Nov 13, 2017

North India Polluion


There seems to be an opinion that somehow the pollution is only Delhi centric. This is not the fact. The crops are being burnt in the states around Delhi, but the stupid and idiotic news media shows only Delhi.

Here are a few visuals from other places. The situation is dire all throughout.




















Aug 6, 2017

Indian Kingdoms : By duration

In my last post I had listed out the various Indian Kingdoms and the duration of their reigns through our recorded history. That timeline gives a great look at the march of time through the ages. But it does not give a good idea of a comparison of how long each kingdom existed.

So, today's post ( a bit short though) is on the absolute length of each kingdom. We do not worry about where it was in the relative timescale here.

We know that India is a young country. But how young ??  See the below chart.


There ! India is right at the bottom. I had left out some very small and short lived states in the historical list earlier - and well, India is just a bit longer than them. Most of these empires are based on the reign of a single ruler/king. India at 70, just is beginning to feature in the list.

Hope to see it grow up upwards as the years march onwards !

But then, this huge list does not give a very good idea of a relative size. How much longer did the British rule ? How long did the longest living kingdom exist ?

So, here is another chart - but based on only a few that I found interesting.



Alright ! Lets take the 70 years of the Republic of India as a single unit of time.

The top 4 empires were 20 times longer at the least. In fact, the Pandayan Dynasty lived on for a cool 2350 years till the mid 16th Century. Obviously this begets the question whether the timeline in Wikipedia for this empire is correct ? Wikipedia lists this as having 3 different stretches - maybe it had its ups and downs ? I do not know - needs more study.

But as with the other top 4, these start in sometime in BC - and we know that these dates are best guesses, so would have an element of error in them. However, the end dates are pretty well known - so there is credence to these long lived dynasties. I would love it if people can point me towards details of these empires.

The Cholas is an interesting empire. It spread from south India all the way to the Indonesian islands. How could they have managed this huge an empire over the seas in that time - without the means of instant communications ? Amazing !

We hear that the Mughals and the British ruled for a very long time. Well, the data is not that much in favor of them.

The entire mughal sultanates, from their times of conquests in India till their ultimate decimation by the British existed only 5 units of time.

And the British ? Even less. So less in fact that I have include the Company Company and the British Raj - as just by themselves they were for a very short duration. The British Raj was actually just a bit longer than the Indipendent India. Just 89 years in fact. However, most of the infrastructure had been built in that time. This begets the question - what have we really done in the last 70 years ?

Jul 30, 2017

A timeline of the Indian Empires

The Empires through the ages.
Link to larger version as Blogspot doesn't let me link the image.

So, over the last few weekends, I went over the various wikipedia articles to figure out the various kingdoms that were , which lead to the mordern day India. Part of this research was instigated due to the fake rehtoric nowadays about how our glorious past has been lost due to the Mughals / British etc.

As I started researching, the timelines kept reaching back. All the way to the time before Christ - the colloquial 0 AD date. We are so much caught up in the hate agendas focusing over the last couple of years that we forget that this land was always very diverse.

Much before the British. Much before the Mughals. Much before the Ashokas and the Akbars. Much before Chandragupta Maurya. Thats when the recorded history starts. Most of this is about the Mahajanapadas - and we owe it to the Buddhist and Jain texts which recorded it for posterity. Before that, most of the history is suspect as it is based on word of mouth. the long lines reaching back to 1500 BC are part of that - we really do not know when those empires started, and so these are best guess dates. More research is needed into them before we can for sure say that these are the actual timelines of these kingdoms.

Before the mahajanapas was the Vedic age. Since there are too many conflicting estimates of that age, I have left it out. Also it does not give any inkling to the various kingdoms that were there.

As you move forwards in time, you see that India was actually very fractured. Mutliple kingdoms existed. Backstabbing each other. Fighting for land. Having various treaties and marriage arrangements.

Fast forward a whole lot of years and you start seeing the first of the Islamic kingdoms - the sultanates. The ones in Green. At the same time, there were healthy and long lived other non-islamic kingdoms. No idea why most of the people forget to mention that, but if you look at the graph, you can see the interleaving of the black and green lines.

Forward a few hundred years more and the red lines - the British start to appear. And yet the black lines do not go away. They exist in different parts of present day India.

Finally, everything merges and we get India ( well, also Pakistan and eventually Bangladesh). The blue blip - that puts into perspective the small amount of time that the Republic of India has existed. Kinda insignificant in the grand scale of things so far.

PS : A lot of time went into preparing this chart. If you do share this - please do with proper attribution.

Link to google drive in case you want to download this https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6LzAV0_xl_2MnIyNUVoV2FTcDQ/view?usp=sharing

Jul 2, 2017

Hindustan - how the name came about to be

There is a recent push to rename India as Hindustan. I wonder if people who want India to be renamed as "Hindustan" even know the origins and the extent of it ?

I initially started searching for the roots because anything <>stan does not seem to be indigenous to the Hindu religious wording - its more Islamic. And true to it, the region on the other side of the Indus was called Hindustan by the Persians.

In 4 BC, when Megasthenes visited India, he wrote Indika - his book on India. Its interesting that in 4th BC, the name used was Indika and not Hindustan - which is closer to the term India that the Brits used. It could be that the term Indika was still being used in Europe at the time that they started to trade with this region.

By the 13th century, the region on the other side of the Indus were called Al Hind, and the "stan" started creeping in and was called Hindustan - to denote the region - not a particular country or state. This I would attribute to the standard Arab terminology. We usually put a "pur" or a "halli" or something similar in the local dialect, and the Arabs just gave their own name to it.

The British and other European merchants in the 18th Century then started trying to figure out the name for the religion. There was not one unified religion - everyone had their own ways of worship. This concept of polytheism was alien to these guys, so they clubbed together everything and started denoting the pagan worshipers as Hindus. Essentially, if you were not a follower of monotheist religion ( Christian or Islam ) you by default were a Hindu.

One more interesting thing is the extent of Hindustan. It did not cover the entire Indian peninusla. The extent was till the Vindyas in the mid of current day India - essentially, the lands of the Indo gangetic plains, demarcated by the seas of the mountains on the sides. Made a lot of sense I suppose in the earlier centuries for people traveling, and also percolation of the same customs throughout due to ease of traveling ( apart from the jungles at that time).

Jun 28, 2017

Affected by Petya

#Petya ransomeware started to creep out on 27th June. Initial analysis by Symantec and McAfee seems to indicate that it is similar to the #WannaCry ransomware that hit about a month back, but Kaspersky says it is #NotPetya

Ransomware screen. Win 8 systems. Source


Also note that the email address that is mentioned in the ransomware screen is blocked. So, even if you pay the ransom ( and 35 people have paid ) , there is no way you are going to un-encrypt your system.

Do not pay Ransomware. The email id is blocked.


While the AV companies debate it out as to what it is, here is the toll that it has taken so far :

Leave a comment if you come across more companies hit by this malware. Please link to source.
  • Russia
    • Rosneft (Oil Producer)
    • Home Credit ( Banks)
    • Evraz ( steel makers )
  • Denmark
  •   Britian
  • USA
    • Merck
  • Ukraine
    • Banks
    • Power Grid
    • International Airport 
    • Metro (wholesale store)
  • France
    • Saint Gobain
  • Germany
    • Deutsche Post
  • Netherlands
  • India
    • Beierdorf AG (India branch) ( makers of Nivia)
    • Reckitt Benckiser ( India branch) ( makers of Dettol , Lysol )
    • Jawaharlal Nehru Port  


Side Note : Someone with the account 1FuckYouRJBmXYF29J7dp4mJdKyLyaWXW6  as paid 0.0000666 BTC ( approx 16 cents ) . That's one way of getting your point across !

Jun 10, 2017

WWDC 2017 Thoughts

It's been a few days since the WWDC that Apple has annually in June and after going through the presentations and videos, here are my thoughts on the same.


1. iWatch

iWatch interface is now more pebble like in the experience. It tells you what is current, whats going to come etc. Also they have better tie in with many franchise so you have a mini-mouse dial and other toy story watch faces. The psychedelic dials looked cool.

Personal analysis - they did not mention anything about the battery life - which means it is still the 1 day and it dies battery. I would give it a pass. I am frustrated as it is with having to charge my phone daily (sometimes more than once in a day!)
(image via cult of mac )

2. MacOS


They named it High Sierra. The earlier OS version was named Sierra.

How unimaginative.

But under the hood quite a lot of good stuff going on. I am actually amazed how much has been updated.
  • Now the OS comes with Virtual Reality support out of the box. 
  • It also supports Unity and Unreal engines - these are mostly used for gaming ( a weak spot for apple), but I do not think that they are supporting these engines for gaming, but for VR. 
Check out this video of the VR ! May the force be with you


I pretty much think that there is a lot going on under the hood with the enhancements here. Probably one of the reasons for calling this release "high" is that it is an enhancement and not a radical leapfrog.

3. Augmented Reality

Pokemon Go was the first brush of most people with Augmented Reality. While in VR you are in a virtual world, AR basically puts you in the real world with stuff that is computer generated. Microsoft's HoloLens demos are a very good example of AR.

Here, I think that Apple has been really smart in using their iOS as an AR platform. There are quite a significant people who already own these devices - and what better way to get them involved in AR apps than using what they have - while Microsoft has the distinct disadvantage of users having to first get the HoloLens headsets before they can do anything.

See the following demo.

And this brings me to changes to the :

4. iPad

The iPad got a ton of updates.

First the specs update:
  • There is now a 10.5" iPad.
    • Officially Apple said that this is because it gives a full size keyboard. Which may be true, you can now get attached keyboards with slightly bigger keys and so easier to type on, but I think that is because...
    • the 9" iPad is the biggest seller, because... 
    • the 12" iPad is horribly difficult to handle.. 
    • So a compromise and bring out a 10.5" iPad.
    • The size per say is not going to be very different as the 10.5" refers to the screen size, and with the side bezels getting thinner, they are able to fit in a bigger screen with a small increment to the overall size.  
    • Definitely a size I would want to use.
  •  The refresh rate is now 120Hz. 
    • usual monitor rates are 60Hz. This is what helps you feel that the video etc that you are seeing is smooth. 
    • 120Hz will mean a very smooth display - especially for stuff like drawing.
  • 512 GB of storage. 
    • That is half a terabyte ! 
    • That's a laptop you have there. Most high-end ultrabooks have this kind of storage.
  • Drag and drop in the iPad
    • Apple has implemented app overlays ( not split screen like how it is in Android, but real app on top of app. 
    • Add to that you can now browse files ( hey - stock Android does not have this. You have to download apps to access the file system). 
    • And drag drop files/images/text etc to other apps.
Here's how this all looks. Now tell me, if this is not going to replace the laptop what will  ?

5. The iMacPro


Apple also announced updates the iMac - most noticeably, the iMacPro. Unlike the older ones, which were upgradeable, these are not. For a machine for enthusiasts, I think that this is a very wrong strategy.

    6. One Last Thing.


    Apple gave this listed as 6. If Steve Jobs would have been presenting, he would have listed 5 things and then said - one last thing. The crowd would have swooned thinking of a new iPhone, but then Steve would have unveiled the HomePod

    I like my music but I am not an audiophile. So, my view may or may not be valid here. But I have seen expensive systems - e.g. from Bose etc. ( hey no harm window shopping - right ?) and most of them have their experts sent to your house to set it up all for you. Or, you may reach out to your audiophile friend who may do it for you.

    Apple automated this. Now the HomePod ( come on man, come up with some good naming, this is getting stale), comes with Apple's A8 chip. This will automatically adjust the sounds from the speakers based on the setting ( I assume they use some audio-wave processing to figure out the surrounding and the reflection of sound). So, you can pick up and reposition the speaker and it will automatically adjust the sound.

    Not only that, you add one more speaker ( Apple did not mention if there are more than 2 speakers what would happen) and the speakers will recognize each other and play the music in tandem.

    I think its pretty neat. But knowing apple, this will be tied in with their ecosystem. And you would probably have to use the dreaded iTunes software to play it /shudder.


    Oh, the iPhone - that usually gets revealed in September. Hold on till then.

    May 13, 2017

    In 2005, as I was leaving a company, I was asked to pen down what may be the problems. I wrote the following letter to the then Director who had asked me for feedback. Names have been abbreviated. I have no idea how much this helped or did not help in the company, but I see similar issues in almost all companies. Its kind of weird how these issues exist time and time again.

    Hi Mxx,

    These are my thoughts based on what I perceive in EP and also in FSS. Most of it is my opinion (mostly as an outsider - as there are things about which I would not even know by now!)

    First the EP groups as such.

    The EP project is quite big. In fact , my previous company was almost half its size - to put things in perspective! To think about things for EP, I just thought what I would be doing if I had to ever lead such a big group.

    So, in my opinion I would say the project has to be run as a company within the company - with a different set of rules than other projects. Things which apply to a group of 10-20 people cannot be extrapolated to something as big as 200 people. Its like the difference between driving a maruti 800 and a F1 car!

    So there should be a full time support staff. This means that the following roles would have people dedicated 100% to EP ( if something like this exists, then I am not aware of it ) :
    - HR ( 1 person from HR only for EP - who takes care of new recruits, inductions, change of group from other groups).
    - Admin ( 1 person for the admin needs , and seating arrangements ).
    - IT ( 1 or 2 people who look after the computer installations, licensing, new computer setup, virus etc)

    The above information should be available easily - probably as part of induction or an intranet.

    The other issues I see are two folds :
    1. Communication , and,
    2. Duplication.

    1. Communication:
    -----------------
    There is a big communication gap even within teams. Take the instance of DSP. Its a big team ( 20+ people) and they are spread around on 3 floors. It took me 2+ weeks to meet everyone. And then almost a month to find out where the people are. Anything that needs to be circulated in the team has to be either through email ( Lotus Notes is *not* a good email client - opensource stuff like Thunderbird are much better ) or through team meetings.

    Team meetings cannot be called every other day, so any communication has to wait till the week day when most teams have their meetings. Emails get lost as there is a quota limit, and also cause there is no filtering/tagging mechanism in LN. Now when free email like gmail is 2.5GB and with a huge number of features it is ridiculous for a company like FSS to still cling on to some archaic tool and space limits. Quite a lot of work can be done faster if people of the same team sit together. It will be easy for managers to get updates, for developers to find answer to queries - and also leads to team building.

    So, I would suggest an immediate seating plan to go in place to get people of the same team together. Another helpful tool would be a big whiteboard for each team - which can be used by the team to discuss something, or for keeping the approaching dates up for easy reference (whatever a team wants). Having boards in rooms does not help - you cannot keep things up there indefinitely.

    Another communication problem is what came out with the IRMA guidelines. No one was paying any attention cause it is not easily available. All these guidelines are either being sent through email , or being put into the EP file server ( where the hierarchy is not easy to see). Such things since being project wide would make more sense to be in one place and easily accessible. The best option here I see is having an intranet for EP. Guidelines/ howtos / rampup / software list / lab lists / etc can easily go here as webpages - which allow people to see the situation from anywhere.

    Another disconnect I felt was that there is no ramp up plans in place. When I joined ( and I guess K is also going through the same kind of problems) there was no ramp up given. Even though we are experienced guys , we cannot work without inputs. And this is leading to an extra long rampup time. I suggest that ramp up plans be put in place which should be in 2 parts 1) A generic rampup on the tech, and about the DDF working. 2) Role specific ramp-up (tech lead/ architect/ management level). These things have not been thought of and there are no such things in place now - which leads to neglecting the rampup cause everyone is so busy - which leads to people working less efficiently - and hence people become more busy ... etc.

    Another thing missing is the visibility of the roles of upper management to the developers. A person recently promoted was given a card from A.J. , and asked me later who was AJ cause he had no idea why the congrats came from him. I suggest that the intranet also have a profiles section for the people in charge so people who don't know will still be able to find out.

    There also seems to be no process in place for induction of a new person in the team. Cubicle space, workstation procurement , setting up of software - no plan exists for this. I had to sit without a comp for 3 days, and the comp was only operational after 1 week ! I was thinking this was slow - but with new people joining the group i see that the wait time is more than 1 week ! Time wastage.

    2. Duplication
    --------------
    Duplication of activities I feel is a critical time killer. Almost everything has to be done 2 times.

    Take the case of effort updation. It has to be updated in MPP on a task basis *and* in Timesheets on a totally different basis. EP ( and FSS probably ) needs a convergence of these things. The Time sheet application is very old - and people only fill it in cause salaries are tied to it. I find it utterly unbelievable that a tech company is tech starved. How else could it be that in a time of AJAX and upcoming W3C specs employees are still forced to use a browser ( netscape 4.5 ) from yesteryear. I have also found instances of places in A where a pop up comes that you *have* to use IE for accessing certain things. Bad design ! People should be developing to the specs not the application.

    And since MPP access is not to the developers, the managers need to indicate the tasklines using something else. So, for the managers its mpp for management meetings and xls or scraps of paper for developer meetings.

    Another place of duplication is the passwords. I have 4 FSS passwords ( desktop login, email, timesheet, ESS ) and a few more from Nokia ( PI access, Webmail, webpronto). No convergence at all. Why can't i automatically have the same login/password at least on a FSS level if not on a client level ? It not an impossible task - WIPRO is a good example of it. Everything is authenticated based on the Active Directory password. It just takes some will to change the existing system. But most people have gotten so used to it that they are not willing to change :(

    Another issue of duplication is the document updates - have to be done in both DOORs and in PI.

    An underlying thread that I find in all the duplication that I theorize is that initially some tool was being used - which was found lacking in some aspect. So, people started looking for a new tool, and *added* that. I think that is a typical knee jerk reaction. What should have been done for any new tool is to see how it can replace some other tool - and only if there is an efficiency benefit (not just a feature benefit) it should be taken up.

    I don't know if something can be done for the above issues - people are so busy that they don't have time to think. But whatever happens, don't add something if it is not replacing something first.

    I think that the work is still holding up because you have some very very hardworking people. They put in the extra efforts and keep pulling things together - but there is a limit to that too.

    You have also asked me for inputs on team members and FSS in general.

    Team members in EP
    -----------------------
    - Very hard working people. But not many bright people. People know how to work hard, but not smart ( typical managerial dribble - but I think you will know what I mean).

    - People don't know the upper management or their roles. Mxx is known as the big guy, but not many people ( specially the juniors) know your role. Ditto for V, S, A.J..

    I don't know if it will be politically correct for making comments on people specifically, but since this is going to be confidential, I have a few observations :

    - Recently promoted people : People have been promoted to higher tech/managerial roles. I think that they are not really ready for it - and have been promoted as a way to keep people in the company. They need grooming. Especially the managers. The senior management needs to keep a constant grooming going on. Also, the promotions seem to have gone into a few people's head and they think greatly of themselves. It becomes difficult to work with these people as they are unhelpfull - and wanted to be treated extra nice ( maybe its my problem as I cannot sweet talk much).

    - I think P needs to be assertive. Most of the meetings turn out to be quite a fish market cause things are not kept on track. And assertiveness does not mean being assertive on deadlines. I think P is trying to pacify everyone - but the problem is not everyone gets pacified. Here I would like to state that since I don't know many of the reasons for the decisions, maybe I am perceiving something which is not there.

    - Another comment that I have often heard is that the management bends over backwards to keep the N people happy.

    - N people complain that they are kept in the dark. Its not about sharing of plans etc - what they say is that they are not told the actual reality, and it is being masked under a smile and "everything is going fine" - while they being here know that things are not ok. I think that the main problem comes from the fact that we still treat the N people as not part of the team , and only as an irritant. If they are treated as part of the team then only will we be more open to them. Currently I am seeing an erosion in trust.

    - No overall Architect : When there is contention between the teams , there is no one who has overall knowledge. R comes pretty close to it - but he is too overloaded.

    - Which brings me to the overloading of R. I think something should be done to make other people take up ownership - as R has the habit of taking everything upon himself.

    General FSS
    -----------
    The general impression is that FSS is not a fun place to work in. Also it is not the best paymaster ( this is from a non-newbie perceptive - freshers are just glad that they get a job anywhere). I will not talk about salaries - you know more about it than me :-)

    The fun factor is missing from the work spaces. Its not about having an annual gala event where people blow up money. Its about peer comparisons. Nothing seems to be happening here which people can identify with as a sense of achievement. Also the impression about N projects is the huge "process" that is being followed - and people from non-N projects don't want to move in , or have sympathetic comments for those who are.

    Even if something like EP gets done on time - and that is taken as an achievement ( as it will inevitably be ), most people will just chit-chat over chai/coffee that management had pushed everyone tooo much for the completion, and the project was a very lousy place to work in. Catch 22. Image drop.

    With a negative image - you will never get smart people in.

    Processes . Hmm... Everyone has a personal grouse against processes it seems. I think its because people don't know what they are for. My way of thinking is that processes are important cause they facilitate things. But here I feel that processes are done for process sake. And almost too often it is tied with the actual implementation.

    What I mean is that supposing a project is to be undertaken. The Process( CMMi etc) talks about the things which need to be done. As a CMMi Lev 5 company all the projects need to comply with this. But what happens is that the implementation ( use MPP, don't use html , etc) is taken as the process. This has lead to processes which are not really useful. If the process talks about finding defect density and tracking it, it does not specify that you can only use one tool - which is the case here. So, if something more efficient comes by , it wont be taken up. Similarly for IT processes. It should specify support for the IT infrastructure, not just which softwares to support. If a requirement comes for a new software, the IT should be able to support it , not say that the policy is not to support. There is a lot of negativism here.

    Most people perceive quality as something which has to be done - not something which is a control mechanism. If a defect density is supposed to be 4 per ksloc, people get confused and think that they have to get that magical figure. Quality is not a much understood topic. Also, I am not too sure how much data was/is being fudged to get good quality figures. People fear RCA.

    Other issues that I have personally ( this is totally an individual thing) is slow network access, blocked sites, blocked messenger services, no CD rom drives. Basically gives the feel that the company does not trust any of the employees. Seems strange that a company which talks about end to end communications is blocking communications inside it (it is probably a huges hangover).

    Well, the mail turned out to be more that I had thought I would write. Its a mind dump.

    regards,
    Vibhu..

    May 4, 2017

    Recovering from Black Screens in Linux

    Windows gives you BSOD ( Blue Screen of Death)

    It seems Linux gives you Black Screens. It is not crashing, but sometimes, you end up landing in such a state that all you get is a black screen and there is not much you can do about it.

    Recently I got into such a situation. This is related to the NVIDIA drivers for Linux, but maybe you got it for some other situation.

    In my case, I was fiddling around with the graphics card setting. The MIS GL62 laptop has lousy battery life - hardly lasts 2 hours. So, I was trying to figure out how to reduce the battery drain when not doing something graphics intensive. There is a mode in Nvidia called Prime which allows you to switch between Nvidia and Intel graphics, and I changed that to Intel - and viola ... the problem. 

    The problem:
    The problem is that sometimes the graphics drivers mess up badly that there is no display. The ctrl+tab+1 trick does not work - you do not end up getting the terminal to fix it.

    So, what can you do in this case ? There is not fallback ! Or is there.

    This requires a bit of jugglery. I will list out what I did in my case - you may need to do something different in Step 3.

    Step 1: Get the boot menu 

    Now, my laptop has only Linux in it. So, unlike my deskstop where I dual-boot I do not get a grub prompt for choosing which OS I want to boot into. As such , it just directly starts the Linux boot process and hangs up.

    So, to get the Boot menu, you need to press the ESC key or Shift . I do not know exactly which ones, so I mashed both the keys.


    Step 2: Get into recovery root shell.

    Now, that you have the menu, use the down arrow to get to recovery option. Click that and you get another set of actions - go to the root .



    Step 3: Fix the problem ( or make an attempt at it) 

    Ok. Easier said than done. I tried a variety of stuff but ultimately I had to remove the Nvidia driver to get the X server to work. You need to remove all settings for which you use the purge option for apt ( debian systems ) to remove the driver. e.g. In my case:

    sudo apt-get purge nvidia*

    Now, reboot and the X server will pick up the default configuration, using the inbuilt drivers which support the Intel graphics chipset and boot you into the windows manager.

    Once you can boot in, you can now reinstall the graphics drivers and continue your work.

    Phew ! 

    Feb 10, 2017

    [Linux] Printer is Paused

    Today got a weird problem with my HP printer. It would say that the Printer is paused.

    After searching a bit found out that this is because the printer driver (cups) gets paused due to any printer error. In my case it was due to the paper jam.

    The solution is quite simple.

    1. Go to http://localhost:631/

    This will open the cups maintenance page. If a password is asked, give your login password which has root rights.

      

    2. Click on printers tab.  You will see your printer listed and in paused state.

     3. Click on the printer and go to the dropdown for 'Maintenance' and click on 'resume'.


    4. You will see the following kind of screen and when you click on printer again, you will see that status has changed from 'paused' to 'idle'.