters and everything but that has been a failure to find in the Indian market. Of course this all depends if I do get the bursary and even after the bursary if Global warranty and currency exchange works out in my favor vis-a-vis what I would have to pay in India.

Apart from above, Taiwan is supposed to be a pretty good source to get graphic novels, manga comics, lots of RPG games for very cheap prices with covers and hand-drawn material etc. All of this is based upon few friend’s anecdotal experiences so dunno if all of that would still hold true if I manage to be there.

There are also quite a few chip foundries and maybe during debconf could have visit to one of them if possible. It would be rewarding if the visit was to any 45nm or lower chip foundry as India is still stuck at 65nm range till date.

I would be sharing about my experience about the board, the CPU, the expectations I had from the Intel chip and the somewhat disappointing experience of using Debian on the new board in the next post, not necessarily Debian’s fault but the free software ecosystem being at fault here.

Feel free to point out any mistakes you find, grammatically or even otherwise. The blog post has been in the works for over couple of weeks so its possible for mistakes to creep in.

Science Day at GMRT, Khodad 2017

The above picture is the blend of the two communities from foss community and mozilla India. And unless you were there you wouldn’t know who is from which community which is what FOSS is all about. But as always I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

Akshat, who works at NCRA as a programmer, the standing guy on the left shared with me in January this year that this year too, we should have two stalls, foss community and mozilla India stalls next to each other. While we had the banners, we were missing stickers and flyers. Funds were and are always an issue and this year too, it would have been emptier if we didn’t get some money saved from last year minidebconf 2016 that we had in Mumbai. Our major expenses included printing stickers, stationery and flyers which came to around INR 5000/- and couple of LCD TV monitors which came for around INR 2k/- as rent. All the labour was voluntary in nature, but both me and Akshat easily spending upto 100 hours before the event. Next year, we want to raise to around INR 10-15k so we can buy 1 or 2 LCD monitors and we don’t have to think for funds for next couple of years. How will we do that I have no idea atm.

Me and Akshat did all the printing and stationery runs and hence had not been using my lappy for about 3-4 days.

Come to the evening before the event and the laptop would not start. Coincidentally, or not few months or even last at last year’s Debconf people had commented on IBM/Lenovo’s obsession with proprietary power cords and adaptors. I hadn’t given it much thought but when I got no power even after putting it on AC power for 3-4 hours, I looked up on the web and saw that the power cord and power adaptors were all different even in T440 and even that under existing models. In fact I couldn’t find mine hence sharing it via pictures below.

I knew/suspected that thinkpads would be rare where I was going, it would be rarer still to find the exact power cord and I was unsure whether it was the power cord at fault or adaptor or whatever goes for SMPS in laptop or memory or motherboard/CPU itself. I did look up the documentation at support.lenovo.com and was surprised at the extensive documentation that Lenovo has for remote troubleshooting.

I did the usual take out the battery, put it back in, twiddle with the little hole in the bottom of the laptop, trying to switch on without the battery on AC mains, trying to switch on with battery power only but nothing worked. Couple of hours had gone by and with a resigned thought went to bed, convincing myself that anyways it’s good I am not taking the lappy as it is extra-dusty there and who needs a dead laptop anyways.

Update – After the event was over, I did contact Lenovo support and within a week, with one visit from a service engineer, he was able to identify that it was a faulty cable which was at fault and not the the other things which I was afraid of. Another week gone by and lenovo replaced the cable. Going by service standards that I have seen of other companies, Lenovo deserves a gold star here for the prompt service they provided. I probably would end up subscribing to their extended 2-year warranty service when my existing 3 year warranty is about to be over.

Next day, woke up early morning, two students from COEP hostel were volunteering and we made our way to NCRA, Pune University Campus. Ironically, though we were under the impression that we would be the late arrivals, it turned out we were the early birds. 5-10 minutes passed by and soon enough we were joined by Aniket and we played catch-up for a while. We hadn’t met each other for a while so it was good to catch-up. Then slowly other people starting coming in and around 07:10-07:15 we started for GMRT, Khodad.

Now I had been curious as had been hearing for years that the Pune-Nashik NH-50 highway would be concreted and widened to six-lane highways but the experience was below par. Came back and realized the proposal has now been pushed back to 2020.

From the mozilla team, only Aniket was with us, the rest of the group was coming straight from Nashik. Interestingly, all the six people who came, came on bikes which depending upon how you look at it was either brave or stupid. Travelling on bikes on Indian highways you either have to be brave or stupid or both, we have more than enough ‘accidents’ due to quality of road construction, road design, lane-changing drivers and many other issues. This is probably not the place for it hence will use some other blog post to rant about that.

We reached around 10:00 hrs. IST and hung around till lunch as Akshat had all the marketing material, monitors etc. The only thing we had were couple of lappies and couple of SBC’s, an RPI 3 and a BBB.

Our find for the event was Aarti Kashyap who you can see above. She is a third-year student at COEP and one of the rare people who chose to interact with hardware rather than software. From last several years, we had been trying, successfully and unsuccessfully to get more Indian women and girls interested into technology. It is a vicious circle as till a girl/woman doesn’t volunteer we are unable to share our knowledge to the extent we can which leads them to not have much interest in FOSS or even technology in general.

While there are groups are djangogirls, Pyladies and railgirls and even Outreachy which tries to motivate getting girls into computing but it’s a long road ahead.

We are short of both funds and ideas as to how to motivate more girls to get into computing and then to get into playing with hardware. I don’t know where to start and end for whoever wants to play with hardware. From SBC’s, routers to blade servers the sky is the limit. Again this probably isn’t the place for it, hence probably we can chew it on more at some other blog post.

This year, we had a lowish turnout due to the fact that the 12th board exams 1st paper was on the day we had opened. So instead of 20-25k, we probably had 5-7k fewer people pass through. There were two-three things that we were showing, we were showing Debian on one of the systems, we were showing the output from the SBC’s on the other monitor but the glare kept hitting the monitors.

While the organizers had done exemplary work over last year. They had taped the carpets on the ground so there was hardly any dust moving around. However, I wished the organizers had taken the pains to have two cloth roofs over our head instead of just one, the other roof head could be say 2 feet up, this would have done two things –

a. It probably would have cooled the place a bit more as –

b. We could get diffused sunlight which would have lessened the glare and reflection the LCD’s kept throwing back. At times we also got people to come to our side as can be seen in Aarti’s photo as can be seen above.

If these improvements can be made for next year, this would result in everybody in our ‘Pandal’ would benefit, not just us and mozilla. This would be benefiting around 10-15 organizations which were within the same temporary structure.

Of course, it depends very much on the budget they are able to have and people who are executing, we can just advise.

The other thing which had been missing last year and this year is writing about Single Board Computers in Marathi. If we are to promote them as something to replace a computer or something for a younger brother/sister to learn computing upon at a lower cost, we need leaflets written in their language to be more effective. And this needs to be in the language and mannerisms that people in that region understand. India, as probably people might have experienced is a dialect-prone country. Which means every 2-5 kms, the way the language is spoken is different from anywhere else. The Marathi spoken by somebody who has lived in Ravivar Peth for his whole life and a person who has lived in say Kothrud are different. The same goes from any place and this place, Khodad, Narayangaon would have its own dialect, its own mini-codespeak.

Just to share, we did have one in English but it would have been a vast improvement if we could do it in the local language. Maybe we can discuss about this and ask for help from people.

Outside, Looking in

What had been interesting about the whole journey were the new people who were bringing all their passion and creativity to the fore. From the mozilla community, we had Akshay who is supposed to be a wizard on graphics, animation, editing anything to do with the visual medium. He shared some of the work he had done and also shared a bit about how blender works with people who wanted to learn about that.

Mayur, whom you see in the picture pointing out something about FOSS and this was the culture that we strove to have. I know and love and hate the browser but haven’t been able to fathom the recklessness that Mozilla has been doing the last few years, which has just been having one mis-adventure after another.

For instance, mozstumbler was an effort which I thought would go places. From what little I understood, it served/serves as a user-friendly interface to a potential user while still sharing all the data with OSM . They (Mozilla) seems/seemed to have a fatalistic take as it provided initial funding but then never fully committing to the project.

Later, at night we had the whole ‘free software’ and ‘open-source’ sharings where I tried to emphasize that without free software, the term ‘open-source’ would not have come into existence. We talked and talked and somewhere around 02:00 I slept, the next day was an extension of the first day itself where we ribbed each other good-naturedly and still shared whatever we could share with each other.

I do hope that we continue this tradition for great many years to come and engage with more and more people every passing year.

The $100 used laptop and getting riled up.

Lenovo-ThinkPad-T500 – Source – Wikimedia commons

I was reading a thread on phoronix where a student was sharing that it is or can be expensive to get even a used laptop and he shared his predicament and was hammered a bit for it to some going to the extent of questioning his life-choices.

While I’m not a student it still triggered something in me. I am not dirt poor but neither am I insanely rich. The same questions he has, similar questions I have had. While in his case he is probably in his early to late 20’s, I am pushing 40. Most of the money I make goes in for everyday purchases, veggies, house-rent, electricity, landline, broadband and cell phone bills. What little is left is most of the time kept for a rainy day as there is no Government pension.

From what I have heard and read on the web, in the west specifically in the States, if I buy a used laptop, I usually get a 6 months – 1 year warranty . Here, while you could get a used laptop for around INR 10k there is no warranty/guarantee, so I never get into that. It’s ‘buyer’s beware’ all the time.

For people who like/want FOSS or specifically something like Free DOS (like me), I had to wait for almost 6 years to get a model I was happy with, with the specs. I was ok with.

Was really lucky enough to get a Thinkpad T440 with 8 GB of RAM for around INR 80k/- with Free DOS.

The specs –

T440 Core I 5 (4300) / Dos (NEW MODEL)

20B7A1SD00

Intel Core i5 – 4300M (2.5 GHz / 3 MB / 5 GT/s) / Intel QM87 Chipset / Integrated 802.11 n WIFI LAN + Bluetooth 4.0 / 8GB DDR III Memory (2 DIMM SLOT) / 500 GB SATA HDD @ 7200 RPM / 14.0 HDy / FPR / Dos / 2 USB , VGA Port , RJ 45 Port /GB LAN /Track Point with 5 button Glass Touch Pad /Stereo Speakers with Dolby Enhanced Audio / 6 Cell Battery /Approx 2.14KG/

While it is/was actually pretty expensive but then wanted something which can take a beating, deal with all the heat, noise and dust (specifically where I live, right in the middle of the city).

The reason I used the word lucky is that now there is no model in the T-series range which has FreeDOS on it. Of course, I hopefully will use it for another 4-5 years at the very least depending on how much it cooperates with me, I have heard that Thinkpads function for a long period of time even in dusty environments so banking on that. 🙂

What probably pissed me is the condensing note in the comment, how does he know what pressures an another individual might be in. It’s almost like saying “You are refugee because you made a wrong life choice” or something to that effect which again is stupid.

I actually feel/felt embarrassed to bring this up as I truly am lucky to be safe, secure, have food on the table, am able to sleep on a bed at night, have a workstation AND a laptop, have somewhat of a sound mind 🙂 and a body which is able to move around without any hassles. Add to that, incredibly as it may sound, was also able to see another country for a few days

In relation to people being persecuted and having to run off to save their own lives or even people living on the streets, I am actually living in luxury. While I can’t go through life feeling guilty for all the good things that have happened with me, I do feel disgusted when I see some people put blinding statements like that.

One of the biggest reasons that GNU/Linux and Debian in particular gelled with me was that it’s incredibly flexible and generous. Nobody tells me which packages I should or shouldn’t have. I do right things, good, I do something wrong, an opportunity to learn and hopefully learn from my mistakes. In either case, one of the most forgiving kind of system to learn and hack on.

While speaking of mistakes, could somebody look at #849684 . It almost feels like a tennis match going between the maintainers concerned. While I don’t have the technical skills to ascertain who’s right and who is not, it would be nice if some cooler heads can make sense and see if a way could be found out. Can somebody help ?

Debian contributions and World History

Beware, this would be slightly longish.

Debian Contributions

In the last couple of weeks, was lucky to put up a patch against debian-policy which had been bothering me for a long-long time.

The problem statement is simple, man-pages historically were made by software engineers for software-engineers. The idea, probably then was you give the user some idea of what the software does and the rest the software engineer would garner from reading the source-code. But over period of time, the audience has changed. While there are still software engineers who use GNU/Linux for the technical excellence, the man-pages have not kept up with this new audience who perhaps are either not technically so sound that or they do not want to take the trouble to reading the source-code to understand how things flow. An ‘example’ or ‘examples’ in a man-page gives us (the lesser mortals) some insight as how the command works, how the logic flows.

A good example of a man-page is the ufw man-page –

EXAMPLES
Deny all access to port 53:

ufw deny 53

Allow all access to tcp port 80:

ufw allow 80/tcp

Allow all access from RFC1918 networks to this host:

ufw allow from 10.0.0.0/8
ufw allow from 172.16.0.0/12
ufw allow from 192.168.0.0/16

Deny access to udp port 514 from host 1.2.3.4:

ufw deny proto udp from 1.2.3.4 to any port 514

Allow access to udp 1.2.3.4 port 5469 from 1.2.3.5 port 5469:

ufw allow proto udp from 1.2.3.5 port 5469 to 1.2.3.4 port 5469

Now if we had man-pages like the above which give examples, then the user at least can try to accomplish whatever s/he is trying to do. I truly believe not having examples in a man-page kills 50% of your audience and people who could potentially use your tool.

Personal wishlist – The only thing (and this might be my failure) is we need a good way to search through a man-page. The only way I know is using ‘/’ and try to give a pattern. Lots of times it fails because I, the user doesn’t know the exact keyword which the documenter was using. What would be nice, great if we do have some sort of parser where I tell it, ‘$this is what I’m looking for’ and the parser tries the pattern + all its synonyms and whatever seems to be most relevant passage from the content, in this case – a manpage it tells me. It would make my life a lot easier while at the same time force people to document more and more.

I dunno if there has been any research or study of the relationship between good documentation and popularity of a program. I know there are lots of different tiny bits which make or break a program, one of which would definitely be documentation and in that a man-page IF it’s a command-line tool.

A query on Quora gives some indication https://www.quora.com/How-comprehensible-do-you-find-Unix-Linux-Man-pages although the low response rate tells its own story.

there have been projects like man2html and man2pdf and others which try to make the content more accessible to people who are not used to the man-page interface but till you don’t have ‘Examples’ the other things can work only so far. Also if anybody talks about X project which claims to solve this problem they will have to fight manpages who have been around like forever.

As can be seen in the patch, did some rookie mistakes as can be seen. I also filed a lintian bug at the same time. Hope the patch does get merged at some point in debian-policy and then a check introduced in lintian in some future release. I do agree with anarcat’s assertion that it should be at the level of the manpage missing level.

I am no coder but finding 14,000 binary packages without a manpage left me both shocked and surprised.

I came to know about manpage-alert from the devscripts package to know which all binary packages that have been installed but not have man-pages.

I hope to contribute a manpage or two if I across a package I’m somewhat comfortable with. I have made a beginning of sorts by running manpage alert and putting the output in a .txt file which I would grep through manually and see if something interesting jumps at me.

The learning garnered from putting the patch to the debian package resulted in another patch but this time for an upstream project altogether. As can be seen all are just baby-steps that even a non-coder can take.

Another couple of bugs I filed which were fixed were of a sim called ‘unknown-horizons’ . A 2D realtime strategy simulation. I had filed three bugs, two of which were fixed in 2 days, the 3rd I hope is also fixed soonish.

Lastly, I spent most of the week-end poring over packages who have left files in /etc/bash_completion.d/ . I spent almost 4-5 odd hours as each package in question as well as entries found in /etc/bash-completion.d/$filename I had to find which package it belonged to first –

[$] dpkg -S /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt

git: /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt


I know that dpkg-query also does the same –


[$] dpkg-query -S /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt

git: /etc/bash_completion.d/git-prompt


But I am used to plain dpkg although do know that dpkg-query can do lot more intimate searching in various ways than dpkg can.

Once the package name was established, first simulate the purge –

[$] sudo aptitude -s purge git

[sudo] password for shirish:
The following packages will be REMOVED:
git{p}
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 29.5 MB will be freed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libgit-wrapper-perl : Depends: git but it is not going to be installed
git-extras : Depends: git (>= 1.7.0) but it is not going to be installed
bup : Depends: git but it is not going to be installed
git-remote-gcrypt : Depends: git but it is not going to be installed
git-svn : Depends: git (> 1:2.11.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: git ( 1:2.11.0) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: git (= 1:1.8.1) but it is not going to be installed
git-core : Depends: git (> 1:1.7.0.2) but it is not going to be installed
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Remove the following packages:
1) bup [0.29-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
2) fdroidserver [0.7.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
3) git-annex [6.20161012-1 (now, testing)]
4) git-core [1:2.11.0-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
5) git-extras [4.2.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
6) git-remote-gcrypt [1.0.1-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
7) git-repair [1.20151215-1 (now, unstable)]
8) git-svn [1:2.11.0-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
9) gitk [1:2.11.0-2 (now, testing, unstable)]
10) libgit-wrapper-perl [0.047-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
11) python3-git [2.1.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]
12) svn2git [2.4.0-1 (now, testing, unstable)]

Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
13) devscripts recommends libgit-wrapper-perl
14) dh-make-perl recommends git
15) fdroidserver recommends git
16) git-annex recommends git-remote-gcrypt (>= 0.20130908-6)
17) gplaycli recommends fdroidserver
18) python-rope recommends git-core

Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] q
Abandoning all efforts to resolve these dependencies.
Abort.


Then I made a note of all the packages being affected, saw purging all of them wouldn’t call others (the Package dependency Hell), made the purge and then reinstalled anew.

The reason I did this is that many a times during upgrade, either during update/upgrade sometimes the correct action doesn’t happen. To take the git’s example itself, there were two files git-extras and git-prompt which were in /etc/bash_completion.d/ both of which were showing their source as git. Purging git and installing git afresh removed git-extras file and git-prompt is the only one remaining.

While blogging about the package, did try to grep through changelog.Debian.gz and changelog.gz in git –

┌─[shirish@debian] - [/usr/share/doc/git] - [10046]
└─[$] zless changelog.gz


and similarly –

┌─[shirish@debian] - [/usr/share/doc/git] - [10046]
└─[$] zless changelog.Debian.gz


But failed to find any mention of the now gone git-extras. Doing this with all the packages took considerable time as didn’t want to deal with any potential fallout later on. For instance, ufw (uncomplicated firewall) also had an entry in /etc/bash_completion.d/, hence before purging ufw, took backup of all the rules I have made, did a successful simulation

[$] sudo aptitude -s purge ufw gufw

The following packages will be REMOVED:
gufw{p} ufw{p}
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 14 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 4,224 kB will be freed.

Note: Using 'Simulate' mode.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
Would download/install/remove packages.


purged the packages, reinstalled it and then re-added all the rules. Doing it all for various sundry packages, had to do it manually as there is no one size fits all solution.

A sensitive one was grub which still has an entry in /etc/bash_completion.d/grub. Doing it wrong could have resulted in a non-bootable situation. There are workarounds for that, but it would have taken quite a bit of time, energy, notes and bit of recall factor what I did the last time something like that happened. Doing it manually, being present meant I could do it rightly the first time.

So, was it worth it – It would be if the package maintainers do the needful and the remaining entries are moved out of /etc/bash_completion.d/ to /usr/share/bash-completions and some to my favourite /usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions/ – for instance –

┌─[shirish@debian] - [/usr/share/zsh/vendor-completions] - [10064]
└─[$] ll -h _youtube-dl

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3.2K 2016-12-01 08:48 _youtube-dl

But trying to get all or even major packages to use zsh-completions would be hard work and would take oodles of time and this concerns upstream stuff, also very much outside what I was sharing.

World History

Before, during and even after South-African experience, I was left wondering why India and South Africa, two countries who had similar histories at least the last couple of hundred years or more, the final result of Independence was so different for both the countries. It took me quite sometime to articulate that in a form of question , while the answers were interesting, from what little I know of India itself, if I were an Englishman I would never leave ‘Hindustan’. What the people answering failed to take into account was that in that era it was ‘Hindustan’ or un-divided India.

Pre-partition map of India

This map can be found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Indian_Empire_1909_Imperial_Gazetteer_of_India.jpg and is part of quite a few Indian articles. I would urge people to look at the map in-depth. Except for the Central India Agency and Central India Provinces, most of the other regions were quite comfortable weather-wise.

Hence I can’t help but feel the assertion that Britishers didn’t like India (as to live here) slightly revolting. See the excerpt/take on Dale Kennedy ‘s The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. xv + 264 pp. . A look at the list of hill stations of divided India is enough to tell that there were lot of places which either were founded by the Britishers or they chose to live there. And this is not all, there are supposed to lot of beautiful places even in Pakistan, especially in North East Frontier, Swat for instance. While today it’s infamous for Taliban and Islamic Terrorism, there was a time it was known for its beauty.

The second most difficult mountain in the world – K2, Pakistan

Trivia – After Everest, K2 is the smaller one although whatever I have read of people’s accounts, most people who ascended all 14 8,000 metre peaks say K2 is technically more tougher than Everest and after Everest has the highest casualty rate.

Also places like the disputed North half of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, Gilgit–Baltistan, Extreme northern Punjab of Pakistan , Northern half of Khyber-Pakhtunkhawa province and Northern Balochistan all of these places would have been more than conducive to the Britishers as it is near to the British climate (snow and pleasant weather all year round). It really is a pity that Pakistan chose to become a terrorist state where it could have become one of the more toured places of Asia. I really feel nauseous and sad at the multiple chances that Pakistan frittered away, it could have been something else.

The Anti-Pollito squad – arrest and confession

Disclaimer – This is an attempt at humor and hence entirely fictional in nature. While some incidents depicted are true, the context and the story woven around them are by yours truly. None of the Mascots of Debian were hurt during the blog post ;). I also disavow any responsibility for any hurt (real or imagined) to any past, current and future mascots. The attempt should not be looked upon as demeaning people who are accused of false crimes, tortured and confessions eked out of them as this happens quite a lot (In India for sure, but guess it’s the same world over in various degrees). The idea is loosely inspired by Chocolate:Deep Dark Secrets. (2005)

On a more positive note, let’s start –

Being a Sunday morning woke up late to find incessant knocking on the door, incidentally mum was not at home. Opening the door, found two official looking gentleman. They asked my name, asked my credentials, tortured and arrested me for “Group conspiracy of Malicious Mischief in second and third degrees” .

The torture was done by means of making me forcefully watch endless reruns of ‘Norbit‘ . While I do love Eddie Murphy, this was one of his movies he could have done without :(. I guess for many people watching it once was torture enough. I *think* they were nominated for razzie awards dunno if they won it or not, but this is beside the point.

Unlike the 20 years it takes for a typical case to reach to its conclusion even in the smallest court in India, due to the torture, I was made to confess (due to endless torture) and was given summary judgement. The judgement was/is as follows –

a. Do 100 hours of Community service in Debian in 2017. This could be done via blog posts, raising tickets in the Debian BTS or in whichever way I could be helpful to Debian.

b. Write a confessional with some photographic evidence sharing/detailing some of the other members who were part of the conspiracy in view of the reduced sentence.

So now, have been forced to write this confession –

As you all know, I won a bursary this year for debconf16. What is not known by most people is that I also got an innocuous looking e-mail titled ‘ Pollito for DPL ‘. While I can’t name all the names as investigation is still ongoing about how far-reaching the conspiracy is . The email was purportedly written by members of ‘cabal within cabal’ which are in Debian. I looked at the email header to see if this was genuine and I could trace the origin but was left none the wiser, as obviously these people are far more technically advanced than to fall in simple tricks like this –

Anyways, secretly happy that I have been invited to be part of these elites, I did the visa thing, packed my bags and came to Debconf16.

At this point in juncture, I had no idea whether it was real or I had imagined the whole thing. Then to my surprise saw this –

Just like the Illuminati the conspiracy was for all to see those who knew about it. Most people were thinking of it as a joke, but those like me who had got e-mails knew better. I knew that the thing is real, now I only needed to bide my time and knew that the opportunity would present itself.

And few days later, sure enough, there was a trip planned for ‘Table Mountain, Cape Town’ . Few people planned to hike to the mountain, while few chose to take the cable car till up the mountain.

Quite a few people came along with us and bought tickets for the to and fro to the mountain and back.

Incidentally, I was thinking if the South African Govt. were getting the tax or not. If you look at the ticket, there is just a bar-code. In India as well as the U.S. there is TIN – Tax Identification Number –

Few links to share what it is all about . While these should be on all invoices, need to specially check when taking high-value items. In India as shared in the article the awareness, knowledge leaves a bit to be desired. While I’m drifting from the incident, it would be nice if somebody from SA could share how things work there.

Moving on, we boarded the cable car. It was quite spacious cable car with I guess around 30-40 people or some more who were able to see everything along with the controller.

It was a pleasant cacophony of almost two dozen or more nationalities on this 360 degrees moving chamber. I was a little worried though as it essentially is a bucket and there is always a possibility that a severe wind could damage it. Later somebody did share that some frightful incidents had occurred not too long ago on the cable car.

It took about 20-25 odd minutes to get to the top of table mountain and we were presented with views such as below –

The picture I am sharing is actually when we were going down as all the pictures of going up via the cable car were over-exposed. Also, it was pretty crowded on the way up then on the way down so handling the mobile camera was not so comfortable.

Once we reached up, the wind was blowing at incredible speeds. Even with my jacket and everything I was feeling cold. Most of the group around 10-12 people looked around if we could find a place to have some refreshments and get some of the energy in the body. So we all ventured to a place and placed our orders –

I was introduced to Irish Coffee few years back and have had some incredible Irish Coffees in Pune and elsewhere. I do hope to be able to make Irish Coffee at home if and when I have my own house. This is hotter than brandy and is perfect if you are suffering from cold etc if done right, really needs some skills. This is the only drink which I wanted in SA which I never got right 😦 . As South Africa was freezing for me, this would have been the perfect antidote but the one there as well as elsewhere were all …bleh.

What was interesting though, was the coffee caller besides it. It looked like a simple circuit mounted on a PCB board with lights, vibrations and RFID and it worked exactly like that. I am guessing as and when the order is ready, there is an interrupt signal sent via radio waves which causes the buzzer to light and vibrate. Here’s the back panel if somebody wants to take inspiration and try it as a fun project –

Once we were somewhat strengthened by the snacks, chai, coffee etc. we made our move to seeing the mountain. The only way to describe it is that it’s similar to Raigad Fort but the plateau seemed to be bigger. The wikipedia page of Table Mountain attempts to share but I guess it’s more clearly envisioned by one of the pictures shared therein.

I have to say while Table Mountain is beautiful and haunting as it has scenes like these –

There is something there which pulls you, which reminds you of a long lost past. I could have simply sat there for hours together but as was part of the group had to keep with them. Not that I minded.

The moment I was watching this, I was transported to some memories of the Himalayas about 20 odd years or so. In that previous life, I had the opportunity to be with some of the most beautiful women and also been in the most happening places, the Himalayas. I had shared years before some of my experiences I had in the Himalayas. I discontinued it as I didn’t have a decent camera at that point in time. While I don’t wanna digress, I would challenge anybody to experience the Himalayas and then compare. It is just something inexplicable. The beauty and the rawness that Himalayas shows makes you feel insignificant and yet part of the whole cosmos. What Paulo Cohello expressed in The Valkyries is something that could be felt in the Himalayas. Leh, Ladakh, Himachal , Garwhal, Kumaon. The list will go on forever as there are so many places, each more beautiful than the other. Most places are also extremely backpacker-friendly so if you ask around you can get some awesome deals if you want to spend more than a few days in one place.

Moving on, while making small talk @olasd or Nicolas Dandrimont , the headmaster of our trip made small talk to each of us and eked out from all of us that we wanted to have Pollito as our DPL (Debian Project Leader) for 2017. Few pictures being shared below as supporting evidence as well –

While I do not know who further up than Nicolas was on the coup which would take place. The idea was this –

If the current DPL steps down, we would take all and any necessary actions to make Pollito our DPL.

This has been taken from Pollito’s adventure

Being a responsible journalist, I also enquired about Pollito’s true history as it would not have been complete without one. This is the e-mail I got from Gunnar Wolf, a friend and DD from Mexico 🙂

Turns out, Valessio has just spent a week staying at my house 🙂 And
in any case, if somebody in Debian knows about Pollito’s
childhood… That is me.

Pollito came to our lives when we went to Congreso Internacional de
Software Libre (CISOL) in Zacatecas city. I was strolling around the
very beautiful city with my wife Regina and our friend Alejandro
Miranda, and at a shop at either Ramón López Velarde or Vicente
Guerrero, we found a flock of pollitos.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/22.77111/-102.57145

Even if this was comparable to a slave market, we bought one from
them, and adopted it as our own.

Back then, we were a young couple… Well, we were not that young
anymore. I mean, we didn’t have children. Anyway, we took Pollito with
us on several road trips, such as the only time I have crossed an
international border driving: We went to Encuentro Centroamericano de
Software Libre at Guatemala city in 2012 (again with Alejandro), and
you can see several Pollito pics at:

http://gwolf.org/album/road-trip-ecsl-2012-guatemala-0

Pollito likes travelling. Of course, when we were to Nicaragua for
DebConf, Pollito tagged along. It was his first flight as a passenger
(we never asked about his previous life in slavery; remember, Pollito
trust no one).

Pollito felt much welcome with the DebConf crowd. Of course, as
Pollito is a free spirit, we never even thought about forcing him to
come back with us. Pollito went to Switzerland, and we agreed to meet
again every year or two. It’s always nice to have a chat with him.

Hugs!

So with that backdrop I would urge fellow Debianities to take up the slogans –

LONG LIVE THE DPL !

LONG LIVE POLLITO !

LONG LIVE POLLITO THE DPL !

The first step to make Pollito the DPL is to ensure he has a @debian.org (pollito@debian.org)

We also need him to be made a DD because only then can he become a DPL.

In solidarity and in peace 🙂

mtpfs, feh and not being able to share the debconf experience.

I have been sick for about 2 weeks now hence haven’t written. I had joint pains and still am weak. There has been lot of reports of malaria, chikungunya and dengue fever around the city. The only thing I came to know is how lucky I am to be able to move around on 2 legs and how powerless and debilitating it feels when you can’t move. In the interim I saw ‘Me Before You‘ and after going through my most miniscule experience, I could relate with Will Taylor’s character. If I was in his place, I would probably make the same choices.

But my issues are and were slightly different. Last month I was supposed to share my debconf experience in the local PLUG meet. For that purpose, I took some pictures from my phone on a pen-drive to share. But when reached the venue, found out that I had forgotten to take the pen-drive. What I had also done is used the mogrify command from the imagemagick stable to lossy compress the images on the pen-drive so it is easier on image viewers.

But that was not to be and at the last moment had to use my phone plugged into the USB drive of the lappy and show some pictures. This was not good. I had known that it was mounted somewhere but hadn’t looked at where.

After coming back home, it took me hardly 10 minutes to find out where it was mounted. It is not mounted under /media/shirish but under /run/user/1000/gvfs . If I do list under it shows mtp:host=%5Busb%3A005%2C007%5D .

I didn’t need any packages under debian to make it work. Interestingly, the only image viewer which seems to be able to work with all the images is ‘feh’ which is a command-line image viewer in Debian.

[$] aptitude show feh
Package: feh
Version: 2.16.2-1
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Priority: optional
Section: graphics
Maintainer: Debian PhotoTools Maintainers
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 391 k
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.15), libcurl3 (>= 7.16.2), libexif12 (>= 0.6.21-1~), libimlib2 (>= 1.4.5), libpng16-16 (>= 1.6.2-1), libx11-6, libxinerama1
Recommends: libjpeg-progs
Description: imlib2 based image viewer
feh is a fast, lightweight image viewer which uses imlib2. It is commandline-driven and supports multiple images through slideshows, thumbnail
browsing or multiple windows, and montages or index prints (using TrueType fonts to display file info). Advanced features include fast dynamic
zooming, progressive loading, loading via HTTP (with reload support for watching webcams), recursive file opening (slideshow of a directory
hierarchy), and mouse wheel/keyboard control.
Homepage: http://feh.finalrewind.org/

I did try various things to get it to mount under /media/shirish/ but as of date have no luck. Am running Android 6.0 – Marshmallow and have enabled ‘USB debugging’ with help from my friend ‘Akshat’ . I even changed the /etc/fuse.conf options but even that didn’t work.

#cat /etc/fuse.conf
[sudo] password for shirish:
# /etc/fuse.conf - Configuration file for Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE)

# Set the maximum number of FUSE mounts allowed to non-root users.
# The default is 1000.
mount_max = 1

# Allow non-root users to specify the allow_other or allow_root mount options.
user_allow_other


One way which I haven’t explored is adding/making an entry into /etc/fstab. If anybody knows of a solution which doesn’t involve changing content of /etc/fstab. At the same time you are able to get the card and phone directories mounted under /media// , in my case /media/shirish would be interested to know. I would like the /etc/fstab to remain as it is.

I am using Samsung J5 (unrooted) –

Btw I tried all the mtpfs packages in Debian testing but without any meaningful change 😦

Look forward to tips.

The road to TOR

Happy Independence Day to all. I had been looking forward to this day so I can use to share with my brothers and sisters what little I know about TOR . Independence means so many things to many people. For me, it means having freedom, valuing it and using it to benefit not just to ourselves but to people at large. And for that to happen, at least on the web, it has to rise above censorship if we are to get there at all. I am 40 years old, and if I can’t read whatever I want to read without asking the state-military-Corporate trinity than be damned with that. Debconf was instrumental as I was able to understand and share many of the privacy concerns that we all have. This blog post is partly a tribute to being part of a community and being part of Debconf16.

So, in that search for privacy couple of years ago, I came across TOR . TOR stands for ‘The Onion Router’ project. Explaining tor is simple. Let us take the standard way in which we approach the website using a browser or any other means.

a. We type out a site name, say debian.org in the URL/URI bar .
b. Now the first thing the browser would do is look into its DNS Cache to see if the name/URL has been used before. If it is something like debian.org which has been used before and is *fresh* and there is content already it would serve the content from the cache there itself.
c. In case, if it’s not or the content is stale or something, it would generate a DNS lookup through the various routing tables till the DNS IP Address is found and information relayed to the browser.
d. The browser takes the IP Address and opens a TCP connection to the server, you have the handshake happen and after that it’s business as usual.
e. In case if it doesn’t work, you could get errors like ‘Could not connect to server xyz’ or some special errors with error codes.

This is a much simplified version of what happens or goes through normally with most/all of the browsers.

One good way to see how the whole thing happens is to use traceroute and use the whois service.

For e.g. –

[$] traceroute debian.org

and then

[$] whois 5.153.231.4 | grep inetnum
inetnum: 5.153.231.0 - 5.153.231.255

Just using whois IP Address gives much more. I just shared a short version because I find it interesting that Debian has booked all 255 possible IP Addresses but speculating on that would be probably be a job for a different day.

Now the difference when using TOR are two things –

a. The conversation is encrypted (somewhat like using https but encrypted through the relays)
b. The conversation is relayed over 2-3 relays and it will give a somewhat different identification to the DNS server at the other end.
c. It is only at the end-points that the conversation will be in plain text.

For e.g. the TOR connection I’m using atm is from me – France (relay) – Switzerland (relay) – Germany (relay) – WordPress.com . So wordpress thinks that all the connection is happening via Germany while I’m here in India. It would also tells that I’m running MS-Windows some version and a different browser while I’m from somewhere in India, on Debian, using another browser altogether 🙂

There are various motivations for doing that. For myself, I’m just a private person and do not need or want that any other person/s or even the State should be looking over my shoulder as to what I’m doing. And the argument that we need to spy on citizens because Terrorists are there doesn’t hold water over me. There are many ways in which they can pass messages even without tor or web. The Government-Corporate-Military just get more powerful if and when they know what common people think, do, eat etc.

So the question is how does you install tor if you a private sort of person . If you are on a Debian machine, you are one step closer to doing that.

So the first thing that you need to do is install the following –

$ sudo aptitude install ooniprobe python-certifi tor tor-geoipdb torsocks torbrowser-launcher

Once the above is done, then run torbrowser-launcher. This is how it would work out the first time it is run –

[$] torbrowser-launcher

Tor Browser Launcher
By Micah Lee, licensed under MIT
version 0.2.6
https://github.com/micahflee/torbrowser-launcher
Creating GnuPG homedir /home/shirish/.local/share/torbrowser/gnupg_homedir
Downloading and installing Tor Browser for the first time.
Downloading https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/update_2/release/Linux_x86_64-gcc3/x/en-US
Latest version: 6.0.3
Downloading https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/6.0.3/tor-browser-linux64-6.0.3_en-US.tar.xz.asc
Downloading https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/6.0.3/tor-browser-linux64-6.0.3_en-US.tar.xz
Verifying signature
Extracting tor-browser-linux64-6.0.3_en-US.tar.xz
Running /home/shirish/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/start-tor-browser.desktop
Launching './Browser/start-tor-browser --detach'...

As can be seen above, you basically download the tor browser remotely from the website. Obviously, for this port 80 needs to be opened.

One of the more interesting things is that it tells you where it installs the browser.

/home/shirish/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/start-tor-browser and then detaches.

The first time the TOR browser actually runs it looks something similar to this –

Torbrowser picture

Additionally it would give you 4 choices. Depending on your need for safety, security and convenience you make a choice and live with it.

Now the only thing remaining to do is have an alias for your torbrowser. So I made

[$] alias tor

tor=/home/shirish/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/start-tor-browser

It is suggested that you do not use the same usernames on the onion network.

Also apart from the regular URL addresses such as ‘flossexperiences.wordpress.com’ you will also see sites such as https://www.abc12defgh3ijkl.onion.to (fictional address)

Now there would be others who would want to use the same/similar settings say as there are in their Mozilla Firefox installation.

To do that do the following steps –

a. First close down both Torbrowser and Mozilla Firefox .
b. Open your file browser and go to where your mozilla profile details are. In typical Debian installations it is at

~/.mozilla/firefox/5r7t1r92.default

In the next tab, navigate to –

~/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/TorBrowser/Data/Browser/profile.default

c. Now copy the following files over from your mozilla profile to your tor browser profile and you can resume where you left off.

cert8.db
chromeappsstore.sqlite
content-prefs.sqlite
cookies.sqlite
formhistory.sqlite
key3.db
logins.json (Firefox 32 and above)
mimeTypes.rdf
permissions.sqlite
persdict.dat
places.sqlite
signons3.txt (if exists)
webappsstore.sqlite

and the following folders/directories

bookmarkbackups
chrome (if it exists)
searchplugins (if it exists)

Once the above is done, fire up your torbrowser with the alias shared. This is usually put it in your .bashrc file or depending on whatever terminal interpreter you use, wherever the config file will be.

Welcome to the world of TOR. Now, after a time if you benefit from tor and would like to give back to the tor community, you should look up tor bridges and relay. As the blog post has become long enough, I would end it now and hopefully we can talk about tor bridges and relay some other day.

GTK 3.20 breakage in Debian, GDM3, Wayland and Technical Debt.

For about a month and a half now, GTK 3.20 has come in Debian testing. While this is good as GNOME 3.20 was released about couple of months back it broke the themes that are in Debian. A bug has been filed for that .

There has been little in way of documentation about how to fix the themes which reminds me of how Pulseaudio was off-putting when it first came to most people due to incomplete documentation, the breakage and not knowing where to look to fix things or even look up unit-tests, functional tests to understand where the breakage was happening.

It does seem that the GNOME team dropped the ball on this release. A more interesting read of the issue can be seen in this bug thread . I especially like the answer that Michael gave which does tell how much undocumented it really is.

Although if you read Mathias MClasen’s blog post it seems more or less in-line with how regular CSS web-development takes place, so pretty much in-line with GNOME’s stated goals of making GNOME very much a web-development platform so more web-developers could write and support GNOME rather than having to learn C or some other language to write for it. This has been their one of the stated goals from long back, I think circa 2012 or even before.