ultrarainycoffeecollector-blog

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Kannur

Why do political parties murder each other in Kannur? Why have they been doing this since independence? Per Ullekh N. P. the reasons are:

There is a tradition of dispute resolution by combat (angams) in this region. Chekavars functioned like samurai, "defending" their lords' honour.

There were few avenues for gainful employment in the region. Some went abroad and sent back enough money to fund conspicious consumption. Some obtained the limited white-collar jobs in the private sector. Some did odd jobs and satyed content. The remaining seethed with envy and frustration at their lot.

CPI(M) leadership post-independance had little respect for even the existence of political opposition. I guess this is straight from the Marxist-Leninist playbook.

A police force whose lower ranks sympathised with the communists while the officers were largely bourgeois.

All these play out against the backdrop of a class struggle between a land-owning (jenmi) minority and a disenfranchised majority. Education exarcerbated the perceived humiliation of the majority.

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Freedom

We are free. I am limited by the laws of physics but no human law and bind me. When my freedom impinges on another's freedom, a system based on rules isn't likely to resolve the problem much like an axiomatic system cannot be consistent.

The law functions admirably in the context of regulating a government but is less effective in regulating human interactions. Appealing to the law in a matter with a fellow human does not guarantee a result in what the layman calls justice.

Some of the most cherished bourgeois rights: freedoms of speech, religion and love are guaranteed only in the context of a citizen interacting with their goverment. I cannot take my neighbour to court for telling me to keep it down.

Conflating the goverment and the group or thought that I am against will lead me to lacunae in my understanding of the issues.

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Coffee

The rise of the Arabs seems associated with the discovery of coffee. Imagine a bunch of folks, hopped up on caffeine, devouring the knowledge of the Greeks that Europe has forgotten. These folks could take over the world. Today coffee is one of the most traded items in the world with a worldwide consumption of 10 million tons.

Pope Clement thought coffee was too delicious to be left entirely to the Arabs. He proposed to "baptise" it and make it a "Christian drink". The first coffee grown outside its native range in Yemen and Ethiopia was in Chikmagluru in Karnataka. The story is part fable but it is true that the Yemeni's jelously guarded the supply of coffee and monopolised its trade for some centuries.

I am not interested in making coffee a part of my life. I drink coffee to get fucked up.

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Mahabharata and slashfic

Vyasa's MBH has spawned a couple of millenia of fanfic and it is awesome. People from Indonesia to Balochistan have brought their own mores, beliefs, and cultural viewpoints to the various characters.

The Anu-gita is vital to some though it is hardly mentioned in the Tamil Terukuttu which structures the performance around Draupadi. Duryodhana and Karna are worshipped in Garwhal and Uttarakhand. Arjuna whines like Luke Skywalker during his "pilgrimage". Krishna is simultaneously the hero as well as the villan. Balarama is given to bhaang and soma. Elders like Bhishma, Drona and Kripa are subtly censured for going against dharma. This utterly human story has been enriched by the riffs that have been composed over millenia.

Justification for a wide variety of behaviour can be found in the Mahabharata. Like Wolverine, it is popularity that makes some immortal.

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Screenwriter

It is true that focus group testing has led to the current state where all loose ends must be tied up in a pretty little bow. However, I think we still appreciate ambiguity, poetry, conflict and all those things.

Producing something good is still hard. After producing crap only takes a squeeze.

This post was written while watching Deutschland 83.

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Is mathematics a language?

Maths describes patterns. Gödel's incompleteness theorem completes mathematics by informing it that not everything is a pattern.

Language is used for thinking much more than it is for communication. We never misunderstand our internal monologues but we find it very difficult to grasp the meaning behind the words of even our closest friends. Except maths. Once we have the maths behind a phenomenon, there are no more misunderstandings.

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Power

In matters of power, the young have always been exploited by the old. It is this process by which the young turn old.

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Divorce

I am going through a divorce. I thought I loved Jenny no matter what. Upon deeper inspection I found that I don't even know what I mean by love.

It appears that I have scared my children. I thought that was my job, after all punishment is the only tool that I have to mould behaviour. I loved them too. I respect their thoughts and their time and I have never had to raise my voice to have them listen to me.

And now to the sordid matters of life.

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Pattern matchers

A while ago while listening to a young Korean pianist I realised that our minds are based on patterns. To understand something we have to be able to see the patterns. To my mind, this is what Wigner referred to as the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics". It is not that mathematics is an effective tool to understand nature it is that it is the only tool that we have.

Nature is chaotic. There are patterns but they are deep and subtle and the interesting ones are on the edge of repetition. There is only randomness. In the vastness of phase-space, our reality is so fine tuned we might as well assume a god.

And yet we look for salvation in others.

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Why do we have a neocortex?

The brain is an organ that simply takes what it wants. It consumes about 20% of the body's energy budget. Of course, that spending results in language, tool use, empathy and emotion which are harnessed by society for the greater good.

Humans evolved in a social structure and the greater good necessarily implies that some will have to sacrifice their own good. Eusocial animals solve this problem by unique genetics. The iron laws of evolution dictate that when one shares more genes with sisters than offspring, apian (or formic) society is the result.

The neocortex explores a different evolutionary niche: supressing instinct. The runaway size of the neocortex points to the amount of engineering and energy required to supress instincts and still be viable. The positive feedback loop is the evolution of neocortical features like language which bind humans closer than genes.

Is this why all religions are obsessed with controlling sexual behaviour? Or is that just a societal outcome of the balance between the procreative urge and a stable environment to rear young?

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SNMP for the AC3200

The Asus specific MIBS have been removed from Merlin as they are considered a security hole.

Disregarding that, I want to monitor the router. So, I got the mibs from the 378.49_4 tag.

First, we enable SNMP via the web GUI. It is under Administration.

After repeated invokations of

$ snmpwalk -Os -c <get community string> -v2c 192.168.1.1 2>/tmp/q $ cat /tmp/q

to figure out the missing modules, I got all the MIBS from net-snmp, dumped them in /usr/share/snmp/mibs and created an /etc/snmp/snmp.conf file like so,

mibdirs /usr/share/snmp/mibs mibs +ALL

You can figure out the MIBS you need one by one, but this was faster. Now, snmpwalk should should have descriptive names instead of numeric OIDs.

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Cross compiling for the Asus AC3200

Debian multi-arch

This is the AC3200 running Asus-Merlin.

# dpkg --add-architecture armel # apt-get update # inst crossbuild-essential-armel

Try building a hello world program:

$ arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc -o hello hello.c $ file hello hello: ELF 32-bit LSB pie executable ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.3, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=c0a6f1e6a507d14337f1594657f795971706ef39, not stripped

Try it on the router:

$ ./hello -sh: ./hello: not found

Damn! Back to the drawing board. Revert with:

# purge crossbuild-essential-armel # apt-get autoremove # dpkg --remove-architecture armel

By hand

Get kvic-z/brcm-arm-toolchains.

Build the hello world as:

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/alok/src/brcm-arm-toolchains-master/hndtools-arm-linux-2.6.36-uclibc-4.5.3/lib arm-brcm-linux-uclibcgnueabi-gcc -o hello hello.c

It does not understand the -L directive. An issue was filed.

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What is life?

When I was at Eelswamp, listening to Beethoven's Sonata no. 22 I came upon a vein of thought. Life is a complex pattern. Mathematics is the language of patterns. At the most fundamental reality that is currently known, there is a medium upon which the isn't has influence on the is. Explaining this in terms of patterns stretches the paradigm to breaking point. Is the language of patterns the only means of human understanding?

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Setting hostname on Asus Merlin

When you set the host name for your router, it reboots and doesn't come back up. One of the reasons might be that samba sharing is enabled and the hostname is not changed there.

When I changed the hostname on the media server page (/mediaserver.asp), the router hostname also changed.

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Hibernate on low battery Thinkpad X220

When I first got this laptop in 2012, Debian would hibernate the laptop when the battery went too low. I didn't set this up and it worked well until it didn't work.

On the X220, the battery LED is not visible to you when you are using the laptop, it is on the top side of the lid.

Figuring this out would mean a lot of waiting and watching the output of acpi_listen and udevadm monitor. The alternative would be to write a cronjob that would check battery status. This workaround offended my sensibilities and I therefore endured unexpected shutdowns. This became steadily worse as the battery capacity degraded.

But not today. I found user svenper on the arch forums who figured out the fact that the firmware does send an ACPI event. This event is sent when,

ac adapter is plugged in

the battery is at 80%

the battery is at 20%

the battery is at 5%

To adapt his solution to Debian's acpid, create a file /etc/acpi/events/thinkpad-low-battery with contents:

event=battery PNP0C0A:00 00000080 00000001 action=/etc/acpi/tp-low-battery.sh

And /etc/acpi/tp-low-battery.sh is:

#!/bin/sh BATTERY=BAT0 CAPACITY=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/${BATTERY}/capacity) STATUS=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/${BATTERY}/status) /usr/bin/logger -t auto-hibernate -p info Got event $STATUS ${CAPACITY}% if [ $CAPACITY -le 6 ] && [ $STATUS = Discharging ] then /usr/bin/logger -t auto-hibernate Hibernating due to low battery (${CAPACITY}) /usr/bin/systemctl hibernate fi

Test this with by restarting acpid and plugging in the ac adapter. You should see some output in /var/log/messages.

Thanks svenper!

[ultrarainycoffeecollector-blog]

SElinux on the cubox-i4

Start by reading the handbook.

Grub is not used on the cubox so selinux-activate will not DTRT. Edit /etc/default/flash-kernel to add selinux=1 ... to the command line.

Reboot.

It will take a while for the box to come back up. I left it for an hour and came back to find that the box was still not up. Connected via serial console (remember to connect to minicom before powering the cubox on) to find that the boot was hung on some auditd messages. I figured that my kernel command line selinux=1 security=selinux audit=1 enforcing=1 was too ambitious for the first run.

After some googling I came up with the u-boot incantation to boot a Debian kernel by hand:

setenv bootargs root=/dev/mmcblk1p1 rootfstype=ext4 ro rootwait console=ttymxc0,115200 console=tty1 ext2load mmc 0:1 0x10800000 /boot/vmlinuz-4.9.0-3-armmp ext2load mmc 0:1 0x18000000 /boot/dtb-4.9.0-3-armmp ext2load mmc 0:1 0x18100000 /boot/initrd.img-4.9.0-3-armmp bootz 0x10800000 0x18100000:${filesize} 0x18000000

${filesize} is set by the last ext2load.

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School 2.1

This article was written as part of a job application in 2016.

Software is eating the world. Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley luminary attempted to explain why in a 2011 essay. His analysis might have been superseded but the premise that our world is being increasingly controlled by software is self-evidently true. Airline prices had long been set by software, now taxi prices also change every minute. The difference is the in the number of variables that are part of the model.

Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil are upbeat about the coming AI-calypse while economists such as Tyler Cowan paint grim pictures of the same. To some this portends the mythical singularity, a post- modern utopia of nerds with the drudgery of life replaced by creativity. Others fear that automation will swallow middle-class jobs and push them down the food chain. Underlying the fear is the unspoken assumption that hard work should be rewarded. However, as the Netflix HR guide states; hard work doesn't matter, results do. This sentiment has an underlying truth that cannot be denied. As many have pointed out, hard work didn't really result in rewards for women or colonial subjects as a class and many others as individuals. Meritocracy is hardly a panacea but it does demand that we face up to facts.

Another fear, as Tyler Cowen described it, is that "the workforce will be bifurcated into those who are good at working with intelligent machines, and those who are replaced by them." This fear resonates with those who worry that the benefits of technology might never reach them and that they may be stuck with the bill. This takes a pessimistic view of the adaptability of humans. After all, we are still the only form of intelligence that can be produced by unskilled labour.

One class of AI applications, those based on neural networks, are a form of intelligence that is opaque to understanding. These applications power digital assistants like Siri and Cortana. While they mimic the way our own computational hardware -- neurons -- work, their reasoning is not obvious to even their human programmers though the results are similar to what a human being would reach. These are different from the expert systems that price airline tickets or run the Hong Kong metro and are the anti-thesis of results arrived at by logical reasoning. Perhaps our children will need to think like this, but we can't teach them how.

The skills that we seek to impart to pupils as part of computational thinking: rational thinking, problem solving skills, analysing the variables of a system; have little to with software, or code. Being able to converse with a computer in a programming language is akin to being able to converse in a foreign language. It is certainly beneficial but most OECD elementary classrooms use just one language to impart education.

The computational thinking that would help us make rational economic decisions today is not a new form of thought, it depends on a new set of variables. These change is cultural evolution and is accessible to anyone who is a part of it. For instance the awareness that as a practical matter, privacy is non-existent in the online world (and to a large extent in the real world) have already been imbibed by the next generation. Self-respecting teenagers are aware of the fact that they are product that Facebook is selling to advertisers and behave appropriately. They have built new cultures and modes of interaction that are suited to their generation. Teaching programming is the 21st century equivalent of shop class and about as useful.