Prasad

The National Do Not Call Registry is effective in India starting this month.  Heres what the official government site has to say:

The primary objective of the National Do Not Call Registry (NDNC Registry) is to curb Unsolicited Commercial Communication (UCC). UCC has been defined as “any message, through telecommunications service, which is transmitted for the purpose of informing about,or soliciting or promoting any commercial transaction in relation to goods, investments or services which a subscriber
opts not to receive, but, does not include, —-

(i) any message (other than promotional message) relating to a service or financial transaction under a specific contract between the parties to such contract;or

(ii) any messages relating to charities, national campaigns or natural calamities transmitted on the directions of the Government or agencies authorized by it for the said purpose;

(iii) messages transmitted, on the directions of the Government or any authority or agency authorized by it, in the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality.”

The NDNC Registry will be a data base having the list of all telephone numbers of the subscribers who do not want to receive UCC.After the establishment of NDNC registry, Telephone subscriber (Landline or mobile) who does not wish to receive UCC, can register their telephone number with their telecom service provider for inclusion in the NDNC. Telecom Service Provider shall upload the telephone number to the NDNC within 45 days of receipt. The Telemarketer will have to verify their calling telephone numbers list with the NDNC registry before making a call.An amount of Rs 500/- per call/message has been prescribed to discourage telemarketers who make calls to numbers registered in Do Not Call list. The defaulter telemarketer will face disconnection of telecom service

I was born on August 17th, 1980 and was browsing to see what else happened on Aug 17th.  Here are a few things that matter to a lot of people.

• The first Compact Discs were released to the public in Germany in 1982. 200 Billion CDs were sold since then!
• Gabon gained Independence from France in 1960
• Indonesia declared independent in 1945
• MD5 Collision was found by Chinese researchers in 2004

If you know of more, post it in comments

ConsortiumInfo.org - Norwegian Standards Council Recommends Mandatory use of ODF and PDF

Norway is the latest European country to move closer to mandatory government use of ODF (and PDF). According to a press release provided in translation to me by an authoritative source, Norway now joins Belgium, Finland, and France (among other nations) in moving towards a final decision to require such use.

I was browsing one of the many government portals - The Ministry of Company Affairs. Though the portal is a great idea for the companies in India, don’t the developers of such important portals realize that the Internet Explorer is not the only browser on the Internet and that Microsoft is not the only producer of software?

Well, I did contact the webmaster through the contact form on the website and got a reply which said that a portal that works on Internet Explorer was part of the requirements and that the developers have met the requirements as laid out by the government!  Will the government ever wake up and move itself to standards?  Thankfully, though not mandated by the government, the reports and a few other downloads seem to be PDFs.

Orangemedhas is the name of the software company we founded.  So, what is in the name?

The name is derived from two words “orange” and “medhas”.  Medhas means intelligence in Sanskrit and orange is a color that signifies strength and endurance.  There is another reason why “orange” is good - “O Range”, “Oka Range” and “One Range” were common terms used to indicate exceptional abilities by the students of IIIT, Hyderabad.

Advantages of using the name - “orangemedhas”:

• Many people, atleast those from IIIT (students and faculty) have already associated the word medhas to us, mainly due to our personal blogging protal - medhas.org
• The name has a meaning that has its roots in the college where we all met - IIIT, Hyderabad
• The color orange looks cool for the promotion brochures and web!

Now, the disadvantages:

• The name Orangemedhas is too long.
• Registrar of companies failed to identify the difference between medha and orangemedhas, so the Registrar insisted that the name be different.  We tried many names like “orangemedhas [innovative] [software|technologies] [labs]… but companies with “close” names already existed (according to the concerned authority, orangemedhas was close to medha).  And now the name of the company turned out to be “orangemedhas creative software private limited”.  By the first look, the name seems okay, but having this big name on all the letter heads, official communications looks awkward.
• The pronunciation - very few understand the difference between medhas - the unexisting plural of medha and medhas (pronounced as being a part of medhassu for those who understand Telugu).
• The problem with pronunciation of medhas is a small one.  But, the very common use of orange in the company names kind of spoils the fun of having a good original name!

Comments and alternate company names are welcome - mail the names to me (there are many people looking for good names on the Internet)

Well, this is what the community had to say to Steve Ballmer.

It’s come to many in the Linux community’s attention you have claimed again and again, that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide.

So, Ballmer are you ready to accept the challenge?

There have been lot of phones that claimed to run on Linux, and most of them failed to support and service the phones properly. Few very good examples are the Motorola series A760/A768i/A780, which were available in India. These phones have Linux running in it, but thats just the Kernel, rest everything is proprietary and cannot be played with. Its not easily possible to do anything beyond what you could do with a non-Linux phone.

The trend seems to change now, with Nokia taking the lead of releasing an Internet Tablet running on an open platform - development of new applications, installing and running them was also supported and this made this tablet look like a true open-source device (not a phone!). With Trolltech releasing the Greenphone, phones went a little closer to having open platforms. FIC (First International Computers) has recently announced a phone based on OpenMoKo - and OpenMoKo has contribution from Herald Welte, which makes me believe that this is going to be another true OpenSource mobile — all for $350

Indic Input Extension is an extension to Firefox that lets the user input Indian language content without much difficulty. It supports Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and a few other Indian languages for phonetic input. Needless to say, I wrote the ‘firefox’ part of it and the backend is mostly from the Entrans project, which inherited code (and ofcourse added a lot of improvements to it) from the IndicIME project.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/

That was kind of hard to believe, but had to after I saw this page on gnu.org.  Its true that it would not take more than a week to roll out another browser based on the free sources available from mozilla.org, but would this not dilute the dominance of mozilla and lead way to IE based browsers?

An article discussing this was slashdotted today.

This August was a month for me to remember for many things. It all started with a trip to Manali - I had the faintest idea of what was in store for me after I returned from the trip. I came back in the early hours of 14th and by 15th everything was on track and the date for my marriage with Srilakshmi was decided. The muhurat was on 20th August and we had only four days to go (compare it with an average time of about two months that Indian families take for marriage arrangements).

Srilakshmi being my classmate at college we had a lot of common friends who took care of all the arrangements, thanks to them, everything was over even before I realized that I was getting married on the 20th of August. Two weeks after having known nothing about my marriage, I got married and married to a very close friend.

Note: All images are available in the gallery.  Sorry, could not add links to the thumbnails.

More than a month ago, from Aug 5th to Aug 13th, I went on a trek to Deo-Tibba base. The trek was good and it was the first time I went into the wild, away from the civilization. This is a small travelogue on the trek and hope it would be of some use to the future trekkers

The medhas gallery has a more complete dump of the images that we took during the trek. All the images below have also been linked to their higher resolution versions from the gallery. Feel free to use the images that don’t have people in them for your own purposes. A link to our gallery would ofcourse be appreciated

On Saturday, the 5th of August 2006, me and Bala started at Hyderabad and reached Delhi the same day by afternoon. We were joined by Metta and Gupta in Delhi and all four of us boarded the Himachal Pradesh Tourism operated bus to Manali the same day. We reached Manali on Sunday well before the lunch time, checked-in to the guest house and visited a few places in Manali. The photo above in which all of us are seen holding hands was taken when coming down from Hidimba temple in Manali. We met our trek operator Surinder (Alpine Tours) the same day.

Hidimba Temple

Gupta, Metta and Bala at the Hidimba temple. Hidimba is a demon from Mahabharat, one of the epic stories of hindu religion. She is believed to be the mother of Ghototkachha and wife of Bhima.

We started our trek on Monday, with us were five porters, a guide and a cook (That’s right, seven people were with us and we were only four!). The itenary for the first day was to trek from Jagarsukh to Kannol. The govt of Himachal Pradesh is constructing a dam on Jagatsukh Nala and most of the work is currently at Kannol. A road is being constructed and the half done road is horrible to walk on - the mud was slippery and made it difficult to trek too! Kannol was the last place where we could find any significant human numbers. By the time we reached Kannol, it started raining too!

First look at Kannol

Posing beside the Jagatsukh Nala. In the background are the labour tents at Kannol. Till this place we were only walking on a half finished, slippery road which was full of mud.

Kannol

Our tents at Kannol. Rain and worker camps made it difficult to find a proper place for camping here.

Tuesday we started at Kannol to Chikka. Due to all the construction that is going, the old trek route was closed and a new path was taken… this new path again had less grass and lose soil. The rain made it muddy and slippery too. Halfway through our journey on Tuesday we crossed the stream to join the old trek route, which made it feel like heaven. The first half of the way between Kannol and Chikka was slippery and a few slips could throw us into a stream 100 meters below.

Crossing to old route

This bridge marks the saperation between the new trekking route and the old. The real trek started here… we leave all the civilization behind at this place.

Chikka was a beautiful place located on the banks of Jagatsukh Nala. There is a small temple accompanied by a couple of small buildings. I will talk more about these buildings when I describe our journey back.

Our camp at Chikka

Bala and I had to use a different tent here because the tent we used in Kannol let some water seep in! And with this one I had a shock next morning when I saw a small creepy, caterpillar kind of an insect on my sleeping bag… eeks.

We started back early next day… it was raining and we put our umbrellas to use. The trek from Chikka to Seri was tiresome and we had to take many breaks for water and snacks before we reached Seri. Bala and I were a lot ahead of others and my research about Seri said that it was a huge plain land which would be of a great interest to flora enthusiasts - I was just walking and walking with a hope to find the huge plain land.

On our way to Seri

The trek from Chikka to Seri was at a much greater altitude, climate was cold and a significant part of the trek was through mist.

The huge plain at Seri

This plain was long time back a glacier which has now dissapeared. Going to the album you will find photos of the nearby glacier and snaps of the Deo Tibba peak as seen from the plains.

Waterfall at Seri

The water fall is one big source of Jagatsukh nala, while the glacier pictured in other photos is the other source. Water from many peaks comes together just before falling down here. In the background is the Deo-Tibba peak.

The next day it was a looong trek. We were supposed to go till the Chota Chandertal and come back directly to Chikka, which was expected to take about 9 hours — yeah right, nine hours of trek in the mountains! We started fine, walking through the marchy football sized plain of Seri, but soon we reached a point where we had to cross the Jagatsukh Nala. I changed my definition of cold water after crossing the stream - we had to walk though a stream flowing at zero degrees! What more, we had to cross it twice in our route to Chota Chandertal and twice when returning!

Formation of the Jagatsukh Nala

The trek wonderfully well, till we found that we lost our way and instead of going to the Chota Chandertal lake, ended up going close to the Deo-Tibba base camp. We had to return due to lack of time. The photo here shows the joining of many small streams to form the Jagatsukh nala.

On our way back, we decided that we will not go by the same route. This time we had to go to Manali via Baraha, a small village close to Jagatsukh. We could find some accomodation at the temple buildings in Chikka. Our guide told us that the buildings here were constructed by the villagers of Jagatsukh for use by visitors to Chikka. It had all the required “comforts” like a room heater, food grain enough for about 200 people, bedding enough for about 30 people etc - and all this put in here by the villagers for the comfort of visitors, trekkers etc!

Next day, we trekked directly from Chikka to Jagatsukh, from where we went to our accomodation. One day more in Manali and started back to Hyderabad!