lawgon

fedora 15 sucks

2011-09-06T11:02:39Z

I have been using fedora 15 for the last few months, but am unable to get my BSNL 3G to work. Why can't these clowns at redhat get their act together? My daughter had no problem with Fedora 14.

irctc madness

2011-08-27T02:47:05Z

circa 2000 I registered an account with irctc. Since I did not have a credit card, I did not use the account for a long time and forgot about it. Several years later when I got a card, I registered afresh and was using the account regularly. The other day the account got deactivated. I tried to register afresh - error, email id already registered. I tried with a different email id - error, mobile number already registered. I mailed customer care and they told me that by creating 2 accounts with the same email id/mobile number, I am in breach of the terms and conditions of the website and hence am banned - I am now waiting for the railway police to turn up with handcuffs.

dvorak

2011-08-19T10:58:02Z

first post using dvorak. Am slowly getting comfortable - with the emphasis on the word 'slowly'.

summer meet starts tomorrow

2011-04-14T11:10:04Z

The annual summer meet is going to take off. This will be the first time Ooty and Coimbatore will be using the USGA handicaps and controls. The software is working perfectly - let us hope my game also works perfectly.

absence

2011-04-14T11:07:39Z

I haven't posted anything for over 3 months. Partly I have been hectically busy, and after I left facebook somehow have a block about posting *anywhere*. So here I go again.

the fifth freedom

2011-01-19T13:04:31Z

Traditionally foss is defined by the 4 freedoms - but seeing the abuse of the GPL by closet merchants and bogus software vendors who release watered down versions of their proprietary products as bait to get one to buy them, I feel that a 5th freedom should be added:

4: The freedom to have the source code of the software you use to be available on a public repository on the internet backed by a full community accessible support structure.

Of course, anyone who uses software where he does not have this freedom is an idiot who deserves whatever happens to him, but if this was added then it can be used to educate people.

the light has gone out - continued

2011-01-17T12:05:59Z

I heaved a huge sigh of relief and said 'I thought you were going to throw me off the course for wearing jeans'. He burst out laughing and said 'I will' - and he lifted me, carried me 10 yards and dumped me off the fairway.

That was his way - everyone felt that they had a special relationship with him. I have approached him innumerable times with problems, things that I felt were not being done right. He would listen, carefully analyse and argue. We had many heated arguments, but he was always ready to admit he was wrong and change his mind. When I got through the referees exam, he congratulated me and then confessed quite frankly that he had gone to Scotland and attempted the exam a couple of times but failed. Even with his vast experience and instinctive knowledge of the game, he found the vagaries of the English language too difficult to master in order to pass the exam. On any question of rules, he never jumped to conclusions, he would study the books, listen carefully to arguments, argue and come to a conclusion - he was rarely wrong.

In the enforcement of rules - he was strict, almost ruthless when it came to breach of etiquette and cheating. Quite a few players who had been caught cheating or manipulating their handicaps were handed bans of 3 to 6 months. And he was harsh on himself also, during one tournament I saw him striding back to the club house with steam coming out of his ears. What had happened? His caddy had found his ball in a bush and had moved it to a more favourable lie. Some players would accept this with eyes closed, most would scold the caddy and take the penalty - but only Captain would instantaneously take the responsibility and disqualify himself and leave the course. I have been hauled up before the committee any number of times - and have hauled up others too. The enquiries were always conducted with the utmost attention to detail and fairness and courtesy to the parties concerned. At the same time whenever I used to make flippant remarks, he would laugh - but that would not distract him from the point in question. I was lucky - disqualified a few times for honest mistakes, but never banned, suspended or even reprimanded.

In the days to come I will try to recall some of the more interesting incidents. No time today. I think the last time I met him was when I was refereeing a tournament in Coimbatore - he had come to watch. I remember discussing the water treatment plant between the 8th hole and the 3rd fairway. For some reason it had been marked as a lateral water hazard which gave a player who looses his ball in the water a chance to be on in 3. In the first place, no player has any business going there unless he plays a rank bad shot. Water hazards are supposed to be in the fairway or just off it. In all fairness this tank should be declared as an integral part of the course. He agreed with me - I do not know if it was implemented.

He was the embodiment of the spirit of golf - though he is no more, I sure the spirit lives on in the thousands of lives he touched in his long career.

to be continued

the light has gone out over the Ooty golf course

2011-01-16T07:10:00Z

Last evening a meeting of the tournament committee was interrupted with the news that our beloved Captain who had been fighting cancer for some time was sinking. Although some people wanted to call of today's tournament, we decided that Captain would not wish it - in fact he would have expected us to play regardless of whether he was alive or not. But we decided to play - and if he passed away during the match we would pay our respects in the place he loved best and then call off the match. Morning came with news that he was still lingering on, so we teed off. Some how I was hoping for a miracle - and with my thoughts on him I wasn't worrying about my swing and was playing beautifully. After 5 holes I felt that it would be ok. As I was lining up my approach shot to the 3rd green the siren wailed. I was not sure whether it was the club siren or the HPF siren. Then it wailed again. And again. We picked up our balls and walked back to the club house. The long line of golfers from every part of the course walking back to the club house with heads bowed is a sight I will never forget. Somehow I was hoping it was still a mistake, but when I saw the club flag flying at half mast the reality sank in. There was a ceremony planned at the club house, but I could not bring myself to attend. I came home and am sitting here to pay my personal tribute to a great man. The newspapers will be full of his history and achievements, so I will not mention them here. All I want to record here is how my life was touched by his greatness - and I hope by recalling it some of his wonderful spirit would have rubbed off on me.

I first met Captain back in 2000 when I was interviewed for club membership. At that time I was of the opinion that the clubs in India were populated with brown englishmen wearing suits and eating with knife and fork. But I wanted to play golf - so I had to become a member of the club. The club has two classes of members - golfing members, who pay less, and social members who pay more. So a lot of bogus bandicoots apply under the golfing category and Captain was strict on making sure the applicants were genuine. Ashok coached me up on the diameter of the ball and the radius of the hole and the proportion between the vertical and horizontal measurements of the club head. Moolchand had proposed me and he told me I would have to wear a suit. Too much. Anyway I compromised and told him I would wear a blazer which I took from his shop - I still have not paid for it though. I was nervous, so played a round of golf before the interview (nothing like a round of golf to soothe the nerves). Then I put the blazer over my tee shirt and was ready for the interview. Moolchand was not happy - but I told him that his attire would cancel out my plebian look. When my name was called, I was in panic - I had forgotten the diameter of a golf ball. But at the head of the table was Captain - having just finished his round he was in a tee shirt. And he asked me just one question: 'Why do you want to play golf?' And I said: 'the doctor recommended exercise so I took it up - and then one day I hit a 230 yard drive and was hooked'. He laughed and said:'I will bet anything that you never hit another like that'. I said: 'yes - but my day will come'. End of interview.

So I was a member, but I felt that the yardages of the course were not right, so I borrowed a GPS instrument from my godson Pavan and tried to check the yardages. In those days (2002) I was getting wildly innacurate readings. One day when I was banging my head in the bar in frustration, Captain asked me what was wrong. I told him. He didn't say anything.

A week later I was playing a round. When I was putting on the 17th, I realised that I was inadvertently wearing blue jeans - which those idiots who run IGU had banned - and the ban had been enforced in OGC. I was complacent until I hit my second shot on the 18th. Go for my third shot and find Captain practicing putting on the 15th. How to escape? I decided to hit my 3 wood OB and escape via the ladies tee. In the stupid way golf balls have the OB shot landed 2 feet from the pin. I putted out for par and saw Captain was summoning me from the 15th. How the hell did he detect my jeans from 150 yards? I was thinking maybe he won't suspend me if I promise good behavour in the future. Anyway I approached him as lamb to slaughter, and he hugged me with his iron hands and said: 'I have brought my laser range finder - it is in the clubhouse - get the course marked.'

to be continued ...

an interesting way to use the GPL

2011-01-12T09:32:45Z

As we all know, software is not a commodity to be bought and sold. The attempt to treat it like a commodity has caused a huge number of problems as well as colossal waste of money and programmers time. So the foss movement was started so that software can be shared freely across the world. And many licenses came into being in order to have some sort of regulation of this sharing to see that it is not abused. There are 40-50 licenses of this sort and they vary a lot - but all of them have one thing in common: they presuppose release of software to the public and availability of the source code. The business model changes - instead of selling software as a commodity, one shares the software and sells service, customisation, support, hosting ... however one bright spark has found a loophole in the GPL. What he does is hide in a closet and develop his software. Then he GPL's it (whatever that means). Then he goes and sells to the customer. The customer, having paid a good sum for it is not going to give to any one else free, so the GPL is as good as any other EULA. Then our friend goes and sells the same package to another bakra - same price, same results. And he goes on and on - proprietary mode of development, proprietary mode of deployment - but all kosher according to the GPL. I think V4 of the GPL may have to be amended to plug this perversion of the idea of foss.

This reminds me of what happens in the govt sector. Government of one state decides to computerise land records on linux platform. Some big company wins the contract, gets paid crores and delivers - source code is handed over under some agreement. Government keeps it secret. Then the same company gets a contract for the same thing from another state - same price, same hand over, same secrecy - and then the third state ... so three states pay public funds for the same thing. And it is quite possible for this to happen while GPLing the software in each case. Actually what should happen is that State A pays for it, releases it and the other states spend for customisation and deployment and not rewriting the same thing. The above scenario actually happened, although I have not named the states or the company.

So what does one mean by distributing software? what does the 'P' in GPL stand for? Yes, the above is probably in accordance with the letter of the law - but is a complete travesty of the spirit of foss.

dreams sometimes come true

2010-12-10T11:19:15Z

two big companies are willing to pay market rates for open source development of an ERP and a CRM. *And* are agreeable to remote working!

how to set environmental variables in windows 7

2010-12-09T06:29:26Z

[16:20] [djangoobie] anyone have tips on configuring DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE on windows 7
[16:21] [all_vs_one] whhat knd of tips do you need?
[16:22] [djangoobie] whenever I use manage.py syncdb or the reset function it can't continue because DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is either undefined or incorrect
[16:22] --] innervision has joined this channel (~david@189.75.37.158).
[16:22] [djangoobie] i've added 2 system environment variables, PYTHONPATH and DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE
[16:23] [all_vs_one] have't you forgot to add database configuration in settings.py?
[16:23] [FunkyBob] djangoobie: honestly, from what I've seen of all the pain in here from people using windows.... you will generally be better off running a vm of linux/freebsd/something-unixy
[16:24] [FunkyBob] even given the learning curve if you've never used *nix before... it will be easier
[16:24] [FunkyBob] that's, as I said, from my observations in this channel of the problems people have trying to work in Windows
[16:24] [djangoobie] I can't use linux and I don't have any experience with it
[16:24] --] cdr_ has joined this channel (~cdr@94-192-110-239.zone6.bethere.co.uk).
[16:24] [FunkyBob] [true, some people have it all sorted, and appear to work on Windows no problem]
[16:24] --] jorn has joined this channel (~jorn@unaffiliated/jorn).
[16:24] [FunkyBob] can't? why not?
[16:25] [all_vs_one] for enjoining good things you have to try bad things ath the beginning

[16:25] [FunkyBob] djangoobie: from memory... don't you have to log out and back in after setting env vars in Win32?
[16:25] [all_vs_one] djangoobie: take virtualbox, ubuntu and play

[16:25] [djangoobie] I'm doing graphic design between the development process and switching 2 OS all the time will drive me crazy
[16:25] [-- cyberdelia has left this server (Quit: Leaving...).
[16:25] [apollo13] s/tutorial/docs/
[16:26] [FunkyBob] djangoobie: that's why I suggested using a VM
[16:26] [djangoobie] I logged out

[16:26] [lawgon] FunkyBob: the other day I went to a browsing centre for a printout and the guy had to reboot after inserting the usb stick
[16:27] [lawgon] djangoobie: lot of people do graphic design on linux
[16:27] [FunkyBob] lawgon: "Windows has detected that you have moved your mouse. Your computer needs to reboot to handle these changes."

[16:27] [djangoobie] can the problem be PostgreSQL
[16:31] [djangoobie] so I set up the environment variables like in the docs, but now I get "Error: No module named settings"
[16:31] [FunkyBob] djangoobie: both SQLite and Postgres would require it to be set
[16:31] --] sym has joined this channel (~sym@cust27-dsl45.idnet.net).
[16:31] [FunkyBob] djangoobie: ah, well.. that's often caused by people misunderstanding PYTHONPAHT
[16:31] [-- sym has left this server (Client Quit).
[16:31] [lawgon] FunkyBob: is a that a thai dish?
[16:32] [djangoobie] :)
[16:32] --] r0bby_ has joined this channel (~wakawaka@guifications/user/r0bby).
[16:32] *** r0bby_ is now known as robbyoconnor.
[16:32] [FunkyBob] lawgon: :P
[16:32] [djangoobie] so how do I fix it?
[16:32] [FunkyBob] djangoobie: did you set/change PYTHONPATH env var?
[16:33] [-- beevee has left this server (Quit: Leaving.).
[16:33] [djangoobie] via Python you mean?
[16:33] [FunkyBob] no, the same way you set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE
[16:33] --] keyo has joined this channel (7cbf53ee@gateway/web/freenode/ip.124.191.83.238).
[16:33] [djangoobie] yes it's configured one directory above my project
[16:34] [lawgon] configured where?
[16:35] [djangoobie] in the system environment variables window I added 2 variables, one called PYTHONPATH with the value of D:\djangoprojects and the django module variable is configured to be mysite.settings
[16:36] [apollo13] djangoobie: did you relogin?
[16:36] [m0no] djangoobie: well you dont need to add django settings module env variable in system environment
[16:36] [FunkyBob] apollo13: well, I think I've seen 3 or 4 people in the last month sk about it
[16:36] [djangoobie] yes I logged out for the changes to take efect
[16:36] [apollo13] try a reboot *runs*
[16:37] [m0no] djangoobie: presumably you have \djangoprojectz\mysite as your structure
[16:37] [apollo13] + check in the console if the env vars are configured correctly
[16:37] [djangoobie] m0no: yes
[16:38] [m0no] djangoobie: and djangoprojects\mysite has an __init__.py, settings.py, urls.py in it
[16:38] [djangoobie] yes
[16:38] [djangoobie] if I echo the PYTHONPATH in cmd it displays the correct path
[16:39] [FunkyBob] ok
[16:39] [FunkyBob] so, in a totally unrelated directory, run python
[16:39] [m0no] ok so open a new cmd window (as this will ahve latest env vars set)
[16:45] [djangoobie] brb gotta relogin
[16:45] [-- djangoobie has left this server.

[16:49] --] djangoobie has joined this channel (~djangoobi@82-169-114-214.ip.telfort.nl).
.
[16:49] [djangoobie] ok where were we :p, I had to import settings from django.conf ?
[16:52] [djangoobie] then what?
[16:55] [lawgon] reboot
[16:55] [djangoobie] the ENV variables are all loaded, no need to restart

[16:58] [djangoobie] i'll remove the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE and see if it will work then, brb
[16:58] [-- djangoobie has left this server.

contributing to open source

2010-12-01T12:19:11Z

Recently I have been embroiled in debates on several fora on what exactly is contributing to open source and how to go about it. And there guys who are going around rating contribution as 'good' contribution and 'not good' or 'second rate' contribution. In one case the advice runs like this: look around on sourceforge etc for projects you like and go ahead and contribute to them. I feel that all this comes from a fundamental lack of understanding of how open source works. In the closed source world there are two defined roles - creators and users. And a firm line between the roles. In open source, the difference between a contributor and a user is not clearly defined. Every user is in some way also a contributor.

ok, so I want to contribute - how do I do it? Why do you want to contribute? if you contribute for the sake of contributing or for the sake of giving something back to the community or because you feel you should - it is likely that your contribution will be worthless, it will irritate the developers in the project and will certainly not sustain.

From my experience and from observation, the first way to contribute to an app is by using it. You use it because you need it. Then you have problems, so you get on IRC or a mailing list and ask questions. Using is contributing. Asking questions is contributing as it shows that maybe documentation is not good or the layout of the UI is confusing. As you keep using the app, you start interacting with the community. And depending on your level, you may remain at the stage of just asking questions, or maybe suggesting features, or maybe contributing patches and code - or translating strings, improving the documents - and possibly, one fine day you are a full fledged core developer. Or may be not. You write tutorials and blog posts on the way you have solved some problem or the other - you do not need commit rights to do that. You may write plugins or develop ui schemes - you do not need commit rights for that either. Since you have become known in the community as a user, a participant in online fora and adding tutorials, howtos etc, you are not seen as an interloper or busybody - but rather as a member of the community.

Developers are absurdly grateful for this kind of contribution - be it just downloading and using the app (and hence contributing to user statistics), or whatever.

Other ways - joining a LUG, attending LUG meets, going around conducting or helping to conduct workshops, seminars, install fests. Installing foss labs in institutions. Installing linux anywhere. And talking about foss - it is talk that distinguishes us from monkeys. Yes, talk is contribution too.

And which is the best type of contribution? No genuine member of the FOSS community would even dream of asking this question.

why?

2010-11-19T10:37:24Z

frankly I am getting tired of fighting. Why do it? You do not get popular. People who you think are friends get bought off. You are villified for trying to enforce rules. Fortunately I am not standing for election in anything - so can go my own way. And I will cease fighting when they are lowering me into the grave - not before.

the conference that never was

2010-11-17T12:30:51Z

so finally the opposition got together to organise a transparent, democratic, community conference to expose foss.in. Support snowballed - then came a lowlife called Kalia - took a prominent role in the fledgling conference without a name, and then one fine day he defected to the other side. Boom - no conference. Lessons learnt:

1. No edifice built on sand will stand long
2. Never trust a php guy.

new app

2010-11-12T12:20:27Z

an app I wrote back in 2007 and been meaning to release since then. Finally got down to upgrading it - needs work as I have learnt a lot since 2007 and django also has developed a lot. I hope I can get time to work on it. http://quadmulc.greenchilly.in - comments, criticism and testing welcome.

spine

2010-11-04T09:45:20Z

nice to see that the foss community of Bangalore has finally woken up and developed a backbone. All the best for the upcoming conference - if it takes place I will be there. More at http://fsck.in

pycon India rocks again

2010-09-30T06:34:33Z

well pycon india took place again. Audience up from 350 last year to 650 this year. Talks were better, organisation good, venue comfortable. We also had the first AGM of the Indian Python Software Society. It went well. It is a great achievement to carry on for 2 years in India without a single split, major fight or walk out. Probably because people are more dedicated to python than to their egos? Next year in Chennai. Let us see how that works out. So far many organisations have planned to hold their conferences in different cities every time - but it has never worked out since the organisers are usually so desperate to hold on to their positions as netas that they have never succeeded in letting the event out of their sights. Except for David Goodger's keynote and Noufal's talk on the road to pycon, I did not manage to catch a full session.

bsnl 3G on fedora - phew

2010-09-09T12:14:00Z

got bsnl 3G and managed to get it to work on fedora 12. It comes with software for linux - presumably written in shell or C, but behaves as if it is written in php by a baaad coder. It does not work. To make a long story short, fedora recognises it as a mass storage device. Actually there seem to be three devices there. So one needs to jump through hoops and use usb_modeswitch to make it into a modem. And then use wvdial as usual. I am too exhausted to describe the process. Suffice to say I got it to work. Phew.

django-addition

2010-09-02T12:12:12Z

django-addition has moved here: http://bitbucket.org/lawgon/django-addition/wiki/Home. Reason for the move is that livejournal is not very amenable to posting code.

how to add two numbers in django

2010-08-31T09:34:02Z

For people coming from backgrounds of php or of application servers, the process by which django works is slightly puzzling. Maybe a simple tutorial that does the barest minimum would put them on the right path - so here is a attempt to do this wrt a thread that came up on the django-users mailing list. Comments?

1. download django:
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django-trunk

2. symlink django to the site-packages directory
ln -s pathtodjango-trunk/django /usr/lib/python2.x/site-packages/django

3. set up django:
python pathtodjango-admin.py startproject project
cd project
python manage.py startapp addnums

4. edit settings.py to point to a database called addnums
4.5 add project.addnums to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py

5. create the database addnums

6. create a model in models.py which will be in the addnums directory:

class Addnum(models.Model):
    num1 = models.IntegerField("First number")
    num2 = models.IntegerField("Second number")
    # display result:
    def __unicode__(self):
        return "%s plus %s is %s" %(self.num1,self.num2,selfnum1+self.num2)

6.5 create the database table

python manage.py syncdb

7. Create a form in views.py:

from django.template import Context,loader,RequestContext

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response, get_object_or_404
from django.forms import ModelForm
from project.addnums.models import Addnum

class Addnumform(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Addnum

8. Create a view to display and get the data from the form

def getnum(request):
    if request.POST:
        form = Addnumform(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid:
            f = form.save()
            #return a success view with the result
            return HttpResponseRedirect("/success/%d/" % f.id)
    else:
        form = Addnumform()
    return render_to_response('web/addnum.html',
                        context_instance=RequestContext(request,
    
                              {"form":form,
                               
                               }))

9. create the success view:

def success(request,id):
    nums = Addnum.objects.get(pk=id)
    return render_to_response('web/addnum.html',
                        context_instance=RequestContext(request,
    
                              {"nums":nums,
                               
                               }))

10. create urls for django to find your views in urls.py:

url(r'getnum/$','project.addnums.views.getnum',name='getnum'),
url(r'success/(?P\d+)/$','project.addnums.views.success,name='success'),

11. create a base template called base.html:
{% block content%}{% endblock %}

12. create getnums.html:

{% extends base.html %}
{%block content %}
{% if form.errors %} Please correct the errors below {% endif %}
    {% csrf_token %}
    {{ form }}
    
{% endblock %}

13. create success.html:

{% extends base.html %}
{%block content %}
{{nums}}
{% endblock %}

14. add the directory holding your templates to the templates directory in settings.py

15. run python manage.py runserver

16. point browser to http://127.0.0.1:8000 and start learning arithmetic.

oss vs foss

2010-08-22T04:44:09Z

பொதுவான அம்சங்கள்:

௧. மூலம் இலவசமாக கிடைக்கும்
௨. எப்படி வேண்டுமென்றால் பயன்படுத்தலாம்
௩. விநியோகம் செய்யலாம்
௪. மாற்றங்களை விநியோகம் செய்யலாம்
௫. மூலத்தை மாற்றலாம்.

வேறுபாடுகள்:

oss: மூலத்தை மாற்றி அதனை மூடலாம். ஆனால் பெயரை மாற்ற வேண்டும்.
foss: எக்காரணம் கொண்டும் மூரத்தை மூட கூடாது.

குறிப்பு: 'Free' என்றால் சுதந்தரம், இலவசமல்லா

hourly billing

2010-08-05T01:55:11Z

I could never wrap my head around the concept of hourly billing. It is a strange western thingie that is totally unsuitable to our culture. Possible it is realistic in the sense of purely mechanical work - like ploughing a field or writing php code - one can predict exactly how much can be done per hour and bill accordingly. But in any field that involves thought, research or creativity the whole idea of hourly billing is stupid. In both the legal profession and in programming, I may estimate 4 hours to do some work. I may do it in 15 minutes or maybe in 24 hours - so what do I bill? Traditionally in India we bill per piece of work done. And in estimating how much it costs, there are 2 considerations: how much work is expected and, more important, how much the client can be expected to pay.

language wars

2010-07-22T02:19:57Z

recently ilugc mailing list had an unprecedentedly huge flame war regarding language. This had it's beginnings a couple of years back when one or two members started posting in Tamil. Ilugc is the biggest LUG in India and has a large and active component of members from outside Tamilnadu as well as members within the state who cannot read Tamil - in many cases do not even have the fonts installed so all they see is either junk or little boxen. Repeated requests were made that the mails be tagged [Tamil] and a brief english translation be appended. The posters expressed the opinion that 'this is the Tamilnadu state LUG and hence they have the right to post in Tamil, and also every member should learn Tamil'. At that time no one was opposed to posts in Tamil - all they asked was that the posters do them the courtesy of tagging the posts so that they could filter it out - or give an english summary so that they could know what is happening. This went on for some years - periodically requests were made for tagging/summary, and the requests were ignored.

In India language is a very sensitive issue - but in Tamilnadu by and large there is a lot of tolerance as there are large linguistic minorities - although I remember torrid times in the anti-hindi agitations of the past and the Tamil-Kannada riots in the late nineties (this was actually more a dispute over water than over language). There are fanatics like the MNS in Mumbai that wants to kick out all the non Marathi speaking people - and a few hot heads in other states. Bangalore comes to mind in this regard.

Anyway the issue flared up again a couple of weeks back - and this time due to the intransigence of the tamil posters (actually only 2-3 of them in a 2000 strong list), flames erupted and this time there was heavy opposition to tamil posting itself, along with a much more insistent demand for tagging/translation. Finally the co-ordinator ordained that any language may be used as long as it is tagged and translated. This lead to posts in all manner of languages and a general state of anarchy. In the end the list owner stated that he is willing to start language lists on request, but only english posts would be allowed. Anyone posting in other languages would be warned and then banned.

So why were they posting in Tamil and refusing to tag/translate? Simply because they wanted to impose Tamil on the members. If they genuinely wanted to promote Tamil, they should have been polite, tagged the mails and also provided translations - or even transliterations to encourage people to learn. There was even one moron who suggested that Marathi posts should be allowed in Mumbai, Kannada posts in Bengaluru and Telugu posts in Hyderabad - which shows how much he knows about the languages spoken in the respective cities and the tensions wrt to language there.

Well youngsters will be youngsters - but I hope some of them get posted to some place like Kolhapur or Kannur - then they will learn.

billdesk scamsters?

2010-06-09T10:22:31Z

I recently had to make an urgent journey - so I booked tickets by 2 different trains - when the waiting list did not clear, I also booked tatkal. 3 or 4 of the bookings ended in failed transaction - billdesk deducted the money from my bank account - but did not credit it to the railways. Then I tried air - two attempts, both times money left my account, but billdesk did not credit it to the booking site. Net result: about 12K rupees left my account and is sitting with billdesk. After lots of emails, all parties agree that I have paid the money, that the transactions have failed and that I should get my money back. Now they say 7-8 business days. Obviously there is some scam here - why should a refund take more than a few seconds when the transaction has failed? They are probably earning lakhs in interest from the money they are holding in this way.

how to build your house

2010-05-24T00:26:25Z

Contractor (C): Sir, I will build your house for you - see pictures of all the houses I have built and choose one
Owner (O): I like house B, may I see the plans please?
C: no sir, plans are secret - if others see they will build houses like mine and I will lose business - but I will give 100% guarantee and you may test the construction when complete
O: ok, please build it, but I would like to watch the construction process
C: no sir, construction process is a business secret - if I show then other people will copy. My building process is highly secret - even the workers and sub contractors do not know the full details. Please pay 20 lakhs advance and I will complete construction within a year, then you can pay baaki 30 lakhs.
O: (two years later) Is house ready at least now?
C: yes, it is ready - you may test.
D (special testing team from Israel): sir, only 5 lakhs, we will test construction with latest techniques
O: ok, please go ahead and give result, I want to move in before I die
D: sir, we have completed testing - we used latest hand grenades and bombs to test structure and are happy to report that house is resistant to all but the very latest bombs which are anyway unavailable to the public and can safely say that the construction is robust.
O: where is the house? I only see a pile of rubble.
C and D: sir, best quality testing will do this, but please pay another 50-60 lakhs and we will build and test another house for you