First, I’m really happy to see Google at least trying to become more transparent. Second, I was very intrigued to see that India is in the top 3! Just in the last 6 months of 2009 India made over 1000 data requests to Google and upwards of 140 removal requests. Here’s the current breakdown:

• 1061 data requests
• 142 removal requests
  • 77.5% of removal requests fully or partially complied with.
  • 2 Blogger
  • 1 Book Search (court order)
  • 2 Geo (except Street View)
  • 119 orkut
  • 1 SMS Channels
  • 2 Web Search
  • 15 YouTube

Thankfully, bulk of the removal requests (119 out of 142) are for Orkut and given the spammy state of Orkut, I’m not really surprised. I’m more interested in the data requests, but right now that (possibly inaccurate) number is all Google can tell us.

Here’s another weird thing, Brazil made 291 removal requests of which 119 were for Orkut. India also made 119. Co-incidence? Perhaps. Or may be it was a common set of bad URLs that both countries ended up getting rid of. Of course, more than 75% of Orkut users are either from Brazil or from India, so there’s definitely some connection here.

All in all, another interesting data source.

Groovy Gurus is a bunch of gastronomically inclined city dwellers (and then some) who’ve chosen to spend a couple of Thursdays each month – the 2nd and 4th to be precise – dining at a yet-undiscovered venue (at least for the purposes of the Thursday dinners), picked by a rotating designatory in the group. San Francisco has such a wide range of cuisines served up by restaurants that often reflect the unique character of their neighborhoods that it would be an opportunity lost to not give the lot of them a try.

Tonight is the third GG meetup. Follow our journey on Groovy Gurus.

Meanwhile, here are some of the other names we thought of before settling on Groovy Gurus:

• Tangy Tuesday
• Water, no ice
• Masala Chai
• Tuesday Tarkari
• Mangal Munch
• The Fortnight Bite
• स्वाद की बहार, महीने में दो बार

A republic is a form of government in which the head of state is not a monarch and the people (or at least a part of its people) have an impact on its government. The word ‘republic’ is derived from the Latin phrase res publica, which can be translated as “a public affair”

Me and my friends grew up with (very fond memories of) a particular video created by Doordarshan called “Mile Sur Mera Tumhara”:

Apparently there is a new version out now:

I for one find the old one still more charming. The new ones are a bit too long and they have way too many actors/actresses with voiceover by playback singers — I’d much rather see the playback singers themselves, as it is the Bollywood stars get way too much attention.

Happy Republic Day!

Over the past few years, the domestic airlines industry in the US has seen a steady decline. Faced with the recession, they have been devising ever new ways of squeezing money out of unsuspecting customers. There are a few exceptions (such as Southwest), but by far, flying is usually not a very pleasant experience for me.

Little did I know that European “budget” airlines are, in fact, even worse than their American counterparts. I recently had the misfortune of traveling on one such airline — easyJet. There was nothing easy about the experience, and if it is up to me, I will never ever travel on easyJet again.

First, let me provide some context. We were planning to do a break journey in Europe on our way to India. In the past, we have always carried two checked bags and one hand bag per person for India trips, for obvious reasons (such a long journey, may be once in a year — you just end up carrying a lot of stuff. Even more importantly, you end up bringing back a lot of things!). Unfortunately, just a few days before we were scheduled to fly, American Airlines decided to start charging a $50 fee for the second checked bag on flights to Europe/India. This actually was not that big of a problem, since we had one flight on easyJet and they already had similar restrictions in place.

Actually, I find easyJet’s baggage policy extremely strange. Here are some salient features (emphasis mine):

• Every item of standard checked (‘hold’) baggage will incur a fee.
• Payment of the fee provides you with an aggregate allowance of 20kg across all pieces of hold baggage which may only be increased by payment of excess weight charges.
• Where checked-in hold baggage exceeds 20kgs in weight (subject to the above rule), each passenger will pay an excess baggage charge per kg.

Finally the fateful day arrived for our easyJet flight. At the check in counter, the gate agent weighed our “hold” bags (1 per person). Since we had been deliberately careful about packing, they were both less than 20kg each so did not pose a problem.

Next came the hand luggage. Now, in prior communication with easyJet, I had been told that easyJet did not impose any weight restrictions on the hand bags, as long as they fit in the overhead bins. To quote the website (emphasis mine):

Save where the limits set locally are more restrictive, passengers are permitted one standard piece of hand baggage to a volume limit of 55x40x20cm (including wheels and pockets) (“Standard Hand Baggage”). It must fit without force into the gauges provided at check-in or departure gates. No weight restriction applies within reasonable limits — i.e. a passenger must be able to place the piece of luggage safely in the overhead storage bins without assistance.

I have traveled extensively with the hand bags that we had and never ever had any problems with any airlines. I’m convinced that our gate agent was determined to give us grief, by the rude manner in which she dealt with us, her hostile attitude and body language. In any case, she asked us to show that our hand bags “fit without force” into the bin. Unfortunately our hand bags were shaped more like bags and less like suitcases (which is what the bin was designed for), so they did not fit comfortably, but they did fit.

I tried to explain the agent that we never had problems with the bags before, that they were empty on the top so looked bigger than they actually were. Furthermore, we were in transit to an international destination, and had no issues in the first leg of our flight (on American Airlines). But the gate agent was simply not ready to listen — it was almost as if she had made up her mind to spoil our morning.

Arguing with her was frustrating since it was not really a dialogue. I might as well have been talking to a wall. She would not listen to reason, or show any compassion. Worried that we might miss our flight, in a moment of panic, I decided to just pay whatever fee was required, and get on with it. Big mistake. As it turns out, easyJet not only charges for the number of checked bags, but after 20kg, there is a per-kg excess baggage charge, which needless to add, is exhorbitant. Long story short, we ended up paying a ridiculous fee for our hand luggage.

To add insult to injury, while waiting in the gate area for boarding to begin, I counted at least two dozen passengers whose hand bags were at least as big as ours, if not bigger. There were bags in all shapes and sizes, and several which could not have fit into the bins no matter what. I spoke again to the ground staff and they deferred saying that we had to discuss it with the airlines. It turns out discussing anything with easyJet is not easy either — they don’t have offices at most airports they serve, finding a phone number on their website was a challenge, the online customer support was basically just boiler plate responses.

It was an extremely frustrating and disappointing experience. I was extremely angry at that time and had thought I’d take this up with easyJet as soon as I got back. But just thinking of the time and energy it would take just to get to speak to some human at easyJet who would actually try to listen and understand our situation is disheartening. At least, I’ve learnt my lesson.

We were working on a paper, and my advisor asked me write a section giving an overview of our implementation. In particular, he wanted me to come up with some good visuals to depict what was going on. So I fired up Inkscape and drew a figure. My figure had a few big prominent markers. Now I’m not too creative when it comes to color schemes. In other words, when I think of “color”, I start from Red, Blue and Green (RGB). Not surprisingly then, I drew my markers in red and blue. Prominent and easily distinguishable.

Now, it so happened that my markers were circular in shape. This was primarily because circles are really easy to draw in Inkscape, and one of the first shapes you see on the toolbar, and also because I didn’t pay too much attention to the shape of the markers. Naturally then, in the corresponding text describing the figure, I had the phrases “red balls” and “blue balls” sprinked all over the place.

I happily sent out the first draft to the faculty on the paper. In our next meeting, everyone came in looking very funny and laughing over something and I had no idea what they were laughing about. I felt so left out, like there was some secret joke that I had missed out on. Well, it turns out that “blue balls” has an entirely different connotation that I had never heard of back in India. Now, imagine a formal academic paper on virtualization talking in terms of red and blue balls. No wonder everyone found it so funny.

Lesson of the story: choose your colors, and your shapes, very very carefully :)

Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007, when 2.2 million homes and businesses switched off their lights for one hour. In 2008 the message had grown into a global sustainability movement, with 50 million people switching off their lights. Global landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House and the Coca Cola billboard in Times Square all stood in darkness.

The funky bar is courtesy the earth hour plugin. Of course, just having a CSS distraction on the website doesn’t do much if it is not followed up by real action. I will be turning off the lights in my apartment at the prescribed time and so should you. I’ll also try to rope in as many of my friends as I can. Remember, this is about making a choice. A single lamp in your house for an hour probably feels trivial, but with millions of people, it adds up. Besides, it is a gesture to show your solidarity and support and committment.

Are you going to take part?

Think about it for a second. Television is, for the most part, a broadcast medium. That is, our television sets mostly just receive data and hardly ever send anything back. You could say that this communication channel is mostly one way.

The Wikipedia page on Nielson ratings sheds some light on the matter:

One involves the use of viewer “diaries,” in which a target audience self-records its viewing (or listening) habits.

I’m not sure how much trust I can put in this methodology. But there is hope:

A more technologically sophisticated system has used Set Meters, which are small devices connected to every television in selected homes. These devices gather the viewing habits of the home and transmit the information nightly to Nielsen through a “Home Unit” connected to a phone line.

But this still doesn’t sound like a good solution. I also read somewhere that another popular methodology involves calling up randomly selected people and questioning them about their viewing habits!!

These days the situation is still a little bit better. Set-top boxes and  DVRs are becoming increasingly prevalent. These devices are significant more powerful and smarter than their ancestors, in the sense that they already do a fair bit of communication with your cable company, and hence it is conceivable that they enable collection of more accurate usage statistics.

Overall, it seems like a hard problem to me, since television has traditionally not been a connection oriented medium. This might change moving forward as IPTV and on-demand videos become more common. If you have some more information on the nitty-gritties of how this all works, please do share!

First, I successfully defended my PhD on October 31st. I have since finished all the paperwork and filed my dissertation. I am now, officially, Dr. Gupta! :-)

Second, I had a blast doing job interviews, and was in the difficult, but fortunate position of having to choose among several excellent offers, especially given the current economy. I will be joining Aster Data in a few days!

And finally, I got married to this most wonderful woman! While our wedding was crazy and intense and hectic and a ton of fun, I have come to believe that the reason marriages are more successful in India is that just one marriage drains you so much that you can’t even think about ever getting married again :-D

The first solution is for a situation where an Amarok upgrade caused the stats to be lost. I was using the default Amarok setup — that is, all the stats are stored in a file on disk using sqlite. During my Amarok upgrade, Amarok decided to create a new database. Fortunately, it left the old sqlite database file lying around. If you have an old version of your database, you can restore the stats using the following script:

The next scenario arose when I switched to using Amrok2 recently. Now, granted that Amarok2 is still under heavy development and hence the requisite migration paths might not be in place. But I still hate to lose all my stats. Amarok2 uses embedded MySQL instead of sqlite to store all its data. The following script uses your old database to restore all the stats in the new database.

Note that for this to work, you need to first start a MySQL server using the embedded MySQL directory as the data backend, as pointed out here.

Hope that helps!