My life

My experiences.

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There is nothing better to lift your spirits than a loving sister.

Ahem..

Well, having finished college, being at home, I usually spend quite a lot of time in front of my computer. That is how I got to publish my book, how I blog regularly, etc.

Lately, I have signed up for an Online course on Programming Languages offered by brown university. You can find the details here. Hence I dedicatedly started spending more time in front of the computer. I watch the online classes, read the lecture notes, work out the exercises, do the daily quizzles, work on the weekly assignments and so on.

Two days ago, at exactly 3.30am in the morning, the Universe (Yes!) kinda felt that I was too happy and content with what I was doing, and decided to toy with me. At that exact moment, a fever built up, my stomach started rumbling and I started vomiting too! Things could not get any worse.

Somehow I managed till morning and woke everyone up and told them my condition. My sister being a doctor, made me take an analgesic to lower the fever. When I was a bit more stable, she prescribed a few antibiotics that I started to take right then itself.

I was so totally dehydrated and weakened that I was bed-ridden for the two days. I would sleep, watch some cartoon or movie to distract my mind from the nausea, suffice to say I was in front of my laptop itself.

Yesterday afternoon, my sister came back from her work and saw me lying down watching an episode of “Mind your language”. She, very lovingly, came towards me, took a pen, opened up one of my old records and took a blank page, and drew me the following picture!

Just so that you couldn’t read any : Haris.

What are you doing?

Assignment.

Watching video.

Work.

Blogging.

Nothing.

Reading.

Studying.

I have a fever.

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Ah, I love her. She is one super awesome cool lady. When life gives her lemon, she makes chicken curry with it!

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He is Me.

One day early morning, two people happened to cross each other’s path. One of them was returning home after spending the whole night in prayers and worship while the other person was returning home after a night of ‘shameful’ activities.

Upon seeing each other, the first person thought, “Oh! That poor man must be tired from having prayed all night long”.

Ironically, the second person thought, “Heh, looking at him coming so innocently. Like I don’t know what he has been upto”.

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Similar to all the posts that I write, this one does not convey a meaning that is absolutely correct. I’m putting down what I have learned from my personal experiences as well as from the people I’ve met in my life. This only is meant to offer you a different perspective of the normal things that we live through each and everyday. Hence if you disagree or have a completely different take on the matter, you are more than welcome to share them.

The idea that I’m trying to convey is that whenever you really feel that a person is bad, that is because that “badness” exists within you. I’m not talking about what you say about a person in public or to your friends. I’m talking about the thoughts that you have in your conscience regarding a person that you see. When you doubt him for something bad, you usually think that you are having such a verdict because you have experience. However, most of the times, I have found the truth of the matter to be that you come up with that verdict because you yourself are a victim of that.

Interestingly, this not only applies to the negative side of things. When you can genuinely think good about a person, I’ve felt that it is possible mostly because you have that goodness within you. However, it might be well for you and me if we drop this positive side of things because otherwise you will most probably start being arrogant about how good you are. You know what I mean right? Too much of self-righteousness might creep up and nothing can make a person more annoying than that.

Hence the next time you think bad about someone and judge him (which is one nasty thing to do) at least try to give him the benefit of the doubt. Just like that, when you sit there gloomy thinking that how bad and unfair the world around you is, maybe it is time to look within you and start making a few changes starting with the man in the mirror himself.

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The tech savvy kid.

We were at my uncle’s home for a family gathering. We had a great feast at noon and were spending the afternoon time chit chatting with each other.

In the midst of this, one of my cousin sisters’ daughter, who was 3 years old, was sitting on the bed in one of the rooms, shouting and making noise trying to get some attention. She used to play with her mom’s mobile phone and she wanted that. However, her mom was a bit busy at that moment.

My sister noticed this. She went towards the little kid and after a few pampering words, gave the little one her phone, which was the ordinary one with the keypad and all.

The little one took the phone from my sis smiling, looked at it and then, started to swipe her cute fingers on the screen, wondering why nothing was happening.

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It is all about attention, and addiction!

As humans, when we are asked why we do something, we have an arsenal of answers ready at our command. We come forth with the “It makes me happy”, “because I think it is right”, “passion”, “this is what needs to be done”, and numerous other answers as well. Basically, what we are all trying to do is to find a reason to justify our actions. The answer to the question, “why?”.

There is another basic instinct that is at work here, which is actually the one thing that we crave for while doing all our actions and yet, the one thing that we are ashamed of admitting that we are after. It is so because admitting to that reason makes you “not cool” or something else of the sort.

What is that basic instinct? Have you ever wondered why criminals are given Jail sentences as punishments? More importantly, do you know what the worst punishment is that can be given to a criminal while in Jail? Apart from all the hard work, bad food and punishing, the most scariest of them all is solitary confinement.

To be in a cell, alone, away from humans, without even being paid the slightest of attention. Prolonged stay in solitary confinement breaks a person down emotionally.

Lack of attention is what channels people’s minds in different directions. When I say people, that includes everyone from a little baby to a kid, boy, a youth, middle-aged and old ones. All of them require attention for their lives to go on.

I have experienced this scenario first hand with a cousin brother of mine, who was entrusted in the care of one of my uncle’s family, because his Mom had to undergo certain treatment and his Dad had to be in another country for work.

This kid was a modest and silent child, sweet and gentle. He was 9 years of age or so. However, his stay at his uncle’s slowly started changing him. He started causing silly troubles, engaging in constant fights, and also started having constant mood outs. He wanted to do something to gain attention. It did not matter what he did nor what kind of attention he gained. Whether it be good or bad did not matter, as long as it provided him with a little of someone’s time.

Almost all of us have other’s attention all the time and thus, as is our nature, we take that for granted and build up huge philosophical mountains on our ego to cover up this basic instinct of ours. If you talk to doctors, you can see that a huge number of patients are coming there to consult him without any real diseases. Especially old people, when they are cast aside without being heard and attended to (attended as in, talked with and heard by), the way that they see to get attention is by conjuring up diseases which do no actually exist so that they can at least visit the doctor. This is true even in the case of young people and not just old ones.

People have connections with people whom they receive attention from. I believe this is the fundamental factor behind love. For when two people are in love, they both give each other their ‘time’ more than anything else in the world. Your time is the greatest gift that you can give one person and time means attention. Also just look at your friend’s circle. Are you friends with anyone who does not pay you attention no matter how much good that guy is? Of course not! You are happy with your circle because they give you attention. No matter whatever greatness and goodness that other fellow has.

I believe that is the reason why certain students get into “bad company” too. Because most of the studious and enlightened students in the class might not have time to tolerate and hear what certain weak students have to say. This basically puts that weak kid in a situation where, in order to gain attention, he tries all sorts of students in his class, and figures out that there is a bunch from whom he can get attention easily. All you have to know are gossips about celebrities and movies. You need not learn math nor do hard work. And since the society nowadays encourages you watching movies and knowing gossips, that weak kid finds that he has an easy way to gain attention and thus, gets into that company.

We talk about ‘passion’ as a reason for doing things. Have you ever thought what would happen if no one notices you when you do the ‘things’ that you claim you are passionate about? In my case, I claim ‘writing’ to be one of my passions. Would I still write if I had 0 hits day and night on my blog after having over 130 posts? Nope. I would have given up way before. Free software, open source, programming being the other things, would you stick to any of those if people did not pay you any attention? Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying people do things without any other reason. I’m just saying that the fundamental reason why people do things is for attention.

People are blessed with interests and likes. That is why they pay attention when they see or hear things that they like. That is how attention is passed around.

I had stated in one of my earlier posts that people did not have passion these days because they were not getting bored. However, a more valid argument would be that people do not have a passion these days because they do not have any lack of attention. Because they have the Internet and especially because they have the social networking sites, they get as much attention as they want. They need not do anything creative in order to get attention. They just need an e-mail account and a few clicks on these sites.

When people do not have attention, they do creative things. Things that others are not capable of doing, in order to bring attention to themselves. I believe that is how passion is born. These days, people who do not entirely succumb to the attention from Social Networking, or for that matter from any other communication media, get to be creative. The lesser the attention that you get, the more creative that you become. This creativity can be for good purposes or bad ones. It does not matter.

You know how people crave for power. How people like to be in the ruling committee no matter how much risk they have to take. What is power if not but attention magnified a thousand times? Attention is more or less like money. You can live decently if you have enough. But you never stop trying to get more. Inspiration, motivation, everything has the fundamental factor of attention attached to it.

So basically what I’m saying here is that everything you do is for attention. Well, everything? Nope. Not everything. You do things for one more reason, and that is addiction!

This is scary. Really scary if you know what I mean. Even if you do not get an ounce of attention, you will go about doing this. Just to mention a few of the common ones – drugs, porn and gaming. You succumb to these even if you do not get any external attention. These are things to watch out for because you would be a lot better if you give your time to almost anything else.

So, don’t be afraid to admit that you need attention. It is something that we all need. Something without which we cannot live. On this, you may create as many pillars of philosophical reasons for the things that you do. It is upto you.

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We need good teachers.

It is no secret that the standards of teachers nowadays in colleges and schools are pretty low. Since most of them consider teaching as just a process to earn money, the ethics and true meaning of being a teacher has been ignored and cast away by them. That being the case, numerous people are out there to take up teaching as a profession.

These days, whenever I talk to someone about teaching, they tell me that it is one of the most easiest jobs in the world. Do you know their reasoning for that remark? They say that you’ll have to work only 2 to 3 hours per day, you will have lots of vacations and if you get a Government teaching job, then swell, you can slack off as much as you like.

Slack off? You have to be kidding me. This is the common man’s view regarding teaching and unfortunately, the views of most of the teachers nowadays too. Since both the teachers and common ma agree with the same idea, there are more and more people trying to get into the teaching profession so that they can ‘slack off’.

However, the funny thing is that there are good teachers among us. But they neither make it to school nor to colleges. I talk from the perspective of a fresh Computer Science graduate here and hence, my views maybe restricted to this field only.

These ‘good teachers’ among us are those who are passionate about what they do and have got an extremely good talent in teaching others what they know. Unfortunately, none of these people have their profession as teachers. from what I have seen, most of these people are in the IT industry, working for a software firm or something of the sort.

What I’m saying here is that the society, and more importantly the students, need people like these. People who have passion and people who actually know what they are talking about. People who can guide the young ones on the right path. People who can be followed.

Alas, these people are unavailable. They work in the industry on technologies they are passionate about and earn a lot more than a teaching job. So what need do they have to teach a few? I think there is a need because otherwise, the coming generation is going to have a hard time thinking straight.

I think it takes an enormous amount of will to dedicate one’s self to teach the new generation just by understanding the situation the young generation is in. I don’t know if it is a responsibility as such, but I definitely know that it is a service only those people can give. I guess no one can blame them for not doing it, but I believe that they can make the world a much better place to live, they can make a change and bring forth a ray of hope.

However, assuming that these people do come to teach, they are not going to do much of a good job if they have egoistic superiors breathing down their neck. The institutional politics is something that they don’t need to put up with because they are there to offer a service. Not to “show” that they are offering a service. Hence, there should be other outlets for these kind of people to come forward once in a while and to be able to share what they know with the young ones.

Pramode sir is one person I have seen as such. He realized he had something to give to the society. He teaches, and the beauty is that he teaches on his own, without any “department politics” or “bossing around”. He took a risk upon himself by doing what he did. To stabilize one’s self in such a way by establishing his own institution. I wish the society or the Government supported such initiatives so that we would have more people like him.

My aim is to become a teacher. I want to learn well and then teach about what I know. I have seen many knowledgeable people in the IT industry who say that they will teach/train if they get paid a huge amount of money. It might be true that what they teach is worth that much, but I believe they are forgetting the deserving ones out these, who cannot afford it.

I agree money is important, but money simply is not everything. I wish, hope and pray that those people who have the skill and knowledge to make the difference in the society, to set aside at least a little of their time to teach those young ones, who deserve to be guided.

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A cook’s grief.

Trying to wipe tears off her face, Namita realized the hard reality of life… She had felt it for the first time. No matter how hard she tried, the tears wouldn’t stop. She paused for a moment to think where she had gone wrong. Hadn’t she paid proper heed to what her mother said? “Sigh…!!”, she said as she wiped her tears… Her eyes were now searing with pain. But the tears alas, wouldn’t stop! It was as if the dam had  broken, giving way to a turbulent and ever flowing river….

But amidst all this, her eyes were focused on the single thing that had caused her to suffer. The thing which, lay there as lifeless and motionless, and the only thought that remained in her mind was..

“Why the hell do they put onions in every dish!?”

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Sent to me by my friend Namita, while she was making her “Bengan ka bhartha”!

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I’m not a FOSS fan boy.

“FOSS fan boy”. That term is really scary. It says in a single breath that the person described by that term is nothing but attitude.

“FOSS fanboys will never understand that, because they need to believe that they’re freedom fighters in a revolutionary war, like characters in their favourite animes”

This is what provoked me to write this post. Trying to draw an analogy, during my college life, I have seen a lot of students getting involved in politics. I have always wondered what got them so interested and dedicated to the cause. I used to find it absurd that they spend time on useless discussions, strikes and fights. I even have discouraged many of them from going after politics and “ruining” the time they had at college. As far as my analogy goes, the belief that something great or superior is there to be achieved by our little actions, is what drives the people, and I believe that there is something free software is destined to achieve.

I’m not sure so as to how this belief is instilled in the young minds. I don’t exactly know how even I got into that mindset. But somewhere along the way,  I did.

People always like to make themselves believe that they are important. They do that by mingling with the ones  who make them feel that they are important. Once they realize which group of people makes them feel important, they will start actively working for it.

I believe that is the truth to getting followers. In some aspects it is easy to provide the motivation because the actions of the group are easy to be imitated. That is the case with political parties as it is easy to be one in a crowd and shout. You can always get attention and feel important without doing much. You just have to make some noise and be somewhere by the side of the mob.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in no way implying that politics is bad. On the other hand, what I’m talking about is the “Fan” attitude. A more meaningful (and unparliamentary) way of putting it would be “All fart and no shit”.

Another observable example are the “fans” of celebrities. It is one thing liking a certain superstar and it is completely another treating them as God, spending time on putting banners and posters of them everywhere and picking fights with anyone who says he sucks. Most of the youth these days, sadly, involuntarily falls into this trap. The seriousness with which they “fight” to support the celebrity is rather… admirable?

There are still many examples like football fans and cricket fans where all they do is talk without ever having kicked a ball or having held a bat.

Now coming to FOSS. I entirely agree that the ‘fan’ culture is there for that too. Basically, it means that you keep on talking about philosophy without an ounce of technical knowledge. The “keeping on talking” would be fine if you would only spend a little time on it. However, with fan boys that is not the case. They keep at it day and night.

You see certain ‘free software enthusiasts’ commenting about Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman saying that they are not right. These ‘fans’ would not have even cloned the kernel source code yet and they say “Torvalds was wrong to do that, he was wrong to say this” and stuff. I mean, the Linux kernel is such a huge project being maintained by one guy collaborating thousand of developers from across the whole world! You have no clue what that management is like nor any idea regarding its implementation. All you have done is to sit comfortably at your home, open your laptop, read some stuff from here and there and there you go! Somehow you are man enough to advice others. XKCD depicts this wonderfully. Take a look below.

What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong

As far as I can see, that attitude is not something to feel proud about regarding FOSS. Let me mention a few people who love FOSS and have done much for it and yet are humble.

The first one would be my brother, Noufal Ibrahim K V. He neither talks philosophy nor tries to correct the “wrong person” on the internet. He lived his college life by tinkering with the internals of the Linux OS and thus learning much about how a computer works. He says that it was the Free Software Movement that brought about the freedom for this kind a thing to happen and thus he respects its existence. He works for the internet archive which is a non-profit NGO dedicated to archiving the whole of internet (as crazy as that sounds!) and yet he does not simply criticize others.

The next would be Ershad. He is just so enthusiastic about computers that he would give his life in exchange for it (Just kidding!). He gets to voice his opinion because he has done much for the society due to his love for FOSS. Not only has he a really good technical knowledge but he has contributed much with it. Both through programming as well as teaching. Personally speaking, he was the main reason for the small light of hope that was lit at our college,

Then comes Praveen ettan whom I have gotten to know over the past few months. Nothing more need be said about him other than that he is a Debian developer! Which means that he spends his time and effort, without any return whatsoever, for maintaining packages for the Debian Operating System. That, my friends, is how you contribute to society. He has strong philosophical beliefs which he puts forward and there is nothing wrong with that because he is one person who tries heart and soul to keep the spirit of Free Software alive not only through words but also through actions.

Now coming to the essence of the post. Am I a fan boy? To an extent I am for my contributions are questionable. Also, since I have been a great ‘fan’ of comic book superheroes like Batman and Wolverine, I’m pretty easy to get excited about “fighting for the goodness of the world”. So the comment at the the beginning of this post applies in my case.

Thanks Sharat for opening my eye. I am not going to be simply “one among the crowd” and shout. Till now all that I have done is to make chances for a few people to come together and learn a little but I see that is not enough. I will try to better myself and one day, I shall speak.

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And Monsoon is here…

“Hey Joe, check this out. Its raining.”

“Oh crap! Dude Andy, I told you we should’ve gone back earlier, didn’t I? Now what are we going to do?”

“What can we do? We have to make it through to the Queen and let her know this”

“What the…!? You mean to go through….”

Before he finished Andy was already on his way. Joe rushed after him.

“Do you know the way dude?”, asked Joe.

“Man you’re sooo looney. Don’t you even know how we find our way? Follow me.”

“What!? Its a pool ahead! Can’t you see high grounds just to your left? Let’s go that way.”

“Joe”, said Andy sternly, “I’m going to follow the pheromones no matter what. If you can go the other way, then be my guest”.

Andy made his way through splashing and making a ruckuss.

“Sigh…”, said Joe. “I guess he is right. I really have to work on this pheromone addiction of mine”. He followed Andy.

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Today we had the first “official” rain of Monsoon at about 5 in the evening. Very punctually, the power went off. I took my text book and went outside to the Veranda. Mom and dad were already sitting there and I accompanied them.

As you might have already guessed, I did not even look into the text. It was when sitting enjoying the rain that I saw those two ants. No matter there being a raised ground without water near them, they simply would follow one course. They did not mind even they had to swim to keep their course. Just for the sake of it, both of them made it successfully to the other side of the house and into our car porch.

It was wonderful to see how much water appeared all around just from a few minutes of Rain. The smell of wet soil was so invigorating.

I guess people were not expecting the rain. There were these motorbikes parked at the smallest of shelters that they could find, trucks and pickups covering their load, cars with vipers on, people with Umbrellas…

The trees seem to shine. There was the slight glow from the evening sun that shone on the wet leaves. You could feel the happiness from all around.

One thing that I did not want to remember was getting up early on days like these and getting ready for school. Oh how I hated those days. But they are long gone. Never to come back again.

Oh dear Rain, pour and bless us with your gift, the elixir of life.

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Naruto IS genjutsu!

For those among you who are already into cartoons, you must have come across this name from some place or the other as Naruto, the anime Cartoon, is the rage nowadays.

It would not be possible to describe what this cartoon is about in a few words. Those who have seen it can vouch for me regarding that. However, keeping a long story short, its about a kid who never gives up on trying to get better, his friends and the world that he lives in.

According to the Cartoon, there are basically three types of skills for a Ninja (There might be more, but I was able to gather only three).

1. Taijitsu : This refers to one’s physical skill in battle. The martial arts he has learnt and the will with which he uses it.

2. Ninjitsu : This can be thought of as special powers that the Ninjas have. They have this inner power called Chakra. Once you learn to master the inner power, you can control and mould it to be used as powerful techniques. You can spit fireballs, make lightning, etc. You get the idea right?

3. Genjutsu : This is the ability to manipulate once reality. If you have this skill, you can project an illusion at your opponent and he can be trapped in it for a time depending upon the skill you have in using it. Even though it can be done using music, sight, etc, doing it via sight is the most effective one. Especially if you possess the Sharingan eyes!

Well, what I’m saying is Naruto IS Genjutsu and I’m trapped in it!

One year back while I was studying my fifth semester, I shared my hostel room with Varun, Shabeeb and Koushik. After class in the evenings and the nights, Varun would turn on his laptop and sit watching Naruto while I wasted my time with my cell phone and laptop. Back then I wondered what the hell was wrong with this guy to keep on watching that stupid cartoon day and night. Upon his request, I had watched a single episode which was the fight between Neiji and Naruto. However, today I wish I had watched that cartoon with him. I would’ve really enjoyed it.

So from then on days went by without me watching it at all. Even at home my sister would watch it from youtube and would invite me to watch it along with her. But I simply wouldn’t watch it. Things went by like this until a month ago when one day while I was having my evening snacks, my sister was watching an episode of naruto. I simply went and gave her company.

Little did I realize it was the episode between Sasuke, the wielder of the Sharingan, and Daedara! I watched the episode and in between them I looked into the Sharingan of Sasuke! I never in my dreams imagined that I would be trapped in his genjutsu! Alas, I was and now even when I realise that I’m under his Genjutsu, I cant stop watching Naruto. Episode after episode I watched and exhausted all the episodes that I had on my hard drive.

I’m still itching for more but it seems that the further episodes have not been made yet. I’ll only be able to come out from this genjutsu once the person who cast it upon me dies. That means Sasuke must die. Like everyone else in the hidden leaf village, I too am counting on Naruto to save me.

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How and when did I start using computers and when did I start using Linux?

Well, talking about personally having a computer, that takes me back 5 years.My brother bought me a computer just 10 days before my 12th board exam. All I knew when sitting in that car from Trichur railway station to Edappal with the computer at the back was that I could play games without depending on anyone any more.

I remember computers when I was four years old. At that time we were in gulf and my brother owned a PC. That was in 1992 approximately and you could imagine its configuration. Frankly, I don’t know its configuration but I’m guessing a few kBs of RAM and… Man, I don’t even know how low I can go with this!

Right now, thinking about the first time that I remember seeing a computer brings this scene to me. I’m sitting on the floor in my brother’s room at our apartment and playing with some toys. I look up a and see my brother playing the “Simpson’s Arcade game”. I don’t know why but I still feel good thinking about that game and I vaguely remember the scenes from it.

Mom comes with food for me and I remember my brother sitting away from the computer and letting me sit in front of it. He put the game “Fox” for me and I would sit and play that while Mom gives me my food. I’ve been able to gather that Fox was one of the really popular games at that time.

There you go! That’s my start with computers.

From then on it has been the equation, computers = games, for me till roughly my eighth standard when I was introduced to MS paint at my school.

I’ve been a raving video game addict from my childhood onwards and it has been only two or three years since I’ve rid myself of that addiction. These days I don’t play games at all and I kinda miss it.

Thinking back, lots of my memories are about playing video games with my cousins, my brother, my dad and my sis. Most of them are pleasant memories while there are unpleasant ones too where my addiction was exploited and some of my cousins wouldn’t let me play their games.

So far I’ve owned 15 8-bit games, 5 16-bit mega drives and 3 PS-1s and 1 Game Boy Advance SP. The number of cassettes and the cheating and transactions are so much that they are better off for another post.

My addiction for computer games only grew when I realised that there were cooler games. There was this computer center near my home and the guy who owned it would let me play some racing games on his system. I only knew “Up, down, left and right” and one day he showed me how to change the desktop wall paper which was like this “great” knowledge about computers!

My brother had by this time bought a Laptop (one of his dreams) and would let me play Sands of time/Deus Ex on it whenever he came home from Bangalore.

So things went on like this until the day I got my computer 10 days before my 12th exam. My brother took it all out, assembled it and turned it on for me. He showed me a menu that comes at the beginning (which I later on realized was GRUB) and told me to select Ubuntu. I did. It was version 7.10 or something back then. He told me to check it out. I was introduced to Linux.

Obviously, my first question was “Where can I play games from!?”. He showed me a few games in Ubuntu with which I wasn’t amused at all. He told me how to restart and logged me into Windows. I don’t exactly remember how it kicked off but my guess is that it was Deus Ex itself. An awesome game even though pretty old.

He simply gave me an advice that if I wanted to hear songs, play videos, look at photos, insert video cds, etc, I were to use Ubuntu and whenever I wanted to play games, I could use Windows.

My brother also did not let me play any pirated games. He told me to never borrow games from my friends. Whenever I wanted a new game, I was to ask him and he would buy me an original one. I did not know what was wrong with him then but today, I think I understand what he meant.

Now and then, he would tell me about Linux. That what I was using was free and I could make any changes that I wanted in it. At that time my freedom was that I could delete the panels, resize them, change the applets on them whereas in Windows the start button and the panel at the bottom would remain the way it was. I even remember telling this seriously to someone making my point that Linux was free.

Oh and the all too familiar belief of viruses not affecting Linux was also there.

Till reaching college, such was my life. It was only after reaching college that I heard the word ‘programming’ and ‘computer languages’. It was then when the things that my brother told me started making a bit of sense.

It was during this year that I moved further into using Linux because one day my Windows was affected with a virus and it was a complete headache until my brother came and reinstalled it for me. After that, I became a supporter of Linux with little knowledge of what ‘free, open source, Ubuntu, Fedora’ etc meant.

First year too went by uneventfully with me playing Oblivion, the elder scrolls. My brother would tell me to read Dennis Ritchie and practice coding. But I guess I never listened to him. Now that I start understanding the world of computers and programs, I realize more and more the mistakes I have made in not listening to my brother. I seriously had not done any sort of coding on my system during my first year. I would copy some seniors programs and show the output in our labs.

Optimistically, my brother bought me a laptop during the end of my third semester. But then too, the only thing that I used it for was to listen to music and everyone at hostel even termed it as my ‘walkman’.

The first time I did a program on my system was when I was learning for my s3 university lab exam I guess. At the end of that year was when my brother introduced me to GSoC. He helped me download and install the tuxmath game. It was then when I started experimenting for the first time.

That was my entry into open source.

From then on I started hearing and seeing things related to it and from then on did my journey further into the world of freedom began!

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DebianUtsavam 2012 – Medal of Honor!

Yet another memorable event at MES, Kutipuram! I must say I’m starting to enjoy my life now. I had no clue the event would turn out to be such an enjoyable one when Praveen ettan first mailed us telling us to get it together on short notice.

There is one milestone in my life that I simply have to mention here and that is, it is the first time I’m getting a medal in my entire life! I’m just so happy that it was for my effort at teaching too. Here it is.

Day 1  (28/04/2012) – Welcome to GNU/Linux!

After attending the release party not a month ago which consisted of about 10 people, I was amazed to see around 30 for this event. Most of them were a group of young foss enthusiasts who knew they had to learn about it and they wanted to learn too.

The event was scheduled to start at 9.30am. But holding up the philosophy of “All good things to those who wait”, we started the event sharp at 10.30am with Ershad, the tallest foss hacker among us, inviting the new ones among us to freedom as well as rejuvenating the rest of us. I could say he got through to us with his cycle. Lol! His session lasted for about half an hour and at about 11:00, it was time to get techy and Nakul was the one who was going to get us so.

Let me mention Nakul and Kiran here. Nakul has this “Alright everyone! I’m here so you guys have nothing to worry about. Let me handle it” attitude and his presence made the entire occasion joyful. Whereas Kiran had this “Yup, you are doing great and all of us are learning from you” attitude. Both of them together were an awesome team in organizing as well as getting the event to go forward smoothly. Great and awesome guys to be with. Its an honor to have gotten to know them.

So at 11:00, Nakul came forward with his arsenal of commands. Ummm… Usually people commands the Arsenal I guess but what the heck…

Anyway, command line and shell scripting were his topics. He ordered each of us to go and sit in front of a system and he started his session. Starting from the very basic of changing directories and creating folders (recursively and not), he took us to tee even! Not tee as in “tee hee” but tee as in the command used  to “read from standard input and write to standard output and files”. Changing the permissions, ownerships (leaving poor Kiran both ‘ownerless’ and ‘permissionless’ over a few files!), the representations of ownerships and all were covered. He more or less taught us the heads and tails of more, less, head and tail. He he… Sorry bro,just couldn’t resist writing that sentence and nope! He exactly taught us, along with examples, what all those four commands meant. He wound up his session with the hierarchical structure of the Linux file system at about 12:oo.

However, we were blessed with a senior pass out from MES itself by the name of Haris (Not me!) and he came forward to share with us his experiences in real life about using GNU/Linux. From how he knew Ubuntu to be just a software to remove viruses to how he actually started using Linux to live. It was pretty enlightening know that all of us had much to hope for.

At about 12.15, we stopped for lunch. However, none of us were ready to give up on foss even during Lunch and I was pretty much amazed at the Discussion Sadiq and Ershad had over their lunch. While I’m one who walks around using free software/open source software (Please note that I’m writing both here as Sadiq is going to be reading this), I’ve never dug deep into the roots of its philosophies. But Sadiq had and frankly, he has done an amazing job at it. He exactly knew what he was talking about while supporting Stallman. He wouldn’t settle, no matter what, for using just ‘Linux’ over ‘GNU/Linux’. The discussion heated up the curries and rice on the table which ended in finally Ershad admitting that Sadiq was right. My stomach was too full by then I guess! Ha ha…

We prayed and got back to the labs at about 1.30 and it was my session then. But I let Ershad handle the introduction to my session and sat back while he nicely demonstrated how apt-get, synaptic and all worked along with how software installation in Linux (No! GNU/Linux) was different from that of Windows. He concluded his session at about 2:00pm.

Then I came forward and I guess no one had any clue that I was scared out of my wits! It was the first time I was taking a technical session and suddenly I felt that I was going to mess it up completely. I really felt to howl and shout out aloud, beat a few times on my chest (Like King-Kong) and cool off my tension. But fearing that would further scare all those present there (I was scared enough for all of them), I pulled myself together and started my session.

I’m not writing down my entire session here because that might remind me of more than I want to remember. He he.. My session was on “installing from source” and I had taken the tuxmath game (http://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org/tuxmath/index.php) as an example. Everything seemed to go well with everyone encountering errors while running their configure scripts and them slowly solving it when all of a sudden came the worst nightmare of every developers – The Horrendous Dependency problems! (reminds me of how Labeebka raised one hand and shouted “Jai Ubuntu!”) No one could install softwares using apt-get because of “Unmet dependencies”, “broken packages” and what not! The lab was infected with confusion and the threatening dependencies popping up everywhere! Sajith sir, Nakul, Ershad, Sadiq and me where on full swing trying to solve these but as much as we tried to solve things, we began to realize that that much things were screwed up.

However, while all of this was going on, the group of  Shamsudheen sir (I hope that is what his name is!) and the sir from the mech dept. (can’t remember his name but I think it is Ayush) got the source installation correct and boy was it a weight off my heart to see the game up and running on their system. I had no idea the game required “Teacher’s privileges” to be installed. Lol! After this happening, unfortunately for our efforts, the internet connection was down and out for the day at 3:00pm and we could not proceed with fixing the Debian system there. Sadiq managed to copy the required library files from the computer in which the installation worked into one of the computers among the girl’s batches and the game worked there too. I concluded my session there telling them the rest of the steps in the installation process and here I forgot to mention an important point. I can only hope the ones who attended will be reading this.

NOTE: While installing from source, the first thing you should do is not run ./configure, but to see whether there is a README or INSTALL file within that folder. This is because ./configure, make and make install are the steps used for softwares that are developed using the GNU make philosophy. But there are many other softwares that will have to be built in a different manner and the instructions for these will be contained in the README or INSTALL file.

Here let me mention Sajith sir. An awesome person who is ready to help when and where help is needed without invitation. He knows how everything works and has a solution for any problem that happens in that lab even if he has to sit and hack at it for long hours. If it weren’t for him, Mine and Nakul’s session wouldn’t have imparted as much as it had imparted. From what I have heard from the students there at MES, he is a teacher under whom the students are proud of having learned! But alas, he is leaving MES to pursue his M. Tech in the coming June. That will be a great loss for them as well as for us as he is the backbone of such events being conducted there. A kernel lover at heart, he aims at making a serious contribution before he returns back to his profession again. Wishing him all success!

Coming back to the event, after I clumsily concluded my session at about 3:00, Sajith sir came forward with a beautiful explanation of what Makefiles are and how they worked. Once his small session was over, our “guest of the day” reached the venue. Mr. Labeeb Mattra and man, did  he have the cutest smile among all! He had this childish face with a geeky spectacle and a whole lot of Debian and FOSS philosophy oozing out of him.

His session was on the Debian philosophy, how it came to be and why it was so. He started at about 3:30 and took us through the romantic world of Debra and Ian (Deb-ian), told us why we needed to support the existence of Debian in our society even if we didn’t use it, how the elections were held at Debian, its philosophy and finally stressing upon FreedomBox and how our personal information was valuable to us. He concluded at about 5:00 and we were on our way home without further delay.

And by the way, all of us “session takers” got Debian medals. Hope someone puts up the pics as well as the list of attendees somewhere.

Day 1 comes to an end.

Day 2 – Debian Packaging

This day was Praveen Ettan’s. However, he let us know he’ll join us only by 10.30am or so and told us to get started on discussion. The internet was down at the morning and Sajith sir was running after it and finally it got fixed. Thank God!

We got started on discussions at about 10:00 with Labeebka chairing it. There was just one topic of discussion and that was why we considered our personal information to be valuable. We traveled through the secretariats of various Governments as well many NGOs and other institutions and saw how it might pose a potential threat to our privacy as well as us being tracked at each and every moment of our life. By the time we had reached this conclusion, Praveen ettan entered the scene and Labeebka handed over the session to him.

Praveen ettan was introduced to us by certain wise and composed person whom I could not get to know and the introduction made us all gape at the great man standing in front of us! I was really jealous of him. Not because of his knowledge or achievements but because of his goatee which was one of my wishes to have before I left college! He he!

Anyway, he started off the session by reading out to us a certain message (or entry by himself) from his phone which inspired all of us to share what we knew with others as well as to write blogs and discuss our experiences of attending the event on the mailing lists. Thereafter he proceeded by asking us what we knew from the previous day’s session and got us to answer a few questions regarding how Debian worked.

He then went on to why packaging was done and how it was done. The theory behind packaging, you could say. A software would get released by someone and its first packaging would happen either if a Debian Developer out of his own interest took the software and packaged it or if someone put forth a request to have that software to be available on Debian. Usually, the package then would go into the “unstable” stage where a priority will be set for it to be Low, Critical or Security. These will stay in the unstable state for 10, 5 and 2 days respectively and then will be moved to the testing stage provided all its dependencies have their bugs fixed and are already present in the testing stage.

There is also an experimental stage where the softwares that are sure to contain a lot of bugs and that crash often are kept. However, on passing continuous tests, these will be added to the unstable state as well.

Now, the testing stage ‘freezes’ when all the softwares that the Debian community decided at their last stable release, would be there in their next stable release, are there in the testing stage. Once freezed, no packages will be automatically added to the testing stage and if you are able to fix bugs from the unstable stage, you have to manually add it to the testing stage. Once the freeze has all the ‘decided-upon’ softwares, the stable version is released and the testing stage unfreezes.

There is something called the ‘backports’ here too which either contains newer versions of softwares that are already in the stable release or softwares that were out after the last stable release. So by manually adding the backports repo, we can install those too.

Praveen ettan made us explain and repeat this session ourselves and finally it was time to go for lunch. Just before leaving the lab, Riyas, a second year fossie (hey, cute term isn’t it?) at mes, jumped up and caught me. Apparently he had not gave up on compiling tuxmath from source and he had almost finished running the configure script correctly. We spent a while together and he did an excellent job of compiling and running the game! Now that is one lad with the proper enthusiasm and potential.

We had a hearty lunch (for which the mes fsug group paid the bills) and returned back to the labs after praying at about 1:30pm.

The hands on session was started and we guided through by Praveen ettan along the steps for packaging a certain Ruby library called mixlib-log using the gem2deb tool. However, gem2deb was not within the Debian repo and we had to install it from source. We did that, made our first package of  mixlib-log and then he tells us to fill out the various informations in the files present within the debian/ directory by referring to the New maintainer’s guide!

We were to run lintian on the .changes file and see the errors and warning there and resolve them one by one. We did it and finally had a package ready but alas, it was just an example and not something to be uploaded. Ah, suddenly I remember how Praveen ettan explained asking for sponsors in order to upload a package and also how the “web of trust” was formed between the various Debian Developers using the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) mechanism.

The session had no formal ending but all of us sat back for a while with him assigning a gem to each of us. Many among us have already requested to work on a bug and let’s hope this is the start and growth of a new Debian community.

Before ending my entry, there is something noteworthy that happened. Although what I am about to say will make more sense to my classmates at college, I’ll just put it down for the sake of it. Guys, I didn’t even yawn during sessions of entire two days! My friends at college can see how amazing this is considering my unmatched skill of sleeping right under the teacher’s noses by sitting in the first bench!

Expressing my joy of having two of my Juniors from NSS, Ashiq and Ranjith having attended the event, here is to the future where I hope gatherings of these nature will be plenty.

Cheers!

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GNOME 3.4 release party at MES, Kutipuram. A day well spent!

Looking back, some decisions of my life have been very well taken, deciding to attend the Gnome release party held at MES Kutipuram being one of them.

I came to know about the event from the SMC mailing list. Seeing a get together of top notch free software enthusiasts at a venue so close to my home was simply something that I couldn’t miss.

Let me put down the names of those who were there because that might be the first thing one would forget if kept unused for long.

There was Sajith sir, a teaching staff at MES, who had welcomed me on the mailing list. A very gentle and friendly person who was of immense support to the students there for anything regarding freedom.

Praveen ettan was also there who was the RMS of SMC while Santhosh Ettan was the Linus of SMC. Lol! Unfortunately Santhosh was not able to make it for the party.

Jishnu ettan was there whom everyone there referred to as “Guru”. I was wondering why this was so and I found out why it was so! If you see http://thecodecracker.com/, you’ll know why too.

Then Sadiq, Kiran, (Update)Nakul, Sooraj, Riyas, Nuh, Rahul, Anish, (Update)Anees and two girls were there. Guys, forgive me if I got your spelling wrong! After all, we were all together for only a short while and we were not spending that time refreshing names! But here is what we actually spent our time on…

It was a completely informal atmosphere where even though I felt a bit out of place at the beginning when everyone was just arriving, it took only a few minutes of interaction between everyone to feel right at home. Such was the free will everyone treated others with.

Trying to start the event, the organisers were dumbstruck at their carelessness. No Knife to cut the cake, no balloons and no cello tapes! On the double, two of them went out and bought all these. And boy did I start to shudder when one of them gave me a balloon to blow! I had never done that in my life! But could I let them know that? Of course not. So I held the open end to my mouth with one hand and pulled the other end so that it was stretched. And what do you know? When I blew it, it actually started to expand! I was surprised at myself and I was like, “Yo guys, here take this one too”. Sooraj taught me to tie it and now, that was the first important lesson that I learnt from this party!

The event kicked off about at 11am (scheduled to start at 10) after everyone goofed off and got over with the initial introductory jokes and cracks (not to mention hacks!) by cutting a Gnome 3.4 cake! Coincidentally, it was Anish’s birthday and it was he who cut it. We all had a few chit chats over eating it and finally when everyone was done with it, we all went to the front of the lab where the projector was all set.

Oh by the way, this party was being held at one of the computer labs at MES. Jishnu ettan started by introducing the features of Gnome 3.4 and few nice applications including a nice preview tool. I forget what its name is, but you can use it if you click on the file and hit “space+enter”. Nagul told us what Gnome was about too.

Then Anish introduced to us what SMC was all about, their projects and how to get involved. We stopped for a lunch break at about 12.30 till 1.30. Afterwards, everyone except Rahul, Sooraj and the girls, sat around for a hearty discussion.

It was serious as well as extremely funny how everyone interacted. Patent-wars and sue-chain was one among the main humorous topics of discussion. Then the serious discussion was on how the entire mentality of people needs to be changed regarding freedom. Praveen ettan chaired the discussion.

The need for copyright, whether it was a necessity or not nowadays as well as how people should support a good cause with donations was discussed. The situations nowadays at colleges and the lack of awareness among the students regarding free software was another one among the numerous topics.

For the question of why people don’t see free software as an alternative for their computing needs, the answer of piracy was put forth. If the proprietary software companies and copyright holders tracked the use of their services and products strictly, then people would appreciate the initiative of free software. As long as one was a thief who never got caught or threatened, why would he go for legally earning or using something? The quality of the open source softwares might be different compared to the proprietary ones but that is no reason to treat these as second-rate ones just because they are free and people are, out of their own interest, writing and developing them.

Ah, now that I read the above paragraph again, I see the free software/open source thing. That was discussed too as in using GNU/Linux instead of just Linux. A lot of other small topics were talked on and many of them let us have a hearty laugh together.

The discussion came to an end at about 4 after which we all went together to have tea. Afterwards we all shook hands and went our own ways, keeping in mind to pray and work for a better tomorrow.

Personally, I really missed Ershad at the gathering…

Looking forward to such free gatherings in the future…

Update: Photos of the party!

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/1498418

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Anonymous messages from Facebook.

First of all, I do not have a Facebook account and I have never ever had one. If sometime in the future I happen to create one, I’ll update it over here.

Scary. In the past two to three weeks, I have been getting 3 messages in my phone from Facebook. The message is as follows :

Click to see <name>’s photos on Facebook: http://fb.me/9zni0p6PajHjT7 Reply “stop” to stop getting Facebook texts

The number from which I am receiving messages is : +919232232665

The names of two people I know distantly came in the place of <name>. Two times it was the same message with one person’s name and the third time, it came with the second person’s name. I tried contacting these two people to see whether they had in anyway done something to trigger this sort of an action and to my surprise, one of them didn’t even know my phone number!

Why would I want to reply to something to stop that I did not ask for in the first place? It would have made sense if these people were my service providers or something. The funny thing being that I do not receive any sort of promotional messages because of having activated DND.

Still, I got this message. Really scary, if you know what I mean.

Please do let me know if there is anyone whom I can complaint to about this and make this stop.

UPDATE (24th April 2012): I happened to call my bsnl customer care and told them that this was happening. At first they said that it was something that they could not do anything about. But I kept on drilling them with questions and I even said I would raise a complaint against them. On hearing that, they told me to hang on a minute. After their private inquires, they got back to me and told me that they had deactivated it! I asked them then how the hell it came to be activated without my knowing. They were stammering and finally told me that the culprit might be the shop from where I actually took my sim card and cut the call.

So that means there is some shady deal between the telephone operators and facebook where our personal phone numbers are being shared without our permission! Have to get to the shop where I bought my sim from. Updates later folks!

UPDATE (2nd June 2012): I again received a message today from the same number saying that someone wanted to connect to me on facebook. I dialled them up again and asked them what the heck was going on. And then they tell me to type “UNSUBFB” and send it to 53733!

So I told them I had not subscribed to it in the first place and I wanted to know how this thing started coming in the first place. Obviously, they had no answer. They have told me to call them back after two hours. I’ll update the post with what happens then.

UPDATE(2nd August 2012): After a gap (in which I thought that I was done with these messages), I again received one today. I called them and waiting for 12 minutes, one guy picked up. Telling him about the problem, he forwarded my call to the senior there. I had to wait for f’ing 45 minutes before that idiot received my call!

After telling him the problem, I told him I wanted to know how this started coming. He wanted me to take “phone settings -> network -> manual -> other network” in order to stop this from happening. I told him that I was not interested in getting it stopped and that I wanted to know how it started!

Suddenly, he was like, “Hello, sir, what, i..” and he cut the call! When I tried calling again, choosing the option to talk with the customer care executive, they have this automated reply that makes us go round and round in a loop! “Press 1 for a 2 for b and 3 for c” When you press one, you get “Press 1 for d 2 for e and 3 for f”. Now if you press anything, the menu stays here itself, giving you the only option of cutting the call.

I think these guy have been bribed by someone not to give out that information.

Further updates as I continue my investigation.