update: mobihf and mobimol

Am happy to announce that the source of mobihf and mobimol have now been merged to PyQuante CVS, thanks to Rick.

Please see:
http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/s60

and the CVS:
http://pyquante.cvs.sourceforge.net/pyquante/PyQuante/MobiCode/

all further updates will be made to the above CVS.

on OLPC: why indian policy makers should rethink?

Till my last post of the OLPC (one laptop per child) subject, I was wondering whether someone in India had experimented with the idea of providing access to computers for underprivileged or rural kids?

I was pleasantly surprised to find the "Hole-in-the-Wall" project being run by NIIT in coordination with International Finance Corporation.

From the hole-in-the-wall site:
"The acquisition of basic computing skills by any set of children can be achieved through incidental learning provided the learners are given access to a suitable computing facility, with entertaining and motivating content and some minimal (human) guidance."
is some thing we should seriously look at, rather than outright scrapping of OLPC in india.

Dr. Sugata Mitra, Chief Scientist at NIIT, who is toying with the idea of providing computer access to the kids since 1982, and allowing them to acquire the skills and education on their own is a prime example of why such projects are needed at a large scale in India. And with the GOI honoring Dr. Sugata with Dewang Mehta award for Innovation in Information Technology, the government probably itself recognizes the need for such work.

India could set an example on how to make technology accessible to the masses .... only if we think right and take right decisions.

PS. To know more about the "Hole-in-the-wall" project visit: http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/

Lost mobile phones: can they be found?

Yesterday while travelling back home from pune railway station to viman nagar, some rouge stole a mobile (samsung) from an unsuspecting girl in an overcrowded bus.
After reporting the matter to the conductor, he offered to stop the bus immediately to get it checked, but as commonsense suggested, this wasn't feasible as the person who stole it would have already disappeared. In any case I found that the attitude of the people really disturbing: instead of suggesting ways what to do next people were finding faults like 'her bag was open', 'its her mistake', 'you cannot find a lost mobile' and all that: not a single attempt the calm down the crying looser!
Any way after waiting for some time, I couldn't resist but offered to call up the customer care center (fortunately it was airtel, same as my service). And also advised to file an FIR with the IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number as early as possible. After few attempts i was able to get the a line to the customer care executive, to whom she spoke. To my surprise, in spite of giving all SIM details to the executive, she refused to block the SIM! and instead asked to call back after lodging an FIR! This was a real shocker for me.
In any case I am not aware of any other mechanism of tracking a lost mobile, than lodging an FIR and then asking the operator as well as the mobile manufacturer for blocking the stolen mobile.

I guess, with more of these thefts, we must device some way to track down these gadgets. And also people must realise that a lost mobile can be (and probably will be) used for unlawful activities. As law abiding citizens we must do all that is possible to avert such misuse. Thus, a theft of a communication device must be taken seriously.

In the end, i could not (and probably can't - at least for the time being) trace the lost mobile but at least brought a slender smile. :)

on OLPC and RTIA

Two disconnected issues. But the way in which policy makers are taking decisions (and giving reasons for them) on these apparently important matters should be of real concern and .

A few days ago, the HRD ministry had indicated that OLPC (one-laptop-per-child) program is *not* suitable for children of rural India... providing some absurd reasons like: ".. the problems (health) faced by rural child is well known, and would be further complicated by usage of laptop". and it goes on to give so many other reasons (by quoting foreign experts)! I fail to understand why no Indian expert is at all considered?

So is the case of Right To Information Act (RTIA) where an amendment to limited/ no access to "file noting" on certain "classified" areas is proposed. Similar acts in other countries were cited as example for the proposed amendment. This is simply not good for a health of democratic India, where we seem to be trying to do what others are doing, and simply not having our own views on these subject of prime interest to any democratic institution.

And as Arvind Kejriwal gets Magsaysay Award for the very RTIA that he and may others (including Anna Hazare) fought for, we simply wonder how our elected representatives are modifying a powerful act to suite some wested interests.

Blog of V.Ganesh

Blog of V.Ganesh

.... Hurray! It up again! So finally the ISPs and DoT, GOI seems to have figured out the "technical issues" involved in stopping access to only certain blogs.

... A real pity situation. But anyways I am happy, and hope that such incidences do not happen in India again. BTW, it would be interesting to see if some of the avid bloggers still file a PIL (which i guess they will) in Supreme Court? This would probably bring in some amendment to the IT Act, 2000 to include "blogs" ... its wait and watch.

INSAT 4C on GSLV fails

An hour ago I was watching the live telecast of the launch on DD. By now its very clear that we have not been successful in launching the INSAT series on Indian soil. This was the third launch attempt of the GSLV (cryogenic development vehicle), the first two have been a success and has placed weather satellites (kalpana I and II) in geo-synchronous orbit.

Hard luck for ISRO. The launch originally scheduled at 4:36 pm IST was postponed twice, first to 5:16 pm and then finally to 5:36 pm. So far no official reason for the failure has been given, but it is speculated to be a failure in the second stage of the GSLV.

The next plan of ISRO, if they are not going to hold up, would be another launch of GSLV in 2007-08 (http://isro.org/decade_plan.htm), and the much publicized lunar mission.

... hope for the best

lexicographical combination algorithm

have written a small article on generating combinations in lexicographical order. you can read it at: http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/comb.pdf

mobioo v0.1, first OpenOffice (odt) reader in PyS60!

ah well but a really basic one with following formating:
- paragraphs
- bold, italic, underline, strike-through
- font colors

not yet:
- bullets and numbering
- pictures and tables: probably never??

Get the source at:
http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/mobioo.py

And set a sample ODT (OpenOffice writer) file from here:
http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/sample.odt

Please note that you will need pyexpat for s60 installed on your phone which is available here:
http://pdis.hiit.fi/pdis/download/pyexpat/

PS. I will be making a SIS installer too shortly so check back!
In the previous post of BtSMS, be cautious about the UID, its a mock UID!

BTSMS v.0.1: forward your SMS over bluetooth and send SMS via PC

With BTSMS you can:
- read all your SMS (no MMS or bluetooth files)
- forward SMS over bluetooth as note files
- send SMS via PC using pcsms.py client
( the pcsms.py client requres you to have:
> python interpreter 2.4 or higher on linux or windows xp
> pybluez extension library available from: http://org.csail.mit.edu/pybluez/
> and ofcourse a bluetooth transreceiver (dongle) connected to your PC
)

- Get the source and SIS file for this application at: http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/btsms_app.tar.gz

My Way News - Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space

My Way News - Hawking Says Humans Must Go Into Space

The survival of the human race depends on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe because there's an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy the Earth, world-renowned scientist Stephen Hawking said Tuesday.


(...my take worth reading and giving a serious thought)

update at: http://english.people.com.cn/200606/14/eng20060614_273839.html

When answering a question about how he copes with frustration, which also mentioned a paralyzed accident victim Bun Tsai in Hong Kong who appealed publicly for legalized euthanasia, Hawking said, "The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants.

"But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope." Hawking is in the best position to say so, his action of defeating physical difficulties has proved his word right.

google spreadsheet

there has be a lot of press attention to the realease of spreadsheet application by google, but i guess many of us don't know a much better, functional, online spreadsheet tool (with can be added on your google home page aka. google ig) by: IROWS

i find it more usable because:
- has lot more features, charting support!
- right click works as in OpenOffice (i do not use excel)
- it can save & read in OpenOffice format!, google can read and write only .xls and .csv format

but probably these features will get added into google spreadsheet with time.

new version of mobihf

get the stuff from:

http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/s60

and let me know the feedback on the previous post on math library in symbian!

Bugs in Symbian math library?

This is my experience of using the math library function for Symbian 7.0 (s60 2nd phone, nokia 6600) while writing two applications that require extensive math support in terms of basic function like pow(), acos() along with some advanced functions like lgamma().
The applications (mobimol and mobihf) are currently hosted at my google pages along with their sources at: http://tovganesh.googlepages.com/s60

Simple functions like pow() and acos() seem to have some problem with handling very low values, which are typically less 1.0e-12. So, using such functions with these low value resulted in crashing of the code (in this case the Python interpreter), with no apparent error message. To avert this problem I had to add a wrapper over the pow() or acos() function that reads some what like as follows:

def myacos(ang):
   if(round(ang,1)==1.0): return 0.0
   return acos(ang)

def mypow(self, x, y):
   if (round(y,10)==0.0): return 1.0
   if (round(x,10)==0.0): return 0.0
   return pow(x, y)

Initially I thought that this problem was only with Python implementation of these method, but it suddenly struck me that the implementation of these function would probably be done by the underlying symbian math library. When I wrote a similar code (for mobihf) in C++ I faced a similar problem of the code crashing with no apparent warnings or errors. To avert this problem I had to write another wrapper in my C++ code, which is probably more correct than the Python version that I had written earlier:

double absd(double x) {
  return (x<0.0 ? -x : x);
}

double mpow(double x, double y) {
  if (absd(y)<=1.0e-10) return 1.0;
  if (absd(x)<=1.0e-10) return 0.0;
  return pow(x, y);
}

The most painful part was that abs(y) did not work, and the complier (Symbian SDK on Windows XP for s60 2nd edition) gave me an error indicating that abs() takes an int argument (possibly it took my code to be a pure C code)!! Anyways, I later on discovered that it is better to use fabs() instead.

And finally many math function that are a part of standard C library seem to be not available with the Symbian SDK most notable ones that I missed were: round(), lgamma()

It may be possible that the Symbian OS developers have not paid a lot of attention in writing these specialized functions given the very limited nature of the smartphone platform, but I guess with stiff competition coming up from other quarters (Windows, Linux, SavaJe), it is possibly worthwhile to correct such problem and make the already wonderful Symbian OS more general.

PS. These are solely my private views and have nothing to do with Symbian development team.
Also I have tested these codes only on my Nokia 6600, these may have been corrected in later version of the Symbian OS, consequently I urge the readers to download the code provided in the above link and verify if the "bugs" still persist. If so, please let me know by posting a comment here.

convert ur mp3 to ogg

if u are a linux user and enjoy listening to some gr8 mp3 and wma, then converting them to a better "opensource" alternative: ogg vorbis is really simple :>

you need:
1) mplayer with all its plugins
2) oggenc (i.e. ogg support - comes default in most distros, i use FC5)
3) use the following script (toogg.csh) to convert the files

------------------------------------------

#~/bin/csh
mplayer -ao pcm "$1"

set quality = $2

if (null$quality == null) set quality = hi

if ($quality == lo) then
# useful for your mono phones (like 6600)
oggenc --downmix --resample 8000 -q 1 audiodump.wav
else
oggenc audiodump.wav
endif
mv audiodump.ogg "$1:t:r".ogg
rm -f audiodump.*


------------------------------------------

and enjoy the freedom in music (or videos) :)

Motorola opensource

Motorola opensource


with Motorola following Nokia http://opensource.nokia.com/ in opensourcing its software stack, i do not see any reason to buy a windows powered mobile!

parvati shots

being in pune for so long and not going to parvati is something that i can't still digest. but any way finally went here for the first time! here are some shots from my mobile.

Sun promises to open source Java

Sun promises to open source Java


WOW! Now that probably means SUN is working on something entirely new. Probably the Fortress.

I guess this is the best way to manage software today, make it so big and usable, and make people so dependable on it that one day if you opensource it: you donot loose any thing, you still win hearts and make money.

what does it mean to opensource J2SE/J2ME will have to be seen. but to my best apprehension, sun will go for opensourcing J2EE and J2SE and may be J2ME too, but will take licensing fee from implementers.

now if J2SE really is opensourced, the other attempts to make opensource implementation of 1.5 like the apache foundations Harmony project become redundant.

secondly, J2SE stack should be opensourced in such a way as not to have forks, which are so common on opensource community. if forking happens that all breaks down the fundamental idea of Java platform: "write ones, run everywhere".

some shots of may

May flower in department of chemistry garden.




and the drops of water looks good in this scorching summer heat.

simputer

have written up a general article on Simputer at: http://qbit777.googlepages.com/simputer

also check an interesting article on programming Simputer at:
http://linuxgazette.net/issue87/pramode.html

and another interesting post from a user:
http://www.knowprose.com/node/3008


... making me more and more crazy about this device and its use ;)

3-Lib History of Psion

3-Lib History of Psion

... A pretty informative article on Psion to Symbian and the man who made it: Dr. David Potter, a doctorate in mathematical physics!