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Notice: after planning it for years, I moved this blog out of blogger/blogspot (which google has abandoned long ago) to wordpress on a fine evening in Dec 2024. This notice will stay here to warn that things might be broken. Let me know if you find anything.

  • Does Healthcare Need Technology or Policy or Passionate People or all of these?

    At HackIndia 2015 in Bangalore which I’d attended during the last 7 hours of 18th July as part of the Mozilla team, I had met three young doctors roaming around from booth to booth. One of them, incidentally, is living in Mysore and I had a meetup with him (S) and his sister (V) at our favorite Kukralli yesterday.

    We were brought together by the feeling that there are problems in health care and that there could be technological solutions to at least some of them.

    Here’s what’s a very rough (rearranged, rephrased, corrected) transcript of some interesting parts of our long conversation around the lake.

    A (me, final year): I was attending a world ORS day program today in my college. And that’s when I thought that we should be having small apps/websites for smartphones, localized to local languages, to help people know about simple things like ORS.

    S (intern, off duty): I was going through some health-tech startups. I think there should be applications that let patients know what to do in every situation – like in an emergency – they must know which hospital to go to, where the facilities are available to treat their kind of disease, and which doctor treats what. I saw this app which lets patients rate doctors according to how good they were during consultations.

    V (OBG PG): I think rating doctors is a bad idea. It puts a lot of pressure on the doctors.

    S: So you were talking about Mozilla Science Lab at HackIndia. What is Mozilla Science Lab? Is Mozilla turning into health?

    A: Mozilla Science Lab is a Mozilla project that brings together researchers, librarians, publishers and developers so that they can publish their work online using the power of the Web and not fall prey to the money hungry publishers that exist today. In India, IITs and IISc are in various stages of such participation in the web.

    S: There’s this online portal where they publish their lectures – NPTEL.

    A: Yeah, I’ve signed up for some 4 courses 😀

    S: You were also talking something about free software, open data in health care?

    A: Yeah, let’s begin with free software. I guess you’re familiar with it, it’s the concept that software should be free. There’s this free software foundation which has supported the GNU project. They’ve defined the 4 essential freedoms for a software to be free. Those are:

    1. Freedom to use the software
    2. Freedom to modify the software (by modifying the source code)
    3. Freedom to redistribute the software
    4. Freedom to distribute the modifications of the software

    These freedoms ensure that a software is actually useful for improving mankind. This is especially useful in government set-ups where the funding is already low, so we have to make maximum use of the money we have. And free software helps in that too. Also, when & if there are specific requirements for customization it is easier & cheaper with free software. And, these solutions can be used in other cities, states too without much cost in scaling.

    Then there is open document formats. Health care can be expected to generate a lot of data in the near future. We should be worrying about what file format these data is saved in. We wouldn’t want them to be saved in a proprietary format which might not be interoperable. That would make any kind of meta-analysis, or other collaborative use of such data difficult or impossible.

    Then there’s this government policy on open data. Instead of filing RTI for access to key data from various government departments, they’re expected to proactively publish various data they collect into the public domain in accessible formats. This is a policy (that is not legally enforcable) and therefore is suffering from lack of attention from various departments. Yet there’s this open data portal at data.gov.in which gives various kinds of useful data in formats that developers can directly tap to create apps or the like.

    In fact, health departments should be very active in collecting and publishing such data because that can automatically lead to very good research. And our ways currently are leading to the destruction of data that is already collected – for example, as discovered through an RTI campaign by NS Prashanth and friends although our death certificates are detailed with income, caste, cause of death, etc, this data is not properly collected and aggregated and therefore many states and districts of India cannot say differential counts for the various causes of death in their area.

    S: Hmm. On another note, I remember this teleradiology platform in which doctors can submit radiology images and then get opinion from a global network. And they are expanding that to other departments like pathology and medicine.

    A: One of my friends was talking about this Canadian team called health-e-net which does something similar – a global network of doctors whom patients can get second opinions from without going far from their home.

    S: Also at hackindia there was this 3D printing work by Fracktal Works. They were talking about developing cheap slit lamps for ophthalmology departments using 3D printing technology by reimagining the hardware design.

    A: Yeah, medical equipments are so expensive that I think anyone who can become a medical equipment manufacturer can make so much money. I bought a peak flow meter for one of my studies. It costed ₹500 and it was just plastic, like a kid’s toy. I guess they can make more money than even drug manufacturers because they don’t even have to spend anything for R&D.

    S: No, even drug manufacturing is cheap these days because of the various ways patent laws are. There’s something called process patent as opposed to product patent. So, if a process is patented, new companies can modify a small step in that process and create a different process which is not patented. Thus they’ll be able to manufacture drugs cheaply.

    A: Ah, that reminds me of Gleevec and Novaris being turned down by the Supreme court upholding India’s stance on how patents should be. Usually pharmaceutical companies, when the patent period on their chemical is over, makes a small change to their drug and gets a new patent. But Indian patent law prevents this. And when challenged in the court Supreme court considered the Indian situation of a lot of people needing drugs and granted in favor of the people. This is one of the things that enables generic drugs to flourish in India. And, Africa’s HIV and other disease control relies in a large manner on India’s generic drug industry.

    And USA under lobbying from these Pharma companies are pressurizing India using international trade laws to prevent production of such generic drugs.

    And Modi government is bringing in too many things. Like the DNA profiling bill with no bothering about issues surrounding it. Then making Aadhaar mandatory across everything even though Supreme Court had asked not to do so and even though there’s no parliamentary sanction, the constitutional validity of which is now being fought over in Supreme Court. India is slowly being turned into a surveillance state.

    S: But it’s difficult to influence the government decisions, isn’t it?

    A: Yes, that’s why we need to organzie. Organizations are powerful. For example, the savetheinternet campaign. When a few people came together, everything started falling in place and soon a large majority got convinced of the importance of net neutrality. Convince enough people and we can definitely influence government.

    S: But convincing people is difficult when they don’t have tangible benefits. With net neutrality they could directly see the problem. But that wouldn’t be the case in other issues.

    A: Yes, true. Like it is very difficult to make people understand that zero rating is the same thing as differential pricing. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. After all, we ought to keep trying.

    S: Coming back, we should have patient centric apps. Like Your D.O.S.T emotional support system. The current apps focus on doctors or hospitals, trying to make money. There are a lot of gaps in health care like doctors not getting enough time to speak to patient. There should be apps that help fill in this space with enough information for the patient.

    V: Doctors don’t have much time for patients at all. There is a lot of workload.

    S: Yes, that’s where these apps can help people. To fill up the gap.

    A: Like medscape or mayoclinic? But probably with localized content?

    S: The target group should be middle class mothers who may or may not be educated. Therefore it should be accessible. Yes, localized content, and even more pictorial content.

    A: Like thai card!

    V: These thai cards, many mothers don’t even open it. There is excellent information about breastfeeding, immunization, etc in that. But they open it only when they are in the doctor’s room for vaccination. There should be more of audio-visual information. In fact, there are a lot of videos created by many organizations. The challenge is in making the mothers watch these.

    A: There should be apps that notifies mothers on mobile phones about immunization and all. Someone else can configure these for them.

    V: There are such apps already. And big hospitals even have the facility of telephone reminders as special packs.

    S: There could be call centres which give information out to patients. They can call these call centres through numbers like 112 and get help.

    A: How would that be sustainable? Who’d pay these people?

    V: You know, even doctors do not know many things. For example, when my friends became pregnant, they’d start googling for what to eat and so on.

    A: In fact, the motto of my website is to improve learning, especially medicine. There are a lot of problems in medical education. We learn a lot but not in creative useful ways. I am still finding out ways to learn medicine. For example, I built a set of open questions in first chapter of ophthalmology textbook. These questions, just by going through them, makes the learner learn a lot of things.

    And there should be more of open educational resources. The Web is still deficient in medical education resources. There are some videos put on youtube by universities, or professors. They are usually accompanied by copyright notices. This shouldn’t be happening. We need remixable, open educational resources that are licensed in permissive ways.

    And there sholud be creative ways of learning. It shouldn’t just be text. We do have creative things like virtual body, etc coming. But these shouldn’t be restricted to just demo apps. Medicine is so voluminous, there shouldn’t be some interactive thing for every topic.

    V: There’s Dr Virkud. He records procedures, clinics, etc adds audio and uploads them on Youtube. But not all professors are cool like him.  For example, downloading slides from slideshare and using them for presentations is frowned upon by professors.

    A: Exactly! I see surgeries from YouTube and that makes professors angry. But they can’t be blamed for these. They should first be made aware of these alternate things – open learning, free software, etc. Once they realize how great they are, they can switch their mindset easily and this is probably a more solid strategy than students switching sides first.

    V: Another thing, these techies research everything on the Internet, including diagnosis and treatment before coming to a doctor. But they’re only like 5% of population. The rest and the vast majority of patients are looking for an emotional touch from hospitals. They care more about care than about technology or luxury.

    Also, if I am not a good communicator, why should I be communicating with patients. Why should I repeat the same advice to every pregnant women? If I’m good at clinical things, I should be left to do that. Counseling, follow-up, treating, paper work, everything shouldn’t be on doctors. Why can’t we recruit more staff for giving patients advice, talking to them etc rather than spending on luxury? Medicine should be a team work.

    S: But I think luxury is important. There are some people who can afford to pay for it. And this can bring in much needed money which can be used to cross-subsidize for poor patients.

    V: Even if people can afford luxury, care is more important for most people. For example, there are RMPs in AP.  They have won patients’ trust by being with them and giving emotional touch. And they bring the patients to the hospitals from where they get commissions. They are called kickbacks.

    A: I guess these are all policy issues that need to be solved by bringing in policy changes. There probably are organizations working for health policy changes? I can remember save the doctor campaign (or the patient?). There should be more campaigns for all these issues.

    S: The problem is that medical student corpus is largely apolitical. A lot of students aren’t even aware of issues.

    V: We had a small organization in AP. AP’s medical education is a mess. Students don’t even know how to take case. Our idea was to increase the feeling of social responsibility in students and make them more political. But in our meetings, they ended up asking questions about how to learn pathology, what to do after MBBS, etc. Even active members lost interest a while later because of peer pressure. How can we expect huge campaigns in such situations?

    A: Hmm. Let’s just keep in touch for now and motivate each other to keep going. We won’t waste time in organizing.

    And then we split ways. If you’re interested in joining our small group, let me know.

  • [jog-journal] Natural Selection in Dogs and FOSS Contributors

    The usual pack of stray dogs were serenely looking at the morning walkers in front of oval ground – not moving unless the wheel of an oncoming car is directed at the ground under their rib cages. One of them suddenly started jumping with joy as it saw an old man and ran towards him. “Did you think I have biscuit?”, said the old man petting it.

    Why do dogs love humans so much? Maybe during our evolution, we humans gave environmental pressure for the selection of loyal dogs only. Maybe cats evolved on their own and maybe that’s why they don’t care about humans.

    I think contributors to FOSS also undergo such a selection, unknowingly.

    People who end up being contributors to FOSS are the people who ask questions and answer them themselves.

    Most FOSS projects are written as dogfeed to solve the author’s specific problem. It is only an after-thought that makes it a public library. Therefore, things would be done in ways that are less than intuitive. Configuration would be a mess, and the only documentation would be the few comments that’re dispersed in the source code.

    With projects being so beginner unfriendly, how do newcomers start contributing to FOSS? Or, what kind of newcomers start contributing? Only those who are genuinely curious, who’re willing to learn by themselves, and who are more comfortable finding answers online than asking people questions.

    This could explain why sometimes FOSS contributors are the worst people to take help from to get started with contributing to FOSS. They themselves are curious truth seekers who do not like third party answers. They are not acquainted with the process of handholding. And therefore, they appear hostile to the poor newbie who is still learning to ask questions the smart way.

    Today morning I made a presentation for two girls in a college in Kerala whom I met at hackindia to get started with FOSS. I have been trying this pedagogy which puts the emphasis on acquiring those skills which help in auto-didactism.

    And I ran so hard that I felt my eyes would pop out.

  • [jog-journal] Streaks

    Streaks are very important. For today, I’d not have gotten up had it not been for the streak. Yes, the 2 day streak is the most difficult.

    And not just that. I didn’t even think while running today. I was testing the efficiency of my method to achieve runner’s high. And it is pretty much efficient, for me at least. I ran faster and longer, today. But being unable to think is a side effect of running faster.

    And while talking about streaks, I’m on a three day streak in learning French using Duolingo, today. I started my streak again because of my friend, who’s on a streak too and catching up with me.

    Looking at duolingo, social pressure and streak pressure must be the two things that makes one learn continuously.

    On the way back I saw them playing Tennis at the courts opposite cosmopolitan club. That’s when I remembered my failed attempts to learn Tennis and play like Federer.

    Talking about Federer, I had once read that forehand was his great weakness once upon a time. But gradually, he turned it into his greatest strength. What is my greatest weakness?

  • [jog-journal] Is Runner’s High Just an Energy?

    Ever since finishing VJ James’ Nireeswaran yesterday, I can’t get rid of the idea that every thing in the universe is just energy. Our body is made up of molecules of various kind. But inside, they’re just subatomic particles in different configurations. And protons and electrons and neutrons apparently have this wave-particle state. Everything is energy. So, the only question we have to ponder upon is “What is energy?”

    The huge pipe laying work in Kukralli is still underway. But good people have kept the jogging trail untouched, as of now.

    By the end of today’s run, I realized that sprint interval training has indeed made one change in me. I can’t run slow anymore. I can’t jog. I have to run. If I try to slow down to someone’s speed, I feel restrained, and soon, tired. Probably the stride length is longer now. Even chi-running has become impossible. I feel impatient at slow speeds.
     
    And if you are unable to attain runner’s high soon enough or at all, there’s a simple trick to achieve pseudo-runner’s high – just look at the trees, or the sky, or anything that doesn’t move with you.

    A day’s run has been perfect if you feel a sense of peace and happiness flowing out from the middle of your chest.

    On the way back I saw this Ola cab. Makes me wonder, how much would it cost to start driving one, and can it be a good part-time job? Imagine all those part time auto driving fuelled self-funded IIT education stories. The auto-rickshaws would be replaced by Ola and Uber cabs in the very near future.

  • Beautifying GNOME with Paper theme (Material design)

    Last night while I was searching for alternative window managers I discovered this wonderful GNOME Shell theme called “Paper”. After installing it, I’m enjoying looking at my computer screen.

    Here’re some screenshots.

    Applications Overview. Look at the menu menu on the top right.

    Nautilus with folder icons

    Tweak tool showing the wonderful checkboxes and the settings I had to change to achieve the theme

    Turning Global Dark theme on was a welcome addition to the Paper theme. Read about setting up GNOME with paper theme on my website.

    Another useful app I installed is Synapse launcher. Ctrl+Space and it gives me access to everything I need.

    With these, somehow, I feel like my computer has gained a few milliseconds in speed.

  • [jog-journal] The mind game

    If you sleep late, you wake up late.
    If you sleep early, you still wake up late.
    That’s why they have invented alarms.

    About one week since I last woke up early enough to go jogging. The body clock is so unreliable. Woke up to my phone’s clock. Two snoozes only.

    Today, my plan was to run the whole round. So I started slow. And quite unexpectedly I had to give up half way round. Therefore, the sprint-interval training I’ve been trying hasn’t worked. Well, it wouldn’t have worked, either. The intervals between sprints were too long. And the intervals between sprint-intervals were too long too 😛

    The idea of long distance running is not to let the heart rate or respiratory rate go above a threshold. Once you’re past that you’re in the sprint mode and you can’t go far. But what I had was pure fatigue. The chest couldn’t hold it. In fact, when I thought of finishing with a sprint in the home stretch, I had acute intercoastal myalgia, one of the differentials of heart attack had it come on the left side. But this one was, as always, on the right.

    On the way to the lake there was an Indian Pariaah which showed cubitus varus. On the way back there was a lost pug looking for its owner.

    Two people asked me the route to Maharaja’s. There was police blocking the entry to DC’s office. Something is happening in Maharaja’s.

    And I met two professors, one colleague today. It’s fun how jogging parks are central to Mysore. Maybe if there was a park in Mattanur, more people would have been jogging.

    I had less thoughts today. That’s good. The ultimate aim of running is to have no thoughts.

    I do not like people who run with earphones, because those keep falling out of my ears. But then I saw this man at the University gate, he had a cooling glass and a huge headphone around his head and it was probably giving him a 3D surround. I hope running with music is a great way to keep running, although I have never experienced it. Have you? Feel free to comment.

  • It’s Based on Science, No Really

    There are two kinds of people in the world – those who understand the meaning of the word “science” and those who don’t. This post is about the latter set of people.

    You know someone has no idea what they are talking about when you hear them say:

    “Numerology is a science”
    Even mathematics isn’t strictly speaking a science.1 And numerology is based on what? Numbers. Where are these numbers coming from? Arbitary things like letters in your name, date of birth, etc. Do the numerologists even acknowledge that there are multiple calendars, multiple languages to write your name in, etc? How can numbers predict future?2

    “Homeopathy is a science”
    It is, if pure water is science. But seriously, the principles of homeopathy are in no way the reason why homeopathy even works for some people. It’s the principle called “placebo” that makes Homeopathy tick. And the difference between correlation and causation is one that these people can’t make.3

    xkcd: Dilution

    “Any kind of alternate medicine is science”
    Read what I just wrote above.

    “Astrology is a science”
    Because planets exert gravitational influence on human babies? Yes, they do exert a force which can easily be calculated by Newton’s laws, but if you follow through, the cars and buses outside the hospital in which your baby is born exert more gravitational force on your baby than the planets outside Earth.

    “Ancient sages had vast amounts of knowledge, they knew most things that modern science is only coming to realize, and we have failed to explore even a fraction their knowledge OR Indians discovered zero and everything else in the universe that is discoverable”
    No. Well, maybe Indians did discover zero before everyone did. You see I call it a discovery because nothingness is a concept that need not be invented. And I’m sure they did figure out the Bodhayana theorem too. But drawings of flying machines is not equivalent to flying. Stories about conception without sex is not equivalent to being able to do stem cell cloning or in vitro fertilization. Observing the binary-ness of a star system is not equivalent to a PhD in astrophysics. And no matter how smart your sages where I bet they wouldn’t have used cellphones to talk to each other. Talking about cell phones,

    “Cellphones causes cancer, kills babies, burns brain cells, and kills baby squirrels”
    No. Simply no. Just because you can think up a plausible theorem it doesn’t become true. Just because one kind of radiation kills people, all types do not. Just because your theory applies to something analogous, it needn’t apply to this.4

    “This world-renowned scientist/professor/doctor/faculty/student of this world-renowned university thinks this is science. So this is science.”
    No, in fact, it is the opposite that is true. This pseudoscience is being approved by those people, and therefore they’re fake.

    “You do not appreciate the science behind these because you are not open-minded. If you think more, you’ll understand”
    No, broad minded you! I have probably thought more than you did about your favorite pseudo-science. I have applied the methods of scientific rigor and realized that it doesn’t hold. And that’s why I vehemently oppose you calling it science. I am willing to put more energy into appreciating it, only if you have something new and logical to contribute.

    It is so kind of you to believe in science and believe in only things that seem scientific. I urge you to grow a bit more and make sure things that seem scientific are scientific. Begin your journey at RationalWiki.

    Footnotes:
    1) Well mathematics is “the queen of all sciences”, and it surely is very important in science. But it is too beautiful and abstract to be called science.
    2) There’s statistics and probability which can predict future with some probabilistic certainty. And of course a huge part of science is entirely based on probability and statistics. But then, you know how it goes.
    3) Of course when it comes to correlation and causation there’s a certain amount of trust we’ve to put on our ability to have avoided all the other confounding factors, but still.
    4) Analogies themselves are useful only to gain clarity in thoughts, not to validate them. Building up from fundamental principles is the right way to validate ideas.

  • Early Preview: telegram-pybot – A Telegram Bot based on Plugins, written in Python

    We have all used and loved Yago’s telegram-bot written in Lua as an extension for Vitaly Valtman’s tg-cli for making funny Telegram bots. But Lua was keeping a lot of people away from making meaningful plugins.

    Alternate approaches included adding a –json flag to vysheng’s tg-cli and parsing that data or building wholly native APIs for Telegram in java or other languages. Liberbot is an excellent example.

    Now, the developers at Datamachine Studios have come up with a Python interface for building bots. I have tested it and it works very well, even at this very early stage.

    Screenshot of the bot listing its plugins on command

    What?
    Spartanly named “telegram-pybot” (for now, hopefully), what these people have created is a wrapper around vysheng’s tg-cli. They did this by patching the cli with Python interfaces and contributing to the upstream (that’s the beauty of free software).

    Why not native Python API?
    Apparently, the developers of telegram-pybot started out making plugins for the Lua bot. Later when they realized they wanted to switch to Python, it was easier to mimic the Lua binding API in Python rather than deal with the whole logic of Telegram (which keeps updating the schemas every now and then too). And many people are trying their hand in developing a pure Python API, should any of them become stable telegram-pybot is in a good space to switch to such a native interface with very little work in the future.

    “It’s kind of a pipe dream of mine to work on a python API, but one thing at a time right now” says Phillip Lopo who’s one of the two main forces behind the bot.

    Python vs Lua
    In my experience, Lua can only be at best called a scripting language, albeit a powerful one, while Python is a power packed, complete programming language. The sheer number of libraries available in Python and the pythonic way of doing things makes development in Python much more easy compared to Lua. Also, threading is a huge weakness in Lua which has mostly been solved in telegram-pybot already.

    Plugins
    The sweetest feature of telegram-pybot is its plugin management system. It is promising even while currently undergoing heavy development. Plugins are organized by repositories. One can search, list, install, update, etc the plugins available in a repository. Soon multiple repositories will be supported so that anyone can maintain their own list of plugins in a repository and others can easily get hold of more plugins, thus also avoiding a single point of failure.

    And the plugins themselves run quite smoothly, and cause no trouble even when they crash. Installing new plugins, restarting the bot, etc can be done over a Telegram chat thereby making them super easy to use (even for a non-developer)

    License
    Licensing bots, especially when they are powered by plugins is a confusing affair (read about the licensing of Yago’s bot). GPL offers no protection to bots that run over the network and therefore if one has to choose a copyleft license, it must be AGPL.

    But the developers of telegram-pybot want to give away as much freedom as possible. “I want people to use it, and I want the option for people to write private plugins for private communities” says Vincent Castellano, the co-developer. So there’s a good chance they will settle for MIT or BSD license when they finish their primary work on the code.

    With all that said, the bot is still in active development, as their readme says:

    “While already very capable, this bot is still in relatively early
    development. Some plugin names, or plugin API calls may be modifed.
    However, we are starting to settle on our stable APIs.”

    But you should check it out already — github.com/datamachine/telegram-pybot

    When I discovered telegram-pybot last night, I was very excited. And I developed a plugin which we’re enjoying in our FSM-K Telegram group. It is so easy to build that I want anyone with a computer to try, and therefore I’ve written a tutorial on my website.

  • [jog-journal] The Idea

    They say an idle mind is devil’s workshop. A jogger’s mind is god’s workshop then.

    I’m waking up at 4 am since I had a sweet dream yesterday.

    Some goons appear outside a hostel. They beat the two securitiy guys up and ask them to go inside, take the mobile phone from every guy sleeping inside, and hand it over to them. The clever securities went inside and woke all the guys up. The guys started coming out one by one and soon the goons fled seeing the crowd.

    When I woke up I had the realization that individually we are all powerless, but if we can wake people up to the reality, we can fend off any enemy.

    That was yesterday. Today I had no dream to wake up with. This thread is going on about licensing of a Telegram based bot. If the license is AGPL, does it protect the bot as we want it to be protected? I’ve sent an email to FSF because the answer isn’t clear from their FAQ either. Then I started making a teaching kit called “Internet elevator pitch for administrators” after wondering how I’d make my college Dean understand the importance of URLs. (My college’s official website is mmcrimysore.org.in. If you’re to visit it, you’ll be redirected to the subdomain of the website of the web developer (I’m ashamed to call that guy by this title). And the guy says the official URL will be used once the website is completed. Poor administration should have believed that.)

    It was 6 o’clock by then and fairly sunlit. And I was having a bit extra energy and so I went jogging to Kukralli kere. There are bulldozers around the entrance laying down huge pipes and I had to jog anti-clockwise today because the other entrance was blocked with soil. I remember reading somewhere that running anti-clockwise is good for the heart, but I wonder if that’s true for large circles (or even small circles). Also, what happens to the previous tar on the road when it is being retarred?

    Halfway through I noticed a woman running with a stooping posture. She didn’t look tired and she was young enough to be not having senile stoop. Do women assume certain positions while jogging to avoid uncomfortable jiggling of their breasts? Can this be avoided by wearing appropriate sports bra? If yes, maybe a bra-salesman can make a fortune at the entrance of Kukralli kere. After all there is already a leafy vegetables/hurbs guy, a glucometer guy, and even water purifier guys there.

    I was in the home stretch by then and I saw an Eagle being carried away by wind. Wind flows from water to land in the day, doesn’t it? That’s why there was wind I guess. And then a blue bird about the size of a small crane with 4 long fingers.

    I should write all this down on my blog! After switching to my website for all serious stuff I have been wondering what I’d do with this blog. Maybe this is the right place to write all these random thoughts. Maybe I should name it “Jog Journals”. Oh! That’d be fantastic. It’d keep me jogging every day because I’ve to write the journal and it’d keep me writing every day in turn.

    Just as I was fancying that idea something happened. I had been jogging regularly in first year. We had a group who’d go jogging and we’d complete the Kukralli round in 20 minutes and be back. But we lost that habit during university examinations. After that the only real reason that made me go jogging was this girl, in my immediate junior batch, who likes running a lot and whom I like a lot because of that. I knew she came to Kukralli every morning but I’d never ran into her despite adjusting my timing frequently. Incidentally right at the end of the round I saw her and she said “hey” and I said “hi”. Ha!

    I have absolutely no doubt that there will be enough interesting things/thoughts every day to fill this series with. Yes, a series, that’s the idea. Keep looking for the tag jog-journal.

  • Mozilla India Task Force Meetup – 2015

    Either of Shreyas or Jafar must have invited me to the Task Force meetup, and I got to be a part of the Mozilla India Task Forces.

    The 2015’s task forces were formed in an event at Bangalore (Lemon Tree hotel, Ulsoor lake) over 7, 8, 9, 10 May, 2015.

    On 7th and 8th, it was previous task force members discussing, evaluating, etc and planning.

    I reached the venue on 8th night.

    Day 1

    In the morning, George Roter talked about the mission of Mozilla and the goals for 2015.

    Afterwards, there was an activity to recall what Input -> Activities -> Output -> Outcome -> Impact was.

    After lunch, the task force concept was introduced. And all the task forces were introduced, including the newly proposed ones.

    Then we divided into groups based on the task force we were interested in joining.

    I joined policy and advocacy task force which was a newly formed Task Force to cover policy issues and also raise awareness about those, privacy, security, etc. We discussed our skills, our roles, our interests and what help we need. Later we aligned these to the Mozilla’s 2015 goals. More about the Task Force in the wiki.

    In the night, I downloaded the mozilla-central code from the mercurial repository and built my own firefox (ASDfox)

    Day 2

    Day 2 was really intensive. We wrote down our short term goals and long term goals for each task force.

    George did a workshop on Fennec, we made personas, discovered a lot of ideas and challenges.

    Towards the end, we finalized the strucutre of the task force and presented the important goals to the group.

    [These notes are super short because there is too much going on and I don’t even have time to note them down before forgetting, let alone expand.]