After day long office work, good TV programs can be very relaxing. But in Chennai and other metros, the CAS or the Conditional Access System is in place. The reason for this nepotism has baffled me. And like most men, I complain, but do nothing. If you get a “normal” cable TV connection from the cablewallah, you will have to watch 10 different Sun TVs and 9 different DDs: A frightening prospect indeed. There is no Discovery, National Geographic, Animal Planet, History or various other movie channels. You have to pay if you need these. The set top box currently costs about Rs. 4,000 and you need to pay up to Rs. 300 if you want to have a decent package. And you are still dependent on the cablewallah. I must say he has offered me a decent service. Well, a decent service I seldom use. So, I really haven’t checked the quality of his service yet.

I decided to get myself TataSky, online from IndiaPlaza.in. They have promised to ship it within 10 days, though I wonder why it will take some much time to deliver. It should not take more than a week to deliver anything point A to point B, anywhere in India.

Even in the eyes of an amateur archeologist, these rocks, extermely crude creations, stand out clearly as the “creation” of man. But on the other hand, the human body, an ultra complex system, whose workings man understands only a miniscule fraction, is attributed to chance and “evolution”. Man, must be crazy.

I fail to understand where this arrogance springs from. Once man has learnt a bit a discovered a tad, he seems to become proud and seems to have forgotten the shortcomings of his learning. Given all the time and money in this world and all the scientists put together, man cannot today, create a single mosquitoe. Let alone a mosquitoe, a single celled organism is out of his reach. How can mere chance be so smart to create life and advance it so tactfully? Is it not always logical to believe in a higher creative force? Is man always not born with the idea of a creator?

To believe or not to believe, is ones own responsibility. There can’t be perfect justice on earth. It has to happen elsewhere. For a man who killed one person and for a man who killed a hundred, the punishment is the same? This is ridiculous.

A man might behave well in public but might be a monster privately. This is where a need for the belief in an unseen God is required. An unseen God is better than a visible God, because belief is better than fear. So my friends, believe in the unseen. There is much to gain and nothing to lose.

But this year I was informed of the event about 2 months in advance, which allowed me to plan well. I chose to speak on a couple of topics:

1. The history of the PC

2. Linux development tools

My talk was scheduled on the 16th and I took a train from Chennai on the night of 15th. Thrisur is about 10 hours by train. There is no airport in Thrisur and a flight plan was ruled out. The train must have reached by around 7 a.m or so and as I walked towards the exit, there were 3 students from GEC, one holding a plackard. I was then taken to “Ramanilayam”, which Pramode later told me is a guest house for ministers. It is a very simple place with many large rooms.

This is the same place that I stayed the last time I was here. After having a shower and breakfast, I was picked up and taken to the college auditorium where the inaugural function was to take place.

The hospitable students took very good care of me and in a while Pramode walked in. After the event was declared open in the inauguration, first up was Anivar Aravind’s talk on “Free Software Philosophy”. The slides he prepared were just wonderful and concentrated more on general culture rather than on the terse philosophy. I think the point that he was trying to drive home was that humans are just too used to copying, in all forms of art and that should be the case with software as well. I agree with him.

Later, Pramode, Anivar and I visited the FOSS exhibition, where interesting projects were on display. Here are some of them.

Insignia 06 was attended by many school students, which I think is very good for them. On the right you can see an old Wipro computer, to me it looks like a mini.

On the the left you see a student demonstrating PWM using RTAI, or atleast it was the intention. She told Pramode that there was some problem getting an RTAI patched kernel to run on that machine. Still, the concept was conveyed. Pramode has writen an article on the subject. You can read it up here. On to the right you can see wires hooked on to a PC’s paralle port. Many interesting projects were done by using the PC’s parallel port and controlling it from Linux.

The guy on the left demonstrates a Puppy Linux Live CD and on to the right is an openMosix 2 PC cluster. You can find an article I wrote for “Linux for You” on the subjects in the “Articles” section.

Some antiques were on display. Look at the platters of a hard disk and the thr right is the famous M68K CPU.

On to the left is a web cam controlled with a stepper motor. Added to that is Motion, a motion detection software used mostly for security applications. To the right is a Lynx/Lyx stall.

As a kid, I was always enthralled by battery powered toys, especially trains, since you did not have to run behind them. Here is one controlled by the parallel port. The “station” can detect it using a reed relay. You can see the magnet on the train in the picture on the right.

To the left is an electromagnetic Tux and on the right are posters made on Computer Science greats, Pramode and Anivar Aravind look on.
Post lunch talks are challenging. No matter how talented a speaker you may be, keeping the audience awake can be a struggle. The better you are, lesser people sleep. My second talk was dropped since there were not enough “technical” audience.

In the afternoon, I had the chance of attending the “Hack a mobile with Python” workshop by a couple of dudes. It described the capabilities of Nokia’s Python port to the Series 60 Symbian phones. I must say that more than the capabilities of the phone itself, the demo items were very interesting. Almost all the demos were done in association with a Linux PC that had a bluetooth dongle. Then by running programs that both on the PC and the phone, some amusing results were attained.

Start_here:

The “Hack a mobile” workshop guys and the Car demo. The car remote control was hooked up to a PC parallel port. A Nokia mobile was then used to control the car. The Linux PC was equipped with a Bluetooth dongle. A Python program on the mobile communicated with the PC through Bluetooth controlling the car. Confused? goto start_here;

OK, don’t use “goto” other than in kernel code and blogs.

“Hack a mobile” workshop chat program between a PC and a mobile.

In the evening, Pramode took me to an Altermedia showroom. These guys are pretty interesting. I bought a copy of Stallman’s essays for Rs. 110. I was printed locally, with an introduction by a local guy. Free media surely rocks. It was very nice to see a copyleft notice, that read “Verbatim copying of this work in whole or part is permitted, provided this notice is kept intact”, rather than some notice that warns you are legal action if you even tried to photo copy it!

After dinner, I took a train back to Chennai.

Recently in the papers, I read about a driver who killed his car owner’s wife for money, so that he and his family would have a great time for diwali. The husband was devastated. Well, he must be thinking in the corner of his mind that he would have happily parted with whatever sum of money, if his wife were spared by his murderous driver. Strangely, that is not how we live. Had the driver asked him for 50 grand, he would have had the police take him to task. That is the justice we know. If some one wants more than a fair share, we will make sure he doesn’t get it, very justly. But in extreme circumstances, we let justice die for convienience or to avoid harm. Life is strange, isn’t it. Very strange indeed. We get fooled by it time and again, yet fail to understand it. I read somewhere that someone’s grandma used to say:

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Recently I was putting on shoes for my 3 year old daughter and I all of a sudden I seem to abandon my practice of tapping shoes on the ground. I instinctively let my fingers on the inside of the shoes and checked if there was anything that might harm her puny feet. I stopped and thought for a second what had made me do this, something that I had ridiculed so much as a child. Only then did I realize the risk that parents take for the child, in matters small and large.

This reminded me of Nissim Ezekiel’s poem, Night of the Scorpion. Where the narrator’s mother is stung by a scorpion. The village backdrop and the rainy night image is drearily brought out by the verses. After a day the narrator’s mother recovers from the sting only to say:

“Thank God the Scorpion picked on me and spared my children”

There are five basic beliefs in Islam.

1. Faith in the one God
2. Prayer 5 times a day
3. Fasting 30 days a year, preferably in the month of Ramadhan
4. Giving alms to the poor and the compulsary tax to the poor (Zakath)
5. Going the Mecca on a holy pilgrimage (The Hajj), if possible

All religions have a way of making its followers start afresh. Islam provides this month – a month of training. Fasting is prescribed literally by all religions, since it clenses the system and teaches discipline. A muslim fasts from dawn to dusk, abstaining from food or water. Just by going hungry, one does not honor fasting. There are other rules like abstaining from sex, remaining honest, etc. But it is sad that many muslims do fast, pray and remain righteous during this month, but continue according to their whims and fancies once the holy month crosses the calendars. When one learns to cycle for the first time, for example, he may do it in a ground where there is no traffic, so that he may pick up the skills. But what if he would say that the training is good enough and the he wouldn’t ride on the roads, in the traffic and use the cycle for its real purpose – transport?

This month is similar. The mosques are overflowing with people, who fast and pray all month long, but disappear once this holy month is over. It is a sad fact witnessed by those who are regular to mosques to offer their daily prayers.

One thing that stops me from cycling to office is the very high humidity levels in Chennai. If I were to cycle to office, I would be drenched in sweat and office guys I’m sure would run away from me due to some unbearable stench. And moreover, people have _no_ respect for cyclists. And cycles neither have headlights, nor tail lights. Even if you had a dynomo that made this possible, it would only make pedaling more difficult. If other motorists can’t see you, you don’t exist and a short while later, you may have existed only in the past.

The true strength of man’s capability of rememberance is his ability to forget.

If we couldn’t forget at all, we would be badly affected by exceedingly good or bad incidences.

I really wonder why someone has to be either good or bad and how someone defines good or bad. Religions set standards on what is good or what is bad. And we know that there are several different standards. Athiests do what they think is good. And so do many “believers” who pretend to know their religion. Good or bad tends to vary along with religion / belief, age and place.

I once lost my cell phone in an auto while in Bangalore. It was early in the morning, about 4 a.m. I had reached the guest house from the railway station. Upon realisation, I felt as if the palm of my hand was missing. I grabbed my collegue’s phone and dialed my own number. After several attempts, the auto driver picked the phone up. I introduced myself as the owner of the phone and his most recent passenger. He was on the way somewhere, but promised to return the phone to me. He asked me to come down and wait where he had dropped me off. He promised me that he would come in half-an-hour.

After about 15 minutes, I went down and waited. I saw many familiar early-morning scenes. The joggers, people arriving from early morning trains travelling in auto-rickshaws, the milkman, the newspaper boys and the pujari in the temple opposit to me, fully awake after his early morning bath. After waiting for about half an hour, I bacame restless and started calling my cell phone repetedly, but he would not pickup. I was wondering why this man had to return my cell phone afterall. Even if he sold it for a mere Rs.500, that was still cash. I remember I spent that I spend almost Rs. 11,000 on it when I bought it 2 years ago. But I just waited. And after about an hour or more, a half familiar face appeared in an auto. He told me he was late since he had to drop a passenger off at Majestic.

I paid him well and thanked him profusely. He smiled shyly as I appriciated his action. I have thought about for hours what things may be right or wrong, but I knew for sure that the things that this poor automan had done was definitely a good thing, even though he only lost much of what he could have made by returning the phone to me.

I played my favorite ring tone and felt happy.

Since my childhood, there have always been kittens and cats around in my house in Madurai. The lifespan of a cat is typlically a few years, but life is harsher than the short life span awarded to them. They typically die at an early age due to other reasons. No obituaries are published.

So roughly once a year, there used to be a new cat in the house. I have lot of experiences bringing them up. In fact several times, I have syringe fed kittens that had bearly opened their eyes up, religiously several times a day until they were on their own. Still, no “love”. I like it that way, the cat is itself and I stay myself.

I love the felines for several of their amazing hunter qualities, amazing eyesight, sharp hearing and precision jumps. Unfortulately, my neighbor bred pegions which have several times served as a good mid-day lunch for many a tom cats I have reared. He obviously hated cats and would give one a sound trashing one it turned up inside of his compound. I’d straightaway curse him if I saw my cats come home limping or injured otherwise.

I had an unusual number of friends visit me, and cats never came in the way, because they can’t bark. I really didn’t feel all that good going to houses that had dogs. Above all, cats are completely maintenence free. You just feed them and keep them from eating your neighbor’s pegions, parrots, fish or the neighborhood squirrels. No matter how much you play with a cat, your hands _never_ turn smelley. That is not true for dogs, I have owned a beautiful and strong dog once. They are self cleaning machines. They have salaiva that contains anti-biotics.
I really miss keeping cats now, since I am alone with my family here in Chennai. I do not remember a single day in my whole life when my house in Madurai was completely void of people. Someone used to be there all the while and the cats were taken care of. I rear plants now. The neighbors are happy to water them if we are not here for long. Life forms are beautiful and I like to be sorrounded by them.

A cat feeder would be of tremendous help, but I wonder what will happen if the power went off(Chennai is still part of India) or there is a bug in the software that controls it. Nevertheless, here is one that is very cool and geeky Probably, there is hope, for all is not lost.