I grew up in Pondicherry, went to Pondicherry Engineering College (class of 99). I used to bike up from college to Matrimandir a lot of weekends for meditation. There are several communities within Auroville and they each operate kind of independently. Some of them welcome guests to stay with them, and I have stayed with a number of communities. So, what accusation may be true for one community may not be true for other communities.
In the middle of all of that, I found Sadhana forest to be a wonderful community in Auroville that is far away from the madness of Matrimandir both physically and spiritually. Aviram and his family, along with volunteers, are doing a fantastic job of reforesting the area west of the Tindivanam highway. If you are going, once we are past this global Covid19 pandemic that is, I would highly recommend a volunteering stay at Sadhana forest.
Narendra Modi is the Prime Minister of India. He has a very interesting (and controversial) history. He grew up selling tea at a railway station and now he's Prime Minister of the largest democracy.
>> "In 2012, Modi was cleared of complicity in the violence by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by the Supreme Court of India. The SIT also rejected claims that the state government had not done enough to prevent the riots."
>> "In April 2014, the Supreme Court expressed satisfaction over the SIT's investigations in nine cases related to the violence, and rejected as "baseless" a plea contesting the SIT report."
In India, our income tax department accepts returns as an XML document, and tax prep software developers have built tools that basically help you generate the XML and upload it to the e-filing website.
Other than this, the government run e-filing website also has a nice interface to do your taxes. It's fairly simple. Just fill in numbers and click Next Next Next Submit, and you're done.
On a related note, a Stanford tax law professor Joseph Bankman had run trials of pre-filled forms for a few California state taxpayers. Listen to his journey on Episode 760 of PlanetMoney podcast:
ReadyReturn sounds like it only works if you have an extremely simple tax return. While that is great, I don't understand how the people with a simple W-2 are having such a painful time with taxes. It takes about 5-10 minutes to finish a simple return. What am I missing?
Assuming you're using tax prep software, you still have to click through all the stuff that doesn't apply to you, and it behooves you to at least skim the text to be sure that law changes haven't changed anything for you this year. Just the act of clicking "no" on everything will probably run you a good 20 minutes, with another 5-10 of actually entering your W-2 data and supplying payment information.
You do not have to go through all the questions if you know your tax situation. It is only for people who are clueless about their tax situation that they have to go through all the questions. If you know you are going to take standard deduction there's no point in going through the entire list of itemized deductions only to find out what you already knew.
In 2003, I was working for a startup in India doing GPS/GSM based vehicle tracking system for fleets of trucks. The trucks would have our unit installed in them, and they would use GPS to get the location and send it to our server via GSM text message. Back then, GSM coverage not good, and trucks would go out of coverage for days. To further complicate matters, our firmware used to crash and the unit would stop sending updates.
To help us troubleshoot this, my boss asked me to program the unit to give a missed call to the server every hour. If we got a missed call, we knew that unit was still working. In countries like India, giving a missed call is a zero cost way to communicate. For example: You would pull up in front of a friend's place and give them a "missed call" to let them know that you are waiting outside etc.
Anyway, I implemented the logic and we sent off our field techs to intercept trucks at highways and update the firmware.
The way I implemented the logic was the unit was to call our server's modem number every hour at the top of the hour. No random delay nothing. So, soon after that, around 50 units tried to call our server at the same time. Remember the clocks in the units are being run off GPS and they are super accurate. This caused our telecom company's cell tower BTS to crash. Cell service in my office area, a busy part of Bangalore, was down for a whole 2 hours.
I was called into the telecom company's head office for their postmortem. They didn't yell at me or anything. They were super nice. In fact, when I finished explaining my side of the story, one of their engineers opened his wallet and gave a hundred rupees to another guy. Guess they were betting on the root cause. From what I understand, they escalated the bug to Ericsson who manufactured the BTS and got it fixed. For my part, I added a random delay and eventually removed that feature.
I've heard similar story about a DNS server: 100 processes would startup at same time, do DNS query, DNS server crashes. 100 processes then retry automatically... exactly 1 minute later. Another crash :) Repeat until human intervenes.
Cool story. While not the same thing, the last line reminds me of exponential backoff.
BTW, the term "missed call" may not be familiar to people outside India. For those not familiar, it's ringing a number and them disconnecting before they pick up. Serves to notify them that you called :)
I would assume the term "missed call" is both obvious and universally implemented (as in phones show the message) but I could be wrong on that last part for a few places I guess.
True, I did think that - since it is a pretty obvious idea that anyone can think of - to use it as a signal to the called party, but was thinking more in terms of India being a less rich country (broadly), so more people may do it here to save money :), since, though it's only a little each time, it can add up if one calls people a lot. On the other hand, India nowadays has very cheap mobile rates compared to many other countries, I've read.
The Tamils originally wrote on dried palm leaves with a sharp scribe. So, if you didn't want to tear the leaf, you had to avoid straight lines and dots. That's why there are so many curves in the script.
Also, one of the meanings of my first name "Mani" is literally "Bell".
It's fascinating (to me) to think that the medium influences the script - something I had never considered. I wonder if we can find medium-based influences on other scripts, say, Roman and Arabic.
My Archaeological/anthropological knowledge doesn't even extend to spelling those words correctly (thank you Chrome spell-checker), so I can't do more than wonder unless someone here... (nudge, nudge)
Cuneiform script (/kjuːˈniːᵻfɔːrm/ kew-nee-i-form or /ˈkjuːnᵻfɔːrm/ kew-ni-form), one of the earliest systems of writing, was invented by the Sumerians.[1] It is distinguished by its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets, made by means of a blunt reed for a stylus. The name cuneiform itself simply means "wedge shaped".[2]
I remember reading about it in Social Studies in school :) - along with the Indus Valley civilization and maybe one or two others.
> I wonder if we can find medium-based influences on other scripts, say, Roman and Arabic.
Two examples:
Serifs on Roman letters originated as a way to clean up the ends of the characters when carved in stone.
When I was a kid in California, you'd regularly see gang graffiti painted in square block lettering that imitated what it would look like carved in wood (e.g. a park bench).
Runes are the most obvious example I can think of. Runes have vertical lines and diagonal lines, but no horizontal lines. This is because the normal medium for runes were narrow wooden sticks, or staves, and horizontal lines would go with the grain and would therefore be hard to see, and while carving a horizontal line you could too easily get stuck in a groove and mis-carve. With the added difficulty of carving curved lines, you necessarily get runes’ distinctive angular style: ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ
This[1] is a fascinating book that delves into this subject in an interesting way. In addition to looking at each letter of the modern Latin alphabet and its history and evolution, the author extrapolates the evolution of each character into three possible future forms that are influenced by different writing implements. It's also quite beautiful in its layout, typography, and presentation of information. Unfortunately it looks like it may now be out of print.
In Sri Lanka earliest writings (which were mostly religious) were preserved first in the mediums such as Palm leaves, and the alphabet clearly shows that influence. As the top comment points out, making sure that you do not damage the script was a pretty important concern, and rounded letters certainly helped. If one studies the evolution of Sinhalese (and Tamil) alphabet it can be clearly seen that things got curvier as the alphabet developed from earlier Brahmi scripts [1].
Roman block lettering avoids curves because it was often curved. That's why the U and V sounds were represented by the same letter, and only later diverged. Norse runes are similar, and lack curves entirely.
It doesn't really avoid curves, though, even when carved into stone. Look at the inscription on Trajan's Column [1], f'rinstance; yes, it's got the classic U written as V, but the C, D, O, S etc are all as curvy as you could possibly want.
The Romans wrote most ephemeral stuff on wax tablets which could be smoothed over for re-use; this is where the phrase "tabula rasa" comes from. Some examples survive and also show curves [2].
Well, the GP was talking about Tamil, not Sanskrit. Tamil is one of the few Indian languages which does not have (much of a) Sanskrit influence (not sure about the languages of the North-Eastern states). Also I've read that Tamil is an extremely old language, maybe as old as Sanskrit or so / more.
If you observe the 2 scripts in the pic in wikipedia, you would notice that in the original one, the "i's are not dotted" as it were. This seems to be a practice that has carried over from palm leaf writing to metal inscriptions.
Does it appear as if the inscription says Muhayidun rather than Muhayideen? Obviously the script has changed with time, but that seems more like a modern du than a dee.
1. Does this mean you are an ISP? If so, how did you go about registering as an ISP.
2. Most other WiFi (ex: at Cafe Coffee Day) requires one to register via SMS and pay by credit card. So the mobile number and Credit Card number becomes the primary key for our Government's Big Brother program to track the person. Have you side-stepped that by selling tokens that one can purchase anonymously using cash?
We have a distributed team, and switched to howdy.ai bot to ask the standup questions on Slack and post them to a channel. During our actual standup call, we only discuss blockers.
(Not related to howdy.ai in any way, just a happy user)
> But unlike apps, I'm not sure how to showcase a particular "devops project" to future employers.
One of the key elements of DevOps is automation. If you can make sure everything you do is in a public git repo, then you just need to show that to future employers. It doesn't have to be a working app, it can also be an Ansible playbook.
In the middle of all of that, I found Sadhana forest to be a wonderful community in Auroville that is far away from the madness of Matrimandir both physically and spiritually. Aviram and his family, along with volunteers, are doing a fantastic job of reforesting the area west of the Tindivanam highway. If you are going, once we are past this global Covid19 pandemic that is, I would highly recommend a volunteering stay at Sadhana forest.