When cruelty is mistaken as cuteness and affection

People find weird things cute. They enjoy watching animals perform tricks and keep flight-gifted creatures as pets in tiny cages. When it comes to gifting and pets though, there are some things a sensible human can do:

1. Animal tricks: Unless the animal actually enjoys it (dog taught to fetch a ball), don't make animals do tricks.
2. Birds as pets: No matter how well you take care of your birds, I feel it is a sadist behavior. A pair of budgies were gifted to a person I know, and she wanted to breed them. So the birds gave rise to five more baby budgies, and she's really happy. But I've observed the behavior of these budgies for many months now. Although they are reasonably affectionate to humans, their natural behavior tends to finding the highest perch available and to fly away from human contact as much as possible. They are independent, intelligent, curious creatures that are denied their freedom because somebody thinks it's cute to own them or because somebody thinks they are being protected from the rest of the world.

Here are some things you need to know:

• The bait: Pet shop owners sell budgies at Rs.150 per bird. One thinks that's reasonable until one realizes that for the duration of the bird's life, one has to buy it seeds. So each bird sold, gives them a permanent customer. Now that they know they got you hooked, they charge exorbitant prices for the seeds. In Bangalore, bird seeds that are meant for budgies and finches, are purchased by shop owners for Rs.26 per kg and sold at Rs.50 or even at Rs.100 per kg. Some people sell it at Rs.220 or Rs.300 per kg on online shopping sites. Also sold, are vitamins etc. which the birds don't really need if you simply feed them with proper diet. Feeling cheated already?
• The possible scam: The pet industry in USA is worth $66 BILLION. I've known shop owners India who deliberately or unknowingly keep pet birds and fish which have parasites, so that customers who buy it would come back to buy more when the pet dies. Would the increase in pet cancer be from something deliberately introduced into pet food? Just speculating.
• Don't set them free: Animals and birds raised in captivity do not know where to find food and how to defend themselves. They also do not have the stamina to escape predators. They don't even know how to escape predators when pursued (I've seen it happen). If you already have a pet, keep it with you and care for it. Don't let it breed and create more of its kind that will have to live a captive life too. If you have birds, give them a larger space to fly around. Don't think you are giving them sufficient opportunity to fly if you have an aviary or allow them to fly in your room. A bird enjoys flying only when it's able to flap its wings and then glide at high speed for a long distance. Breeding a bird and keeping it caged denies it of its fundamental right to fly free. There are aviaries like Shuka vana where injured or uncared birds can be taken care of.

Having a pet was an old tradition. Of a time when cruelty was considered normal. Crazy behaviour was considered a normal part of a ritualistic, egoistic society. Of a time when people were a lot less civilized and immature. A time when even humans were displayed in a zoo.

We do not have to continue those practices. Please....stop buying pets. Stop breeding them. Stop forcing them to live an unhappy, bored life in captivity. If you've rescued them and are taking care of them, it's an entirely different thing. Just don't breed more captives for your pleasure/profit.

Your imagined cuteness is a heartless cruelty.

Summary: Ubuntu's 17.10 bug 1734147 which makes motherboards unusable is now fixed

The last time I tried Ubuntu 17 was on a non-Intel motherboard, so nothing happened. But there was something that I didn't like, so switched back to 16. Now I read that Ubuntu 17.10 has a bug which corrupts the BIOS and prevents USB boot.

Why it happens: This happens because Intel's SPI driver (allows the OS to rewrite firmware's flash memory) causes the firmware to become write protected. This happens only in Intel Broadwell and Haswell machines with serial flashes with SPI_NOR_HAS_LOCK set.

If your BIOS is affected: Try the fixes mentioned on this page. If it doesn't work, you may have to replace the flash memory chip or the entire motherboard, depending on how it is manufactured.

Is it fixed? Yes. This page mentions the problem, the fix and the machines affected. You can now fearlessly download Ubuntu versions higher than 17.10, and you won't have any trouble.

Lesson: Although contrary to conventional advice, it helps to not have automatic updates enabled, and to upgrade to a new version of an OS only after some time has elapsed since its release.

An open letter to hospitals that make patients relatives run around to get blood

Note: You can try to get blood from these places:

• Blood availability locator (does not seem functional in 2024)
  
• e-RaktKosh
• Sankalp's Bombay blood group list 
• Sankalp's project Disha helpline
• Blood and bone marrow transplants for thalassemia patients

 

A relative of mine was being treated at a hospital, and I heard the hospital was making his friends and relatives run around, to arrange for replacement blood donors. Since he was undergoing plasmapheresis and dialysis, there was a huge demand for blood. Moreover, even though they brought blood donors and paid the donors, they still had to pay extra for blood units that the hospital gave. That was a shame. Especially for a hospital that claimed to treat its patients well.

I wrote a letter to them. The links in the letter are important. They will take you to a whole new level of knowledge.

Hello,

I know there's no point in taking you on a guilt-trip of making relatives of patients running around trying to find blood donors, so let's get down to some facts:

• At least in Mumbai, hospitals who arm-twist relatives of patients can lose their NOC.
• Blood obtained from relatives/friends or coercion is unreliable. It is the duty of the hospital to organize for safe blood by conducting frequent blood donation camps. Don't promise free blood though.
• Since April this year, all registered blood banks can organize blood donation camps and inter-blood bank transfer is permitted.
• By forcing people, you undermine voluntary blood donors. "Why should we donate?" they ask, "when we will be forced by the hospital anyway".

I understand hospitals have their own logistics to worry about, but when you have a marketing term that claims to treat people well, the hospital's word-of-mouth advertising will definitely improve when people know that this is one hospital that does not inconvenience people. Apart from the blood donation aspect, I really appreciate other procedures that are followed well in the hospital.

Kindly forward this to the person who can take decisions on organizing blood donation drives. Meanwhile, I hope your hospital could immediately stop inconveniencing people and instead organize for processed blood units to be brought to the hospital from other blood banks (which follow strict guidelines). You could of course charge a premium on it.

Regards,
Nav

For the reader: If you can organize for donors, then please do. There is indeed a shortage of blood. But be aware that you are not obligated to.
Bangalore itself needs an average of 800 units of blood everyday!!! Do encourage and participate in blood donation drives. It's the best way to ensure there is safe blood available for everyone in need. Encourage hospitals to organize frequent blood donation camps instead of just complacently indulging them with replacement donors.

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

Some points from the links above:

• With no official complaints raised by the public, corporate blood banks have no incentive to walk away from replacement blood. “Grievances can be filed at the PM’s portal,” Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System (CPGRAMS), “which collates grievances from multiple sources and forwards them to the state government, nodal officer, or blood bank concerned,” says Dr Shobini.
• Shobini Rajan, assistant director general, National Aids Control Organisation (NACO), said the blood policy doesn't say it is illegal for hospitals to ask for donors but it is undesirable.

More on blood donation: http://nrecursions.blogspot.com/2015/02/blood-donation-what-went-right.html
And volunteering: http://nrecursions.blogspot.com/2015/07/how-to-start-volunteering-or-how-to.html

Forgot BIOS password and removing CMOS battery does not work?

In the "good old days", if you forgot your BIOS password, all you had to do was open up the computer, remove the CMOS battery or remove the jumper near the battery and your CMOS password would get reset to no password.

That's changed now. I recently reset my laptop to CMOS factory default settings, saved and exited, and it asked for a password the next time I wanted to enter the CMOS settings. I had not even set a password!!!

 

Opening up the laptop and finding the CMOS battery was an interesting proposition, so I did just that. Removed the battery, replaced it after 30 seconds, put back all components, started the laptop and it still asked for a password. Darn! Going through the laptop manual showed that the battery had to be removed and kept aside for at least an hour.
Ok good. So I did that. Waited for more than an hour, put back all components, started the laptop and bang! There was the password prompt again!
Turns out that there was a person who even kept the battery aside for three months and yet the password didn't reset. It's likely to be stored in a more permanent location in memory in today's computers.

The solution:
After a lot of anxious searching, I found this website. The ultimate guide to resetting the BIOS password.
Turns out that when you take your computer to the official service people, they don't need to know your BIOS password or hack into it with brute force techniques.
They simply use a default password that the manufacturer programs into the motherboard. These are called backdoor codes.

So all you have to do is try out some of the openly available backdoor codes on the website, and if that doesn't work, then try entering some random password three times and your BIOS password prompt will show you a number. Enter that number into this website https://bios-pw.org/ and it'll show you the backdoor password for your BIOS.

That's it! I was able to access my CMOS settings screen again and this time I set my own password.
Do try this before you take your laptop to some service person who'd use the same simple technique and then charge you a huge amount because you'd think they used some super secret hacking technique to elegantly solve your problem for you.

________________________________

The fact that you are here means that you use the computer a lot. So please also take some time to understand the real cure for eye strain.  Yes, it matters.

 

 

 

 

You can check your voter details online

The draft electoral rolls for Bangalore are out already, and voters can now check/edit their details online.

There is a regional website where the backend didn't function properly, so I'd recommend going to the other regional website which takes you to the national website. Sadly, none of the websites have https, so anything you enter there could be viewed by someone else. Your browser will inform you about this the moment the webpage opens.

Once on the national website, you can search for your existing voter information. I typed in my details and it didn't find anything, but on clicking the Search by EPIC number tab, I entered my voter ID and was shown my details which were exactly what I had entered earlier, and the backend didn't even return an exact name search match. Since the websites were powered by C-DAC, I wrote to them and hope they'd introduce HTTPS.

Still, as long as you are ok with not using https, you can use the website to submit forms online and track your application status online.
Forms are available for:

• Inclusion of names for residents electors    
• Inclusion of names for overseas electors    
• Any objection on inclusion of names       
• Correction of entries in the Electoral Rolls     
• Transposition within Assembly

Some thoughtful person has also created a nice caricature document explaining general voter information. Do go through it and show it to kids.

Do a 'Google Trends' on Google Books

This may actually be quite a good incentives for scholars and literature enthusiasts, for uploading more books online.
Similar to how Google Trends gives you graphs to compare various Google search terms used over the years, Google Ngram viewer allows you to search and compare the usage of words and phrases used in books over the years. You can even add wildcard characters like the asterisk, and even specify if what you are searching for is a noun or an adjective etc. Two researchers, Sparavinga and R.Marazzato even wrote a paper on it.

For example, searching for "how are you" vs "how do you do" shows that "how do you do" was used more in the 1700's, but slowly the usage declined. On a side note: the reply to "how do you do" is "how do you do", and not "I'm fine".

More on how Ngram works: https://books.google.com/ngrams/info#

If your work is primarily on Google Scholar, there are good search tools (including advanced search) and metrics information available to gauge the visibility and influence of articles published. Useful tools.

Mostly, time spent online is time well spent

Which is better? Finding a bunch of intellectuals online, who love discussing your favourite topics on artificial intelligence, general knowledge, TED talks, research efforts worldwide or switching off your phone and computer and spending time with relatives who discuss cricket runs scored and religious rituals?

Interacting online has the advantage of filtering out a HUGE amount of irrelevant data, awkwardness and annoyances. If you like it, there's nothing wrong with liking it. Time is precious to all of us. Let's spend it doing what we like, and with the people we like. Whether the people are online or physically present with you is irrelevant.
It's the genuineness of your connection with them that matters.

That being said, physical meetings have a flavour of their own, and should be encouraged at the comfort level that people would like it to be encouraged.

As for Simon Sinek's observation...

...it's easy to use the pointing finger to highlight "what's wrong with this generation", but one has to know that this is what every generation has been saying about the next generation for the past millenia.

The truth is, there's nothing ever wrong with a generation. There's nothing wrong with how people do things. Some people build good relationships, some don't. Some people adopt and use technology in specific ways, some don't. Some people will always be less confident and unhappy, some won't. That's how we are meant to be as a population. There's nothing wrong in that.

Every single species on this planet was not meant to live and behave in a certain way forever. We evolve. We are meant to evolve. When you see someone doing something different, it's because that's what they are meant to do. We as a generation, have better access to information. We know and understand relationships better. We know whom to connect with and when to run away from toxic people. We've even researched and spread awareness about addiction to social media. We learn from people all around the world.

Accept change for the good it brings. For as someone once said: There is only one constant: "Change". Rather than point fingers at a generation of people, see how these well informed, intelligent people can help you and you'll be surprised!

A tutorial on Differential Evolution and Otsu's method for image thresholding

The first thing you need to know before your foray into computational intelligence (CI), is that the creators of these algorithms themselves don't know how it works. CI algorithms are inherently analytical techniques that depend on randomness to give solutions that are close to optimal, but not necessarily the best solution. It's like finding a lovely house in a city and choosing it as your home, but you have not actually found out if it is the best house that you could find in the city, because you just did not have the time to explore. The fact that people come up with naming these algorithms after animals (bat algorithm), insects (ant colony, bee colony, glowworm algorithms) and bacteria (bacterial foraging algorithm) is an amusing practice because the lack of theoretical backing makes the creation and optimization of the algorithm more of an art than a science.

Still, the way these algorithms improve over the generations is very impressive. This video shows you how:

This tutorial covers the topic of finding thresholds for a grayscale image using a CI algorithm named Differential Evolution (DE). We check if the thresholds are good enough by using the Otsu criterion. The best references for DE and Otsu criterion are the original papers presented here and here.

What is image thresholding?
Consider Lena's image. When you convert the red, blue and green pixels to gray colours, you end up with colours ranging from 0 to 255. Zero is black. 255 is white and the numbers in between are shades of gray (I'm not talking of Fifty shades of gray). Now if you decide that all pixels below the shade 118 are going to be converted to black and all pixels above or equal to 118 are going to be white, you end up with an image like this:

This is called "image thresholding" or "image segmentation". There are more complex ways of doing image segmentation though. The basic idea is to try and separate the image into distinct segments based on our interest. Sometimes we want to distinguish between foreground and background. Sometimes, to distinguish between parts of objects or multiple objects. If the threshold were closer to 50 or 10, the image would appear too dark. So we have to figure out which threshold will give us an optimum image. An image where the pixels are shaded in such a way that the objects in the image are well distinguished from other objects. An "optimal threshold".

So how did we find this threshold at 118?
We used the "Otsu" technique. A person named Otsu figured out that a simple and nice way to segment images was to first create a histogram of the pixels and then statistically analyze the histogram.
This is what Lena's histogram looks like:

The vertical columns are the count of the pixels of a particular shade of gray. Notice the bottom of the graph showing the shades of gray. At shade 100, the vertical column just crosses 2000. It means that the Lena image has a little more than 2000 pixels which have the gray shade of 100.  These vertical columns are called "bins".

In statistics, there is a concept of "class", which is a group of objects with a similar property. So in the above histogram, we want to find a threshold which would separate the pixels into two classes. Black pixels and white pixels.
Otsu figured out that he could statistically find the best combination of classes (and hence the location of the best threshold), by examining the mean and variances of the classes. He created a formula and called it "finding the between class variance". This between class variance will be used as a value that gives us the "fitness" of the image. Higher the value, better the threshold.
If there are two thresholds, there would be three classes. As shown in the image below, the image would be eventually shown with all pixels below grayscale 32, as white. Anything equal to or above 32 and below 106, as gray colour 32 and any pixel equal to or above 106 as white.

The calculation goes like this:

The gray histogram is first normalized. Each of the 0 to 255 bins of the histogram are iterated as i.

probability of i = number of pixels in bin i / total number of pixels in image

total mean = sum of probability of i of all bins

If there are t thresholds, then there will be t+1 number of classes c the image can be segmented into. So with a threshold of t=1, there would be classes c1 and c2. Class mean values would also be computed as mean1 and mean2. Or, as shown in Figure 2.1, if there are two thresholds t1 and t2, there would be three classes and therefore three mean values calculated.

pc = probability of class occurrence c = sum of probability of i of all bins in c

 

class mean = sum of (i * probability of i of all bins in c) / class occurrence c

Class variances of each class c are calculated as:

class variance = sum of ((i - class mean)² * probability of i / probability of class occurrence c)

The variance between the classes gives the fitness of the threshold. 

between class variance = sum for all bins(pc * (class mean - total mean)²) 

Note that the between class variance (BCV) is one single value. You don't calculate between class variances for each threshold and sum them up. You use the one formula given above to calculate it.

Ok, so now we know how to calculate the fitness of a threshold, we can write a simple for loop that places the threshold at the zero'th position in the histogram and calculates the BCV. Then move the threshold to position 1 of the histogram and find the BCV and keep going on for values 2, 3, 4 ... till 255. The threshold with the highest BCV will be the optimal threshold. For a single threshold of the Lena image, it is at 118.

Now you'd say. Hey, that's it? We just have a search space of 0 to 255? Then why do we need a computational intelligence algorithm? Couldn't we just use normal for loops?

Well, for one threshold you can do an exhaustive search from 0 to 255. For two thresholds, you'd have to run two loops nested. So that's 255². For four thresholds, the number of iterations are 4294967296. It would take 95 days to compute on Matlab.

Enter the saviour: Computational Intelligence algorithm: Differential Evolution:

The basic idea of DE is to place thresholds randomly within 0 and 255, and keep evaluating the BCV. With some luck, you will get good thresholds which won't be the best, but will be good enough.

The secret weapon of DE is "mutation" and "crossover". Similar to how we have a population of humans and our genes undergo mutations and crossover of traits, the DE algorithm initializes a 'population' of vectors. If we are solving a problem of finding two optimal thresholds, then each vector will contain two random thresholds. During the DE algorithm, these vectors will be combined randomly with other vectors in the population to provide some variety to the result, and somehow, we end up finding near-optimal thresholds. Nobody knows how, but it works. Magic.

If there are 4 thresholds and a population of 3 vectors, the vectors would look like this:
X1 = [t1; t2; t3; t4];
X2 = [t1; t2; t3; t4];
X3 = [t1; t2; t3; t4];
Where, the t1 of X1 does not have to be the same as the t1 in X2 and so on.

This is the pseudocode for my DE algorithm:

• Load image and convert to 8 bit grayscale
• Generate histogram from image. Bins ranging from 0 to 255
• Initialize DE parameters: PopulationSize, thresh, crossover probability (cr), beta.
• Set thresh number of thresholds each, randomly within bin space for each population entity X.
• Evaluate initial fitness of X
• forEach generation for a defined number of iterations
• forEach population p for PopulationSize
• Select population entity p from X.
• Select 3 distinct populations from X. The thresholds should not be equal to p.
• Generate mutant U_p = X1 + beta * (X2 – X3)
• If U_p == X_p, regenerate threshold at random position for U_p and continue;
• Crossover at least one threshold from X to U and other thresholds if generated rnd <= cr
• If mutant thresholds are outside histogram range, regenerate threshold at random position
• end for population
• Evaluate fitness of U_p
• forEach population p for PopulationSize
• If fittest mutants in U_p are fitter than fittest X_p, replace X_p with fittest U_p
• end for population
• decrease beta by 40^-1
• end for generation

Beta value: Ranges from 0 to 2. A high beta value ensures that the mixing of vector values have a much larger variation, so the mutated vector will end up far from the existing vectors. This is called "exploration", and helps visiting many other threshold positions within the 0 to 255 values. Smaller values of beta keep the variations of threshold values closer to the existing thresholds. This is called "exploitation", as you have found a good threshold already and are trying to exploit that area to find better thresholds in the area. Beta is also called the constant of differentiation.
The crossover probability: Ranges from 0 to 1. Having a low crossover probability like 0.2 was found to help reach an optimal threshold faster, but it does not necessarily reach the most optimal threshold. A higher value like 0.8 helps reach a more optimal threshold, but it can take three times more number of generations to do so. Setting cr=0.3 appeared to help reach an optimal threshold with a slightly higher number of generations than cr=0.2. Allows exploitation of symmetry and separability of a function.

That's all there is to it. You can have multiple thresholds and the time of execution is just around a minute or two in Matlab even for 6 or eight thresholds. This is a major advantage of CI algorithms. You could achieve the same results with genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization, bee colony algorithm or bacterial foraging algorithms.

The code for the DE algorithm and Otsu method, I've listed here: https://github.com/nav9/differentialEvolution

Programs to install after a fresh Ubuntu installation (specifically for 16.04)

Install vim:

sudo apt-get -y install vim

Create a bash aliases file.

gedit .bash_aliases; source .bash_aliases

vim .bashrc, and add this to the end of your .bashrc: (not necessary Ubuntu 20 onward)

if [ -f $HOME/.bash_aliases ]
then
  . $HOME/.bash_aliases
fi

 

Download Google Chrome and install it:

sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb 

If there's an error with appstreamcli:

sudo apt install --reinstall libappstream3

Remove Amazon:

sudo rm /usr/share/applications/ubuntu-amazon-default.desktop
sudo rm /usr/share/unity-webapps/userscripts/unity-webapps-amazon/Amazon.user.js
sudo rm /usr/share/unity-webapps/userscripts/unity-webapps-amazon/manifest.json

Install various programs:

sudo apt-get update; install gimp; install vlc; install git; install audacity; uninstall rhythmbox; install audacious; install kdenlive; install kazam; install inkscape; install gnome-tweaks; install meld; install kdiff3; install gparted; install shutter; install htop; install iotop; install tcpdump; install atop; install nethogs; install nmon; install glances; install dmsetup; install swapspace; install snapd; install redshift; install git-cola; install bleachbit; sudo apt autoremove -y;

Remove the boot curtain and the ugly pink grub background:

https://nrecursions.blogspot.com/2021/07/what-to-do-when-ubuntus-boot-time-is.html

Change grub timeout:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub; sudo update-grub

Install Snap if necessary and change the update time:

sudo snap set system refresh.timer=fri,3:00-3:01

Install virtual environment for Python:

PyEnv

Get rid of Ubuntu 16.04's annoying drumbeat sound:

sudo mv /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/desktop-login{,-disabled}.ogg; sudo mv /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/system-ready{,-disabled}.ogg

Other tasks

• Install Firefox extensions.
• Change colors of terminal.
• Change settings of Gedit.
• Change the wallpaper. 
• Create another user.
• Disable the guest account.
  

Creating a dual boot with Windows and Ubuntu when you have UEFI

People on many blogs say that you have to disable secure boot when you have UEFI and want to install Ubuntu alongside Windows 8 or 10.
Not necessary. You don't even have to switch to Legacy boot.

The basic concept to understand is, that if you have UEFI, you'll have to tell the boot manager where to find your boot file. That's all.

After a lot of searching and ending up at all the wrong blogs and posts, I finally found this post. Worked perfectly!

The steps are:

• Install Windows, leaving a separate partition for Ubuntu
• Install Ubuntu on that partition
• Reboot and enter BIOS screen
• Follow the steps here about selecting grubx64.efi
• Save and exit BIOS

That's it! You've got a dual boot system. Grub will show you the options for booting into either Windows or Ubuntu.
If anything goes wrong, you can always press F12 when starting your computer to see the boot options.

Oh btw, don't disable secure boot. It's a very important feature that prevents your system from getting infected at boot time, by malware that might be in an external drive that's connected to your PC at boot time.

Our Income tax website has a perplexing error message

I logged into my income tax e-filing account yesterday, and saw this message: "You are not authorized to view this page because either your bank details of your PAN and profile details are incorrect or these details have not been passed onto e-Filing. Please contact the owner of the information for details".

I was completely perplexed. I had filed my taxes correctly, so why this message? I couldn't even access my dashboard and didn't know what to do.

A bit of Googling revealed that few other people had faced the same issue since 2014. One of the answers on a forum said that this message shows up when the website is undergoing some routine maintenance, and we should check back after six to twelve hours.

I logged back in the next day and sure enough, everything was back to normal.

Phew!

Whether it's a routine website maintenance or too many connection requests to the server or because there's an actual issue with the details not matching, I hope the message could be changed to display something that specifies what the actual issue is, so that we could be informed of it and do what is necessary to fix it. For example:

• If it's routine maintenance or too many connections to the server: "Routine website maintenance ongoing. Please check back after few hours".
• If it's a problem with the bank details: "Your bank details for <bankName> are incorrect. Please ensure that <problem> is fixed by <solution>".

This is for all of you who were perplexed by this message and didn't know whom to ask. Hope it helped. In most cases, you just have to wait a while before you try logging in again. Otherwise, you can always contact the income tax helpline to find out more.

 

Update 2020: The issue still seems prevalent, as shown in the comments below. I hope contacting the relevant authority or submitting feedback or submitting a grievance or contacting your bank to mention this problem may help resolve the problem faster.

How to download files or an entire folder from Google Drive?

I've found it very strange that a product of Google didn't have a straightforward way to download files or an entire folder in one shot.

There is a way though:

• As shown in the image below, click the folder or file you want to download
• Then click the menu button to open the menu.
• Then if you don't see a download option in the menu, just click the empty area at the bottom of the menu.

You'll get your folder in zipped format.

I assume it's just a bug that the download icon isn't visible.
Another way to download is to double click the file to open it and on the top right corner of the screen you'll see the download icon.


UPDATE: I wrote to Google support about this issue, and as of August,  the CSS issue with the hidden download button is fixed. There also was another issue of people using Chrome being unable to download files. Google told me they are working on fixing that too. Until then, you could just use incognito mode to download.

Wear that helmet. It's actually worth it

Few years ago when taking my friend back home on my bike, he noticed me taking my helmet and asked "You wear a helmet for short distances too?".

I couldn't really believe what I was hearing. Still, there is a large number of people who hate helmets because it's claustrophobic, because they think it causes hair loss (it does not), because they actually feel they'd never get into an accident and sometimes simply because they can't afford one.

The safety lectures are not the only reason to wear them:

Stones, insects, tree branches: Even when riding a bike at 40kmph, these objects can hit your face at high speeds. Have a full face helmet with a visor. I've encountered these projectiles at least once a month. The stones that get half under a vehicle tyre and shoot out at you are particularly dangerous. A colleague's car windshield looks like as though a bullet hit against bulletproof glass and left a dent there. It was hit by one such stone.

Wind, dust, sunlight and rain: Very useful to be protected with a helmet.
And of course...safety: The visor protects your nose and the front of your face from getting damaged too much. A full face helmet protects the sides of your face (which are most probable for damage during an accident).


Look at all the pics here.

Get a helmet. Wear it.

Writing GATE exam of another branch

I was forced into a different branch of engineering, even though what really clicked with me was computer science. Ever since then there was a desire to pursue an education in CS.

So what can engineers of other branches do to get a degree in Computer Science? Either write GATE or PGCET. The PGCET people were obstinate about not allowing me to write a CS paper, but the GATE organizers (bless them) agreed.
With five months of preparation time and a work schedule which many-a-time required me to work on weekends, I started preparing. Even though a week before the exam I couldn't study due to work deadlines, I wrote GATE and waited...remembering the amusing moment when the examiners at the centre, double-checked my photo ID with my face, wondering if I was a genuine candidate (others who wrote the exam were much younger).

Results were declared and I was among the top 11% of candidates across India. To me it initially didn't seem a big deal that I qualified. It was only later that a friend from IISc told me that qualifying in GATE itself is a big deal. On top of that, I cleared GATE from a different branch than what I studied in my bachelors. This was accentuated by my meeting some CS graduates who told me that they couldn't clear GATE when they wrote it.

Even more surprising:  Only 16% of the students had qualified. Articles from HindustanTimes and IndiaToday.

I also wrote back to the GATE organizers thanking them for the opportunity and the organizing chairman Prof.G.J.Chakrapani replied back with his best wishes.


What helps with preparing for GATE?

The wonderful people who created GateOverflow. The single best resource on the internet. There's a PDF you can download which contains questions from previous years, segregated subject-wise.
They also have a stackoverflow-style forum where you can ask your doubts.
This is a very useful piece of knowledge, because it lets you know how you have to study the concept, in order to be prepared for the exam.

Now I'm finally doing my masters in Computer Science. A bunch of mind boggling mathematics as part of the syllabus, but I'm glad I got here.


And to the socially conscious parents...

I still meet people who have newly become parents, who are already planning to send their child to college to become a doctor or engineer. I ask them if they'd be willing to consider what their child's interests are, and they don't really care.
I feel sad for their kids.
A bunch of lovely dreams squashed by the perception of social status and bullying.

As long as the education system and the industry allows people to switch to what they like doing, I feel our people and our nation will have a bright future. Better still, might be the concept shown in Man of Steel, where the genetic makeup of a child is determined at birth and they are trained from childhood to become the best at whatever career they are genetically and mentally most inclined to like and perform.

"Knowledge is most precious to the one who truly seeks and respects it"

- Nav

What exactly is the "mothers love" part of home cooked food?

One of my seniors in college always loved saying (whenever we were at a restaurant) that mother's food is always the best food because it is sprinkled with a necessary ingredient: Love.

I mentioned the same thing to a pragmatic uncle of mine, and his immediate response was "Bull***t!" :-)
At least he wasn't of the opinion that the taste of food comes from an emotion.

So what exactly is the "mothers love in home-cooked food" or to ask it differently, what makes home cooked food more healthy? What makes restaurant food bad?

Answers you are familiar with (about restaurant food):

• Artificial ingredients
• Too many spices
• Reused oil

But that's not all. There are some things you've never noticed because your stomach was either resilient enough to handle it or you just didn't know:

• The food was not cooked fully (many cooks aren't really cooks. They were just looking for a job and someone taught them the basics and they have too many customers to serve)
• The food has burnt particles in it (I know there are a lot of silly people who have told you that the black portions of rotis and parathas are ok. They are not)
• The ingredients used were of low quality.
• The food can contain H Pylori. Causes horribly painful stomach aches.

So the "Love" in the food is...

The love is the care with which the food is cooked. Not every mother can do that though. Many of them hate being in the kitchen and many aren't very knowledgeable about cooking. But the more access to knowledge the mother or father or any family member has, the better their cooking will be and the more healthy it will be for you.
There's one other thing: Certain foods get associated with memories of one's mother or family. For example, there are friends of mine who love Ragi Mudde (plenty of childhood memories associated with it). Others can't even stand the taste of it.

If you don't have access to healthy home cooked food, buy a stove (even if it's an electric induction stove) and learn to cook your own food. Trust me, it'll be entirely worth it. If you live in a place that does not allow you to cook, then leave that place and find a place where you can cook.
Invest in your health. If you ignore the food part of health, every other part of your body will suffer.


ps: On a side note, if you've heard of people saying that eating with the fingers is tastier than eating with a spoon but were never able to explain why; I have the answer for you. I asked this question on skeptics.stackexchange.com and here's the answer:

There is scientific research which says that touching (tactile sensations) itself, not just the changes in the diffusion of taste and odor compounds with different textures, can adjust the perception of taste and smell. The studies don't specifically say that the taste is always improved, but tactile sensations affect the perceived taste.