Thursday, 26 September 2013

Delhi Assembly Elections, WHOZ LINE IS IT GONNA BE?

With the Delhi Assembly election being the hot topic of this season, it is quite a subject of contention also. With AAP(AAM ADMI PARTY) challenging the fortress of Sheila Dikshit, it is eminent that in this election we may see some unpredictable result scenario.


     Delhi Assembly has got 70 seats out of which 12 are reserved (as per latest amendment)
 Here is a quick glance at what previous years result was
Election Result 2008

SN Party Seats
Contested
Seats
won
Seats
Changed
 % Votes
1 Indian National Congress 69 43 - 4 40.31
2 Bharatiya Janata Party 69 23 + 3 36.34
3 Bahujan Samaj Party 69 2 + 2 14.05
4 Lok JanShakti Party 41 1 +1 1.35
5 Independent
1 0 3.92

Total
70
95.97

(source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delhi_state_assembly_elections,_2008)
   And for the same I saw pretty more interesting stats for the 2003 election. It is often being said that who holds the NEW DELHI, holds the centre. It is generally believed that the mandate given to a particular political party in the Delhi Assembly election represents the kind of mandate (expected from the nation).  This was the performance of the NATIONAL POLITICAL PARTIES in 2003 Delhi Assembly elections



(source http://eci.nic.in/eci_main/SR_KeyHighLights/SE_Nov_2003/StatisticalReports_DEL_Nov2003.pdf)

Now coming on to the current scenario as per IBN 7 HT-C fore opinion poll survey Delhi Assembly Election 2013. Congress likely to get 32-37 seats, with AAP likely to get 7-12 seats in the current election. Where as the Times Now and CVoter survey shows that AAP is likely to get 4-7 seats where as Congress is likely to get around 23 (-20) from it's current scenario, on the other hand BJP is likely to get a hike of around (10-15) seats compared to previous election.

So all in all, it's going to be one helluva election

Moreover, as per my own interest I am about to do visualization on the same. Hope it'll be up by tomorrow. Till the next time ADIOS!

P.S EXERCISE YOUR VOTING POWER, NO MATTER HOW BUSY YOU ARE !
CVoter poll survey, the Congress party is likely to drop to 29 seats from its current 43; the BJP is likely to 30 seats, an increase from its current 23 seats; while the Aam Aadmi Party will get around four seats.

Read more at: http://www.firstpost.com/delhi/delhi-elections-may-result-in-hung-assembly-says-survey-1118589.html?utm_source=ref_article
CVoter poll survey, the Congress party is likely to drop to 29 seats from its current 43; the BJP is likely to 30 seats, an increase from its current 23 seats; while the Aam Aadmi Party will get around four seats.

Read more at: http://www.firstpost.com/delhi/delhi-elections-may-result-in-hung-assembly-says-survey-1118589.html?utm_source=ref_article
CVoter poll survey, the Congress party is likely to drop to 29 seats from its current 43; the BJP is likely to 30 seats, an increase from its current 23 seats; while the Aam Aadmi Party will get around four seats.

Read more at: http://www.firstpost.com/delhi/delhi-elections-may-result-in-hung-assembly-says-survey-1118589.html?utm_source=ref_article
CVoter poll survey, the Congress party is likely to drop to 29 seats from its current 43; the BJP is likely to 30 seats, an increase from its current 23 seats; while the Aam Aadmi Party will get around four seats.

Read more at: http://www.firstpost.com/delhi/delhi-elections-may-result-in-hung-assembly-says-survey-1118589.html?utm_source=ref_articl

Tuesday, 17 September 2013

Myths regarding GPL

Recently in a meeting which happened on 14th of September, a very debatable topic came up. And that was GPL licensing!!
    Being the member of the FOSS community, I knew some of the terms of GPL v2 like "FREE AS IN FREEDOM" and few more. But I was really boggled to see when one of the person who was in the meeting quoted that since these apps which we are submitting under #OpenDataApp Challenge, lie under GPL there won't be any money making involved in the whole of the process, as the source code is available to all. And this is where the topic of writing a blog post over myths regarding GPL came into my mind. As they say "HALF KNOWLEDGE IS A DANGEROUS THING" so I first did my homework reading some of the versions of the GPL.

 ref URL : http://www.gnu.org/licenses/

After bit of googling I landed up in the FAQ section of the following website. And Voila!! there lay answers to all of my queries that were there in my mind. To quote a few, in which majority of "US" would be interested are as follows

Q. If I distribute GPL'd software for a fee, am I required to also make it available to the public without a charge? (#DoesTheGPLRequireAvailabilityToPublic)
Ans : No. However, if someone pays your fee and gets a copy, the GPL gives them the freedom to release it to the public, with or without a fee. For example, someone could pay your fee, and then put her copy on a web site for the general public. 

Q. I want to get credit for my work. I want people to know what I wrote. Can I still get credit if I use the GPL? (#IWantCredit)
You can certainly get credit for the work. Part of releasing a program under the GPL is writing a copyright notice in your own name (assuming you are the copyright holder). The GPL requires all copies to carry an appropriate copyright notice.


Q.I would like to release a program I wrote under the GNU GPL, but I would like to use the same code in non-free programs. (#ReleaseUnderGPLAndNF)
To release a non-free program is always ethically tainted, but legally there is no obstacle to your doing this. If you are the copyright holder for the code, you can release it under various different non-exclusive licenses at various times.


 As you can see, it is thus a myth that binds most of the MICROSOFT MOLE (as I may term them, people who don't have sufficient knowledge how open source community works and it's product development schema) out here it's for you that YES you can make MONEY with GPL licensed SOFTWARE!


Well I'll restrict myself to this only, as I have plenty of other projects pending. Do give your suggestions, criticism, comments, over this post. Till the next time adios!

Sunday, 8 September 2013

My feedback over DATA PORTAL INDIA

 Well few months ago I was introduced to a new concept called OPEN DATA, which is nothing but refers to the data which is available to the public without any hassle. We all know that DATA in general has no particular significance unless and until it is processed and something meaningful  is conveyed out of it.
     I was surprised to know that NIC (National Informatics Center) is already, working on DATA PORTAL OF INDIA,  and numerous amount of data is already there. Since I was the part of their collaboration (IN PURSUIT OF AN IDEA), so I thoroughly peeped into some of the data sets that were there on DATA PORTAL. I believe that it is a very remarkable  step to allow people access to certain kind of data. Some of the applications we made using the data from DATA PORTAL are displayed here. But to my surprise there are still some gaping loopholes in the DATA PORTAL. This post is not an attempt to discourage Government to not to publish data, but in fact it is my way of saying that you can always improve such things. 

First of all the website design is good, and graphics and other things are quite well embedded, but the only thing which troubles me as a DATA PORTAL user is search query. Sometimes, search query takes longer than the usual to produce output. I think this is one of the aspect which can be improved. Also the quality and the indexing is pretty basic in nature, I may be wrong here because I am still not fully aware of the backend part but still it appears that some of the searches show results which are totally not required, for example I want a dataset related to crops grown in Himachal Pradesh, so my general search term would be Crops + Himachal Pradesh or the whole query, Crops grown in Himachal Pradesh, these are the search result I generally get, which is quite absurd because as per my query the result should be pin point and upto the mark. Searching should be made more user friendly!


Secondly, data.gov.in often face downtime of total of 10+ minutes per week, especially at night( I may be wrong here but happens with me most of the time). Though, I understand that server maintenance etc are some of the issues for it, but if that is the case why don't GOOGLE or FACEBOOK or any other TECH giants faces the similar issue, I bet that they are also handling a large amount of data, and also the number of user of GOOGLE and FACEBOOK are much more than that of DATA PORTAL itself. Yes, these TECH GIANTS do close up for their maintenance but only once in a while.

On one front I want to congratulate the dev team of DATA PORTAL INDIA, that they have solved the login and session expiry issues,  so KUDOS!

Now coming on to another major part, in some of the datasets I find that there are many discrepancy or the their is no valid information given about such discrepancy. For example few days back I was searching for a dataset and I came across a dataset, which was about the elected members, during the first LOK SABHA, and it says 543. I initially didn't thought about it but then after referring to Wikipedia, I came to know that during the first GENERAL ELECTION, only 489 MP's were elected to the Lok Sabha, so why the official data here is saying 543!! Even the data with same discrepancy is there on the official LOK SABHA's website. Since the Wikipedia is also managed by users I thought ECI that is Election Commission of India must be having some information about it. So as per ECI official data, it was 489 only, so on seeing this discrepancy, I went on to report this problem to the DATA CONTROLLER, Mrs. Sushma Rungta (as per data.gov.in) but till now I haven't got a reply! I mean it's good that you want to engage people in your open data concept, but unless and until a swift and apt reply won't come up, this will end up being just another project. And ultimately it will damage the whole idea of data sharing on a community based scale.

Finally, I feel DATA PORTAL and Data Sharing Policy is an excellent venture that Government of India has launched. It's just that some of these issues need to be resolved and gaping holes must be filled as soon as possible. Furthermore, I am looking forward to contributing more to it.

Till the next time ADIOS!

Saturday, 7 September 2013

Configuring ZNC on a Server

Well it was the first time I was configuring something on a web server. Till now all I did was configured different podium, interfaces on localhost only. But this time I thought it would fun if I get a chance to deploy something on actual web server. To my surprise my mentor Mr. Satyakaam  gave me an assignment (not an assignment literally) to install and configure ZNC on web server.

     To give you a brief intro about ZNC is a IRC bouncer which is used to relay traffic and connection in IRC channels. So all I did is  read all the documentation related to ZNC implementation and configuration, and I also peeped into their source code, and found it that it was quite easy to understand in fact. But I was unaware that I'll have to deal with so many things, in order to configure the ZNC. So after downloading the .tar file on the server, I extracted it and did all the steps as described in the wiki page of the ZNC official documentation. But to my surprise I was unable to see the ZNC working on the specified port of my server, even though I performed each step very carefully.






I again re-installed it, but then I got the CONFIG error, as the config file was already there on server, so I again deleted whole of it, including the .znc folder and again re-installed it and voila!! my webmodule was working fine. Meaning, I could see the web interface of ZNC. But then came another problem, I was not able to log onto the system properly, the error being my IP was changing dynamically!! (EVEN I DON'T KNOW HOW) this is where the code base walkthrough comes into effect. I checked into their codebase, and edited some of the files manually, also people who were there on their IRC channel #znc, helped me to rectify my error, so after typing a simple one line, which was

echo 'ProtectWebSessions = false' >> ~/.znc/configs/znc.conf


BINGO!!! All of my problems were solved and finally after 7 hours of hard work. I was able to pull this off.

Teachings: Well be patient, you never know what obstacle may come in your way, secondly, READ THE DOCUMENTATION CAREFULLY !!

Sunday, 1 September 2013

IST (Indian Stretchable Time)

"Yea, I am on my way, coming in five"

"What took you so long?"

"I was stuck in the jam"

"I'll be back in next fourty five minutes or so"

And that fourty five minutes never ends. Well this blog post is dedicated to all those people including me (to certain extent) whose watches face time dilation. Maybe because we guys are lightning quick, and as per basic Physics 101, the more your speed the lesser the time. For you NORMAL people who are so lethargic that for you fourty minutes are just fourty minutes!! I mean come on, you should exercise some special powers like us.

        Jokes apart, recently I was with one of my senior, one of his colleague took a break saying that he needs to go somewhere for half an hour but eventually that guy didn't returned for the next four hours! I mean it's not about that being professional your personal space will be chewed on, but especially to all the Delhites don't give  goli when it comes to time. I mean if you're late, you should admit it. But lame excuses sucks a big time, not just in professional environment but in day to day life also.

I've seen Delhi's MNC's culture a bit and from my experience I can very well say that Delhites are the best when it comes to excuses for being late. For the first time in my life I realised that ten minutes are not exactly ten minutes. During my first year of college life, one of my friend told me to wait as he was coming to pick me up in TEN minutes and those TEN minutes eventually become an hour.

According to my mentor, Surendran Delhites follow two time zones, first is IST that stands for INDIAN STRETCHABLE TIME and second is DST which is DELHI STRETCHABLE TIME, funny indeed.
Well that's all for now, need to do couple of more interesting things on the web. Till next time adios! and mind your time

Sunday, 25 August 2013

Flirting with DATA Set

Well recently I was working with Random Data sets which were required to complete my application for the NIC APP CHALLENGE. Well, some of the interesting insights I came across are as follows
(DATA DUPLICATION IS THERE)

Total Number of Member Selected (from 1st to 15th Lok Sabha) :-  8323

Number of Female Members (1st to 15th Lok Sabha) :- 565

Number of Male Members (1st to 15th Lok Sabha :-  7738

Total Registered Political Parties :- 292 + (I am not sure about this figure, if you guys know please let me know the exact figure)

Total Number of Independent Members Elected (since 1st Lok Sabha):- 200

Party with Highest Number of Nomination to the Lok Sabha :- Congress (2035+)

State with Maximum Number of MP's Nominated to LOK SABHA :- Uttar Pradesh (1316)


And I can write about this on and on..... But I believe it's enough for now, please give me your review regarding the correctness of this data.

P.S I am politically sound but least interested into it
P.s (P.s) :- This blog is not written to create any controversies :P

Till we meet again adios!