my top words

Tried wordle.net and here is the result of feeding in my blog RSS feed..

similarity

In the below shown screenshot, the emacs window has 3 emacs-windows within it. Try to find the similarity between them Reward == *free* **hugs**

the “dog” joke

<He`> not as risky as naming your dog “sex” though

<He`> no as it after the dog runs away at night … and you go looking for him

<He`> and have you explain to the night beat cops… that you are out looking for sex

<He`> it’s rather long one
<He`> he gets married.. and his wife forces him to give up the dog

<He`> they decide to get divorced later.. and he tells the judge.. I had sex before marriage.. and my wife made me give it up after marriage
<He`> and the judge says … welcome to the club

<He`> he goes looking for an apartment .. and tells the landlord .. he needs a room for sex

<He`> and the landlord tells him he doesn’t care if he does it any room

ROFLMAO!! And, here is the original story.

its story time

Read this interesting story “The Ants and the Grasshoppers” by Jim Hutchinson today in Planet Ubuntu. A story about ants and grasshoppers, when you read it you will know what they are meant to be really

And I Digged it !

its obvious, they track you!

Today morning (a few minutes ago) I got an usual forward about Uncle Billy (you know who !?) sharing his fortune, blah blah blah! But this time, my eyes were wide open that I noted something which we all know and its obvious, but the innocent doze users fail to realize and that is..

When you forward this e-mail to friends, Microsoft can and will track it (if you are a Microsoft Windows user) for a two week time period.

So, they accept that M$ *can* and they *will* track (or rather crack into) doze machines and can take valuable user data ?!

Unfortunately a lot of people who have believed this and forwarded it to all their friends (because each mail is said to fetch them $245) are from top MNCs of Indian IT arena. Thankfully am not a doze user (and hence no use in forwarding them, other than to /dev/null )

At the end of the mail, it was said…

Within two week! s, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a cheque.

Ohh, so they can’t/won’t get your address out of your machine ?! Or probably they will get your phone number and contact you *evil grin* Probably they can get your account number and transfer you the money directly *evil grin*

Update: I was pointed to an attachment with the forwarded mail, which I thought was part of the mail content, containing the following eye opening message for those who did forward them

According to the bogus email, these corporate giants are conducting an “e-mail beta test” to ensure that “Internet Explorer remains the most widely used program.”

Actually, all you will get is a sore trigger finger from pressing the Forward button and quite possibly return email from conscientous friends urging you to visit the Hoax Encyclopedia before acting on info found in an email.

I wonder how many in the “forward” army read that doc attachment with the forwarded mail.

5 Types of FOSSites

I and HereBeDragon were discussing about the various kinds of people we have in the Indian FOSS community, when he started listing the different types of FOSSians.

Here’s a 5-point classification of FOSSites. What type are you?

a)The Diehards - They are firm believers in FOSS philosophy and will not accept anything other than FOSS and sometimes feared to be fanatics too.

b)The Dedicated - They are dedicated to FOSS and are also believers of FOSS philosophy, but are not fanatical. Though they personally advocate and follow FOSS, they leave the choice to others to decide for themselves.

c)The Didactics - They are one who make a lot of noise about FOSS but have little to contribute or mostly they themselves do not follow FOSS.

d)The Pragmatists - They are very practical in nature. They give the importance to solving issues than sticking on to philosophies. Though they are admirers or followers of FOSS, if they seem to have a better solution in non-FOSS they do not feel bad in implementing them.

e)The Opportunists - They do not have real interest in FOSS philosophy, but consider it as a means of gaining something or moving higher up in their professional ladder. They neither advocate FOSS nor contribute.

What Am I ? Hmm… /me is (b + d) What about you ? :-/

Biscuits, Songs and Free Software’s Philosophy Explained

G0SUB has forwarded an interesting mail regarding Ubuntu, giving it Free and how about making money with it. As the guy who posted the original query did not have any idea of philosophies associated to Free/Open Source Software, I decided to write a enlightening reply to him. A couple of years of performing GNU/Linux advocacy, especially to the student community, has made me a really good story teller which will be evident from my reply to the OP. Here is the query and the reply of mine.

OP’s Question..

> Hello, i am shailendra patidar doing engineering in the mechanical
> stream (in 2nd yr) from indore (m.p.).and recently i got a PC eddition
> cd for linux from my friend. and i want to know about what is ubuntu ,
> and the main thing is that is there any thing in the world which is free
> of cost or they give us for his publicity. or they are using us and can
> they do something for you or me. i can make a lot of users which will
> use the linux.Because i know that it is easy for me and the other reason
> is that the i know very people who want some changes in their computer
> operating system and the linux can make this.but is their any financial
> help to me from ubuntu because nothing is free today. so i am waiting
> for some useful tips or some help from you .and if u can forward this
> request ,then this is too good for me.i am waiting for your response .

And here comes my l00ng reply

First, there are some things in this world which is available as *free as
in free of cost* as well as something which should be rendered so. One
such thing is *humanity*, i.e. helping another fellow human without
expecting something in return. For example, when an old woman tries
getting into or out of the bus, you go and help her but you do not
charge her for doing so? Your neighbor’s kid is not able to solve a math
problem, (considering that you can solve the problem) you help the kid
with solving the problem as a gesture of humanity or friendship. But,
you do not go to his/her mother and get money for the help (This is not
about taking tution classes to the kid!).

Second, consider you and me. You have a biscuit and I have a pappad in
our hands. You give me half of the biscuit and I give you half of the
pappad, we both get some biscuit and pappad but only half of them. Similarly, consider that you know a Hindi song and I know an English song. I teach you to sing the English song and you teach me the Hindi song. Now we both know both of the songs but we did not lose our original knowledge (as in biscuit, we did not end up knowing half the Hindi song and half the English song!).

The reason for the latter comparison leading to gain of something from
other, without losing something which we have, is possible only when the
thing being shared is *knowledge* and not in any other cases.

Now, coming to another reality which is very close to our subject of
actual discussion is, we have been seeing Software as a product. I should
rather say you see it wholly as a product, but we the FOSS community
see the Software as Knowledge. Taking the essence of the above
comparison, since Software is considered as Knowledge, it should be
*freely* sharable. The problem is people have been used to charging for
any service did to the society as well as considering Software as a mere
product which is sold in the market, similar to biscuits, electronic
gadgets and what not.

Software is an idea of getting a job done. Software has this capability
that you can create 100s of copies of it without incurring much cost.
For example, for making 100 monitors and distributing them you incur
heavy monetary cost, you make a voluminous investment and hence, you
charge the customer for each monitor (which is completely justified).

But software is not so. You create a software and for giving it to
100 people you just need to burn them in CDs. The cost you incur is for
creating of the software first time (which is very small compared to
come out with a monitor model) and then cost of 100 CDs.

Another point to remember is “Software is knowledge”. If you can convert
and idea into a software, I have equal chance of converting the same or
similar idea into a software. Also, for your idea to become better and
your software to grow into a high quality one, what you need is
feedbacks from the users, additional ideas from people, encouragement
for you to continue with the software and make it better. This is what
we call it as collaborative development and community participation.

This is how Linux kernel grew into what it is now, from what it was as a
college project. Its all because Linux Torvalds went ahead of just making
money; he shared the kernel code he created, he welcomed people to send
in feedbacks, criticisms, bug reports; he allowed people to participate
with him; he allowed people to contribute in bits and pieces as well as
large features; and important of all, he gave equal respect and
importance to every individual who was ready and tried to help
him, as well as considered every contributing individual as a
co-developer. He never charged any one for using his code and he never
gave money to any one sending bug reports, patches, new codes etc. As a result, more people (in thousands?) took participation, contributed
as much as they can and you now see its result as a Linux Kernel having been wholly
evolved out. This is how things work in FOSS world.

Our philosophy is “share the knowledge you have, you will experience that
you gain many times more than what you gave”. This philosophy, adding to
the humanity concept I told in the beginning, is what Ubuntu follows. We
have a Linux Kernel or rather a GNU/Linux OS around. We have the
ability to use GNU/Linux, add freely available packages around to it and
make a bundle of it called as *Linux distribution*, naming it as Ubuntu
to remind our actual philosophy behind all these is *humanity* and we
finally share it with Humans. This is why we have a tag line “Linux for
Human Beings”.

We are giving it free of cost because we ourselves have been getting
these things free of cost. So, we are ready to share it free, we are
ready to put in a bit more effort and making GNU/Linux suitable for
being used by ordinary household desktop users. We think we are doing a
service to our own society in the way we know. Though we are software
people, we are proving the humanity within us by sharing our capability
to create down-to-earth GNU/Linux distribution and share it with our own
fellow Humans.

And before closing this mail (which is already too big), that what we
mean as *Free* generally is *Free as in freedom*, freedom to share
things with others without anybody preventing or prohibiting us to do
so. We give it *Free as in Free food* as well because, we got it for
*free cost* and we do not want to do injustice.

Tired of reading ? Have some *Free* biscuits

(Thanks to Barkha for helping me with a suitable title for this weblog post )

Come Back India!

As India has failed to get into Super 8 and thereby been thrown out of the World Cup 2007. Indian fans have a better job opportunities for them when they come back.

They will really like their new jobs, at least hope they do well in them

The Zen of Python

Just finished reading an article on What is Pythonic ? by Martijn Faassen. At the end of the article there was a try this; I tried..

>>> import this

The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.

Explicit is better than implicit.

Simple is better than complex.

Complex is better than complicated.

Flat is better than nested.

Sparse is better than dense.

Readability counts.

Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.

Although practicality beats purity.

Errors should never pass silently.

Unless explicitly silenced.

In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.

Now is better than never.

Although never is often better than *right* now.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.

If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.

Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

Laughter with Lappy

Here are a couple of laughable things that happened a while ago in IRC. In both of them, my dearest dude ‘lappy’ is involved . Check out the two successive conversations, while others have been blurred

/me runs and hides from lappy

V Day - V as in V(W)aste of Money!!

Here is a small convorsation happened between me and one of my IRC buddy some minutes ago, about spending for V’Day.

<Lap_64> techno_freak, so how was your meeting with the girl
<techno_freak> Lap_64, eh ?
<techno_freak> Lap_64, i never met any girl
<Lap_64> techno_freak, ok so sad
<techno_freak> Lap_64, rather am happy, i need waste my money
<techno_freak> s/need/need not
<Lap_64> techno_freak, yeah
<Lap_64> techno_freak, i spent 5 k today
<techno_freak> Lap_64, :0
<Lap_64> techno_freak, sent some flowers and chocolate
<techno_freak> Lap_64, i did not get anything ?
<Lap_64> techno_freak, sigh
<Lap_64> techno_freak, not to you
<Lap_64>
<Lap_64> techno_freak, norway
<Lap_64>
<techno_freak> Lap_64, *sigh* waste of money
<Lap_64> techno_freak, she sent me things also
<Lap_64> techno_freak, so its ok
<techno_freak> Lap_64, oh.. mutual waste of money..
<Lap_64> techno_freak, rofl

Starwars - M$ vs Others

I came across this interesting map of a starwar attack happening around us. Am not going to say more, most of you might have guessed what it is with the title

Check this out, Software Starwars !! B-)

the typical “lawgon” witt

This happened today in #linux-india and is a perfect example of the typical ‘lawgon’ witt

<lawgon> Sup3rkiddo: one thing i *never* *ever* do is configure my sound card
<lawgon> but in the ibook it is configured by default
<Sup3rkiddo> lawgon: wow..it gets configured automatically in my box no matter what distro i have used
* lawgon goes to see if it is configured
<lawgon> aparently it is configured
<lawgon> but i dont get any sound anyway
<Sup3rkiddo> lawgon: must me the mixer setting
<Sup3rkiddo> *be
<carpenterThe> yes, maybe the volume setting is at zero. Happened to me once.
<lawgon> i click test sound and nothing happens
<carpenterThe> lawgon: go to the mixer and see what the volume is set to
<kushal> lawgon, check alsa unmute
<lawgon> 80%
<carpenterThe> ok
<techno_freak> lawgon, check PCM value/state
<lawgon> maybe i need a speaker or two?
<Sup3rkiddo> LOL
* techno_freak guessed this


Indentifying Bharathi !

Suddenly tuxmaniac started copy-pasting something on our Private Message in IRC, a few mintues ago. It was a conversation going on in the channel ##hurd. One of the channel mates, ams (Alfred M. Szmidt - ams@gnu.org ) had received a CD by mail today. when he opened it up, he was surprised to see it was in a language which he had no clue of. But he could identify the Indian Flag printed over it. Other than this, he could find a few things in English, “CDNF 14734 COMPACT disc DIGITAL AUDIO”, “MADE IN INDIA”, “SEE INLAY CARD FOR DETAILS”, “(P) & (C) 2000 SAREGAMA INDIA LTD” and finally this “Vol. 1″.

More than this, he was able to describe the picture on the CD cover like this, ” There is a flag above the whole, the indian flag.”, “On the right of it is a face of a man.”, “With a turban, a dot on his head, and a muschtace.” and “On the left is a statye, female looking, no idea which one.”.

Prior to this description, we had a doubt whether it was ‘Vande Mataram’ as it could be possibly what an Indian will gift some one. A bit of searching by me and trying to show him how ‘vande mataram’ is written in hindi didn’t fetch anything good. He also tried to install hindi fonts and try reciprocate what he was as title in the CD.

But, once he told us about the image in the face of the CD, I quickly googled and showed him a photo of ‘Mahakavi Bharathi’. He was quick to inform it was the same pic. Ahh, he had received a copy of Bharathiar’s songs, probably patriotic due to the presence of tricolor and Bharath Matha (see the last point in the description).

Finally, after breaking our heads to solve this mystery, we did end up finding it to be a well known Tamil Poet. Now, ams has got interested in knowing about Bharathi as well as installing Tamil font, typing the title of the CD and showing us. He also said he will try to hear the songs when he gets access to a CD player, hope he likes them

Semma Reply!

Its been happening for quite sometime, that people have been asking to be removed from the ilugc mailing list. Though every mail send to the subscribers contains a link for unsubscribing, not many look into that. We people get so much annoyed of such people continuously pestering us.

It happened again this time and to my surprise, got one fantastic reply from a buddy, here it is…

On 9/25/06, Support <support@inspacetech.com> wrote:

please dont send me the mails

There are two ways to go about doing this:

a. you can contact our support team to get your id removed
from our mailing list. we charge $1000 per id for this service.
( visa and mastercard accepted, option available for paypal)

OR

b. You can follow the instructions at the footer of every email
from this mailing list. this process is free of charge.

–
saha

ROTFLOL!! Saha, fantastic reply!! Kudos!!

And here again, Raja ‘the superman’ has added something

As a permium service, for a low one time fee of $699, we can also
ensure that your email ID never gets included in our mailing list
in the future*.

* Terms and conditions apply.

- Raja

Man, can a mailing list get entertaining than this ?!