Shubha’s cousin Kiran, who came to Bangalore this week to meet a girl he had met over the Internet, found that she is everything he had dreamt of, and apparently she thinks the same thing of him, and they have decided to take it one step further – they are getting engaged on Monday, the 16th.

Ever thrown a stone into an ant-hill? The effect you get is roughly equivalent to what happened to the family here – waves of very busy people. This morning, the first wave arrived and settled in at my house. Quite a change for someone who is used to having only his wife, kid, dog and two cats in the house – now we are *only* SIX people more, and this was only the first wave, with more to come. Plus of course all the local branches of the family that drop in to visit the visitors….

Ah well, I guess one will survive, but I have this incredible urge to find the meanest distortion level on my new toy, and practice some Van Halen at around afternoon siesta time, or 3 in the morning. Those 100 Watts RMS in my amplifier must be good for *something*

Yesterday was Friday the 13th, and traditionally I do not leave the house on that day – not even to step on the porch or into the garden. So I spent the day in the basement replying to email and surfing weird corners of the net. Hmmm – can you call roaming the world electronically, on a day when you decide not to step out, cheating?

Last night, AXN showed Part 1 of “Dune” – the second attempt at making a movie based on the book by the same name. The first attempt was a *disaster* and is best forgotten, but this version stayed remarkably close to the original story arc, with only small deviations, and though it was pretty long (this is part 1, am not sure how many parts there are) at 2.5 hours, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am a hardened Dune fan, and it was pleasure seeing a movie that so closely matched the images formed in my mind as I read the book.

My email box continues to throw up responses to my Yahoo rant, many of them from list admins equally stung by Yahoo. Apparently a lot of people have known about the Yahoo issues, but no one has ever commented on the emperor’s new clothes until now. I got a call from a newspaper wanting to interview me on this, but that would turn this into a witch hunt, so I declined (for now).

Originally, I had planned to do some recording this weekend and put up some MP3s, but that seems to be a washout now (seriously high decibel levels when more than two female members of Shubha’s family get together, and right now we have 3 aunts plus assorted cousins all in one place .

So maybe I will just creep off to office and try and get some work done.

Ah well, after several failed attempts, I am now the proud owner of a Zoom GFX-707II Guitar Processor.

Shubha’s cousin Kiran carried it in from the USA, after he and Shubha’s brother-in-law Vibhu got me a killer price to begin with (*way* below the US$249 MRP!).

This is the first time that I have used anything like this. I have used standalone pedals (fuzz and wah-wah mainly), but this thing is a completely different beast.

I tried getting to grips with it, gave up, and hollered for help, which brought Mrinal to my door. He showed me how to tame the beast, and also how to create my own “patches” for it.

Towards evening, Sony and Shanu joined us, and it was a joy to see the glee on Sony’s face as he walked through all the effects, and discovered that he was able to simulate much of the sound that he and Shanu listen to – some of it extremely loud and noisy.

Towards the end of the session, I introduced Sony to another feature of the 707II – you can plug in headphones and play without an amp!

I have updated my equipment list, in case you are interested.

Yesterday’s rant about Yahoo got a whole lot of people upset as hell, but do I care? Nope! If Yahoo doesn’t care about its users, why should I care about Yahoo’s feelings?

For years, Yahoo has provided the Internet community with reasonably well maintained, stable services in the form of Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Groups and Yahoo messenger.

But all that seems to have gone down the drain, and irretrievably so.

For many months now, I have tried interacting with Yahoo, trying to get problems fixed at all levels of their services.

I failed to make any headway, and I give up. The only way left for me now is the public route, and I am taking it.

Let’s start with Yahoo Mail, which can be described in one word – spam. Open an account on Yahoo, and don’t tell anyone about it. Just sit back and watch as your brand new, unknown account starts filling up with spam. And not just pyramid and other “get rich quick” schemes – every second piece of spam seems to be pornographic in nature. And never mind if you are a 40 year old adult or a 10 year old kid.

Since the account has never been used (in fact has just been opened), there is very clearly a nexus between Yahoo and these spammers.

I am not saying that Yahoo sells your address to porn spammers. No, it probably only sells your address to “good” spammers. What Yahoo does *not* take into account, however, is that these “good” spammers then sell your address further to porn spammers.

Let’s move on to Yahoo Messenger.

Ever logged in, just to find your mailbox and Yahoo messenger full of abuse from people you know who are upset because you never respond to them when they try to chat with you?

Well, that happens because when you disconnect from the internet, the stupid Yahoo servers don’t time out on your connection and continue to show you online. I had a hilarious scenario when a friend of mine went offline one day, then went to Pune for some training, and for all those months was shown online by Yahoo Messenger Service. He finally returned to Bangalore, and I had to ask him to log onto Yahoo Messenger, then specifically choose “Logout” from the YM menu so that the stupid Yahoo servers recognised that he was going offline.

As I am typing this, my daughter (who is standing next to me, having been off the net for hours) is shown as online in YM.

An additional atrocity is the “logic” (a violent abuse of the term) that Yahoo uses to determine when an IP address should be blocked because of illegal login attempts.

The cable network I am connected to in office has tons and tons of subscribers, all of whom are firewalled and NAT’d behind a handful of IP addresses. Every morning, people come to office, or settle before their home computer, and try to log into Yahoo Messenger. Now given the huge number of people involved (essentially at any time in thousands), it is very likely that a few people will mistype their passwords.

But apparently, you don’t need a huge number of such typos before Yahoo Messenger’s servers rely on their “logic” to block the IP address that these people are coming from – just 5-10 such failed attempts are enough for Yahoo to block these IP addresses (which are gateways to hundreds or even thousands of YM users) for periods as long as 2-3 hours.

Don’t believe this? Just ask their *own* people, who found themselves blocked from the service, until they got “exception entries” placed into their servers so that these gateway IP addresses wouldn’t get blocked!

But poor suckers in corporate networks and small ISPs are out of luck since they cannot wield such influence, and have been forced to switch to MSN Messenger or other competitors just so that they would be able to communicate with people across the world.

Finally, the biggest tragedy of them all – Yahoo Groups.

For years, Yahoo groups (formerly known as eGroups) provided efficient and well organised services to hundreds and thousands of mailing lists, clubs, groups of people, etc.

Then something horrible happened to Yahoo Groups – Yahoo tried to “improve” it. And what they did to the service is worse than any sado-masochistic nightmare can ever be.

First of all, Yahoo Groups has defective DNS servers. Since sometime in 2001, the servers sporadically can no longer resolve domains, resulting in people’s accounts being marked as bouncing, because “No MX or A Records for domain xyz” where “xyz” could be any domain you can think of, including (but not limited to) my own domains (exocore.com, atulchitnis.net), well known domains (hotmail.com) and (ironically) the ones you’d least expect to bounce because of a bad MX or A record – “yahoo.com”, “yahoo.co.in”, etc.!!!!!!!

OK, so what does this mean to the poor list admin who has his lists on Yahoo Groups (in my case about 15 of them)?

Just this – at any given time, more than 50% of his list subscribers are marked as bouncing and no longer receive messages from the lists!

The more active the group (like the linux-bangalore lists I maintain), the more likely huge percentages of list subscribers will be marked as bouncing.

Worse – there is no way that the listadmin can mass-undo such false alarms. No “unbounce all”.

In fact, when I complained about this, Yahoo went one step further – now the “bouncing members” lists are either inaccurate, or completely empty, even when individual member profiles show them as bouncing.

My favourite test is to first look at the “empty” bouncing member lists, then do a search on “yahoo.co.in” in the member lists, and check each and every account that shows up in the subscriber base – each and everyone of them will be marked as “hard bouncing”.

One could say, of course, that this is “natural” given the “huge numbers” of lists and subscribers and the “instability” of the Internet.

However, this is not true at all.

I tried to find out the reasons for these problems, but even my friends at Yahoo India weren’t talking. That made me very suspicious, and so I had some sniffing done elsewhere. And what I found was horrifying – Yahoo has known about these problems for a long time, but has simply been unable to solve them. Their response to the danger of someone going public about this is to call a meeting with their PR people.

This is a world far removed from the worldclass services David Filo and Jerry Yang set out to build. This is a nightmare, and no one in Yahoo seems to care, or be able to do anything about it. “More advertisements” is the focus for these people, not “better and reliable services”.

Yahoo no longer deserves the support of its subscribers and people relying on its services. Not when this is the consistant shoddy service they offer people. Sure, you can scream about “it is free, you get what you pay for”, but do you think that the “premium” service, where you pay some money to have the ads removed from your messages, would solve the issue?

I am a member of a lot of such “premium” groups on Yahoo, and *all* of them have the same problems.

The problem lies deep inside Yahoo. It is a problem often seen when a company becomes top heavy, when the people at the middle and operational levels don’t really care anymore, or lose touch with reality.

It is time that David Filo and his band of visionaries come out of their board rooms and have a look at this mess, and roll up their sleeves, and fix this broken, whimpering mess that calls itself “Yahoo”.

p.s. Yahoo – don’t waste money on sending your lawyers after me to gag me – spend it on good people who will fix your technical problems, not your legal ones.

Been a week or more since I updated my diary, so here is what’s been happening:

First of all, I was sick. And stayed sick for a while.

Just as I was began to surface, Gopi fell ill, having just nursed his son through a similar flu.

So I had to sit in office minding the shop. Which caused me to fall ill again

Ah well…..

Have started playing around with my proposed home studio again. As a first run, I got my mixer and assorted equipment talking to my PC, so that I could *finally* do some decent recording. Found lots of flaws – an SMPS that is too noisy (physically and electrically), a sound card that has a permanent crackle, a mike that loves to sing along (with feedback), bust cables, etc. etc. etc.

Am slowly fixing issues one at a time. Am playing with the idea of picking up a Creative Audigy Platinum EX sound card, which really is the closest that you can come to non-professional home-recording equipment. Turns out that it costs a whopper (like around INR 13K) so that one is still under consideration.

But at least I am off the ground now, so hopefully I should be able to upload a few MP3s soon.

News on the Guitar MFX front is that we are now into the 5th attempt at getting one down here from the USA. This one may actually succeed – in the sense that it has been purchased and actually packed into the luggage of the person (Shubha’s cousin) who is supposed to bring it here.

Am holding breath!

I have also re-started the process of learning more about audio engineering – especially about stuff like balanced and imbalanced inputs, EQ, recording techniques, etc. I had actually started doing that years ago, but not much was available on the web then. Today, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a webpage talking about stuff like this!

On the work-front: the next seminars are now being shaped, prodded and moulded, and they are beginning to look good.

Keep an eye on Exocore’s Events page for info.

After weeks of no star TV, Siticable finally coughed up their dues to star and started re-broadcasting Star’s channels, much to the relief of their subscribers who were ready to go out to tar and feather a few Siticable executives.

Personal problems (read – family issues) occupied my time for the past couple of days – hopefully these issues will be resolved by tomorrow.

Am at home, sick with what appears to be a flu that I have been successfully keeping down for the past couple of days with lots of paracetamol. My sinuses are in revolt, and the left side of my head feels dead.

Today’s rant is about cellphone companies who are hell bent on alienating their customers with irritating “features” to their service.

For more than a year now, Airtel has been spamming me with useless information on my cell phone. It started innocently – maybe a message once a month talking about some new facet to their service. I could live with that.

But this has been increasingly steadily. These days, 2-3 spams from Airtel are the norm, but sometimes they outdo themselves.

Like the other day I was in a meeting, with bunches of people around, when suddenly almost *every* cellphone in the room beeped. Airtel spam. About what? About the fact that they now have a roaming arrangement with some country (I think it was Uzbekistan or something like that)!

That was *so* embarrassing for *everyone*.

Then they started sending these “informational” messages about bills having been issued, and what the amount was.

But the one I got today, while I was desperately trying to get some sleep, took the cake:

“This is to inform you that your bill is being processed and will become available on the 30th of this month”.

That was IT! I went postal.

I picked up the phone and called Airtel service (dial 800), and screamed. The poor sucker at the other end quickly put me onto his manager, who couldn’t take it either, and passed me up to an even higher authority.

I told that lady that in any country in the world, I could request that such useless and irritating information should not be sent to me, and the service provider would comply.

She innocently said “These messages are automated and…”

I didn’t let her finish, and screamed at her loud enough for Shubha to come running to see if I was OK.

Finally the Airtel person admitted that Airtel could indeed turn off such messages for my number, and that it would be done immediately.

Whether or not it will actually be done will be seen over the next few days, but people – if your mobile phone service provider is being an idiot like Airtel has been so far, call up the help desk and *HOWL*. You have a right not to receive such junk.

Do it *now*.

Today was the annual BLUG meet – the one meet in the year where we look back on what has been happening in the opensource world and the BLUG, and generally have a nice non-technical nose-rub.

I didn’t have too good a time – for the past couple of days, I have had something nasty creep up on me. Luckily nobody noticed the amount of Crocin I was droppnig to stay afloat.

Things didn’t get better, given that as usual I found myself doing more than I expected to. Slides needed to be done, videos to be edited, event issues to be resolved, etc. And of course everyone (apart from Jessie) seemed to be in “Atul do” mode, as usual. Some people just disappeared on me, only to show up at the meet expecting me to have kept their slides ready.

I am getting sooooooo tired of this.

The meet went off reasonably well, though we started late, thanks to projector issues and amplifier issues (the Ashoka hotel has the world’s most pathetic PA system). The latter was resolved by using my own PA equipment, the former required 30 minutes of fiddling before it started working.

Ran through the slideshow, announced Linux Bangalore/2002, broke for socialising and food.

Food was good, but I couldn’t eat the Channa Bhatura (that people were really happy with, apart from the excellent Sandwiches), because I needed to spare my throat.

Post food, Mrinal and I gave a little “Unplugged” concert, singing and playing a few songs.

The songs we played were the result of two practice sessions, and a lot of Pink Floyd (Brain Damage/Eclipse, Hey You, Wish You Were Here, Comfortably Numb), Beatles (In my Life), Simon & Garfunkel (America, The Boxer) and Dream Theater (Hollow Years).

We did well on some, but some I just plain lost my beat – by then, my ears were buzzing badly, and my sinuses were in full-blown war mode. Mrinal managed to cover up my goofs nicely, and did a perfect windup with an excellent solo on Comfortably Numb in the end.

IAC, thanks to Mrinal for indulging me, and no thanks to the guys who walked out halfway through.

Nice surprise this morning, when I found myself featured in a story on rediff.com. This interview was done a while back by Anita Bora, and I had totally forgotten about it. The complete interview is here.

Very interesting was the reaction Shubha (my wife) had to the top graphic featuring me and very eye-catching young lady – who turned out to be *the* Radhika Nair, who is also featured in the same article.

(Hey – I had nothing to do with that, so quit beating me over the head!!!!!

Ah well…..

More later.

Spent the night leading up to India’s independance day hacking code (for the un-educated – hacking is good, cracking is bad) to get my favourite IM of choice gaim to show the Indian Flag when you sent the correct smiley in Yahoo, a la the Indian version of Yahoo Messenger. Took me till 4 a.m., but finally got it right.

That was quite an achievement for me, since I don’t know C, so was clueless on where to even look (turned out to be quite simple, actually).

That was good.

Slept through till noon (with a minor interreption from Mrinal who buzzed to say that he would be coming over in the evening).

Towards evening, Mrinal showed up, complete with a cold that made him look like he had a hangover (or was it a hangover that made it look like he had a cold? I guess we will never know . The problem with his guitar was a simple one to identify, so we decided that he could do it himself, and we proceeded to practice some songs.

Turns out that I had a massive sinusitis coming up, which seemed to affect my sense of timing – can you imagine my going out of beat on “Wish you were here”????

Man, that was bad!

Late in the night, checked slashdot to read that Wil Wheaton (known to the Startrek world as “Wesley Crusher”) had been cut out of (what can be assumed to be) the last Startrek movie (Nemesis). What a complete downer! I feel for the guy. He has never denied the fact that he had missed being on StarTrek:TNG, and was so full of joy being on the last movie. And now this.

That was outright ugly.

And he is such a caring guy, too!

This is so sad.

Well, today was supposed to be “No Power Day” in our area. Appears that our part of Sanjaynagar does not get considered as “sanjaynagar” when it comes to the Electricity Board – we had power all day, apart from a few minor outages lasting a minute or two.

Not that this raised my productivity in any way – it was a most boring day. Boring enough for me to sit down and watch “Men in Black II” – which was pathetic.

Mrinal forgot that he had said that he would be coming by in the morning so that I could help him fix his guitar, so the morning crept by with positively nothing happening.

Sat down and practiced a few numbers on my acoustic guitars – my amp, mixer and assorted jam gear is still in a state of disrepair.

“Wish You Were Here” now sounds really good when I play it, but “Hollow Years” is killing me.

Crashed out in the afternoon and slept for a while before heading back to my PC to do some work. Found that our VPN was down, so couldn’t get into the office machines, so ended up *not* doing any work.

Shanu and Sony dropped in, carrying a load of Marvel and DC comic books. Almost dived into those, but somehow it didn’t feel the same. They were too small, too jazzy and didn’t smell like the pulp comics of yesteryear.

Finally was so bored that I decided to re-arrange the living room. It didn’t make me any less bored, but it was fun watching the dog and the cat trying to figure out where the furniture went.

Judo has this habit of sitting behind the sofa with his snout resting on the backrest, observing the happenings in the household. Well, he can’t do that any more.

And Honey likes to sleep in the cane chair by the garden door – only there is no cane chair by the garden door anymore.

Do I sound bored?

Hmmm, one of those days.

First, I decide to stay at home for the day, because Mrinal said he’d come over for some stuff. Beeps me in the morning that he couldn’t make it because of some stuff at home.

Later in the day, PCQuest Editor Krishna Kumar was supposed to come to Exocore to check out a cluster we were building, and to discuss some stuff vis-a-vis the PCQuest Linux Initiative. He was supposed to be there at 3pm, finally shows up at around 5pm.

In the meanwhile, I was at home, with no way to get to office because Shubha had taken the car, saying she’d be back by 3pm. She finally trundled in at 4, and that too only after I screamed.

While I was waiting for her, the SMPS of our newly reinstalled home PC blew in a spectacular fashion.

Finally, KK, who was supposed to come home for dinner, announced that he couldn’t since he had to go to Vellore the same night.

Hmmmm…..

At around 6:30pm, I was back home, complete with a new SMPS in tow. Well, not a new one, but one that was lying around in the office. It didn’t work. I then opened both the blown and the replacement SMPS, and start canibalising parts from both until I had enough to build a working one. It took me four hours, but in the end I had the machine working again.

As you must have figured out, it wasn’t my day.

Harsha took me to task for spending four hours of my time on something that I could have purchased for some 600++ bucks in the market. Except that the markets were closed, and my only other choice was to wait till Monday to buy a new one….

Actually, I enjoyed the “menial labour” of building the SMPS. It wasn’t just that I *had* to, but also because I *could*. It has been years since I wielded a soldering iron for anything more than soldering a guitar cable.

Speaking of guitar cables – tomorrow (electricity board willing) I should sit down and redo my jam outfit, which is still lying scattered around after returning from Allen’s party.