I moved my blog to posterous. The new link is http://journlr.com

I have decided to leave Twitter. It is useful for some and I even got noticed due to the whole UHS data breach fiasco, but I just don’t find a utility for it. There is just something missing. I like writing down thoughts, but most of the time I don’t really care if people read that stuff. Actually most of the time I actually wish that no one would read it. I might want to write certain things that I just want to keep private and I think for stuff like that Tumblr fits the bill. I can post the random links, quotes, etc. I run into as well as post to a private tumblelog. Then again Tumblr allows you to post Tumblr posts to Twitter so I might use that… maybe…

Reading the New York Times article on Pakistan’s absence in curbing Taliban insurgency I am still wondering why the US is even supporting Pakistan at this point. The government is weak, the army and the intelligence are clearly calling the shots, and people seem fine with the coming of the militants. It is clear that our trust that Pakistan will do the right thing is highly questionable especially with the leniency with which it has allowed the Taliban and other terrorists groups such as the one linked with the Mumbai attacks to continue.

The government is extremely weak in Pakistan. When, following the Mumbai attacks, the prime minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, offered the ISI’s support in helping India the army shot it down. When, according  to the article, the government wanted to send army troops to fight the militants, yet again, the army rejected it since it did not want to move troops away from the border from India.

This basically says that the ISS and the army are still in the modality that India is the enemy to fight especially to get Kashmir. My question is what are they going to do if they get Kashmir? They haven’t shown any competence in self management what good will adding more territory do? At this point I think Kashmir should gain independence from both India and Pakistan, both are bad stewards of the land and the people have suffered immensly under both.

Kashmir and India should be the least of Pakistan’s worry, but the mentality has been set. The army which gets a $1 billion from the United States doesn’t spend it on fighting terrorism, but fighting India. If this is the case then the US should not give this money to Pakistan which is just provoking another war in the region. If money is to be given thre should be strict guidelines in how it should be used.

At this point I don’t think that Pakistan can even be trusted. They had 8 years to show us that they will fight a battle against terrorism, but in those years their own region has fallen under the terrorists’ mousetrap.

I’ve been using Thrift a RPC  framework from Facebook. It allows you to define a service outline and generate a template in various languages which you can then use to create the service. What this means is you can say use Haskell for you server and hook it up with a Ruby client or vice versa.

I installed thrift on my Mac from the subversion repository. Here are the commands to install the pre-reqs and thrift itself assuming you have MacPorts.

sudo port install boost libevent
svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/thrift/trunk thrift
cd thrift
./bootstrap
./configure --prefix=/opt/local/
make
make install


Now that’s settled here is an example of a thrift definition file. Named myauth.thrift

namespace rb MyAuth
namespace py myauth

struct User {
  1: string username,
  2: string password
}

enum LoginStatus {
  SUCCESS,
  FAIL
}

service Authentication {
  string say_hello(),
  LoginStatus login(1:User cred)
}

As you can see this has several components to it. The first the namespace definitions. These are the modules/packages/namespaces which this service belongs to. You can define one for each of the languages that you are going to code for. The second is the User struct which holds the data that we will be working with in the service, third the enums and finally the service definition. The service definition has two methods: say_hello which returns a string and login which returns a LoginStatus taking in a User struct as an argument.

This only uses a subset of the definition syntax to show a small example of what you can do with the service. To see a more thorough example of the definition file go to the Thrift Wiki.

Once you have written the definition compile the file (here I’m going to use Ruby and Python):

thrift --gen rb --gen py myauth.thrift


Now write the server code (in ruby):

require 'thrift'
$:.push('gen-rb')

require 'Authentication'
require 'myauth_constants'

class AuthenticationHandler
  def say_hello
    puts "thrift client connected"
    "hello thrift client"
  end

  def login cred
    if cred.username == 'hello' && cred.password == 'world'
      puts "logged in"
      return MyAuth::LoginStatus::SUCCESS
    end

    puts "great pie of fail"
    MyAuth::LoginStatus::FAIL
  end
end

handler = AuthenticationHandler.new
processor = MyAuth::Authentication::Processor.new(handler)
transport = Thrift::ServerSocket.new(9090)
transportFactory = Thrift::BufferedTransportFactory.new()
server = Thrift::SimpleServer.new(processor, transport, transportFactory)

puts "Starting the server..."
server.serve()
puts "done."

Write the client code (in python):

import sys
sys.path.append('gen-py')

from myauth import Authentication
from myauth.constants import *

from thrift import Thrift
from thrift.transport import TSocket
from thrift.transport import TTransport
from thrift.protocol import TBinaryProtocol

transport = TSocket.TSocket('localhost', 9090)
transport = TTransport.TBufferedTransport(transport)
protocol = TBinaryProtocol.TBinaryProtocol(transport)

auth = Authentication.Client(protocol)

transport.open()

print auth.say_hello()

user = User()
user.username = 'hello'
user.password = 'world'

print "Login: %s" % auth.login(user)

user2 = User()
user2.username = 'failed'
user2.password = 'world'

print "Login: %s" % auth.login(user2)

What thrift gives you is a transport layer as well as a protocol layer so you don’t have to worry about mucking around with sockets. There are also several protocol layers defined so you could use a JSON protocol for example.

All in all this is a useful technology for using the right tool for the job, i.e the right programming language for the job. By working with different languages thrift gives the programmer the capability of writing different services using the strengths of the appropriate language.

Apple is set to announce about its upcoming OS 3.0 for the iPhone. There are a few things I really want which I thought I’d write since I am procrastinating studying for my midterm.

• Background apps – I really want to listen to Pandora while at the same time sending and receiving SMSes without the radio going off. Is that so hard to ask?
• MMS – I think it’d make the whole communicating thing a lot fluid as I’ll probably be much more likely to take pictures and send them to people since I tend to be a visual person anyways. The whole email thing is sort of out of the way.
• Copy and Paste – Seriously? It’s so annoying, for example, to find a song on Shazam wanting to send the name to a friend only to realize that you have to write down the name on a paper then send it by retyping it, good luck remembering a complicated foreign song title when you don’t have a pen at hand. Seriously what century are we in? Come on Apple!
• Tethering – Not a biggie, but would be nice especially since I’m giving AT&T $30 bucks for a shitty 3G connection that barely works if at all. Then again tethering would probably cripple the already bad network or force them to upgrade, but I’m betting on the former.

If they have those I’d be a happy poor-college-student-paying-for-an-overpriced-service-on-a-shitty-network-on-an-awesome-phone. I just feel that Apple has made a great phone which is great at individual tasks, but hasn’t worked on getting apps to talk together.

Update: A big sigh of relief as MMS and Copy and Paste have been implemented. Thank god! Also a pseudo background task ability. Still no way to listen to Pandora without getting cut off by replying to a message…

I got calls to be cheaper in the US and saved a bunch of money for my parents by switching them to Skype To Go for local calls. But what to do about calls to India?We have a lot of family in India who my parents tend to call often. Right now they use callingcards which are not the cheapest and have all these connection fees associated with them and Skype is pretty expensive in its calls to India costing nearly $0.09 a minute. So I wanted to find a solution to this problem with my newfound knowledge of VOIP technology.

I was thinking of setting up a VOIP switch with a cheap DID and routing calls through that to bridge calls to India except they would have to talk for about 2 hours before the actual calls would start to become cheaper. Initially this seemed like a good deal since 2 hours isn’t that much time. I was set to do this since it seemed like a great way to learn about VOIP and cut costs.

It consisted of creating a mini callingcard IVR. I setup FreeSwitch with a cheap DID number from Callcentric, and bridge the call with Gafachi (their rates are pretty cheap). This resulted in Costs = $2.95 + ~$0.024 x minutes per month. This was better than Costs = ~$0.05 x minutes.

However, this requires a lot of work on my part. I need to buy the minutes every so often, make sure the server is not on the fritz, and make sure my IVR works as intended. This is where opportunity cost becomes important. I can learn a bunch about VOIP and how those systems work, it’s pretty interesting, but at the end of the day I just need something that works and gives my parents cheap calls to India.

So I signed up for this service called IndiaMinutes which seems to be reselling Gafachi, it has a simple UI and a dial through number. This means I can just set it up and let my parents use it as they need. Plus, the Cost = ~$0.024 x minutes which means that it is already a couple dollars cheaper per month than my solution. Further, it has an ability to top up when funds run low so minimum supervision required. In general it seems to be a good cheap solution to call India. So I just setup their number in my parents Skype to Go speed dial to call India. We’ll see how they end up liking it and using it.

I decided to sell some of my old textbooks which I see no value in keeping for the future. I ran into a choice when going about this (like most things in life). Should I use half.com or Amazon?

Initially, I was using half.com and it seemed like the way to go. I mean they have a commission that slides down from 15% as the price of the book increases. They also have no flat or variable fee for selling. However, unfortunately it seems that eBay, which owns half.com, has abandoned working on the site. There is a complete lack of information about the books that are being sold and the site just feels like another marketplace, not really a place to buy books.

Therefore, I decided to use Amazon even though they have a commission of 15% regardless of price and charge $0.99 flat fee plus a $1.70 variable fee. However, the benefits of the site outweigh the costs as the site is a dedicated bookstore with thought given to the seller. The maintenance tools don’t seem like they’ve been last touched somewhere between 2005 and the 90’s. It overall has a simpler and more professional interface. Plus, I would wager that people are more likely to go to Amazon to find books before they ever touch half.com so the likelihood of someone buying from the site is much greater than half.com.

So what does all this mean? If you need one of my old textbooks please consider buying from Abhi’s Books.

Being a product of the web/mobile/text messaging generation, landlines are a bit of a mystery. They are phones people have at their homes, people call from them, but why are these antiquated things still around? In the land of cell phones why are those things even used. I decided to take a look and decided to put it on a diet at home, an extreme diet actually though not a diet that will lead to death.

So my parents had this $60 a month plan with AT&T called All Distance (meaning as far as the borders of the US… I guess AT&T has a patriotic meaning for all, false advertising suit anyone? I’m looking at you pre-law friends of mine) which provided all the wonderful features one would expect on a modern day cell phone on a land phone. But the pricing scheme is off the fucking roof especially since it’s only $20 bucks lower than the cell phone bill. Also, looking at the bills for the last 6 months (at least they got the website right… when it’s up) I saw that they barely made 40 calls a month on the service.

I told my parents to go basic and get the cheapest plan possible since we usually only get incoming calls not really outgoing. This automagically cut the cost of our bill by $45 bucks! So I was looking around their site and saw the “features” I could add to the phone line and was struck by how expensive it was. $15 bucks for CallerID! Are you fucking kidding me? I can get a fucking SIP provider who will not only provide a DID number with all the bells and whistles that these bastards are charging ridiculous amounts for less than they are charging for a basic plan!

My research continued a bit further. So what was the state of our cell phone? We have AT&T Wireless (I love my iPhone) and realized we were not using all of our minutes (hell we have about 10,000 rollover minutes with like a 1000 expiring every month) so I told my parents to start using the cell phone more. Your probably thinking, “You told them what? Are you mad?” Yes, I know it was unusual advice. Yes, I know I could have just gone to the lower tier rate and cut a further $20, but with almost $45 saved on landline bills and with how much my mom has her cell phone with her anyways on my parents long drive to their second store it was a fair call… no pun intended. My voice usage oddly enough coincide with the evening and weekends when calls are free so I don’t have many minutes used during the day (ah… college). Since we have enough minutes to last a recession using the cell phone a bit more is not a problem.

So what about the landphone why even keep it then? It seems a bit useless if I told my parents to just use the cell phone a bit more. Well since we did have it and local calls are free and I started liking Skype (ykabhinav… call me) so I got the $30 a year unlimited US & Canada subscription and setup Skype to Go on the home phone. Since my parents are used to the nuances of Calling Cards anyways it is not much of a hassle for them to call Skype and bridge the call. I even set it up so that it just dials through Skype in the address book.

So what did we do with the savings? Well my dad spend $5 bucks more to get faster internet at home and I spend $10 bucks more to get unlimited family text messaging, after all my sister is growing up and she needs texting as much as I do. And I figured might as well teach the parents a bit about modern day convieniences where not everything requires a call… (Sent some info to my dad about BofA which he was asking about yesterday, he replied, “Ok.” My father’s first text message…).

Update: After using Skype for a couple more weeks my parents have gotten rid of all but the minimal service at their store thus saving them even more per year. If people were to do this at this rate it would seem that the landline business is pretty dire.

I’ve started working on a simple project over break. Actually it’s a really simple idea, one which can be built in 15 minutes or so with any good screencast on a framework of choice. Then why I am I writing it? Because I can! It’s called Journlr. The idea behind it is simple, there are so many places where you can publish thoughts for others to see there is no place to just keep a plain old for my eyes only journal (or none that were astetically pleasing to me). So Journlr!

Though, it needs a lot more work especially in the departments of making it “official-looking” it is good enough for general use. I will release incremental updates to fix the sore spots. It uses OpenID so I don’t collect any information about you and is intended to get you writing as soon as theoretically possible, so just sign on with OpenID and you are ready to go. The only thing that is in the server is your identity url so if you use a service that obfuscates your identity url you are generally anonymous.

However, I feel this isn’t good enough for anonymity so I’ll be adding client side encryption in the future using JavaScript (especially since Firefox 3.1, Chrome and Safari-Nighly are kicking ass in performance. All I can say about IE, fuck you. your useless now and will be useless in the future… though I have heard Windows 7 is nice…).  But the gist of it is that data will be encrypted on the server and all encryption will happen on the client, so all data stored on the server itself will be encrypted. Hopefully, if I have money and this service becomes popular I’ll add SSL, but that’s a big if right now. This is in the works on a branch on git, but I haven’t gotten to it per usual.

You might be wondering, “What kind of half assed software is this? It doesn’t even have a damn edit button!” Well my angry friend there is a reason for that design. I don’t want the filtering of thoughts that are written. We filter too many of our thoughts, even though it is a good thing there are times when we should just write and be done with it: unfiltered, unbiased, pure stream of consciousness. That is what Journlr wants to be, a place where you just write and post once done. If you really need to edit it copy it and post again with all the nuances of reformatting the Textile markup (yes, I’m not going to make it easy on you).

My parents store uses a POS software called PCAmerica Cash Register Express. It has worked for them so far but it has a lot of problems. It uses a lot of memory; I am assuming there is a memory leak somewhere as it uses up almost 200 mb of ram for a products database that is less than 1mb, I am assuming it copies all the invoices ever made into memory. Also it’s a nightmare to configure where hardware fails to work for no reason randomly. I get really annoyed when my parents ask me to deal with that software’s issues since when one thing is fixed usually another thing is broken. The main reason that choice of software was made was due to my dad being used to the software from a previous store that he owned as well as there being no real open source alternatives.

My parents usage requirements are quite simple. They need a location to enter their stock (which all systems have), a place to check out current inventory and a daily report. All this was available in Openbravo POS. For the last week or so I’ve been working on migrating to the new system. Initially, I was looking at getting a system up for uploading data to the Openbravo ERP so they could be able to integrate their other store, but for right now I wanted to keep it simple. I want them to use the software and get it running then add an ERP to get the other store running on this software as well. This is mostly to avoid duplicating the efforts of entering stock into both stores.

I got the POS setup. This was done first by getting the CRE products database into the Openbravo POS where I had to import the data into Excel then remove all the unnecessary fields. And then import the csv files that I generated into Openbravo POS. This is the code for that. All in all it was a simple transfer, all that remains to be done are to add the specific tax categories which should be a simple SQL query and possibly import the customer table from CRE.

My parents seem happy with the software and we’ll start using it tomorrow since today I was training them in using it which was simple enough. The only major glitch I see in Openbravo is that when there is a text based barcode it doesn’t show up on screen as  you enter it this is became my parents use some mnemonics for certain items, e.g. pot for potatoes (I know what your thinking you stoner you! ). Overall, this seems to be a good investment in time and hopefully it’ll workout as they use it in the next few weeks.