Generally I am the last one in the office to move to a new release of Fedora on the main box. I tend to move through stable -> rawhide / development -> newer release on the test box using a variety of combinations of desktop environments and applications. Since the test box is MIA and I was getting tired of the “raah-raah Sulphur” that seems to be echoing from corners of the office, I decided to take the plunge and take the main box to rawhide / development with the intention of moving to Sulphur (stable). Used a LiveUSB to “install-to-hard-disk” activated the livna repo and pulled in a massive upgrade followed by the install of my preferred applications. First impressions - [i] the graphics look way too smooth and beautiful [ii] NetworkManager had some initial hiccups but then began working nicely (UPDATE: Thanks to the poking around the system by mether it turns out that some till_now_undocumented gconf cruft in /home was playing hard to get with NM other than which the disable-enable trick for the connection seems to work nicely) [iii] Pidgin hasn’t crashed yet, so I am off Kopete for a while [iv] took some time getting used to the packagekitd + yum thing with yum getting locked now and then. I generally turn of yumupdatesd and then do yum install / remove etc and guess getting used to PackageKit will take time [v] scim and Bengali (India) support work nicely [vi] fonts on the browser render well, I could do with some of my browser add-ons though, but I guess they will come in due course [vii] the firstboot doesn’t include the SELinux bits so you can trip up getting the system installed and booted into SELinux “Enforcing” mode. Fun, fun, fun

And in some other news

• Yesterday evening we had a lovely meal at Barbeque Nation which is doing a soft launch at Pune. The concept of a “live barbeque” at the table is fairly unique for me at least and the food was lovely. For a change the music wasn’t really too loud, the seating comfortable and we had a whole lot of stories to share over the fixed price 5 vegetarian, 5 non-vegetarian “eat all you can” barbeque feast. The food could have done with a touch of less salt and I really wished I had dragged my camera along.
• Runa is back from her vacation and she re-arranged the bookshelf and I have space for more books. She also brought some goodies (read palm-candy) for me. Yay !!
• During an unguarded moment of enthusiasm I had opined to Lucas that the RoadMap needs to be “un-geeked”. So, I plan to sit down during the coming weeks and ask the lamest of questions on the now-released-roadmap and be a general pain in the posterior for all the fine folks who responded to the roadmap call.
• ps. we are looking out for a software engineer.

and a report. Rest of the photos are here.

The last blog entry has initiated an interesting round of comments and mails. The one thing I’d like to point out is that I wasn’t the one discussing about “alternative education” or even “home schooling” (come to think of it, I don’t really know anything about how popular home schooling is in India). That stuff was written by Pradeepto and I guess he’s being shy not to follow it up with the discussions he’s been having.

I am a bit more worried about the “rewards-for-results” process that parents seem to follow. I have enough first hand anecdotes from various bookstores, retail stores and what-not to take a guess that the process seems to be adopted since it is easy to implement.

The problem as I see it lies in putting rewards (or “carrots”) in order to “make” the children do tasks and then also providing details of punishments (or “stick”) if the consequences are not according to expectations. Doing it this way makes it easy since the kids do have a lot of interesting things on their wishlist and tying the wishlist to real-life and real-time performance is supposed to get things done faster. It also puts in the incremental fear about “consequences” if things are not_done. Children are not supposed to be “made to learn”. The motivation from learning should be coming from within ie intrinsic and the environment should be such that the intrinsic motivation is fostered and nurtured.

The over emphasis on individual excellence over peer level collaboration that the current education system puts in place does create a paradox. Students go through life striving to be excellent “individual contributors” and then when they end up at a job (including research assignments) they are expected to learn to collaborate. How’s that for fun ? The other side effect of the “rat race” is the lack of focus on skills that children should learn to inculcate - managing their time, their assignments and most importantly taking time to play. The urban sprawl that the country is turning into is ensuring that the housing socities have a tiny patch of green called the children’s park. And the ones between 10-15 years either just laze around at the house watching TV or are compelled to attend an innumerable and wild variety of activity classes like tennis, karate, cricket etc.

There has to be something called multiple process disorder which creates the conflicts in the mind of a child as to what really needs to be done. The other problem of course is the overt studies (including this arm-chair one) which try and figure out what is wrong by boxing things into convenient and “pragmatic” (?) action items.

 ভুবনেশ্বর হে ,
মোচন কর’ বন্ধন সব মোচন কর’ হে ।।
প্রভু, মোচন কর’ ভয় ,
সব দৈন্য করহ লয় ,
নিত্য চকিত চঞ্চল চিত কর’ নিঃসংশয় ।
তিমিররাত্রি, অন্ধ যাত্রী ,
সমুখে তব দীপ্ত দীপ তুলিয়া ধর’ হে ।।
ভুবনেশ্বর হে ,
মোচন কর’ জড়বিষাদ মোচন কর’ হে ।
প্রভু, তব প্রসন্ন মুখ
সব দুঃখ করুক সুখ ,
ধূলিপতিত দুর্বল চিত করহ জাগরূক ।
তিমিররাত্রি, অন্ধ যাত্রী ,
সমুখে তব দীপ্ত দীপ তুলিয়া ধর’ হে ।।
ভুবনেশ্বর হে ,
মোচন কর’ স্বার্থপাশ মোচন কর’ হে ।
প্রভু, বিরস বিকল প্রাণ ,
কর’ প্রেমসলিল দান ,
ক্ষতিপীড়িত শঙ্কিত চিত কর’ সম্পদবান ।
তিমিররাত্রি, অন্ধ যাত্রী ,
সমুখে তব দীপ্ত দীপ তুলিয়া ধর’ হে ।।

Pradeepto has a small blog entry about “alternative education”. We were talking about it on the very day the programme was aired on TV but not everything that’s there in the blog was being talked about.

The most significant problem with the issue is that the kids are generally pushed into activities by their parents because “co-curricular activities are nice” and since they don’t really like these karate-swimming-tennis-what_not classes - they are rewarded each time they do attend or participate in them.

If the hassled parents of today think that rewards are a good way to enforce behaviour change - I’d say they are dead wrong.

Rewards are a mistake. And a big one.

Rewards don’t really bring about behaviour change. What they end up doing is ensuring that a repetitive pattern of behaviour is put in place so as to minimize the chances of losing out on the rewards. Ergo, the kids don’t do things that would ensure that they don’t get rewards. And since they are being rewarded for something they might not be enjoying - the very act of rewards+praise drains away the intrinsic motivation for taking interest in the activity. There is the additional bit about disparity of rewards causing problems in the social / peer circle of the kids.

The method of in-your-face rewards to enforce behaviour is thus linked with the threat of withdrawal of the reward if the outcome is not desirable. In a way, the linking of rewards with outcome limit the desire of the kids to explore (and take a few learning risks here and there). Rewards are very disruptive. There have been a few studies done on rewards and motivation in the workplace and the general conclusions haven’t been very pleasant. There’s no reason to believe that rewarding kids for something they might not enjoy doing is going to bring about any different result.

It is kind of sad to see that there aren’t more of the schools which focus on an “alternative” way to teach. The current system of education only demands that the kids can regurgitate the facts - not learn from what is there in the text books. It is not that there are brilliant (and not limiting that word to the academic sense only) kids. But they are there “in spite of the system” and not “because of the system”. And that is what is a really bad sign.

4 years seem like yesterday and yet it has allowed me to have the honor and the amazing excitement of reaching out to and meeting a whole lot of really wonderful people. Some of them think like us, some compel us to think in newer ways. And it has been a really awesome journey. We have changed hosting providers twice, changed webmail interfaces thrice, suffered from some crude attempts at breaking-in thrice, changed the look twice and a number of other smaller bits and pieces have come up around the site.

Here’s to us !!

In the happy news section I read that at least 2 of the GSoC candidates from last year (limited to the subset of the candidates I know) have turned mentors this year. Super nice.

In the this-should-have-happened-last-year news section, a fine gentleman has decided to put his hat into the ring as a mentor as well. Ideally, he should have done that last year but then he insisted that he was not ready. Eugene has blogged about his ideas here and is also looking out for applicants. So, if you are an applicant and want to work on this nifty instrumentation tool called Systemtap, you should know whom to get in touch with.

Umm…doesn’t anyone feel that ImportFiltersFromThunderbird is a good thing to do for Evolution ? Or, BackupThunderbirdProfile a good thing to do for Thunderbird ? The latter would save me the trouble of scripting it when moving machines and the former would get me to try out Evolution someday soon

- the sunlight was nice enough to come out well on a piddly mobile phone camera.

Indiaplaza.in

• big online presence supplemented by being the back-end various *shopping portals
• landing page is much too cluttered
• good selection of books
• reasonably good selection of other items (haven’t bought any from there)
• search engine is unstable - throws up lots of irrelevant results
• an unexpectedly bad customer service that doesn’t have a RT (or like system)
• packaging quality of consignments are uneven and generally going down
• the inventory does not catch “Out of Stock” items quickly (one can actually still order them and wait for refund)

Flipkart.com

• a bare site design - functional and pretty fast
• good selection of books and details associated with each book is accurate
• good quality of packaging
• path to cart is short and easy
• search engine needs some love - throws up irrelevant results
• doesn’t have a recommendation thing (”those who bought F00 also bought Bar”) thing yet
• not many user reviews of books
• no tie in with Goodreads
• average customer service (nothing exceptional that is)
• not all payment gateways are functional at this point

 MusicYogi.com

• landing page has too many moving images / bright colors
• path to cart is short and easy
• good selection of Indian Independent Music
• not so good selection of other kinds of music
• the emphasis on movie DVD is a bit odd
• awesomely good customer service
• search engine needs love - times out more often than not
• not too many reviews on the site - user feedback needs to be worked upon

Sagepub.in

• doesn’t seem to work with Firefox, worked with Konqueror but barely
• a range of selection of books and journals
• path to cart is complicated (asks for far too much detail than required to complete shopping)
• payment gateway is sluggish at best
• search functionality is better than other online book retailers but requires improvement
• currency details are overdone and that level of details is jarring

Most of the portals seem to suffer from not being designed with the “online” experience in mind. More like the traditional over-the-counter experience being somewhat morphed into the semblance of online. The other additional aspect is that none of them work on creating a social network around their portals which would lead to a community of loyal users. Which in a way is very strange given that it is a good thing to do.

And in a completely unrelated news, SCIM is up for translation.