Merry Christmas World.

Wishing you all Merry Christmas.

This ASCII Art is our gift to you all this Christmas day.

Vivek & Phebe.

Life in Netcore.

After a brief sabbatical from my corporate career due to health related reasons and after my marriage to Phebe, I decided it was time to find work.

I’ve joined NetCORE Solutions Pvt Limited as a Senior Systems Administrator this September. It’s been a quite 2 months at work with me getting familar with the Mail Server and Mail Routing Architecture of the Company and also assisting clients migrate from their existing mail setup to the various Mailing, Anti Spam and Anti Virus solutions of Netcore.

Advantages of the National Unified Identity Number

The National Unique Identity Authority (NUID) has been in news ever since the Prime Minister picked up the boss of InfoSys, Nandan Nilekani, and gave him a Cabinet Rank to implement this. Many groups have been protesting about this since this is being felt as being pushed through more for benefit of IT industry rather than genuine benefit of the citizen. It is also being cloacked in the garb of solution for delivery of social welfare benefits. No one is able to answer for the reasons of failure of rationcard, election card and similar. Such “dog tag” can have unintended consequences if right of citizens are not safe gaurded. Here in lighter vein is an imaginery dialouge between a customer and an anonymous BPO employee:

Operator : “Thank you for calling Pizza Hut . May I have your…”

Customer: “Heloo, Heloo, can I order..”

Operator : “Can I have your multi purpose ID card number first, Sir?”

Customer: “It’s he…,hold……….on……889861356102049998-45-54610″

Operator : “OK… You’re… Mr Singh and you’re calling from 17 Jal Vayu. Your home number is 22678893, your office 25076666 and your mobile is 09869798888. Today morning you landed in India at IG International Airport. Welcome back, Sir. Which number are you calling from now Sir?”

Customer: “Home! How did you get all my phone numbers?

Operator : “We are connected to the system , Sir”

Customer: “May I order your Seafood Pizza…”

Operator : “That’s not a good idea ,Sir”

Customer: “How come?”

Operator : “According to your medical records, you have high blood pressure and even higher cholesterol level Sir”

Customer: “What?… What do you recommend then?”

Operator : “Try our Low Fat Pizza. You’ll like it”

Customer: “How do you know for sure?”

Operator : “You borrowed a book entitled “Popular Dishes” from the National Library last week Sir”

Customer: “OK I give up… Give me three family size ones then, how much will that cost?”

Operator : “That should be enough for your family of 05, Sir. The total is Rs 500.00″

Customer: “Can I pay by! Credit card?”

Operator : “I’m afraid you have to pay us cash, Sir. Your credit card is over the limit and you owe your bank Rs 23,000.75 since October last year. That’s not including the late payment charges on your housing loan, Sir..”

Customer: “I guess I have to run to the neighbourhood ATM and withdraw some cash before your guy arrives”

Operator : “You can’t Sir. Based on the records, you’ve reached your daily limit on machine withdrawal today”

Customer: “Never mind just send the pizzas, I’ll have the cash ready. How long is it gonna take anyway?”

Operator : “About 45 minutes Sir, but if you can’t wait you can always come and collect it on your Nano Car…”

Customer: ” What!” Operator : “According to the details in system ,you own a Nano car,…registration number GZ-05-AB-1107..”

Customer: ” ????”

Operator : “Is there anything else , Sir?”

Customer: “Nothing… By the way… Aren’t you giving me that 3 free bottles of cola as advertised?”

Operator : “We normally would Sir, but based on your records you’re also diabetic……. “

Customer: #$$^%&$@$% ^

Operator : “Better watch your language Sir..Remember on 15th July 2010 you were convicted of using abusive language on a policeman…?”

Customer: [Faints]

Advantages of National Unified Identity Number Attributions to the net as I picked this up from Sudev’s Blog who in turn picked it up from from a mass Cc’d email.

A myth called the Indian Programmer

I came across this very old but interesting post about the state of the so called ‘Indian Programmers’ in The times of India website.

A myth called the Indian programmer
——————————————————-

They are the poster boys of matrimonial classifieds. They are paid
handsomely, perceived to be intelligent and travel abroad frequently.

Single-handedly, they brought purpose to the otherwise sleepy city of
Bangalore.

Indian software engineers are today the face of a third-world rebellion.
But what exactly do they do? That’s a disturbing question. Last week,
during the annual fair of the software industry’s apex body Nasscom, no
one uttered a word about India’s programmers.

The event, which brought together software professionals from around the
world, used up all its 29 sessions to discuss prospects to improve the
performance of software companies. Panels chose to debate extensively on
subjects like managing innovation, business growth and multiple
geographies.

But there was nothing on programmers, who you would imagine are the
driving force behind the success of the Indian software companies.
Perhaps you imagined wrong. “It is an explosive truth that local
software companies won’t accept.

Most software professionals in India are not programmers, they are mere
coders,” says a senior executive from a global consultancy firm, who has
helped Nasscom in researching its industry reports.

In industry parlance, coders are akin to smart assembly line workers as
opposed to programmers who are plant engineers. Programmers are the
brains, the glorious visionaries who create things. Large software
programmes that often run into billions of lines are designed and
developed by a handful of programmers.

Coders follow instructions to write, evaluate and test small components
of the large program. As a computer science student in IIT Mumbai puts
it if programming requires a post graduate level of knowledge of complex
algorithms and programming methods, coding requires only high school
knowledge of the subject.

Coding is also the grime job. It is repetitive and monotonous. Coders
know that. They feel stuck in their jobs. They have fallen into the trap
of the software hype and now realise that though their status is
glorified in the society, intellectually they are stranded.

Companies do not offer them stock options anymore and their salaries are
not growing at the spectacular rates at which they did a few years ago.

“There is nothing new to learn from the job I am doing in Pune. I could
have done it with some training even after passing high school,” says a
25-year-old who joined Infosys after finishing his engineering course in
Nagpur.

A Microsoft analyst says, “Like our manufacturing industry, the Indian
software industry is largely a process driven one. That should speak for
the fact that we still don’t have a domestic software product like Yahoo
or Google to use in our daily lives.”

IIT graduates have consciously shunned India’s best known companies like
Infosys and TCS, though they offered very attractive salaries. Last
year, from IIT Powai, the top three Indian IT companies got just 10
students out of the 574 who passed out.

The best computer science students prefer to join companies like Google
and Trilogy. Krishna Prasad from the College of Engineering, Guindy,
Chennai, who did not bite Infosys’ offer, says, “The entrance test to
join TCS is a joke compared to the one in Trilogy. That speaks of what
the Indian firms are looking for.”

A senior TCS executive, who requested anonymity, admitted that the
perception of coders is changing even within the company. It is a gloomy
outlook. He believes it has a lot to do with business dynamics.

The executive, a programmer for two decades, says that in the late ’70s
and early ’80s, software drew a motley set of professionals from all
kinds of fields.

In the mid-’90s, as onsite projects increased dramatically, software
companies started picking all the engineers they could as the US
authorities granted visas only to graduates who had four years of
education after high school.

“After Y2K, as American companies discovered India’s cheap software
professionals, the demand for engineers shot up,” the executive says.
Most of these engineers were coders. They were almost identical workers
who sat long hours to write line after line of codes, or test a fraction
of a programme.

They did not complain because their pay and perks were good. Now, the
demand for coding has diminished, and there is a churning.

Over the years, due to the improved communication networks and increased
reliability of Indian firms, projects that required a worker to be at a
client’s site, say in America, are dwindling in number. And with it the
need for engineers who have four years of education after high school.

Graduates from non-professional courses, companies know, can do the
engineer’s job equally well. Also, over the years, as Indian companies
have already coded for many common applications like banking, insurance
and accounting, they have created libraries of code which they reuse.

Top software companies have now started recruiting science graduates who
will be trained alongside engineers and deployed in the same projects.
The CEO of India’s largest software company TCS, S Ramadorai, had
earlier explained, “The core programming still requires technical skills.

But, there are other jobs we found that can be done by graduates.”
NIIT’s Arvind Thakur says, “We have always maintained that it is the
aptitude and not qualifications that is vital for programming. In fact,
there are cases where graduate programmers have done better than the
ones from the engineering stream.”

Software engineers, are increasingly getting dejected. Sachin Rao, one
of the coders stuck in the routine of a job that does not excite him
anymore, has been toying with the idea of moving out of Infosys but
cannot find a different kind of “break”, given his coding experience.

He sums up his plight by vaguely recollecting a story in which thousands
of caterpillars keep climbing a wall, the height of which they don’t
know. They clamber over each other, fall, start again, but keep
climbing. They don’t know that they can eventually fly.

Rao cannot remember how the story ends but feels the coders of India
today are like the caterpillars who plod their way through while there
are more spectacular ways of reaching the various destinations of life.

Tata Indicom CDMA USB Modem.

After more than a year (since Nov 2007) without a personal Internet connection, I decided to finally go ahead and get myself a Tata Indicom CDMA based Internet connection.

The connection speed promised is upto 153.6 kbps ( with a disclaimer that the speed mentioned is subject to network conditions.)

This is how my /etc/wvdial.conf looks like.

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 230400
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2
Init3 = AT+CRM=1
Stupid Mode = 1
ISDN = 0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Phone = #777
Username = internet
Password = internet

The connection speeds is fairly slow with frequent packet drops all along. I am told that the network connection speeds do pick up during the night and non peek hours.

It serves the purpose of checking my emails, doing some research on the web and also for IRC though I find opening sites like YouTube extremely time consuming with this connection.

I am finally ‘Free as in Freedom’ says VRMS ( Virtual RMS)

My Laptop is now a Dual boot between Ubuntu Hardy Heron and Pure Debian Etch. I am in the process of upgrading to  Debian Unstable (Sid).

I was playing around with the Debian packaging system and decided to give the application VRMS ( virtual Richard M. Stallman ) a try.

This is what the package description says:

‘ The vrms program will analyze the set of currently-installed packages
on a Debian-based system, and report all of the packages from the
non-free tree which are currently installed.

Note that vrms is not limited to Debian systems only (which means that
it also works with Debian-derived distributions such as Ubuntu). It is
also not limited to Linux-based systems.

Future versions of vrms will include an option to also display text
from the public writings of RMS and others that explain why use of each
of the installed non-free packages might cause moral issues for some in
the Free Software community. This functionality is not yet included. ‘

I tried running vrms on my console and I got this output

vivek@wisdom:~$ vrms
No non-free packages installed on wisdom.local! rms would be proud.
vivek@wisdom:~$

Cool, finally an operating system that is completely ‘Free as in Freedom’

Let the hacking games begin

A GNU/Linux based tool to check Child Porn on computers.

Simple Image Preview Live Environment (SImPLE) is a tool that has been developed at Perth’s Edith Cowan University in partnership with Western Australia Police. The tool is still being beta-tested.

The software scans a computer for illicit images or video. The software has been designed to capture users of Child pornography.

SImPLE is a GNU/Linux-bootable CD that is put into the CD-ROM drive of a computer or laptop and boots into its own forensically clean environment.

Australian IT has this article on SImPLE.

The interesting point to note is if SImPLE can detect encrypted pornographic images which as per my experiences with working with Anti Child Pornography Organizations like CyberAngels is one of the major ways pedophiles operate and escape punishment even when caught.

Lets keep our fingers crossed wait for the final release of SImPLE to see how effective is it in the actual child porn crime fighting scene.

I am now a Patron Lifetime Member of The Super Dimension Fortress.

I always wanted access to a Free (as in Freedom) shell account which was reliable and had good uptime and one that would not burn a big hole in my pocket. I have tried various Free shell providers like Metawire (which was providing OpenBSD shells before it was closed down because of excessive script kiddie activity), Rootshell and even Indian shell providers like the now non existent freeshell.in

I was even invited to administer the NIPL free shell community by it’s founder Sam Watkins, but that community too had a slow death.

My main hobby site hosted at rootshell and the mirror hosted at freeshell.in vanished for weird reasons leaving me homeless in cyberspace for a while.

It was towards the end of October 2008 that i decided to give the The Super Dimension Fortress Public Access Unix System a try.

I had heard good things about SDF from Vimal Joseph a while back and they seem to be in the business for the last 21 years or so.

Their site says:

” The Super Dimension Fortress is a networked community of free software
authors, teachers, librarians, students, researchers, hobbyists, computer
enthusiasts, the aural and visually impaired. It is operated as a federally
recognised non-profit 501(c)(7) and is supported by its members.

Our mission is to provide remotely accessible computing facilities for
the advancement of public education, cultural enrichment, scientific
research and recreation. Members can interact electronically with each
other regardless of their location using passive or interactive forums.
Further purposes include the recreational exchange of information
concerning the Liberal and Fine Arts.

Members have UNIX shell access to games, email, usenet, chat, bboard,
webspace, gopherspace, programming utilities, archivers, browsers, and
more. The SDF community is made up of caring, highly skilled people who
operate behind the scenes to maintain a non-commercial INTERNET.”

I decided take a Patron Lifetime Membership Level (ARPA) for a one time payment of $ 36 (Rupees 1800/- Approximately).

I can avail the following features for a lifetime.

# 600MB disk quota / 15000 files
# Lifetime membership for only $36
# All features of the ‘users’ account
# Voting rights on system features and policies
# Private ‘arpa’ member server
# telnet, ssh, sftp, ftp, ytalk, irc, snarf, wget
# gcc, elisp, perl, php, python, ruby, et cetera
# 50 domains to choose from for your URL
# Full CGI access for php, perl, python, ruby.

My new website http://vivekvc.freeshell.org is now hosted on Super Dimension Fortress and I am pretty happy with the way they run the service.

Early days to give any feedbacks on thier service but with thier reputation and track record they seem to be a good place to host small low cost hobby websites.

Marathi l10n Nah-Nirman Sena style

Marathi l10n Nah-Nirman Sena Style

To the kind attention of the poor Indlinux and Marathi l10n folks.

For free (as in free for all) Marathi l10n work upstream, contact the Nah-Nirman Sena. Contact details available on Google (Don’t forget to do the googling in Marathi though or the Nah-Nirman sena will pickle your whole ).

ps: Copied shamelessly from Shardul’s blog.

Microsoft now FORCED to co-operate with the Samba Team.

It all started way back in 2004 when Microsoft appealed against the Anti-Trust
decision by the European Commission. The result was that Microsoft got what it actually deserves.

Microsoft lost the appeal in September 2007 !!!

As a result it was forced to make protocol documentation available to competitors. Microsoft has organized interoperability fests in Santa Clara and Redmond in late September and early October 2008 and have knowledgeable engineers answering technical questions without legal or marketing drones getting in the way. They even invited then invited the Samba Team to it’s home campus for a week of hands on testing with their engineers.

It seems that the sky is indeed falling, as Microsoft’s engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully inter operable with Active Directory.

Andrew Bartlett of Samba has even written a document describing Samba’s collaboration with the MicroSoft Active Directory Team.

Note: I was reading up today 28/09/2009 on some more articles on Samba and came across these links describing the Samba Team view on the whole episode.

Links:

1) Samba Team Recives Microsoft Protocol Documentation.

2) Freeing up the Windows workgroup Protocols.

3) The PFIF Agreement.