The Owl Watch

Look we have fixed these two countries

2010-10-26T09:14:00.002-06:00

US has done a great favour to Afghanistan and Iraq by attacking them. These countries no longer have dictators. They have "democracies". Oh wait. Iraq doesn't have a government 10 months after election, and won't have one in the foreseeable future. Afghanistan does have a "government" in theory, but not much in practice. And here's the cake: in the latest transparency international report, Iraq and Afghanistan place 175 and 176, respectively, only exceeded perception of corruption by the shining examples of Myanmar and Somalia.

Finding a low-price car rental

2010-05-11T23:43:00.000-06:00

A post after a long time. I think I want to jot down anything interesting for the day in this blog. I was looking for a low-price car rental in New York. Went to Kayak. $77 a day + tax. A bit steep. Tried AAA. ~$60 a day incl. tax with Hertz. A little better. Went to Hertz website. They had a AAA coupon for 1 day free. Final cost ~$50 a day. I guess as good as you can expect in NY, I guess.

Unraveling 2

2008-11-19T06:54:00.003-07:00

Eric Holder may be the next AG. After leaving the Clinton administration, he worked for Covington & Burling in defending/settling corporate misdeeds (notably Chiquita). To his credit, opposed death penalty, though he has no say on it.

Some kind fellow found some information on him (as opposed to the wire services disguised as news) http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=7891962&mesg_id=7891962

The unraveling of change: Obama picks Rahm Emanuel for chief of staff

2008-11-06T07:27:00.001-07:00

Obama has picked Rahm Emanuel, his liaison with the AIPAC as chief of staff. Palestinians have no hope for the next four years.

Apparently the LHC going to bring the world to an end

2008-09-10T07:56:00.000-06:00

There was panic in India yesterday that turning on the LHC would destroy the earth!

How to tackle climate change the right way

2008-09-07T16:08:00.001-06:00

The biggest trouble with the current situation is that the environment is treated as an unlimited commons, which clearly it is not. No one has to pay for environmental resources that they use and that has led to apathetic destruction. The solution is to make sure people using the resources pay for it.

But who decides what's a good price? The best known current method is to use a trading system. Who gets the money? I would suggest the UN. Environment is a global resource and the UN is currently hobbled because it does not have revenue of its own. Seems like a win-win.

Of course, a system such as this cannot be introduced over night. It will have to be gradually phased in and the assets gradually released for trading. Unlike the EU system for carbon trading however, the incumbents should have to purchase assets as well.

Will something like this ever going to happen? You bet it isn't. The incumbents have too much control over the process. So the most that will get done is a EU like system in the US with more corporate sops.

The thugs of VHP strike again

2008-08-25T07:30:00.001-06:00

VHP is at it again. Their leader got killed, perhaps by naxalites. So they decided to disrupt life in Orissa, attack churches and kill Christians. What happened to the normally brutal Orissa police? Why can't put this thugs behind bars? BJP, which made VHP legal during its tenure at Indian government, was of course delightfully supporting this atrocity, perhaps materially.

When to buy tickets to India

2008-08-17T12:01:00.004-06:00

According to http://www.fly4less2india.com/ here are the best times to buy tickets to India.

Following is a guide of travel pattern to India and suggested time to book. Availability for different airlines can vary.

USA to India  Travel pattern   What's happening                Suggest booking
------------  --------------   ----------------                ---------------
01Jan - 15Jan ===========     Overspill from winter holidays   by mid Nov    
16Jan - 31Jan ========        Slowing down                     by mid Dec    
01Feb - 15Apr ======          Slow                             Jan onwards   
16Apr - 10May =========       Pre summer travel picks up       Feb onwards   
11May - 31May ==========      Start of Summer Holiday rush     Feb onwards   
01Jun - 10Jun ============    Summer rush picks up             before Mar end
11Jun - 15Jul ============    Peak summer travel               before Mar end
16Jul - 31Jul ==========      Continuing                       Apr onwards   
01Aug - 15Aug =======         Slowing down                     May onwards   
16Aug - 31Aug =====           Slow                             Jun onwards   
01Sep - 15Sep ===             Low fare rush                    May onwards   
16Sep - 10Oct =====           Slow                             Jun onwards   
11Oct - 15Nov ==========      Diwali travel                    Jul onwards   
16Nov - 30Nov ============    Thanksgiving Holidays travel     Jul onwards   
01Dec - 10Dec ==============  Low fare rush                    before mid Jun
11Dec - 15Dec ==============  Winter Holidays rush begins      before mid Jun
16Dec - 24Dec =========       Peak winter travel               before mid Jun
25Dec - 31Dec =====           Low fare rush                    before Jun end

India to USA  Travel pattern   What's happening                Suggest booking
------------  --------------   ----------------                ---------------
20Aug - 08Sep =============   Peak summer return travel        by mid Mar    
20Dec - 10Jan =============   Peak winter return travel        before mid Jun

The hunt for cheap tickets to India

2008-07-19T23:24:00.001-06:00

So I was trying to buy tickets to India last week. I, like every other person, want to get there cheaply and as hassle-free as possible. Unfortunately, arranging that is not easy.

The world of international flight ticketing works in mysterious ways.

Some websites like Travelocity, have a flexible date search (which makes for cheap flights) for flights to Delhi, but not Kolkata. If one sets November as the departure date, one cannot get January return date, because the webpage only has November and December dates.

AA.com has a flexible date search, but maximum length of trip is fixed at 30 days.

globetravels.com has a search engine that lists fairly high fares. They also list some very low fares on top of those results. Those fares are available only for manual booking. So I fill out a form and send it over to them. They call me next day, saying we have found you this 5 connection flight that is about the same price that you saw with the more straight-forward itineraries on our website.

BA.com has a good search that lets you trade-off travel dates and prices. Unfortunately, they were the first ones to run out of good fares. One day I saw fares that were $1400 /per person to Delhi and next day they were up at $1700 / per person. Busted. Besides, I do not want to fly BA because of the jinx.

So off I go again hunting for low fares. I am resigned to my fate that I cannot get the dates I want any more. Seems every one else in the world wants to travel on the same dates. I call a friend for a reference to a travel agent. They took two days and cam back with a almost equally convoluted route as globetravels.com . I tried a few more websites. Farecompare.com and Vayama.com seemed to have the best searches, but even they were not good enough.

I also tried to get some tickets using my miles on United. They had routings via Denver-Toronto-Zurich-Vienna-Delhi . I am surprised, the routing didn't include Siberia.

AA has tie up with Jet Airways. So one can get tickets on AA to many places in India, but not all that Jet flies to. Finally I bought my tickets on aa.com for a reasonable $1610 / per person. The price, I have to go from Bhubaneswar to Calcutta to Delhi, spending one day in getting out of India and then a 12 hr layover in Chicago.

So if you are buying tickets to India my friend, it pays to be early. This is one case where procrastination does not work.

My saga with British Airways

2008-07-19T22:59:00.001-06:00

So last week I was trying to buy tickets to India. It reminded me of my jinxed history with British Airways.

I did my first ever international flight on BA from Calcutta to London. It was delayed 3 hrs (because of a faulty door, if I remember correctly) and I missed my connection from London to Denver. They were nice enough to put me up at the Renaissance and provided transport vouchers for the trip there. I got on a plane the next day and got to Denver.

The second time I flew BA was in 2003. They had a strike of the ground staff in London and flights were cancelled for two days. No hotels this time. Just a voucher that I didn't get time to redeem. I stayed with a friend (Prateek, if you read this please contact me +1 970 372 6308). Their phone did not work. So I spent most of the 2 days at the airport, hoping to get on the next flight.

Then my mom came for a visit in 2007 by BA. She had to because the people she was traveling with were on BA. The plan was for both of us to back via BA. Unfortunately, I bought my tickets via the travel agent in India that she bought her tickets on. Big mistake. Not only was communicating over a 12 hr time difference incredibly difficult, I failed to realize that I needed a visa to transit in the UK. I did realize that, but 1 day too late. I sent the application in a hurry. I later found that the UK visa office will give a 1 day turn around if one uses a courier but 5 days if one sends by priority overnight. So, of course, I got my visa 1 day after I was supposed to travel. Duly stamped and everything. I had to do a fairly acrimonious negotiation with the BA CSR to postpone my ticket (a no-show non-refundable ticket is useless) to a future date. Since BA was booked for all days I wanted to travel on, I had to again postpone that ticket to 2008 and buy a separate ticket on US airways.

Fast forward to last week. I found out that tickets are ony valid for 12 months from date of first issue (Aug 2007) in my case and there is no way to get around that.

So there you go. I think BA and I have a jinxed relationship. I will not fly BA again.

WordPerfect Lightning

2007-07-07T11:55:00.001-06:00

Corel has created a killer app in WordPerfect lightning. It's a 22MB download, small program. It has basic rich text editing, and one can paste images. It's just perfect for note taking. And there is no save button. Yay!

US messes up in middle east -- again !

2007-06-20T20:51:00.001-06:00

Mahmoud Abbas's government was brought around by the US and Israel. It is "democratic". Hamas was elected in a landslide victory when Fatah was in power. It is "undemocratic". US, Europe and Israel do not support  undemocratic governments. So they withdrew or blocked all sources of funding for the PLA.

Obviously, US being on the side of democracy, supplied arms and training to Fatah militant Mohhamed Dahlan in a clandestine manner. Hamas was supposed to sit idly by and watch. In stead, they dared to destroy Dahlan's organization and take control of the area that they were elected to govern. So, with US backing, Abbas sacked the Hamas government (never mind that he has no power on the ground). Immediately, the pro-democratic Western forces came to Abbas's aid with promises of lots of money. This is supposed to turn a hostile Palestinian population pro-US and pro-Israel.

From dual-boot to vmware with minimal changes

2007-05-22T07:57:00.001-06:00

I had set up my Dell D620 for dual boot in Linux and Windows Vista. What I really want is to be able to instantly switch between the two depending on needs. So VMWare is the way to go. I gave up my initial idea of running Vista inside VMWare on Ubuntu. Microsoft didn't give me the permission. So I set it up the other way round -- Vista host and Ubuntu guest.

I didn't want to set up a new hard disk for Ubuntu. So I downloaded VMware server and VMware player. Installed the first, created a virtual machine using my existing hard disk as the VMware hard disk. Then I uninstalled VMware server and installed VMware player. The server software is older. Networking and sound didn't work. I edited the .vmx file ( C:\Virtual Machines\Ubuntu\Ubuntu.vmx ) to enable sound



  sound.enable = "TRUE"

VMware player took off from where VMware server left off. And I am posting this from Ubuntu inside VMware.

Setting up bluetooth headset under Linux

2007-05-18T19:47:00.001-06:00

I figured out how to use my new Jabra BT-150 headset with Linux. Here's the deal.

Install bluetooth-alsa and libsbc packages (feisty backports not there yet)
Put the headset in pairing mode
bdaddr=$(hcitool scan | awk '/BT150/ {print $1}')
sudo hcitool info $bdaddr
cat /usr/share/doc/bluetooth-alsa/sample.asoundrc >> ~/.asoundrc
Change the default BDADDR in .asoundrc
headsetd

That's it. Test using 'mplayer -ao alsa:device=headset'. Now I need to find out how to dynamically switch output based on whether bluetooth headset is there or not.

US Supreme Court raises bar for obviousness in patents

2007-05-03T20:59:00.001-06:00

Until now, the obviousness test was defined as non-obvious "to a person having ordinary skills". This allowed for rather low standards of obviousness and there are a lot of patents that are simply blocking innovation. The latest decision makes mere combination of existing technologies fail the test.

May be one day we will see the length of exclusivity granted under a patent depend on the industry it is in. A patent about cars is useful for 20 years. A patent on software (which shouldn't be patentable anyways) is not.

Somalia in tatters again

2007-04-25T21:58:00.001-06:00

Mogadishu is once again the most dangerous place to live in the world, but we have displaced the Islamic government. In the 15 years that Somalia had no government (as opposed to a dysfunctional one), no one bothered about it. When the Islamic courts came in, the governments of the world gave Ethiopia tacit support in its fight against them.

The EU has appealed to the Somali President to intervene! Wow, the same president that had no real power until Ethiopia showed up to help it.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=71805

Matrubhoomi

2007-04-22T22:13:00.001-06:00

Watched this movie called Matrubhoomi. The acting is great (few Hindi movies can boast of that), and good direction.

The movie has a really tragic story, which is sadly much closer to reality than I would like. It is about a young girl who is "married" to  a five brothers (there were some press reports similar to this) and her survival through regular rape and torture.  Horrors like this are still going on in this world and most of us turn a blind eye. How do we get out of these nightmares?

Could Naboj save scientific publication?

2007-04-21T19:20:00.001-06:00

Anyone who has tried to read a scientific journal knows how complicated getting access to them is. If you don't live in the US or Europe, you have to working at a pretty wealthy organization to be able to access the latest research. It is mostly because of the established publishing clique that the inefficient practice still abounds. I would love to see the day that all scientific articles are published to be freely accessible by all citizens of the world. Science advances not by restricting information but by making it available to everyone. Open systems would also allow automated tools for information harvesting (did I make that term up?).

The physics and math people had understood this long back. So they set up http://arxiv.org . arXiv is a great resource with all the latest research available for free and on time. But it has the drawback that the articles haven't been refereed. Now there is a new open reviewing system -- Naboj. Naboj allows anyone to review the papers on arXiv. It will be interesting to see how well this process works. I hope someday every technical publication will be similarly available.

IEEE needs to reform

2007-04-21T19:03:00.001-06:00

From there Mission page:

Vision

To advance global prosperity by fostering technological innovation, enabling members' careers and promoting community worldwide.

Mission

The IEEE promotes the engineering process of creating, developing, integrating, sharing, and applying knowledge about electro and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession.

Let's check that with reality:

They require the copyright for papers to be transferred to them and preprints to be taken down once the article is published. Of course, their journal subscriptions are so cheap that most people in the world can't afford them. Section 7 of their copyright policy allows use of public domain articles. But see http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html for contrary actual practice.
They don't disclose how much they spend on lobbying efforts. In the latest financial report, I saw $60m for membership and public services. I am assuming public services includes lobbying.
IEEE opposes H1B visa program. They also oppose "off-shoring". The idea of being able to protect domestic wages by simply restricting others from coming in is bogus. People need to wake-up and realize that national economies are slowly giving way to international economies. Protectionism is also another name for inefficiency. Markets may not be entirely efficient, but the increasing possibility of separating the workers from the market means, protectionism is only going to hurt the US economy. The US is still a pretty good place to do business in spite of higher wages because of lower taxes, consistently enforced laws and highly skilled worker pool. Try protectionism and that's going end pretty soon.
They support software patents.
They support tax credits for a whole array of things. Tax system has been overused over the years as an instrument of policy instead of a revenue collection system. No need to burden the system with credits for things that companies want to do anyway. The trouble with the R&D scenario today is not incentives, but disincentives of the quarterly reporting phenomenon.

To be fair, they have some decent positions too:

They support reverse engineering.
They have come out somewhat in support fair-use limitations on DMCA, though I think their stance is not strong enough.

I will post again if I find more information.

Thou and You

2007-04-21T16:17:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time, you used to be the plural form of thou. Then the language changed and you became the formal way of addressing a superior. For some reason, thou stopped being used. The only place it shows up is in the King James Bible and some ancient text that is still read (Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc). These days, because of association with the Bible, thou has come to take on connotations of respect, while you is the egalitarian second person pronoun. Interesting how they flipped positions.

Economics and Political Weekly

2007-04-20T19:06:00.001-06:00

The "Economics and Political Weekly" is a pretty erudite publication that is reportedly one of the more influential ones that affect policy formation in India. I read their analysis of the budget for 2007-2008. Have to admit, it reads like a peer reviewed paper, but is on topics that actually are of interest to normal people.

IMF in action

2005-08-12T07:29:00.000-06:00

Excerpt:

In countries such as Niger, Mali and Chad, which hug the southern fringes of the Sahara, there is always a shortfall of food at this time of year, between one harvest and the next. Some children will always die in this lean season. The same used to happen in Britain, in the depths of midwinter; hence the need for a December celebration to lift everyone's spirits. This year, unusually, the shortfall in Niger has been devastating. The reason, analysts say, is not locusts or drought, which only dented last year's harvest by about 11%. According to the Famine Early Warning System Network, a Washington-based group that tracks such crises, a major factor in Niger's shortfall was the export of food to wealthier West African countries, driving prices in the market out of the reach of the poorest.

The Niger government offered food at subsidised prices, below market rates, but even this was too much for the very poor. The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres blames Niger's pursuit of free market policies for escalating the crisis. The government refused to distribute free food in the worst-affected regions because they feared it would disrupt the markets, the charity says. The comparison with Mali is instructive. Mali, which neighbours Niger, was also hit by locusts and drought after last year's harvest. But the Mali government instantly handed out around 10,000 tonnes of millet, the staple crop, for free to the hardest hit. It has since organised the free distribution of a further 11,000 tonnes of millet.

Don't blame the locusts -- The Guardian

BA staff strike again

2005-08-12T07:20:00.000-06:00

BA's decision to cancel its 500 flights scheduled for today has left at least 70,000 passengers stranded. The stoppage - although not a dispute of the airline's own making - threatens to become another public relations disaster and a costly setback.

"This is the third straight August that BA employees have taken industrial action. This is an annual event for BA."

Striking BA staff told to resume work -- The Guardian

Famine in Niger

2005-08-09T23:59:00.000-06:00

One of the main results of the attempted use of private enterprise to tackle malnutrition was to push up drastically the price of staple foods. The policies were not President Tandja's own. The International Monetary Fund has pressed for structural changes to the economy, including the introduction of 19 per cent VAT on basic foodstuffs and the scrapping of emergency grain reserves. As a result the price of basic food rose by between 75 and 89 per cent in five years.

President Tandja: 'The people of Niger look well fed, as you can see' -- The Independent