Author: akshay

Each day passing, I am turning more and more a feminist. Although I abhor extremism in feminism (I do not think calling every action of a man “sexist” is the right way to achieve gender equality), I cannot overstate the importance of visualizing the routine, systematized discrimination against women based on their gender alone.

In this address to the UN as its woman ambassador, Emma Watson says how it is important for men to be participating in women empowerment programs. By alienating men from gender equality programs, we are just increasing the gender gap. Read more at HeForShe.org

Yet, that is what some feminists do – give no respect to men, attack them on whatever they do or say.

Read about the dongle joke that spiralled way out of control. 

But all these are issues of fine adjustment. There are coarse course corrections to be made in countries like India.

“India’s Daughter” is a documentary that was released today by BBC. And it shows how vulgar the mindset of many Indians are. If you watch that documentary, you get avulsed not by the guilty defending himself, but by the lawyers of the rapists trying to define the role of women in society.

And to ban that outright is worse, from the Government of India. Anyhow, I have a few mirrors at learnlearn.in/indias-daughter/#mirrors

I’ve found myself guilty of (unconsciously at times) discriminating against my female friends many times in the past. Every time it is discovered, I try to never repeat the mistake. Yet, there is so much to unlearn that I still commit new mistakes. Anyhow, I am a feminist. I know that manhood and womanhood are just two colours of human beings.

Morality is a dilemma for many – “What is right for me is not necessarily right for you. Am I right in forcing you to see things my way?”

Christopher Hitchens and Shashi Tharoor debate for over an hour in the above video about which is more important – “freedom of speech” or “not hurting others’ sentiments”.

The dilemma is that if we concede to Tharoor’s argument and censor ourselves in whatever we say we will turn into a gun without bullet, and on the other hand if we follow what Hitchens says, to speak our mind out without worrying about the consequences, we will all turn into guns shooting each other.

After thinking about this issue for weeks, literally, I have come up with a middle ground.

First I’ll explain why it is necessary.

We should do what we feel is right because otherwise we are doing it wrong. It is mean on our part to see “wrong” and not react. Do not conform to majority opinion, or minority opinion, or anyone’s opinion because they could all be wrong. We do not know the absolute truth, or the absolute right. But what we do know is our “rights” and our “truths”. Be courageous to put it forth.

Now I am sure some of the readers will take it down the slippery slope and say that this argument favours terrorism – what they feel is right, they do. But I have not finished my point. Keep reading.

But what if I am not sure what is right? In such a situation just listen to all sides and form an informed opinion which you are ready to change if proved wrong later. It is fine to change your opinion. You could support someone and later oppose them if it turned out you were wrong, or vice versa. You could support an ideology and later oppose it if that is better in the light of new knowledge.

Okay, I know what is “right”. But am I right in forcing others into my “right”? They have their right to have their “right”, right?
True that. This is where terrorists are wrong. While asserting their right they are taking away the others’ right to live, learn, etc. We can do what we feel is right as long as we don’t deny others their rights.

Is that the ground-breaking middle ground insight that I promised? No. We have all heard “Your freedom ends where my nose begins”. But what we have not heard is how to swing our hands in such a way that it almost reaches the opponent’s nose and scares them, but does not touch their nose and cause harm.

It is this line that we must aim at. A war in which both parties shoot, but not at each other. Where do they shoot then?

They shoot into the consciousness of the society. I can explain.

You know that ethyl alcohol is a harmful substance. When you see a lot of people drinking it, you feel like the government should ban it. But by banning drinking – even when a person is not a government servant, not responsible for anything, or is a dead waste in the world – you’re essentially shooting at the alcoholics and denying their right to drink whatever poison they want to (Note: Of course there’s a question about suicide being legal or not). There is an alternate way. Though it is more difficult and long, it puts you in a moral ease. And that way is to shoot your argument at the masses and convince them collectively that alcohol is a harmful substance. Like what Dr Dharav Shah does.

You know that Bollywood/Tollywood/Kollywood/Sandalwood movies are produced by perverts who want to make money by tickling our dicks. You know that actors and actresses are selling their bodies off under the pretext of “doing it for the script”, “what the character demands”, and you feel the society is being exploited. But you shall not ask the government to ban these movies. You shall not tear the posters and make filming impossible. What you can do without consciousness prick is criticize them vehemently, call them what they are – hypocrites, expose their lies, and raise the society’s awareness about how they are being exploited.

Still not sure you are right enough to do such good things for the society? Think of this. Collectively our society thinks very less. Its opinions are heavily shaped by the mainstream media and easily biased by glamour and money.

It is a place which cannot understand sarcasm, takes words by the face value, and listens to celebrities (politicians and actors) – whatever shit they say.

It is a place where emotion rules over logic, and superfluous thoughts and ideas triumph over deep, far-sighted visions on any day.

And if you read so far be assured your “rights” and “wrongs” are better than those of 95% of this society.

Mozilla is asking all of us to throw parties all over the world from July 15 to September 15. Webmakers all over the world are responding by hosting “Maker Parties” wherever they can.

I did one too.

This is a report for the sake of other webmakers.

To begin with there was me. I have been getting a lot interested in the web ever since the Firefox 29 launch party in Bangalore a few months ago. Also, I was learning web developer’s power tools like yeoman after getting stuck with optimization of saMMsCRIthi ’14 website.

And there was Swathi. The moment she heard about maker party she was excited and wanted to host one at her home. Since she had WiFi all we wanted was some participants.

After postponing the event twice about 10 people were all set to attend on August 31, Sunday. I registered the event only two days before the party. And therefore there was no point asking Mozilla for some stickers or banners. So Swathi took colour prints of the webmaker logo, firefox logo, etc and made some awesome goodies on her own!

The awesome self-made goodies by Swathi. Note that the maker party stickers on the left had double sided sticky tape behind it so that they could be stick-ed anywhere.

Since our event was from 12 noon to 7 in the night, Swathi also had to take care of lunch. Thanks to her awesome mom for the nice food!

I’d remixed a teaching kit and made this kit
for a small maker party. But it was very boring what I came up with.
So, most of the activities were planned an hour before they happened.

I reached the venue at 10 am, well in advance to make sure everything would work fine, but that wasn’t necessary because the host had taken care of it all. All I had to do was get the WiFi password and make sure it was connectable. 10-12 I made a small webpage for the event which was useful in demonstration of some activities too.

Luckily not all 12 of the people who wanted to come did come. Therefore everyone could sit in 2 couches + 3 chairs in one room.

See how cramped everyone was. But that made working together easy.

Around 1 we started with the IP by hand activity. I believe that people should understand the chain of events that happen whenever they do anything, and if they do they can easily understand everything else surrounding it. So the participants assumed the roles of browser, router, ISP, DNS, internet backbone, server, and domain name registrar. And then we sent IP like requests with originating address, to address, etc in a piece of paper.

Immediately after that I could explain how the router works, how our 6 computers were connected to each other even if we removed the wire connection from Airtel. We went to 192.168.1.1 and learned how to configure the router. Then we went to 192.168.1.2 where I had the local version of the event webpage running and I explained how a server works. We pinged each other on the local network, we pinged google and was surprised at how different people got different IP addresses to ping (although we were all connected via the same internet connection). I explained the various load balancing issues involved.

After that we started learning browser shortcuts. This could have been planned better with some competitive activity between teams. Instead we were just opening new tab, closing that, searching google, etc without using the mouse.

An ultra-small quiz was held when we were all on India wiki. I would ask a question based on some sentence in the page like “Who ruled Gangetic plains from 606 to 647 CE?” and the teams would ctrl+f to find the answer.

Then we had lunch.

All plates were clean when we were done

Following lunch I talked about domian name, URL structure, https connection, certificate. And the importance of making sure these are proper when we’re banking or shopping.

Then we solved 3 privacy challenges. There could have been more challenges using the myriad privacy settings in facebook to hide things from people.

Then I gave a small intro to all the tools available in google using the more -> even more page. We started typing on a Google doc, all of us at the same time.

Then we used google search tricks, to uncover secrets about the participants and people we hate. We would use queries like:

• “name of person”
• name of person site:rguhs.ac.in
• “name of person” +mysore

Since most government details are put online (without any consideration of privacy) we could easily find some interesting stuff.

To introduce the need for HTML I asked everyone to draw a small webpage for themselves in a piece of paper. They made nice shining pages. Then I asked them to reproduce what they did in notepad. Everyone would get stuck at line 1, because there’s no center align in notepad. Once stuck, I introduced thimble, and the need for mark up. With the concept in their head, all I had to tell them were “h1”, “p”, “a href=””, etc , and they soon started asking me the tag for inserting images, the attribute to restrict image size, etc. And they made these. I missed telling them to tag the makes and now it is difficult to find the beautiful makes.

To wrap things I spoke about Mozilla and the open web.

That web which makes you read this. Without which life would have been much more difficult. Which is consistently denied to many people in certain parts of the world. Which is under-utilized in most places sheerly due to ignorance. Which is scary for some, which is the only way to communicate for some. Which is the one biggest reason the world feels so small.

Mozilla is all set to sell Firefox OS smartphones that costs $25 (~₹1500) in India.

Who is Mozilla?
Mozilla is to Internet what WHO is to world’s health.

Mozilla is a community of “Mozillians” from all over the globe with a common mission – to build a better internet.

Most of us know Mozilla as the non-profit organization behind the mighty web browser – Firefox. But Firefox is just a small part of what Mozilla does. Mozilla plays an active role in promoting the openness of web, bringing down disparity and bridging the digital divide, and empowering citizens all over the world for innovation.

They do this through building products that transform the way we interact with the web, through educating the world about the web, and by influencing policy making in matters related to the web.

A screenshot of the mozilla.org homepage

What is Firefox OS?
Firefox OS is an operating system for your mobile device, an alternative to Android, iOS, Windows, etc.

It is built using the same set of tools that is used to build the web – HTML5 and other open web standards. This makes it easier for people to develop applications for Firefox OS. In fact, any website on the web can become an app on Firefox OS – because they are built using the same tools.

What this means for the end user is that there will be a lot of apps – a lot of apps – that runs on Firefox OS.

How is it different from Android, iOS, etc?
There are differences at multiple levels.

Everything in Firefox OS is a web app. In fact the entire user interface of Firefox OS is a web app. The camera app is a web app. The dialler app is a web app. These are all written in HTML5, css, and javascript, like the websites are written.
In other operating systems, you write apps in different languages, like java, C#, etc. And this brings on the additional complexity of having to know those languages.

Firefox OS needs very little resources. It runs on very low-end phones. The minimum hardware specs required are low, and the cost of devices in turn becomes low.

But the most important unique feature of Firefox OS is that it is adaptive!

3 screenshots of a Firefox OS phone showing how it is adaptive

When you search for soccer, you get all the apps from all over the web related to soccer, and so on.

Cool! Where do I buy a Firefox OS device?
Like all other phones, you buy Firefox OS phones from shops! 😀

Update:
So, do I need an internet connection always on to run Firefox OS?
No! Actually, there are two kinds of apps in firefox – hosted app, and packaged app.

Packaged apps (like dialler, sms, cut the rope game) work offline (though they can connect to the web if needed). All the resources they need are already downloaded when you download the app initially (or when you buy your phone, in case of default apps).

Hosted apps (like facebook), are hosted at their own websites. Hosted apps are usually used only when the content that is shown in the app is regularly changed online (think of news, social networks, etc).

For all practical purposes, Firefox OS needs internet connection only in the cases the other platforms (android, iOS, etc) need internet – to update the system, to install new apps, to browse the web.

Ubuntu comes with Bash as its default “shell”. So, when you’re running `gnome-terminal` (the default terminal emulator) it actually sends the commands to ‘/bin/bash’ which interprets your command and displays output.

What is the difference between shell, console, and terminal?

Zsh is an improvement on bash. It adds more functionality, and better ways of doing things.

Bash vs Zsh | /r/linux

Image from Oh My Zsh

Switching to zsh is a “do once, be grateful for ever” task thanks to Oh My Zsh.

As explained on Getting started with ZSH on Ubuntu (for technotards), you need to first install zsh.

sudo apt-get install zsh 

Then you can install Oh My Zsh

curl -L http://install.ohmyz.sh | sh

Change Shell
At the end of the Oh My Zsh installation script, there’s a command to change the default shell to zsh (from bash, or any previous shell). But this might fail by not asking for a password. In case this happens, do this manually.

chsh -s `which zsh`

Important: Changing shell needs you log out and log in to take effect.

Configure
Zsh has a lot of configurations, and Oh My Zsh does these for us. Now you can configure Oh My Zsh!

Enable plugins
In .zshrc, change

plugins=(git)

to, say

plugins=(git common-aliases autojump python sudo)

With common-aliases, you can do `vim .zshrc` by `zshrc`.

Themes
Oh My Zsh comes with 137 themes. Set a random theme to load at startup by changing in .zshrc

ZSH_THEME=”random”

Override plugins (optional)
The common-aliases plugin has “j” alias for jobs. Autojump uses “j” to jump directories. To resolve conflicts like these, just make your own custom version of the conflicting plugin. Like I copied ‘~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/common-aliases’ to ‘~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/common-aliases’ and edited the ‘common-aliases.plugin.zsh’ in that to comment out the “alias j=’jobs’”

Migrate .bashrc and .bash_aliases (optional)
If you had custom settings in ‘~/.bashrc’ or ‘~/.bash_aliases’ that you want to copy over, you can copy them to ‘~/.zshrc’

Alternately, you can create an Oh My Zsh plugin of your own by creating a *.plugin.zsh file in custom/plugins directory.

Enjoy (required)
Open a new terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T), and see a fresh terminal