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Paying respect to the Legend…

Thursday, April 13th, 2006
In the wake of demise of Dr Rajkumar, fondly known as Annavaru, i would like to remember the great soul. There is no exageration when we say that Raj was the greatest thing to happen for Kannada film industry. He acted in over 200 films showcasing his acting and singing prowess. People who had gathered in lakhs over the last couple of days to pay homage to the departed soul, speaks of his popularity among his fans, whom he used to refer to as “Abhimani Devarugalu”.
Some of the reasons for his popularity among Kannadigas:-
  • Only kannada. Though we got many offers to act in non-kannada films, he stuck to his stand of acting only in kannada films. He also played his part in Gokak Cheluvali, started to uplift the kannada language.
  • No politics. With the kind of fan following he had in karnataka, any person would have been tempted to join politics, float a party etc.. But Annavaru didnot succumb to this temptation. His justification for not joining politics was that, in politics one has to divide and rule, pit against others etc., these things were not of Raj’s liking.
  • Upheld Middle-Class values in his movies and real life. As Dr Ananth Murthy noted on TV yesterday, Dr Raj’s movies used to showcase the middle-class values like respecting your parents and elders, love for children etc.
  • Actor-Singer duo. Apart from being a great actor, Annavaru was also a great singer. It is really rare to find a leading actor also being a leading singer of a film industry.
  • Modest soul. When Raj was offered Karnataka Ratna award he refused to accept the honor ahead of Kuvempu, the great Kannada author. This speaks of Dr Raj’s modesty.
Though he was educated only till 3rd Std, he cherished some great values, which are worth emulating.
Some of the honors that were conferred to him:-
  • Dadha Saheb palke award
  • Padhmabushan
  • Karnataka Ratna
  • Honorary Doctrate from Mysore university
  • Many National, State and Filmfare awards for best actor and singer
All this said, it is true that there are people who question his contribution to the society. There are many ways in which one can contribute to the society. You can do it the Sir M Vishweshvarayya way by striving for people by his services, or the Narayana Murthy way by improving the economic strata of the society or the Dr Rajkumar way by inspiring people to develop good values, raising social awareness, demonstrating his strong will, determination, modesty etc.

Its really sad to see people engaged in violent activities on the demise of this great hero. There is no justification in turning their grief into violence and causing damage to public property and lives of others.

Read more about Raj at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajkumar

PS: Most of the comments made in this post may be reflecting opinions expressed on TV over the last couple of days.

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Motorola V3

Saturday, February 25th, 2006
Today I bought a Motorola RAZRV3. It is sleek, solid and looks great.
Some enviable features of Moto V3 –
  • 2.2 inch 176 x 220 pixel 64K color TFT display
  • Sleek metallic body
  • Feather touch keypad
  • Weight: 95 grams
  • External color display
  • Polyphonic speaker with MP3 ringer support
  • Bluetooth enabled
There are lots of other phones which have better features ( like extendable memory, better camera ) and priced less than the Motorola V3. But these are no way close to the superlative design of Moto V3. It just rocks…

When people put their brains and heart while designing a product it is sure to sell.
This is very well justified in the case of iPod. iPod is prefered over other cheaper and feature-rich mp3-players because of its design aesthetics and highly intutive user interface. Motorola seems to have finally learnt the importance of intuitive user interface.

PS: I hope phone manufacturers will stop naming their models using weird 4-digit numbers, and instead have some simple names.

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Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts

Saturday, February 25th, 2006

http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/keyboard has a list of Keyboard shortcuts for Firefox. It gives shortcuts for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows users of Firefox. It also lists the corresponding shortcuts for Opera and Internet Explorer, provided they have the corresponding feature.
Some very useful ones among them…

  • Previous tab - Ctl PageUp
  • Next tab - Ctl PageDown
  • Location Bar - Ctl L
  • Open Addr in new tab - Alt Enter
  • Web Search - Ctl K

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vim file-explorer

Friday, February 10th, 2006
VIM has always been my favourite text editor. As a programmer, i enjoy the power it gives me through features like regular expression search, word completion, beautiful highlighting, auto indentation, macro definitions, system shell interface etc. vim being a command prompt tool, all these features come at the cost of getting used to some key combinations. Some people feel it is not worth to break ones head in remembering some *weird* key strokes to do things as simple as editing a text file. Such people prefer using graphical editors like kate, which also provide some of these good features in an easy to use menu option or through an intuitive shortcut. And if you are a java programmer it is always an advantage to use IDEs like eclipse or netbeans which come bundled with tons of features like object browser, method completion, syntax checker, exhaustive code formatter, debugger etc. But we all know the amount of resources these powerfull IDEs require to provide all these flashy features. But the command line tools like vim are the only hope when you are required to connect to a remote m/c through telnet or ssh and are devoid of the luxuries of graphical user interfaces. Having said all that, i still appreciate GUI tools and so i use the Gvim - a more convinient version of vim, for text-editing and eclipse for java programming. This way i can always remain in a familiar environment whether it is a local desktop or a remote ssh session.

Being forced to use MS windows at work, i hate to find my explorer going for a toss every now and then for reasons beyond my comprehension. So i tried out some replacements like servant salamander but ended up using by favourite text editor also as a file browser. VIM has a very useful *file-explorer* plugin which can be used for browsing or exploring directories or files. This file-explorer plugin comes in the default vim installation. This is lauched when you open a directory in vim or by pressing :E in vim. If you are using Gvim then you can even click on the names of the files to open them. There is a preview option in which it splits the window and displays the contents of the selected file in the newly created buffer. This is particularly useful when you are trying to look at the contents of a bunch of text files. To realise the utility of this embedded vim file-explorer think of a case when you have a directory containing 100s of text files and you have to search for certain file names and examine their contents. With vim you can do a simple regular expression search for the file name in that directory, preview its contents and then move on to next matching file name. Doing the same thing using the windows explorer and an external editor is quite a task.

Some basic vimrc options to customise the *file-explorer* behaviour:-

let g:explVertical=1 ” Split vertically
let g:explSplitRight=1    ” Put new window to the right of the explorer

To get the complete list of options type :help file-explorer in vim. Similar documentation can also be found at http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/pi_expl.html

PS: I have avoided mentioning emacs - “the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor”, because i found it too complex to handle.

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The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Sunday, January 29th, 2006
I recently read “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“. I liked the way Eric Raymond has effectively discussed the two models of s/w development or evolution which he aptly calls Cathedral and Bazaar models. In this essay Eric uses his own project fetchmail to substantiate how the Bazaar model of s/w development is much supperior to the Cathedral model. He also discusses about the things that need to be done to get an open source project off the blocks. I like his style of putting things accross.

Some comments and extracts from this revolutionary essay

  • Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. He dubs this as Linus’s Law
  • Every good work of s/w starts by scratching a developers itch
  • Good programers know what to write, great ones know what to rewrite and reuse
  • Plan to throw one away, you will anyhow — Brooks. This essay frequently refers to the theories of Brooks discussed in his book The Mythical ManMonth. Eric very cleverly explains how the Linux’s successful model of development doesnot contradict some of Brook’s theory.
  • If you want to get it right be ready to start over atleast once.
  • If you have right attitude interesting things will find you
  • When you lose interest in a program your last duty towards it is to hand it over to a competent person
  • Treating users as co-developers is the most hassle free route to rapid code development & effective debugging
  • He discusses 2 tier model of development i) Cathedral mode core ii) Bazzar mode toolbox. Examples of such projects are Emacs, MATLAB
  • Release early, release often and listen to your customers
  • He explains the theory of Knowledge of Masses. Averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion of a single randomly-chosen one of the observers. –Delphi’s law
  • More users find more bugs
  • Make distinction between stable & cutting edge versions by the version number
  • He talks about advantages of having source-aware beta testers.
  • Adding more men to a late project makes it latter.– Brook’s Law. The Bazaar model doesnot violate Brook’s law because it usually has a small core group of developers
  • Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. This one is analogous to Brook’s observation
  • If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
  • The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better
  • Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
  • Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
  • Exploration essentially by diffusion, followed by exploitation mediated by a scalable communication mechanism :- is applicable to s/w world aswell
  • When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
  • A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets
  • For Bazaar model to work well you should start from something & should be able to attract people
  • He also talks about Egoless Programming - developers not being territorial about their code
  • For the success of bazaar model “Severe effort of many converging wills” is required and not “principle of command”.
  • More heads are better than one, if the coordinator is good and the communication medium is powerful like the internet
  • In closed commercial s/w development, people have to be motivated to do boring but necessary drudgework. Very True…
  • A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Hope my manager looks at this :-)
  • Enjoyment predicts efficiency
  • Play is the most economically efficient way of creative work.
  • Open source is not magic pixie dust

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India Rocks

Friday, January 27th, 2006
I justed watched a program on CNN-IBN called India Rocks. It showcased some of the famous and upcoming music bands of India. Going by the theme of Republic Day all the songs which were aired were patriotic. This program was a bit hatke. Every song that was telecast was interlaced with the members of the band talking about the inspiration for the song and expressing their feelings of being proud of India. There were artists like rabbi, lucky ali, indian occean, euphoria etc.. Of these, the band Indian Occean was the most hatke in their music and lyrics. During the program, in between songs, people used to chant some praises for these bands and also express their deep patriotism. I am not trying to be sarcastic here, when i refer to being patriotic. I am also not expressing my angst against the innumerable patriotic movies / books / songs which are being thrown at us year after year. It always sells to be patriotic. It is one of the most touching rasa’s of all. So it obviously makes sense to pluck some patriotic strings and take to the hearts of the people.
After all these patriotic jibes, the program ended with a song from Rabbi in which he questions all the so called proud to be Indians what they were upto when Gujrat was burning in riots, when a man was shot dead for speaking truth… This man ( i don’t remember his name) was the inspiration for this song by Rabbi and is honestly touching.

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Using ipod on Linux

Saturday, January 7th, 2006
GTKPod provides a Cross-platform multilingual interface to Apple’s ipod. With gtkpod it is very easy to use ipod on linux:-

1. Create a directory /mnt/ipod
2. Mount ipod into this directory
3. Read from ipod using gtkpod
4. Add / Remove songs from the file / directory listing in gtkpod
5. Sync the new contents into the ipod
6. Unmount ipod and start listening to your favourite music

If your music is in audio cds, then all you need is Grip to rip and encode it into mp3 format. Simple steps to rip a cd using grip:-

1. In Grip select the tracks to be ripped from the cd
2. In Config/Rip/Ripper tab you may choose [ grip (cdparanoia) ] as the ripper and provide suitable location and rip file format [ like ~/Music/Album/%n.wav ]
3. In Config/Encode/Encoder choose a suitable encoder

  • lame - for encoding mp3 files
  • oggenc - for encoding ogg vorbis files
4. You can also choose suitable location and Encode file format [ like ~/Music/Album/%n.mp3 ]
5. In Config/Encode/Options tab you can also give Location and M3U file format [ like ~/Music/Album.m3u ]
6. With all these settings done, from the Rip tab you can either
  • Rip only - to extract .wav files
  • Rip+Encode - to get .mp3 or .ogg files
From the ipod you can play .wav files or .mp3 files. To play .ogg vorbis files you have to choose other portable music players like iRiver…

Some useful links:-

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In the cockpit

Sunday, December 18th, 2005
Yesterday i attended Aero Sports Jamboree held at the Jakkur airfield in the outskirts of Bengalooru. As part of the event, joyrides were offered in Microlight aircrafts like zenair, x-air and power glidders. For the sake of getting a feel of the cockpit i decided to go for a joy ride. I wanted to go on a power glidders but because of huge demand for these glidders, i was put on zenair - a two-seater microlight aircraft . The pilot was Capt Arvind Sharma, director of Agni Aero Sports, a really cool guy. I started the aircraft just like starting a car using an ignition key, but with my left hand. It was a great feeling to start a plane. After a series of acknowledgements from the command post, the Capt steered the aircraft to the run-way. Then we did a quick take-off. For the first time in my life i felt like literally flying on my own. Once in the air, the pilot let me handle the plane closely. We shared a common handle ( like a driving school car having two steerings ) to control the aircraft, but the throtle was fully under his control. After a small circuit in the air over the Jakkur village, getting a birds eye view of Bangalore city, we lined the aircraft to the runway and made a smooth landing. After landing i expected the aircraft to cruise along the runway and slowly come to halt. But to my surprise, soon after landing, the pilot did a U-turn, like going around in a Maruti car on an empty road. When i was taking leave, the Capt said - “Never let computer fly a plane“. This remark of his has left me pondering over the issues of “Our dependence on computers” and “Where should we stop with computerisation of things?“. Even if it is easy to replace a human with a computer for doing a certain task, we should deliberate on the issue, because in many cases there is more to “human touch” than to “mechanical accuracy“.

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My new Shuffle

Sunday, December 18th, 2005
Last week i got my IPod Shuffle. Its has 512MB storage space - thats about 100 songs capacity. After installing the s/w ( itunes player ) which ships with it, i started looking for some stuff to play on my new Shuffle. Browsing through the itunes music stores, looking for some free stuff, i ended up in the podcast section. There is a good collection of podcasts listed here. I subscribed for a few ITC( IT Conversation ) feeds. Some of the podcasts listed in the ITC Open source channel interested me. Of the few i listened to i particularly liked the talks of Paul Graham, the co-founder of Viaweb, the first Application service provider. I listened to his talk, titled “Great Hackers“, delivered during O’Reilly Open Source Convention (2004). Paul Graham is a very opinionated person. In this speech he makes fun of IBM by saying, ” .. no startup can think of being the next Microsoft unless there is another IBM which will be ready to bend over at the right moment… “. Seeing the way things have come along over the past few decades, this makes sense. Paul Graham looks down upon people programming in Java when compared to those working with languages like python or C. Being a java programmer myself, i don’t completely agree with this. It is one thing to get the desired output and another to think of the programming language to use. I feel the choice of programming language not just depends upon personal expertise or liking but more on situational requirements.

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How not to brake?

Sunday, December 11th, 2005
Yesterday i went on a bike ride to Nandi hills. It was a nice experience. I pushed my bike to its full limit, sometimes wishing it was more powerfull. On a good highway strech I managed to almost touch 100kph. The trip was marred by a freaky accident. While coming back to bangalore, I lost balance and my fierro sliped off the road. It was again due to my crazy braking, applying only front disk brakes. First time when i slipped, when in college, it was Katte who was sitting behind me, and now it was Kojesh’s turn. This was his first accident on road. Probably when Katte fell it was his first accident too. So I seem to be building a great reputation here. Its only matter of days before my mom finds out about this incident, when she sees my torn pants. But for now, I have managed to keep it under covers, and hope to get their nod for my future bike trips around the city.

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