Praveen Arimbrathodiyil blogs here

I would like to just look at how advancement in digital and communication technology is impacting this world. One reason to look at this topic is my interest in Free Software. Eben Moglen has been speaking on impact of these technologies on larger society and it is very inspirational. Most of what I say here is originally said by Eben. When we moved from analog to digital format for storage and transmission of information, knowledge and culture became very cheap or additional cost has become zero. Once we pay for computer and internet it does not cost us any more to copy from a friend or download a movie, song or a software. I see this as huge advancement in human history. At this point we can give every one all of our culture, knowledge and information free of cost. Instead of using this opportunity to put all our efforts together to make this available to every one, we are trying to device even more restrictions to prevent even natural effort in this direction.

With mobile phones and internet becoming more prevalent, collaboration has become easier. Wikipedia, Free Software, Free Maps etc are examples of this. Collaboration of large number of common people now have the power of beating wealthiest corporation (Free Software communities can beat Microsoft today). Also use of twitter, facebook and other social media tools in Middle East and North African uprisings shows the power of these tools in effecting social change. Frantic efforts by governments to curtail free speech on the internet is another indication of its effectiveness. I believe it is right time to take this to as many fields as possible.

Price of petrol has been hiked by rupees 5 to around 70 per litre last Saturday midnight and diesel price is likely to be increased by 4 per litre and cooking gas price likely to go up by 30 rupees per cylinder. 8% increase is steepest petrol price rise ever with oil companies asking for even more. This hike will feed into spiraling of prices of all essential goods. This is going to give a serious blow to the common man. The most striking thing I felt in this petrol price hike is the timing of it. Government waited for polls in many states to conclude before announcing the hike, to me it looks like they expect people to forget about it by next election. I observed long queues in petrol stations before the price hike came to effect. My friend Shravan mentioned about ‘Out of Petrol’ boards at some stations and observed it as cheating to sell the stock next day at a higher price.

Currently we cross-subsidise diesel and natural gas (cooking gas) with higher prices for petrol. The thinking behind this move is that, diesel and natural gas affects common people and also its price has a big impact on prices of commodities. But SUVs and luxury cars run on diesel and that picture is changed now. But still the price hike poses questions about government’s spending priorities. There is also a green demand for spending more money on renewable energy sources like solar and wind instead of continuing to subsidise polluting and dangerous energy sources like coal, nuclear etc.

We are doing a cycle rally in Pune coming Saturday at 5:00pm from Deccan Corner. Join in and register your protest. It is organised by Lokayat, an activists collective fighting against all injustices in our society. Visit lokayat.org.in to know more about Lokayat and get involved.

Petrol price hike: What do you think should be done? – story by Rediff.com

It was a great event. I liked the small turn out 12 on first day ~20 on second day and about 12 on third day, because it meant we could make it interactive and ensure every one folllowed each step.

The highlight of the event was that it was a zero budget event. MES College of Engineering provided us lab and hostels, every one paid for their own travel and food. I hope to see more such events – small interested audient, less burden on organisers, more interaction and effectiveness. Instead of less big events, let’s start doing more small events.

I really liked the enthusiasm of the participants and we made sure those who completed a step helped others to complete. We proceeded to next step only when every single person completed each step. This is something I usually focus on wherever I take classes, but it is not effective with big audience. That is one reason I like small audiences. Normally only the brightest gets to follow everything and those who have less exposure feels left out. This time even if one is smart and completed a step, he/she has to help others if they want to move on.

First day we focused on different problems and complaints people have about Free Software and GNU/Linux. Instead of normal focus of a Free Software event on features of Free Software, we focused on what is not working in Free Software. Our focus was not in selling Free Software to the audience, but to make sure Free Software will become popular if we fix these problems. Normally audience just have complaints and speaker is always defensive. Here audience had to analyse the problem with the speaker, find out the root of the problem, and plan how to fix it.

One common complaint we always here is about dependencies and software installation. So we focused on two parts to solve that problem. First was lack of good internet connection, so apt-on-cd and keryx needs to be popularised. Second one is having to install from source. We concluded that once all software is available in a repository this problem will go away. So we decided to package all available Free Software. Starting with popular software that is in demand. We also figured out it will need many more packagers too. So if you want to help out, join our packaging effort. We have online packaging sessions every Saturday. Those who learned packaging, consider teaching it to others.

Food was really good, I was happy to get puttu (rice steam cake), beef curry and ghee rice. Lime juice was very good too, I miss it in Pune, where most places give old lime We stayed in their hostel. Bhushan, Abhishek and Ranjan came from Magalore standing in a train! Their enthusiasm cheered up everyone. I planned my vacation around these dates so that my travel expense would not be an issue. We missed Pavithran as he had fever and could not come.

Second day we had more people joining. This rarely happens in any conference, most of the time people drop out after first day. Last year we had a tough time manging a crowd of about 200 on the first day, but almost half of them did not turn up on second day. First day I explained debian release process and I made sure every on understood the process by asking each of them to explain it. I was happy to see most of them got it. Second day I asked Sajjad to summarise discussions on first day and explain release process. He did a pretty good job of explaining various concepts. Sooraj’s explanation of dependencies by taking example of average depending on sum and division was very good.

Then Jishnu started explaing control file and we asked every one to refer debian new maintainer’s guide. The whole day was spent on creating these files. Most of them were not used following a document and doing it themselves. Many times I have to ask them to read the document again when they make mistakes. Most of them made mistake about standards version, they used upstream version. Explanation of sections is a bit mis leading in new maintainer’s guide and most people ended up choosing main. I explained it and asked them to read the whole paragraph. I felt new maintainer’s guide could be improved a bit. We will try to send some patches.

Over enthusiasm resulted in a few RFPs being filed for lekhonee-gnome. We told them just create a text file, but many already sent RFPs! I told them how to close a bug and all of them closed it. Though it added a little bit of noise to BTS, I hope it has helped in the long run, hopefully these over enthusiastic folsk would help close more bugs!

We skipped copyright file as many wanted to leave. We just created a blank file for copyright and moved ahead with changelog and rules. Both these files caused bit of problem with formatting. Many did not have dch installed and they eneded up figuring out extra space or character causing error. Whitespaces instead of tab caused rules file breakage. We fixed all of them and I was happy every one had a working deb at the end of the day. First day we were explaining anatomy of a binary package most of them saw the control file, I think it would have been a rewarding experience for all of them when they opened up the binary file and saw their names inside it.

Third day was coordinated by Vasudev Kamath online. I had to leave for Sujith’s marriage. I have to mention about Sajith sir here. It was really encouraging to see a lecturer sitting through the whole session. I was happy to meet Raju sir after a long time. I remember two of my previous sessions at MES. I am sure we will see more contributors from MES. Anish and Sooraj had come from Thiruvananthapuram. Manu was running around fixing proxies all the time. I was happy to meet to aethiests there – Aneez and Nakul. Aneez was calling me agnostic I remember few more names – Shuvaib, Jasir, Muzafir, Jamal, Sunaiba. If you don’t see your name here, sorry, please shout your name as a comment Overall it was a really memorable experience. Now looking forward to Mini DebConf India tour stops in Mangalore, Pune and Ahamedabad.

Update: Jishnu told me there were about 12 students on third day. Ershad complained that I missed his name Ershad was playing with GNOME 3 release party balloons with every one and took pictures too. He has uploaded photos on diaspora and facebook, I will link it here once I get net access on my computer (now using my mobile and wifi sharing is too slow that only ping works and even that takes 5000-6000 msec for response).

This beautiful song was sung at yesterday’s sabha demanding justice for Dr Binayak Sen.

HTML5 Video

Flash Video

Chale chalo dilo me ghav leke bhi chale chalo,
Chalo lahuluhan pao leke bhi chale chalo,
Chalo ki aaj sath-sath chalne ki jarurate,
Chalo ki khatm ho na jaye jindagi ki hasrate.

Jameen, khawab, jindagi, yakeen, sab ko batkar,
Woh chahtehe bebasi me aadmi jhukaye sar,
Woh chahtehe jindagi ho roshni se bekhabar,
Woh ek-ek karke aab jala rahe hai har shahar,
Jale hue gharo ke khawab leke bhi chale chalo.

Woh chahtehe hai baatna yeh jindagi ke kafile,
Woh chahtehe baatna yeh jindagi ke walwale,
Woh chahtehe hai khatm ho ummid ke yeh silsile,
Woh chahtehe hai gir sake na loot ke yeh sab kile,
Sawal hi hai aab jawab leke bhi chale chalo.

Woh chahtehe hai jatiyon ki, boliyon ki phoot ho,
Woh chahtehe hai dharm ko tabahiyon ki choot ho,
Woh chahtehe hai jindagi me ho fareb, jhoot ho,
Woh chahtehe hai jis tarah bhi ho magar yeh loot ho,
Siro pe joh bachi hai chav leke bhi chale chalo.

US response to Julian Assange of wikileaks
Uploaded by thesasikkuttan. – News videos hot off the press.

“We have come to the conclusion that Julian Assange of Wikileaks is royally screwing us. People believe and respect him. We have to break it.

We need to trap him in some rape case and get rid of him. Once our propaganda succeeds he will lose his credibility.”

21st August 2010

Dear Friend,

Since May 2009, the UID project is under implementation. Even though any legislation sanctioning it is yet to be passed in parliament, the UID authority is functioning. Rs.19,500 million have been allocated to the project. In addition to this allocation, the census expenditure has a budget of Rs. 30,230 million. The UIDAI plans to use the census data, to issue Aadhar numbers. The total project is estimated to cost Rs. 1500 billion. The budget for the Authority was passed with the GoI annual budget but without discussion on it or setting up of UIDAI.

The UID project envisages recording ten finger prints and iris scan of all people residing in India, allocating a unique number to each individual whose biometric data is captured, and storing it in a database with other basic information such as: name, parent’s name, date of birth, gender, and address. Clearly, the UID project will affect everyone residing in India. To ensure proper implementation it is important to carry out a detailed study of the project’s viability and feasibility. That the project has been launched without such a study is a matter of grave concern.

The authority presents the UID project to the public as a way to prevent leakages in the PDS and MGNREGS. If the project could achieve this, it would be a welcome solution, but even a cursory examination reveals several reasons why this objective seems impossible to achieve. Among these is the fact that many countries, after trying similar projects, have abandoned them because they were found to be incapable of achieving their projected objectives and posed high security risks. For example: in a study that was conducted by the London School of Economics on the UK Government’s National ID card scheme, it was found that it would not achieve the objective of preventing illegal immigration and further that such a central database would itself become a target for terrorists, The new elected UK government scrapped the project in June 2010.

The UID project also raises many questions concerning the abuse of personal data gathered in the process. The collection and logging of data, done in the manner proposed by the UIDAI, is in effect similar to “phone tapping”, a practice which can be abused by those overseeing it. The data collection itself is outsourced to private agencies. The linkages provided by UID to a person’s data that is collected for the UID to other databases, such as bank accounts or mobile phone companies have the potential for serious abuse. Despite these concerns, the UIDAI has already taken initiatives, such as collaborating with many multinational and Indian private companies for gathering data and setting up / maintaining the database.

This meeting is organised to discuss UID’s lack of a feasibility study, huge cost, legality and real danger of abuse. Hence, we invite you to come for a public discussion where people from many diverse groups will express their viewpoints on the subject on -

25th August 2010 from 10.00 am to 6.00 p.m.

at the Constitution Club Auditorium, Rafi Marg, New Delhi.

High-Tea and meeting with MPs: 4 pm to 6 pm.

This will be an interactive meeting in which, we hope you will be able to gain insight into this immense project, its costs and impacts. Please confirm your participation in the workshop at insafdelhi@gmail.com. This would help us make the necessary arrangements for your convenience.

In Solidarity -
Alternative Law Forum, Citizen Action Forum, Delhi Forum, PEACE, People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) – Karnataka, Moving Republic, Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF), National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights (NCDHR), Slum Janandolana – Karnataka, The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) and many other organisations and concerned individuals.

Read UID appeal to MPs (pdf)

It feels great to announce webm support for fedora 13 on the day of its release!

For the impatient download my repo file

First of all congratulations to Google for releasing VP8 codec as Free Software. VP8 and Vorbis in a customised Matroska container means webm and royalty-free multimedia on the web. Thanks to lardbucket for his step by step guide to building ffmpeg with webm/vp8 patches. Even though I was able to build x264, libvpx and ffmpeg easily, packaging it was not as easy as I imagined. x264 was pretty straight forward, I took spec file file from existing package. libvpx was tougher as it was not creating a shared library by default. But Tom “spot” Callaway had already worked on it and found a solution. Now the toughest was ffmpeg. It took quite a while to get all the patches to apply and fix incompatibilities between the patches Google provided and those accepted by ffmpeg. Finally I found out the secret sauce and you have the fedora 13 packages. If I’m correct this is the first GNU/Linux packages available for webm desktop support.

Once you have ffmpeg install

ffmpeg -i source .any target .webm
ffplay -f webm target .webm

Somehow ffplay is not able to recognise webm format without -f webm option. I have provided a sample webm created with this ffmpeg here. I converted a 12MB mp4 video to 7.7MB webm video. I thought running a browser with webm support would enable watching it directly. But both Chrome and Opera builds with webm support could not play it Chrome offered to download it, which ffplay played, but Opera just showed the contents. Hopefully these will be ironed out by a stable release. I could not try firefox as they don’t provide a 64 bit version. If someone at Mozilla is listening, I would tell them to offer 64 bit downloads, because they might lose some of of their impatient users on 64 bit to Chrome or Opera.

Update: I had to move the repo from people.fedoraproject.org to j4v4m4n.in because of legal issues (fedora cannot host ffmpeg or x264). Thanks to Rex Dieter for bringing this to my notice. I want to say sorry to fedora admin folks to have caused this trouble.

“I was the first minister to propose that either this act should be amended or repealed” – P Chidambaram about Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act 1958 or AFSPA.

“Consensus is needed for that and different political parties have different views on the issue but I am working on that,” he added.

Will he act on his own proposal?

The agencies that recommended to repeal this draconian law
include

• The Manipur Human Rights Commission
• Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy Commission
• Administrative Reforms Commission
• UN Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination

But people of Manipur and other 7 North-Eastern states are still under this military rule. Manipur’s Iron Lady Irom Sharmila is on hunger strike for repealing AFSPA since 3rd November 2000.

Sharmila Irom, a young woman from the Indian state of Manipur, has not eaten for almost 10 years. She is too angry to eat, too upset, too disgusted by the violence that surrounds her, too disturbed by her helplessness to do anything about it. She is hungry for justice, not for food.

So, three times a day for the past decade, two nurses have poured a liquified mixture of vitamins, carbohydrates, proteins and laxatives into a plastic feeding-tube, which enters her nose, attached by a grubby piece of white tape. Initially this force-feeding was uncomfortable, but now she no longer feels a thing. – Andrew Buncombe, The Independent

Sharmila Irom stopped eating on 3 November 2000. The previous day, 10 people waiting for a bus at the village of Malom on the outskirts of Imphal, had been shot dead by a unit of paramilitaries belonging to the Assam Rifles.

Earlier, insurgents had attacked the paramilitaries’ base. There was nothing to suggest that any of the 10 people, aged from 18 to 60, were in any way linked to the insurgents, but the paramilitaries simply wanted revenge. It was nothing less than an execution of innocents.

Today, the bus stop has been transformed into a small memorial, sitting among the quiet rice fields and surrounded by mountains, with the names of the victims inscribed on a white block. Nimai Tsokchom, a farmer, lives in a shack opposite.

He had a fever and was lying in bed when the paramilitaries struck. “The paramilitaries came inside and I was badly beaten,” he remembers.

Sharmila, the youngest of five brothers and four sisters, was deeply disturbed by the killings. The following day she spoke with her mother, ate some food her mother had prepared and – having asked for her blessing – announced that she was launching a fast.

Sharmila had always been different to other young women, say her family. She had just two or three friends, she scorned the use of make-up and channelled much of her energy into journalism and poetry. She read the Bible, the Koran and Hindu texts. When she was born, her mother had been unable to breast-feed so one of her brothers took her to other local women with newborn children who would act as wet nurses. The deal was that the brother did the women’s chores while they fed his baby sister.

After she announced her fast, the family were unsure what would happen, but they knew they could not dissuade her. It was then that Sharmila and her mother decided they could no longer see each other.

“If I meet with her, she might lose her courage,” says Sharmila’s mother, Shakhi Devi, huddled over a steel bucket of glowing embers at the family’s simple home, less than a mile from the hospital where her daughter is detained. “So I will not meet her unless she gets her wish. I will meet her after getting our demand.”

The authorities – unsure how to respond to Sharmila’s actions – arrested her and charged her with attempted suicide, an offence for which she can only be jailed for a year. As a result, since late 2000, Sharmila has been repeatedly detained, force-fed and then set free for a day before being re-arrested.

All this time, she has not eaten or drunk a thing, nor washed her hair, which is now matted and twisted. Her fast has caused her to stop menstruating, while some reports say her internal organs have been damaged. She uses dry cotton to wipe her teeth, insistent that water will not pass her lips. Held in a shabby, peeling room that measures 20ft by 12ft, she spends her days reading books, newspapers and letters from well-wishers. She sometimes does yoga. She has made cardboard models from a kit of famous structures of the world, among them the Empire State Building and London Bridge. – Andrew Buncombe, The Independent

How to silence a silent protest?

Now Khuman Leima, president of International Manipur Mother’s Association, is on a silent strike for the same cause.

“I began my silent protest after seeking the blessings of god. If the act is repealed, I will end my silent protest. If the act is not repealed during my lifetime, I will die keeping mum,” she wrote while starting her protest.

How long can the government remain silent towards the peaceful non-violent protests?

A group of cultural activists from the State of Kerala are undertaking a peace march to Imphal to express solidarity with Irom Sharmila from May 8 2010 to May 27 2010. A 13-member team led by social activist Civic Ramachandran, writer Sara Joseph and Gandhian Suresh George started the march to mark the centenary of publication of Mahatma Gandhi’s seminal work “Hind Swaraj” that advocated Indian Home Rule in 1909. More about their stop at Pune from Sakaal TImes and at Vijayawada from The Hindu.

It now the duty of every Indian who believes in our constitution and its promise of equal justice to everyone to put pressure on this government and make it follow its own promise to repeal this draconian law real.

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

Customer: “Heloo, can I order..”

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

Customer: “It’s……., 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. 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]

[Courtesy: An email forward in a discussion group]

Someone is not feeling good about FOSS Meet and its success. Yesterday we were not at all prepared for this kind of an attack in our irc meeting. But we managed to contain the attack by kicking out all the offenders and changing the channel to invite only.

At first look it looks like the regular irc take over attempts, but if you look at their nick names like thankappan and thangamma there is not a doubt left that hands of some mallus are at work. I don’t know if they are from NIT Campus itself or some other mallu online gang.

Remember this is the second time, there were attempts to vandalize the forums as well. If they dare to come to the event and do these kind of stuffs, the response would be different. These are cowards and let us not be bothered with these gimmicks.

If would like to see the irc logs, it is shared in the mailing list archive.

Update: Mailing list archive is public now. Visit thread with irc logs.