Meanwhile my camera (Nikon D80) should be back from repair and servicing tomorrow from the Nikon service center.

I have stopped reading newspapers about 5 years back and stopped watching the news on TV about 2 years back. In fact, I have disconnected my cable connection and view less than 1 hour of TV per week – most of it at lunchtime in office. I guess I am not missing much. Most of my news comes via either social networks such as Twitter and Facebook or by talking to friends and colleagues. The danger with this approach however is that you tend to get marginalised in your thought process and tend to lose touch with your immediate surroundings. It is possible that I might be aware about what is happening in Kazakhistan but unaware of the riots in Bangalore. The upside of this approach though has been, I have been able to concentrate on what I am interested in and become extremely productive. I am watching myself to see how this experiment goes.

Last weekend I went to the Fireflies festival of Music. Fireflies festival was relatively less known underground indie festival on the outskirts of Bangalore but has become popular over the years. This years edition had several good bands crossing various genres and covering everything from traditional and experimental sounds of Kerala to sufi inspired hymns to Lounge Piranha’s alternative grunge and Low Rhyderz Reggae and Hiphop.

I reached a little late around 7pm and stayed through the night through till the last two acts. All the acts were very good and the variety was staggering. The only downside was the time taken to setup the stage and occasional problems with the sound setup.

Esperanto Soul Fusion

With Geeta Navale on the Veena, the esperanto project had some funky psychedelic sounds combined with Carnatic music.

HFT Jazz

Shabnam Virmani rendtion of “Kabir ke dohe”

Shabnam Virmani – Filmmaker-turned-singer regaled the audience with her soulful rendition of couplets of Kabir. She explained the meaning of the couplets before singing them. Her performance got a fantastic response from the audience.

Hulivesa

Definitely the highlight if the evening was Huilvesa – a traditional dance from coastal Karnataka. Hulivesa (Loose Tulu translation “In the form of a tiger”) is performed by young males typically aged between 5 years to 10 years are painted with yellow and black stripes like tiger adorning tiger masks and other props. The kids dance to a familiar drumbeat and perform various acts such as eating a coconut and doing acrobatic acts.

Lounge Piranha

Lounge Piranha are a post-rock alternative grunge band. They performed several songs from their released (and upcoming) albums. They played some good guitar riffs. The lead singer had a wry sense of humour and kept making jibes at “world music”.

Qawwali – Bharat Sargam and group

The Qawwali troupe got the audience on their feet by playing some popular songs such as “Jhoom Barabar Jhoom” and “Mast Kalandar”. There was almost a mini riot when the audience wanted to play one more song but the organisers wouldn’t relent and let them play the request.

Vayali – Traditional Kerala songs and experimental bamboo orchestra

Vayali started with an experimental bamboo orchestra in which all the instruments (mainly percussion) were made of Bamboo. They ended their performance with traditional Kerala songs.

Low Rhyderz

Low Rhyderz is a Hip-Hop/Reggae band. Probably the least interesting on all the performances, they were not able to engage the audiences like the other artistes. They were high on style but disappointingly low on entertainment.

Last year I had been to a friend’s place and seen a painting at her place which I liked a lot. She said she had bought it at Chitra Santhe. Chitra Santhe is typically held on the last Sunday of January every year along the Kumara Krupa Road. This year it was crowded and buzzing with activity and I saw several people carrying cartloads of paintings. This year, Chitra Santhe attracted more than 1300 artists and the road was choc-a-bloc with paintings of various styles. Also every other person seemed to carry a DSLR to take pictures of the artists and paintings. I did not carry my camera but the fair was a treat for the eyes. I bought a series of paintings depicting dances of India – Odissi, Bharatnatyam and Kathak. If you are in Bangalore during that time of the year, this is one event you should not miss.

What was surprising for me was the number and the variety of helicopters on display and in the air. Unfortunately due to the cheering crowd I could not hear the names of the helicopters. Here are some pictures of those.

But the best display was that of Sarang Helicopters. They first all lined up in a row in the air

And then separated out from each other. After a small lull and disappearing from view, suddenly I saw one coming in from the left

Then two side-by-side from my right.

They crossed over when they seemed right on collision course.

Quite a close shave that (though not apparent from the pictures – they were approaching each other at 320 kms per hour). The pilots must have had amazing skill not to mention enough confidence to pull off something like this. The display by Sarang was truly exhilarating but not as good as the Saras Planes to be covered in my next post.

The first planes on display were the vintage training planes such as the De Havilland Tigermoth 82 and Harvard MK IV. These planes seems to have a British legacy as they were used by the RAF of Britain to train pilots as well as by the nascent IAF. Here are the pictures of the planes.

de Havilland Tigermoth 82

Harvard MK IV

There were about 10-15 modern aircraft on display including Mirage-2000 (in pictures below), MIG-21 Bison, Jaguars and Sukhoi-30.

Underwing Armaments for MIG-27M-Bison

Indian Air Force Mi-35 Hind – Not as intimidating as the Apaches

Dhruv Helicopters Built for Equador

There were also students from PESIT who had this high performance engine vehicle on display and were continually driving between the barricades between the people and the static display. I could not catch what was special about this vehicle as the airshow was about to start. If you know something about this. Leave a comment, I will add it to the post.

High Performance Vehicle from PESIT

Recently I went over to the Strand Book stall’s 60th Anniversary sale which is on till Dec 28th. There was a decent collection of books (though not more than the typical 20% discount). Among the books I bought was ‘The book of Indian Birds’ by Salim Ali. This book brought back fond memories of my childhood. My parents were members of BNHS (Bombay Natural History Society) and regularly took me out to talks and slideshows (Salim Ali was associated with BNHS for a longtime). It is a nice guidebook with lots of interesting information though by no means exhaustive.It contains informative entries on more than 500 birds found on the Indian Subcontinent. I used it to identify the Small Bee-eater in Udaipur and the River Tern near Bhadra Dam in Chikamagalur.

I took this picture at the Maharana Pratap Memorial (Moti Magri) overlooking the Fateh Sagar Lake in Udaipur. The Small Bee-eater (Merops Orientalis) is distinguished by Reddish Brown head and neck and it’s tails fears which prolong into blunt pins. You can see the Bee-eater actually has a bee in it’s beak. It found all throughout the Indian Subcontinent.

The River Tern (Sterna Albifrons) can be distinguished by it’s yellow beak and black cape and is a noisy and a gregarious bird. It is found all round the Indian Subcontinent (except Sri Lanka) and usually seen near river banks and lakes. This picture was taken near the Bhadra Dam (We stayed in the nice Jungle Lodges log huts nearby).

The pictures have been crossposted to my Photoblog

I have been using Wordweb for over 2 years (on different laptops). It has a good dictionary which includes pronunciation and usage information. While looking up “pabulum” from a NYTimes Guy Kawasaki interview it gave me this message.

“You have been using wordweb for over a year. Please remember that you may continue using this free version only if you took at most four flights (two return flights) in the last 12 months and you do not own a SUV. If you do not qualify you must uninstall this program or order the pro version, otherwise this is software theft. Al users also benefit from the extra features of Wordweb Pro”.

There is a weird sense of fairness in this message – “If you can afford it, please pay up or uninstall”. The software author is banking on the fact that if you can afford to pay for it and don’t pay for it then you have a sense of guilt. You would just pay up to clear your conscience. But I am not sure how that equates to software theft. The user (in this case me) has not pirated the software or got it off a warez site, so a message such as this is disconcerting.

The Jargon files by Eric S Raymond defines guiltware as

A piece of freeware decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money.

Nevertheless, Wordweb is a good software and I don’t mind paying for it. I wish however the software author would not send me on a guilt trip. What do you think ?

PS: Then there’s beerware and postcardware as well

But to graph the relationships between people on IRC channels you need to write a bot which does this. IRC protocol is very simple and easy to implement. There are quite a few opensource bots out there which could be modified to fit. Luckily I found a IRC bot called PieSky which was written in java which does exactly this. It can infer relationships between people using the IRC conversations. Piesky has some nifty features which makes it really good for this purpose such as:

1. It draws an internal graph depending on who is talking to whom on IRC.
2. It has built in visualization tool for graphing these relationships (which is customizable)
3. It has some heuristics for temporal decay.

I registered the nick social-bot using nickserv on irc.freenode.net. After that I choose 3 channels to monitor for this experiment – #gentoo – A linux distribution channel, #python and #perl – both open source programming languages, ##linux-india – an IRC channel where linux enthusiasts hang out. I ran Piesky for about 12 hours on these channels. Piesky generates graphs for every dialogue between participants of an IRC channel. So make sure that you run this on a reasonably powerful machine if you are going to try this on a very active channel. Piesky has built-in temporal decay for relationships, so that relationships fade out when people stop talking – just as in real life. Running piesky on IRC channels threw up some interesting results. Those who have been using IRC for sometime like me will identify with this.

What the graphs represent :
1. The nodes represent the participants of IRC channels and lines represent the relationships between them.
2. The thickness and darker hues of the lines indicates the strength of a relationship.

##linux-india
Lap_64 was yakking away and seemed to talking to everyone and hence he is well connected with everyone. But he seems to be mostly talking a lot to binand. Similar lut4rp has been busy chatting away but he seems to have his own set of friends and though there is some overlap between them. Obviously Lap_64 and lut4rp seem to be hanging around for sometime and know quite a few people on ##linux-india or are particularly chatty during nightime (when this test was run and graph was generated). binand and binand_ indicate that binand had got disconnected but did not bother to ghost his IRC nick. ##linux india has been around for a long time and does not have many people logged onto it. This channel is active during the evening and late at night so the graph indicates that (with two almost disjoint set of nodes). This is typical of country-specific channel where activity rises and diminishes depending on time of day.

#perl and #python
Perl and Python are well known open source languages which attaract loyal followers from around the world. Such channels also have a long discussions on code and features of languages. The two social graphs indicate that. If you run piesky you are likely to see well-interconnected graphs such as this which means there is great amount of cross discussions and hence more dense relationships than country-specific or distro-specifc channels.

#gentoo
Linux distros such as gentoo also attract followers from around the world. But much of the discussion on features and code happens on the developer or maintainers mailing list and not so much on public IRC channels. So many of the participants in the #gentoo or #fedora ask a few questions and then leave. This is reflected in the disconnected graphs which piesky draws for distribution channels.