Indian Pride Destroyed : Archaic Indian Laws

Many Indians (not all) believe that India is a great nation. These people don't even know what are the qualities that makes a nation "great". Law of any nation, and its implementation is one of the most important and fundamental factor in any countries greatness very important factor. India fails miserably on this front.

The most shameful fact for India is that most of the laws that make up the Indian Judicial system, are derived from the British. The very people, whom they drove out of their country. In fact, much of the criminal code, that is still followed in India is the creation of Lord Macualay, who by some accounts had scant regards of India's past.

In India the conviction rate is terribly less. More then 65% of people in Indian prisons are undertrials. Given the miserable conviction rate in India - hardly 25%. It is very clear that more then half of prisoners are wrongly imprisoned. More then 80% of arrests are made for bailable crimes. Such is the unjust legal system of India, which is actually tyrannical. Most Indians are infact are very much unaware of the reality. Even if they knew, as many of them are apathetic, they would just try to run away from the reality.
For the curious, have a look at data from NCRB (National Crime Research Bureau) http://ncrb.nic.in/

Fellow Indians, Are you still proud to be an Indian ?

India's (pervert) Obsession to be a Super Power

Many (well educated) Indians always dream of India being a Super Power. What adds fuel to this dream, is the continued news barrage, of how India's economy is growing, and how it will overtake United States, and China.

If quality of life is taken into consideration, hundreds of millions of Indians live a miserable life. The government doesn't takes care of them, neither do wealthy Indians. That's the reason, the actual number of people, living in dire poverty actually hasn't came down.
If one looks at India objectively, one sees a nation, whose GDP is amongst the fastest growing in the world. On the the other hand, India is full of corruption, and a very incompetent legal system. Judiciary and Police are the two important arms of the govt, which ensures, that citizens of that country get justice. But both these arms are extremely pathetic. The police force is very corrupt, and incomptent. It has totally failed to maintain law and order.
Same goes for the judiciary. One cannot expect justice from the Indian judiciary. Delays of years is the norm in India's courts. And even after years and years of delay, one cannot expect to get justice.

India is actually light years away from being a Super Power, and it is nowhere on the path to become one. Masses of asses don't mean anything. They are just cannon fodder. The sooner majority of Indians realize this, the better it is for the country.

Dubai - Paradise for some, hell for some

Nice article about Dubai

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

Explains its dark side, which isn't revealed often. How people(mostly construction workers) are exploited, in a modern-day form of slavery.

The Recession

So we have a recession now, which is best defined by Harry Truman, as "It's a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours "
This is the second recession, that I am seeing. The previous one, was the one in 2001, when the dot-com bubble burst. There are some differences though.

That recession, was mostly IT specific. Other industries, were hit, but not as bad. People knew, that dot com bubble, was going to burst, though, most of them (including me) hadn't thought, it would be so bad. That also saw layoffs in indian s/w companies, a thing, many people, never dreamt of, at that time.
Till 2000, indian s/w companies, were hiring like crazy, and suddenly got hit, by the recession. Till the time, they knew about the recession, it was a bit late, and they had excess employees on their payroll. The size of IT industry in India was comparatively very less. I guess it was below $10 billion.Though, within 2-3 years, the recession in Indian IT was gone, and it was back to hiring binge, and the pace was greater then the one in late 90's.

This time, things are different. I am no longer a guy with 1-2 years experience :-) which might actually be a bad thing in a recession. The recession has hit most of the sectors. Auto, finance and realty are the worst hit. And it is spreading to other sectors. Though layoffs haven't yet started on a large scale. If the recession continues for a longer time, there might be layoffs. There are recruitment freezes everywhere now. Projects are being put on hold, and the usual recession related stuff is doing the rounds(no pay hikes, though in these times, most people are happy enough to have a job) .
Actually even this time, the recession was in the offing. Most people just didn't took a clue from the downward slide of the BSE sensex.

On the positive side, the hit on realty, was very much expected. The rates were (and still are) pretty inflated by speculators. Hopefully the downward slide in realty will last longer then the recession.

Patents and Innovation

Recently, at the place, where I work, there was a talk on patent process. In this age, companies
are trying hard to build a good patent portfolio. While we were discussing about patents, someone
remarked - encouraging Patent fosters innovation. Nothing can be farther from truth. In fact, FSF
and some like minded guys have exactly the opposite outlook. According to them patents kill
innovation !

So, do patents kill innovation or do they promote innovation ? If one looks at software(including
networking) industry, it is clear, that networking, particularly TCP/IP is one field, which has
truly revolutionized our lives. Other is the PC. Also one remarkable thing about these two
technologies, was the lack of patents filed around these technologies. Imagine what would have
happened, if TCP/IP would have been patented, and there weren't publicly and freely
available RFC's. And even if someone gets them, they have to pay a huge royalty to use TCP/IP.
That would have discouraged companies/institutions from using TCP/IP, and we wouldn't have the
phenomenon called the www.

Most of the technologies, that we use, gained widespread adoption, because they were good,
and more importantly they were much more open, then their counterparts. NFS is a good
example of this. Sun, put the protocol in public domain, and the result is that NFS gained so much
acceptance.

Patents might not be necessarily evil, but to say that they "foster innovation" is ridiculous, and
people, who say that, do not understand innovation.

OpenSuse 11.0

After playing with KDE4.0 (OpenSuse 11.0), I have installed KDE 3.* . From what I have read, opensuse and other vendors have bundled a half backed version of KDE 4, they should have waited for KDE 4.1 to be out. I really hated the fact that Konsole didn't allowed me to switch between shells, using Short-Cut keys. That is my most used application, and I cannot live without the short cut keys. Even plain/simple Linux console allows that :-)

Most of the apps, seem half baked (WIP). Though I really liked the display of KDE4, and would switch to it, once it becomes stable(I hope 4.1 is better), and more importantly Konsole is improved.

OpenSuse 11.0

Recently(well just today) I installed OpenSuse 11.0. I was a bit excited to see
the all new KDE 4 desktop, that came alongwith. After installing, OpenSuse(OS),
the first thing I noticed was that the fonts were better looking, and more crisp,
then in 10.3. Note -> I did a clean re-install, not an upgrade. After browsing
through the system for a while, I noticed that Alt-Tab combination wasn't working
well sometimes. The configuration of desktop has changed quite a bit.

The thing, that was annoying me most, however was that I was not able to
do an update. Yast kept giving error, about malformed URL. Since I was
able to browse net using firefox, I was a bit intrigued. The soln was, I had to
configure Proxy under Yast,. And the proxy I was using had a diff port number,
which I had to give in the proxy's URL. So my proxy looked like
http://proxy....com:Port_Number , after that things worked well.

Save Tibet

The peace loving people of Tibet have been oppressed by the cruel Chinese government, for
almost half a century. Despite being oppressed so much, the Tibetans didn't took to arms.
Recently there has been a spate of demonstrations against the Chinese government by the
Tibetan people. The Beijing Olympics have provided a nice opportunity to highlight the pains
of the Tibetan people.
The Dalai Lama is currently living in exile in India. It is a great tragedy that the Indian goverment
is not extending its support to the Tibetan cause, and on the contrary it is trying to stifle the Tibetan
protests. Kudos to Baichung Butia, who has refused to carry the Olympic torch, in protest of
the Chinese oppression of Tibetans. Unfortunately he is the only public figure to do that.

It is very rare that public figures in India have ever expressed solidarity with any group of people
suffering from a repressive regime. I never expect the meek and corrupt Indian government
to stand up against such a regime. It is very unfortunate to see, how the so called celebrities in
India are dying to carry the Olympic torch. May God torch their souls in Hell :-)

It is really a shame, to see how the Indian government is working hard to ensure that, Tibetan
protests are stifled, and the Chinese are protected. Indian government is doing this, at a time,
while China continues its repressive policy, against the Tibetans.

WagonR Duo or Zen Vxi

I am planning to buy a car pretty soon. I am right now doing reviews of the cars, and have finally
zeroed in on two cars, viz, WagonR Lxi Duo and Zen Estillo Vxi, both from Maruti(Suzuki).

The reasons for choosing a Maruti over others were -
1.) Maruti's dealer network is very good, and little problem finding anyone to repair a maruti.
2.) Its resale value is better then other cars
3.) A safe bet for first time car buyers.

Prices for both these cars are almost the same. The technical features of both the cars are also almost
the same, the only major differences, that I can see are below
WagonR Lxi Duo
1.) Runs on LPG. By doing this, you are going green. Though, not sure, if in future, LPG will be as
cheap, as it is today.
2.) It has more space then Zen
3.) More space in the front, so impact on front would be less compared to estillo.

Zen Vxi
1.) Looks better then WagonR. I like the capsule look of it.
2.) Interiors are better looking.
3.) More features like all powered windows, door open alarm, etc. It comes fully loaded with all features.


Rest everything is same, the gear shift is not so good in both :-)

The People's car aka Nano

So finally Tata group launched its ultra secret small car, which
they have named Nano.
http://www.tata.com/0_media/features/interviews/20080110_one_lakh_car.htm

This is really an amazing achievement. To dream something, and to
make it true, is very tough. But even tough is to dream, something
impossible, and then to achieve it. This is precisely what
Mr. Ratan Tata, the chairman of Tata group has achieved. Defying
all the nay-sayers, he delivered a car, which, well, almost
every-one except the Tata's had doubts about.

There are a number of things, which add greatness to this
gentleman.
- Indian automobile industry is well, not so much famous. This
achievement of Tata, has certainly put the Tata's in the top
league.
- Achieving efficiency in India's manufacturing industry is an
arduous task.
- While the car was in the making, inflation, was also rising, but
still, the cost of the car is same as, what was promised.

Mr. Ratan Tata has surely made every Indian proud, by this
launch. He is one genuine role model for Indians. It has proven
to the world, that India _can_ deliver.

I have never felt so proud to be an Indian.

Kudos to Mr. Ratan Tata, he has became a legend now.

Benazir Bhutto an evil lady

With all the emotional farce surrounding Pakistan's ex-PM Benazir, one
level headed French journalist Francois Gautier, had this nice article
on her, which portrays what Benazir actually did
http://in.rediff.com/news/2007/dec/31gautier.htm

She was an evil lady, who indulge very much in India bashing,
and spreading the poison of terrorism.

She got the death which she deserved, in fact, she was lucky to
die a quick death, unlike the millions of Indians, who are living a
hellish life, thanks due to her policy of supporting terrorism.

It is hard to understand, why all the idiots are mourning her death ?
Or are they mourning, that she died so easily, and deserved a
more painful death ?

Shawshank Redemption

After a friend recommended I watched this movie. Well I had this movie with me, for more then 2 years, and had almost forgotten about it, until my friend told me about it. It is very worth watching. It has this nice build-up and sudden punch. After the first 30 minutes, the film, seems to drag a bit, but not much.

This movie made my weekend :-)
If you haven't watched the movie, don't read the wiki description, it gives away the plot !
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shawshank_Redemption

using Bit Fields

There was a question, as to write a program in C, which
when supplied 0, would print 1, and on being supplied 1
would 0. You are not to use, bit wise operators, i conditions, ternary operators. Below is my attempt at it.

#include
#include

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
struct packed_struct {
unsigned int f:1;
} pack;


pack.f = atoi(argv[1]);
pack.f++;

fprintf(stderr, " %d \n", pack.f);

return 0;
}

This works for me ;-)

The Empire Strikes Back !

I was talking with a friend of mine, who is a
die hard softie(MS zealot), and I casually
mentioned that MS is going to go down, and cannot
survive the Linux onslaught. On hearing this, he
he disagreed, and said that MS is going strong,
and coming up with new things. He said for e.g.
see www.surface.com, he gave a brief, like they
have came up with a board, and if you keep your
camera on that board, all the pics from that
camera are transferred to the board, and on the
flick of a finger, you can transfer all those
pics from the board to your mobile camera.
I had a look at the site, and it was _amazing_.
I recommend you to have a look at it, it is
a breakthrough thing, and you will have a hard
time describing it. A truly breakthrough
innovation. I think after PC's and the mobile
revolution, this is one major innovation.
This is real sci-fi stuff.

Coding in Pre-Internet days

Nowadays, it has become a common practise among programmers,
to search google for any problem they face. Recently one of
my colleague asked me, hey how did people used to work, when
there was no google (read WWW and search engines). Since I
was busy with something I didn't thought much about it.
Later, while pondering over the discussion, I remembered, in
the pre internet days, programmers used to rely much on
manuals, even now, many of the veteran programmers who
started coding prior to launch of www, do rely on man pages
a lot.

Also it came to my mind, that earlier when a naive(basic/
stupid) query was asked, the answer used to be RTFM (Read
the F* manual), which has now changed to STFW(Search the F*
web) Times have changed, and so have the acronyms :-)



Luckily or unluckily when I started learning C, and Unix,
around 97, our lab didn't had access to internet, and hence
I had to rely on man pages, and that was fun. So it feels
good to be part of both worlds (rtfm and stfw :-)

Switching to FireFox

So alas, I shifted to using FireFox from using Internet Explorer(IE). The reason
for the shifts are manifold. Well I started using Linux desktop, and well
firefox was the default browser in the distro I was using, and it wasn't
so bad I thought :-) So I got used to using firefox, and contrary to what
some so called "experts" claim, you don't have to be a geek to use firefox.

On my windows machine, I upgraded to IE7, and I saw that IE7 had support
for multiple tabs. Wow I thought, now that would make IE better. But
discovered later, that organizing favourites in IE is a nightmare now. I
have a pretty big list of favourites, and when I want to add a link to a
deeply nested directory, IE7 makes that a nightmare. Another good
feature that IE cannot handle well is increasing font size by pressing
"Ctrl +" keys. IE increases the horizontal screen size, when you try to
do so, due to which you get a horizontal scroll bar, which is quite
annoying sometimes. FireFox doesn't increase the size horizontally
and handles that pretty well.

Another feature is while browsing sites which present security
certificates. Firefox allows you to accept certificates permanently, so
that you aren't asked again for accepting certificates everytime
you browse the same site again. IE instead makes it harder, even
if you accept a certificate, and it doesn't understands the
certificate, or rather the certificate is not from some trusted authority,
it would keep on telling you that the site is untrusted and do you
really want to access that page. Also the button for saying "yes" is
red in color, and is pretty non-obvious. Adding to IE's pain points.

I like apps which consume less memory, and if you use the Multi
tab feature in IE, IE starts to hog a lot of memory, which makes
the system slow.
And if you browse through a zillion sites in half an hour, right-click
stops working in IE and sometimes even in Windows, and bizzare
things starts to happen, unless you restart IE.

With all these annoying features in IE7, I thought I better switch to
Firefox, and stop this "feature discovering" exercise on IE :-)

Also Firefox comes with a lot of cool extensions, to make browsing a
lot of fun. So goodbye IE and welcome to FireFox !

Software Documentation

While working on any software project, while talking with people the first question that most people ask is where is the documentation, or manual. Most of the people expect good documents of the software to be there, so that they can spoon feed. However while working on UNIX, which follows the philosphy of "code is the documentation", such a question really sounds stupid sometimes. Particularly in this age of google. When my team members asks me this question, it peeves me sometimes. There is a good reason for that. Most people hate to document their work, but at the same time expect documents to be ready for them. They fail to realize that they are part of the problem. However common sense is not so common :-)

The need for documentation => But good documentation is a vital component of software engineering. I make it a habit to document much of the stuff I do, that helps me, when I want to look at those topics again, and even while preparing my status reports. I heard this is a part of personal software engineering :-)

Today's Scenario => Apart from the manual's, in todays world, the online forums/mailing lists are a big boon, and they act as good pieces of documentations. Many queries, which a book simply cannot take care of are easily answered on a mailing list. In fact most of the time, the queries are already asked and answered by some expert on some forum or mailing list.

Enthusiasm the key to achieve success

Maintaining one's enthusiasm is one of the most
difficult thing for a human being. There is a famous
quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

So true. Enthusiasm is one of the most important
quality that one needs to achieve success in life.
However it is not only enthusiasm, I would like to
prepend it with the word "unlimited". Having
unlimited enthusiasm is important. Many times,
we don't start a venture simply because we don't
have enough enthusiasm. So ensure that you
have enough(well unlimited) enthusiasm in you
so that you can achieve your goal.

Is google cheating ?

Recently saw that he serach results provided by google,
have "sponsored links" at the top. These links are
being marked in a different color. But the color usually
used is very faint, and it is not so obvious at first time,
whether the link is an ad or not.

Earlier google used to put the ads in a column, on the
right side of the page, they still do, but it seems to
generate more ad revenue, google, is now putting
them at the top of the search results. Today they
are putting 2 results, some day later, they will
increase it. Think of it, by default 10 results are
displayed. 2 ads for 10 is about 15%. And you thought
google was ethical ?

Do we need SEZ's ?

There is a lot of debate going on in
India about SEZ(Special Economic Zone)
SEZ's are being projected as an elixir,
which will give a huge impetus to the
Indian economy.
Big industrialists are pumping in huge
amounts of money in lobbying to create a
favourable atmosphere for SEZ's.

What is an SEZ -> As the name suggests, it
is a piece of land, running into thousands
of acres. This area would have special
labour laws. The industries operating
inside these SEZ's would get huge tax
benefits. There would be housing complexes,
malls, restaurants, movie theatres, etc in
SEZ's. One salient feature of SEZ's is
that govt would be acquiring land, mostly
from farmers for SEZ's at supposedly
throw-away prices and simply evict the
farmers. More on this later.
In short SEZ's would be like leeches on the
economy. They would enjoy benefits from
India, without much obligation to pay
back. SEZ's are promising huge employment
opportunities, for getting these benefits.

Do we need SEZ's ?
To take care of industrial development,
each state in India has got a state
Industrial Development corporation, which
creates industrial areas, and take cares of
the infrastructure needs of industries.
Also to take care of export oriented
industries, most of the states have EPZ aka
Export processing zones. Industries under
these zones, are given import duty benefits
under the condition, that all their
products would be exported.

SEZ's are supposed to enjoy the benefits of
EPZ's but not the responsibility, i.e. the
export obligation won't be there. This
would give the industries in SEZ's an
unfair advantage over companies, which are
operating outside SEZ's. This question is
still largely vaguely answered.

Opposition to SEZ's
Opposition to SEZ's is from several quarters
- farmers
Farmers are asking, why should they be
displaced ? A fair question. If someone
comes at your doorstep and tells you to
leave your house, and get relocated what
would be your re-action ? The situation
gets more complex, when you consider that
the livelihood of these farmers is their
very own land. Their skills are in
farming, and they have a lot of attachment
to their land. Govt and the SEZ lobby
wants the farmer to learn new skills, and
be part of the industries under SEZ. This
is like telling a software professional
to start working on a farmland. So
outlandish, and absurd ofcourse.

- Economists
Some economist, are questioning, whether
SEZ's will really help India. A report of
a recent SEZ has shown that the company
proposing that SEZ had earmarked 45% of
the land for housing and related things
like malls, etc. And 55% for industrial
activity. So the real motive is to create
hosuing enclaves under the facade of
industrial development ?

- Credibility
There is a huge question on the
credibility of private players. In the
past private sector has been largely
socially irresponsible. So it remains
to be see, if the private sector, can
really achieve the stated goals of SEZ's,
rather then becoming real estate
companies.

- Area of Land
The size of land that these SEZ's are
demanding are raising serious doubts,
about their real motives. Thousands of
acres of land is being ear marked, without
a real need for it. In fact the actual
need is only a fraction of the land
that is being demanded.


There have been violent opposition to SEZ's
from farmers, and they have a very good
reason for it. The govt is behaving like a
dictator, and caring less for the
farmers. The recent spate of demonstrations
by farmers in the state of West Bengal and
Maharashtra, have put the state governments
temporarily on a backfoot, and they have
softened a bit. Lets see what happens next.