Busy people

I am a fairly active technical person. I work on a few crazy projects. I keep track of the technology trends. I tend to broadcast all my technology junk around. Some people like some people don't. But there is my boss who is always busy. I don't say she doesn't like to listen to technology trends. But she is too busy to listen to such news. It's been happening from the last 6 months. She says she is really interested in knowing tech stuff but she can't find time. But my dilemma is if she can't listen for another few months, a new technology will come and replace the old trends. She stands to loose a generation of trends. She may never be able to catch up again!

Why people need pirated software?

There is this student called Venkat. He is a gifted artiste and visualizer. Some of his design works are outstanding. He is passionate about his abilities and wants to continue this as a profession. Flickr and Google inspired him to design something for the Web. He wants to combine his designs with the Web and create neat user experiences. Most of his works are still paper based. One of his friends suggested him to take up a computer course and learn graphics software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. That will put him in the right path to realize his dream of creating good user experiences in the Web. Without tools like these softwares it’s impossible to create something for the Web. But this is where the problem started. He hails from a lower middle class family and can't afford computer courses. They are expensive and will not allow him to spend as much time as he wants. He instead preferred buying a computer and practice at home.

The computer costed him 30k rupees. When he enquired about Illustrator and Photoshop, they were priced 22k (500USD) and 29k rupees (650USD) respectively. This was equivalent of his father's quarterly salary! He had already borrowed enough money from his father and knows his father can not afford any more money. There were more pressing matters than his software at home. Despite his problems, his father promised him to save money for this software. In the meantime, his friend suggested him to try GIMP. GIMP is an open source equivalent of Photoshop. He was really happy about this and started practicing his design work. But sooner realised GIMP was not meeting all his requirements. He had experienced Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop in his friend’s place and was happy about their abilities. He was in a dilemma at this point. Should he wait till his father saves him the required 51k? That would not happen for another 8 months. And by then he had to start searching for a job. Nobody would give him a job if he didn't know these software packages. Everything was in jeopardy. Or should he get back to his friend and ask him for a copy of Photoshop and Illustrator?

So, what should Venkat do now? Should he be ethical and wait till his poor father struggles to arrange money? Should he be patient when his other friends are overtaking him despite his natural abilities? Or should we say 'hey you can't afford these softwares and so you can't create what you want..sorry about it'?

Just because he is poor shouldn't suggest he doesn't have the privilege to learn the best software and chase his passion.

Anybody who has worked with GIMP and Photoshop will know that GIMP cannot come anywhere close to Photoshop. I have used both of them for longer periods and now settled for GIMP because I am not a designer. I just have to crop few images or pick colours from an image.

Scenarios like this are not uncommon. Bright kids struggle with command line compilers on slower computers when everybody else has the luxury of visual tools, faster computers and more productive programming environments. Having seen village kids from closer circles I know there are Venkats in every Indian village. I am not even considering urban areas here. These people do not know what open source or commercial means. They also have a dream. Who is NASSCOM to deny it?

There are a number of ways to tackle piracy than simply issuing press statements and creating flashy advertisements like "kill piracy". As a nodal body, NASSCOM and other such bodies can pursue product houses to release student versions or learning editions. This will help students to acquire necessary skills before they can enter the corporate world. Not many companies including Adobe have student or learning editions. Microsoft has taken some steps in this direction. They have released student/learning editions for a few of their products.

Alternatively they can create an eco-system to consume software like GIMP. That encourages the usage of open source systems and also creates demand for such products to sustain and mature as products with out costing any money.

When the world is advancing with technology we can't leave rest of the country behind us. They need some handles to catch with the rest of us and come along.

Organic meat

I was running out of my groceries and toileteries (Currently I am in Sydney, Australia working for a software consulting firm). So I visited a nearby super market (Coles). I was a little surprised to see organic meat products. They had organically grown poultry and lamb meat.

http://www.organicmeat.com.au
http://www.freerangechicken.com.au

I was also surprised to see another product. Its a free roaming poultry. This is nothing but the country chicken in India. The difference is they had a nice way of packing and selling through good advertising mechanisms.

In general there were more varieties of meat products than I could find anywhere in the world. There were almost all kinds of meat varieties including tandoori, minses and the complete range of cut meat products. You can find Kangaroo, Poultry, Lamb, Pork, Beef, Fish and other seafood varieties.

Its easy to be noble when you have enough money

It felt really great to buy Kill Bill DVDs. I was excited about all the features they can give me. I was feeling a little strange when I got back home. A few years back when I didn't have enough money to pay for all my necessities, I didn't really mind picking a pirated copy of some software. I was like...hell...how can I pay so much? I didn't really care to rip a copy of my favourite movie DVD. I had a good collection of most of my favourite movies and music CDs. All pirated. I was proud to own such a good collection. Whenever I lay my hands on a rented or a borrowed movie I'd make a copy of it.

Now I don't have any pirated stuff. All my collection is genuine. I can afford all of my necessities including software and music. I try to think that people must have worked really hard to create a music CD...put in a lot of hard work to write software...must have spent a lot of money to make a movie....we should respect people's intelligence and time and money....blah blah

There is so much of talk about free stuff on the web, DRM, open source, commercial software, war against Microsoft, intellectual property, being ethical....

Its really easy to keep our morals and ethics when we can afford what we are being ethical about. I guess this is how a normal person behaves at two different situations. When you can afford and when you can't.

Food miles

When we buy vegetables or fruits we don't really care where they are grown. Those items might have been grown in different parts of the country or sometimes they might have been imported from other countries. All we consider while buying is the price, the freshness in their looks and the availability of a particular item in the market through out the year. We wouldn't mind paying more price to buy mangoes if they are available off the season.

In reality what happens when we ask for mangoes after the mango season is over? This puts pressure on the market and the market players tend to source it from other places to meet the demand. Another motivating factor for the suppliers is the extra price they get from selling items in off-seasons. These food items have to travel long distances to meet our off season demands. Food miles is the distance travelled by a food item to reach the consumer's plate. It's often referred as 'from the plough to the plate'.

A report published by The Guardian newspaper found that a selection of 20 fresh food items purchased from British supermarkets had travelled an average of 5,000 miles each. Look at these numbers: grapes had travelled 7,247 miles, carrots and peas 5,979 miles and Apples had travelled 10,133 miles before being consumed by people. In the USA, on average, each food item travels 1,500 miles before arriving at consumer's tables. This travel burns huge amounts of fossil fuels. Farmers also employ inorganic ways to improve the travel life and durability of vegetable and fruits. Sometimes this comes at a cost of the quality and taste of the food item. This report gives some astonishing facts.

It's not this worse in India though. But any travel by a food item is a waste of energy.

Radish is probably the most consumed vegetable in Madras due to its importance in making a sambaar. But a large volume of radish consumed in this port city comes from a village called Sheegehalli in the Kolar district of Karnataka. On average this village transports about 4-5 lorries of fresh radish to Chennai everyday. This radish travels around 270-300 Kilometers and takes about 7-8 hours approximately before being part of the delicious sambaar.

I also know a few places who do intelligent sourcing. For example FoodWorld in Bangalore source baby corn from Hosakote which is about 25 Kilometers away and just takes about 1 hour to reach its stores. Most of the vegetable shops in towns and villages source their vegetables from local farmers. Even if we are buying less good looking items from these shops at least we are sure the vegetables we are consuming are not emitting carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. They are genuinely fresh looking as opposed to chemically fed containers during the travel.

While travelling we must have seen the roadside vendors selling vegetables and fruits. This is the freshest quality we can get without burning a single calorie of fossil fuel as food miles.

Next time when I go to the vegetable shop, I am thinking of asking him how far a vegetable has travelled before reaching his shop and what was its place of origin!!

Saving Tank Water From Evaporating

I visited a colleague's home for the easter weekend. He has a lovely house in the Manly suburbs. We had a very long break for work. He was very kind to invite me. Otherwise it would've been really hard for me to spend the 4th day without doing anything. I took a ferry from the circular quay to Manly. Its a great experience to travel in these ferries.

My colleague's house (he is my CEO!) is well equipped with all the needs. While surveying the house I noticed their swimming pool was covered in a blue rubber sheet. When I asked him why they covered it, he mentioned they had limited supply of water. If they fill the pool and leave it for a couple of weeks, all the water would evaporate and they had to fill the water again. Then they found out this solution of covering the whole pool with a rubber sheet. The local water bodies gave them this solution. This rubber sheet would look like the waste left after making hawaii chappals. This solution solved their water evaporation problems completely apart from protecting the pool and water from dust and waste material. Whenever they need to use the pool they just remove the cover, use the pool and cover it back again.

• Minimise the cooling of the pool by stopping evaporation and convection heat loss. This occures mainly during the night when the ambient air temperature drops below the temperature of the water in the pool. By creating a barrier between the water surface and the outside air, these losses are virtually eliminated.

• By keeping evaporation to a minimum, you not only save water, (approx 1.5 metres per year in the Sydney Metropolitan Area), but you also save on the cost of chemicals as you dont have to re balance you pool after topping up. It also reduces the amount of chlorine lost to the Suns’ UV Rays.
  
  
• Blankets keep the pool cleaner - about 80% to 90% of debris is kept out of the pool. This reduces the work load of your pool cleaner. Most types of pool cleaners will work quite happily under the blanket.

• Reduces pool heating costs by up to 50%. Even the cost of running solar system pumps is saved by reducing the amount of heat loss from the pool. Effectively 90% of heat loss is from the surface of the pool. By using a blanket in conjuction with Gas, Electric or Solar heating systems, significant energy cost savings can be made.
  
  
• Extend the swimming season. Even without other forms of heating on the pool, the addition of a pool blanket can result in a temperature increase of from 6 to 8 degrees in a pool that has a sunny aspect.

All these benefits are pretty good to the swimming pool owner.

But covering a pool with these sheet is an expensive affair. It costs considerable maintenance costs as well along with the high initial setup costs.

At my village we have a borewell and my father pumps it into a storage tank so that he need not depend on electricity to water his crops. But what he hasn't realised is, he is loosing huge amounts of water to evaporation and ground percolation. There are other problems as well. Most of these problems are same as the swimming pool owners. However, they have a solution now.

How about making this an expensive solution, alter it suitably to suit Indian conditions and apply it to my father's farming storage tank? Well I am working on that will post as soon as I have a workable solution.

Alternative agriculture practices - Skyscrapers and Underground crops

I was very impressed by the following article published in Wired.
No Green Acres? Try Skyscrapers If this technology can be made a little more simple it can be revolutionary. By simple I mean it shouldn't need a brilliant computer scientist to maintain the farm.

Another Wired article about what pharma companies are doing to grow their genetically engineered crops. Though its expensive they can be assured about the yield and they need not worry about their crops contaminating other crops.
Underground crops