Indic Scripts and Linux

If you have the fonts for Indic scripts (for example, the Lohit fonts), Firefox on Linux is able to display the Devanagari text on sites like BBC Hindi and Google News in Hindi. (Devanagari is the primary writing system for languages like Hindi, Sanskrit, etc.) However, if you are using the builds released by mozilla.com, you would notice that the matras (diacritics) are not applied properly to form the correct ligatures. For example, the word "हिन्दी" ("Hindi") itself is not rendered properly. Konqueror does not suffer from such problems.

It turns out that Firefox does not support complex text layout because it doesn't use Pango in the officially-released builds (Firefox 3 will support it by default). You have to either compile it yourself from the source and enable the support for Pango by using --enable-pango, or use a build that has Pango enabled - for example, the builds provided by the Fedora Project. (Setting the environment variable MOZ_ENABLE_PANGO to "1" had no effect for me with Firefox 2.0.0.3.)

On Fedora Core 6 (FC6), it is very simple to get this working:

1. Install the fonts for the Indic scripts you are interested in. For example, "sudo yum install fonts-hindi" , "sudo yum install fonts-malayalam", "sudo yum install fonts-kannada", etc.
2. Install a Firefox build for Fedora using "sudo yum install firefox". Note that FC6 installs Firefox 1.5 by default - if you prefer Firefox 2.0 instead, you can install it using "sudo yum --enablerepo=development install firefox".

By the way, I recently came across Omniglot, a site about the writing systems of almost all known human languages, existing or extinct, naturally-evolved or artificially-created. I found it extremely fascinating and insightful. For example, I did not know that Devanagari was not considered to be an "alphabet" but an "abiguda". Check out the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) that can represent almost all spoken languages. How about Loglan (and its freer derivative, Lojban) that claims to be a "logical" language? (I first came across the IPA on Wikipedia, where it is used to provide the pronunciation for some terms. xkcd is where I first read about Lojban.)

ICFP Contest 2007

The 10th ICFP Contest is scheduled for the weekend of 20^th July 2007. I hope it turns out to be as fun as the one held last year.

There is already a blog written by one of the organisers that contains some teaser puzzles. (Do these images use some form of steganography or can we simply work out the graphical transformations applied to the original image and apply them in reverse to obtain the desired image? I wonder.)

"Superstition Reigns"

"Superstition Reigns" by Rahul Singh, published in The Times of India today:

"Amitabh Bachchan, an icon for tens of millions of Indians, makes his daughter-in-law [Aishwarya Rai] perform outlandish ceremonies because she is supposedly under the evil influence of Mars. Politicians routinely consult astrologers before taking important decisions, despite abundant proof that astrology is no science at all, just quackery. Horoscopes continue to be cast in most families and palmists consulted. A newly-inducted cabinet minister insists that her bungalow be completely redesigned because it does not follow vaastu principles, a system nobody had heard of till only a few years ago."

Superstition in all its ugly forms is sickeningly pervasive in India, even among educated people who ought to know better. We waste a lot of time and money and unnecessarily make life difficult for ourselves as well as others, all in the name of something that doesn't withstand rational scrutiny.

Firefox 3 and Linux

Mike Connor blogs about the proposed requirements for Firefox 3 to run on Linux. A nasty surprise for me was the inclusion of GNOME as a dependency. While the GTK/Pango/Cairo/etc. requirements are quite understandable, I don't understand why it should need GNOME. Many of us are happy with KDE or Xfce and would like to avoid the bloat and the dependency hell of GNOME for the sake of running a browser.

As an aside, Firefox on Linux also seems to behave quite differently from Firefox on Windows. For example, on Linux Firefox seems to consistently consume more CPU time and memory than on Windows. Some pages are rendered differently on Windows and Linux (perhaps due to the availability, or otherwise, of the fonts requested by the page designer and the rendering infrastructure). I have personally also noticed bug-337093 on Windows but not on Linux.

VU3RDD Gets $2.56 From Donald Knuth

VU3RDD (a.k.a. Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan) recently received a cheque for $2.56 from Donald Knuth as a reward for spotting a mistake in TAoCP Volume 2. Among the people I have met, he is the first such person. Congratulations!

Mohan Embar

I met Mohan Embar this weekend. He used to maintain the Windows port of GCJ. It was nice to finally be able to associate a face and a voice with the name, since our interaction so far had only been over email. He turned out to be much thinner, more soft-spoken and more boyish than I had imagined.

I think I ended up asking him a bit too much about how he managed to remain a freelance programmer for so long, that too in Milwaukee, since it is something that interests (as well as scares) me.

Wayanad

The Labour Day holiday last Tuesday, combined with a day's leave off work on Monday, offered us a four day long weekend that Anusha and I used for a mini vacation in Wayanad in Kerala.

A couple of Anusha's friends, along with their spouses, also joined us on this trip. We drove from Bangalore to Wayanad via Mysore, Nanjangud, Gundlupet and Sultan Battery, taking SH-17 and NH-212 and passing through the Bandipur wildlife sanctuary. The roads were quite good in general and the road from Bangalore to Mysore was excellent in particular. We covered the distance in about 5.5 hours, including a couple of short breaks. We stayed in Edakkal Hermitage, a resort quite close to the Edakkal Caves.

Pre-historic Carvings of the Edakkal Caves

Kerala is one of the most beautiful states in India. Even for someone from a generally green city like Bangalore, the lush and pervasive greenery of Kerala is an exhilarating change. As with The Tall Trees Resorts in Munnar that we had visited earlier, the cottages of Edakkal Hermitage were located on the quiet slopes of a mountain in a way that allows one to soak in the beauty of nature in relative privacy while affording a fantastic view of the valley below. The two resorts were also very similar in the amazing service provided by the respective staff and the delicious food that were served by them.

Our Cottage

On the first day, after having refreshed ourselves and having had lunch at the resort, we drove down to the Pookote Lake. This lake turned out to be a disappointment. It was small, filthy and full of tourists. We didn't stay there long, moving on to a view-point and then returning to our resort. Later in the evening, we had our dinner in a cave in the resort that was beautifully lit by more than a hundred candles.

The next morning, we visited the Edakkal Caves and admired the pre-historic carvings on the walls of the caves. The climb to the caves is a bit difficult and is not everyone's cup of tea. Three of our party, including me, wanted to climb further up the mountain and on to the summit, while the others preferred to stay back on a landing waiting for us to come back. We kept climbing up till we reached a rock-face that was a bit steep. There was a single rope for support and not many footholds. Not being experienced climbers and only having our ordinary shoes for support, we chickened out. We tried to find an alternate route to the summit and turned back on not finding any. I regret this now and wish I had mustered the courage.

Our only consolation was spotting a huge butterfly on the way back. It was the biggest butterfly I had ever seen and must have been about 20 to 25 centimetres (8 to 10 inches) across. We were able to get very close to the butterfly and even touch it - it just moved its wings and continued to sit on its tree.

The Butterfly

Tired from our trek, Anusha and I chose to relax in our cottage that afternoon while the rest of the party drove to the Suchipara waterfalls. In the evening we had our dinner in an amphitheatre in the resort.

The next morning we went for a safari through the Muthanga wildlife sanctuary. The safari was utterly disappointing for the most part with not many animals in sight (as has been our luck on all such occasions), when it suddenly turned rather interesting towards the end. Our way was blocked by a herd of at least seven elephants, one of which was a baby elephant. The driver of the Jeep was evidently quite scared and was ready to scoot at the slightest hint of trouble. Retreating was a bit difficult since the path was rather narrow (you had to either retreat in reverse gear or find a clearing large enough to turn the Jeep around) and there were other Jeeps behind us. We had to wait for about half an hour before the herd moved away and we could proceed. Other than the elephants, we were able to spot a Malabar Squirrel, different types of deer, langurs and peacocks.

The Elephants

That afternoon we headed back to Bangalore, regretting that we could not stay longer and dreading the plunge back into the daily grind of our lives.

Running Java Applets in Internet Explorer on Linux

One of the unfortunate things about the current state of the internet is that some web sites refuse to work with anything other than Internet Explorer (IE). Some of these also require you to run Adobe Flash Player and/or Sun's JVM within IE. Most of these sites can be happily avoided, but some of them just can't, especially when they run important applications within a corporate intranet. This can seriously dampen the enthusiasm of people willing to try out Linux as their primary desktop.

WINE allows you to run many a Windows application natively on Linux, including IE (albeit with a few tweaks). IEs4Linux makes it really simple to install one or more versions of IE on your Linux system, something that is very difficult on Windows itself, if not impossible! You can also view Flash content and run Java applets within such an IE. The latter requires a bit of tweaking with the current release of WINE (0.9.34), if you want to use Sun's JVM instead of that provided by Microsoft, as explained below.

Install a version of IE using IEs4Linux into, say, $HOME/.ies4linux (the default). Assuming that you choose to install only IE 6.0 SP1, IEs4Linux will create a WINE "bottle" named "ie6" within "$HOME/.ies4linux", separate from your regular WINE bottle (which is present by default in "$HOME/.wine"). IEs4Linux can also automatically install Adobe Flash Player along with IE. Run IE at least once to verify that it is working.

Now install the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) making sure that you correctly specify the WINEPREFIX environment variable by pointing it to the IE WINE bottle. For example:

export WINEPREFIX=$HOME/.ies4linux/ie6
wine jre-1_5_0_11-windows-i586-p.exe

For some reason, RegUtils.dll is not correctly copied during the installation of the JRE and therefore you must copy this file from a Windows machine that has exactly the same version of the JRE. This file is usually found in the "bin" sub-folder of the JRE installation folder. Without this file, the Java Control Panel applet will not be able to register Sun's JRE with IE.

Now run the "javacpl" programme found in the "bin" sub-folder of the JRE installation folder. With the current WINE release, this would cause your display to flicker or black out since it does not yet fully support DirectX-based acceleration (but where the maximum development effort currently seems to be directed). To avoid this, you can also invoke the Java Control Panel applet alternatively like this in the "lib" sub-folder of the JRE installation folder:

java -classpath deploy.jar \
  -Dsun.java2d.noddraw com.sun.deploy.panel.ControlPanel

Go to the "Advanced" tab and uncheck the check-box for "<APPLET> tag support" for "Internet Explorer", apply your changes and close the applet. Restart the applet once again and this time check the check-box, apply your changes and close the applet. You should now be able to see Java applets within IE using Sun's JRE.

If you wish to avoid the flicker/blacking-out of the display whenever you run Java GUI applications, you can either pass the JVM option -Dsun.java2d.noddraw to Java applications and applets or disable DirectX-based acceleration for Java 2D completely by looking for a registry key like:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\JavaSoft\Java2D\1.5.0_11

and setting the value of "DXAcceleration" to "0". (WINE includes a "regedit" programme just like its Windows counterpart.)

With IE, Flash and Java Applets with you, you are now ready to savour the worst of the internet first-hand on your Linux desktop instead of hearing about it from your friends who use Windows.

(The method outlined here seems to work with WINE 0.9.34 on Fedora Core 6, IE 6.0 SP1 as installed by IEs4Linux 2.0.5 and Sun's JRE 1.5.0_11 - your mileage might vary.)

Update (2007-07-03): With WINE 0.9.40 on Fedora 7 and Sun's JRE 1.5.0_12, I don't see the problem with "RegUtils.dll" and the JRE installs just fine. Another way of avoiding the blackening of the entire desktop while using Java Swing applications (and for getting a much more accurate display) is to enable a "virtual desktop" that will hold your Windows applications. To do this, invoke "winecfg", select "Enable a virtual desktop" under the "Graphics" tab and provide a size for the virtual desktop (say, 800 by 600 or 1024 by 768).

Update (2007-10-31): The default location used by IEs4Linux is $HOME/.ies4linux (notice the period in front of the directory name). Changed the post to use this location instead as people were getting confused by the location used earlier.

NX

NX allows you to remotely access a Linux or Solaris machine and makes applications using X Windows appear quite responsive even over slow links. It even supports resuming, from anywhere, a session with the server suspended for any reason (for example, a broken network connection). The "Free Edition" of NX is free for personal use. The core NX libraries are Free Software. There is also FreeNX that provides a Free implementation of the NX server licenced under the GPL.

NX performs incredibly well, especially when you compare it to VNC, ssh with compression and X forwarding, etc. The desktop client, especially on Windows, still has a few bugs that are mildly irritating but nothing catastrophic. The sheer improvement in the response of your remote applications more than makes up for these minor shortcomings.

Investing For Retirement

(Note: This post might not be of interest to those not from India.)

Most of us do not even think about planning for retirement until we reach the age of 30. Some of us "live for the moment" and don't care for the future, some of us feel uncomfortable thinking about retirement and pretend like the proverbial cat that closing our eyes to the problem will make it go away and some of us just do not know how to assess our financial requirements three decades into the future.

Unfortunately for us, there is not much of a government-provided social security in India for old folks, we cannot realistically expect our children to take care of all our expenses, inflation constantly lessens the value of our savings and interests on assured-return investments (fixed-deposits, EPFs, etc.) keep falling. We must have some idea of our needs at the time of our retirement and know how much to invest now to be able to afford the same lifestyle that we are currently used to.

The good news is that we can use basic mathematics to calculate these figures. We will make use of two equations. The first equation (call it "E₁") tells us the final amount "S" that an initial amount "P" grows to if it grows at a compounded rate of "r" over "n" years:

S = P × (1 + r)ⁿ

The second equation (call it "E₂") tells us the final amount "S" that a regular annual investment of "P" over "n" years gives if it grows at a compounded rate of "r":

S = P × ((1 + r)ⁿ - 1) / r

Note that since the rates are usually quoted as percentages, you need to divide them by 100 to get the value of "r" usable in these equations. For example, a quoted rate of 8% translates to "r" equal to 0.08.

Now assume that you are aged 30 years, plan to retire at the age of 60 years, have a montly expenditure of 20,000 rupees and the rate of inflation is about 5% on the average. Using E₁, you can see that at the time of your retirement 30 years hence, your monthly expenditure would become about 86,438.85 rupees simply because of inflation! That translates to about 10,37,266 rupees in annual expenditure. With old age come many an ailment for which you would need to spend money - at about 1,00,000 rupees per year at today's rates, you would need about 4,32,194 rupees at the time of your retirement to meet medical expenses. So you would need an annual income of at least 14,69,460 rupees at the time of your retirement just to sustain your current lifestyle and cope with the inevitable medical expenses!

How will you generate an income like this at that time? It is very likely that your appetite for risk would have considerably diminished at that time and you would only be willing to invest for assured-returns and thus lower rates of interest, say, about 5%. This in turn means that you would need a sum of 2,93,89,200 rupees (5% of which is the amount you need per year) at the time of your retirement. You need to have raised about 3 crore rupees by the time you retire just to be able to afford your current lifestyle!

To raise this kind of money, you either need to invest a certain amount annually till the time you retire or do a one-time investment. If you assume an annual return of 8% on your investments, you either need to invest about 2,59,431 rupees annually for the next 30 years (using E₂) or about 29,20,620 rupees at a single shot (using E₁). If you assume a more aggressive (though riskier) annual return of 15% on your investments, the amounts change to about 67,601 rupees and about 4,43,867 rupees respectively.

If you had started at the age of 25 years, you would have had 35 years to raise the money. At a per-annum return of 8%, you would have either invested about 1,70,533 rupees annually or about 19,87,725 rupees at a single shot. At a per-annum return of 15%, these figures become about 33,352 rupees and about 2,20,680 rupees respectively.

If you postpone investing for your retirement by another five years, you would have 25 years to raise the money. At a per-annum return of 8%, you would need to either invest about 4,02,008 rupees annually or about 42,91,349 rupees at a single shot. At a per-annum return of 15%, these figures become about 1,38,112 rupees and about 8,92,774 rupees respectively.

So the earlier you start investing for your retirement, the better it is for you. The folks at Personalfn.com have a report titled "Retirement Planning and You" that provides a more detailed analysis of this situation as well as the available investment options suitable for retirement planning.

Of course, these are simplified calculations. They do not take into account the fact that you will very likely have to pay income tax on the returns from this investment. They also do not take into account the fact that because of inflation, you would need slightly more and more every year after you retire instead of the fixed amount assumed here. Hopefully the average rate of inflation for India for the next 30 years will be less than the 5% assumed here.