I decided to go to India after 2 years and landed in India on 2nd December 2011. A lot of things have changed since I last visited India in 2009. The first things I noticed was the people, lots and lots of them. Even my baby was a bit upset and frightened to see so many people going along their own business and the constant hustling with a steady noise stream. The good part was that things were moving quickly. Of course all the paper work to be done when landing in India is a pain in the a**. I filled up all the forms with a green colored gel pen. When I reached the immigration counter, I was asked to fill up the forms again using either a black or blue pen. And nowhere was it written that green ink was not accepted. Anyways, I had to waste another 20 minutes filling up those stupid forms.

This post is a bit of marketing for the applications that I have been doing since the last couple of weeks. I have now release three applications on the Android Market. The first one is a re-write of my open source application Conference Manager (GPLv2) for Maemo. This application is also available in the Maemo Extra repository. I was hoping to port it to MeeGo but Mr. Elop had other plans. So I have stopped contributing to MeeGo all-together. And the best thing that happened was that I got an Android device (HTC Desire HD) about 3 months ago. The first thing I did was root it and then load some custom ROMs.

In the latest developments in India, Anna and team are put behind bars on 16th August, 2011. There has been a huge uproar in the nation and across the media. The irony being pointed out that Anna and team (completely clean and non-corrupt people) are put in same jails as their corrupt counterparts (Raja and Kalmadi). My rant today is not on whether Anna & team should be caught or should be allowed to roam free, or whether Article 19 and 144 of the Indian Constitution has been misused or whether the Indian Police acted in a corrupt manner or everybody in India is corrupt except Anna and team (according to one of my friends).

 Available on: http://slideme.org/application/smsbiljett

This is for all the people who have been struggling to get a proper ticket on the buses run by Skånetrafiken in Sweden. As most of you are already aware, starting with 1st June 2011, Skånetrafiken local buses are not accepting any cash on board the bus to buy a ticket. One just has 2 options: either buy an SMS ticket or have a “Rabatt Kort”. As an outsider, it might be very difficult to get on a bus. Also the process of getting an SMS ticket is very cryptic. My new application SMS Biljett eases the process.

Yello! I have been busy searching through the archives of my yahoo group which I started way back in 2003. And guess what? It has a wealth of information. It is quite amazing to see how I have evolved in my art of writing and thinking. Feels a little bit nostalgic to start talking about MS DOS, Windows, etc. Now that I have been almost exclusively working with Linux on the system level and have kept myself confined to application layer on Windows, it really is fun to go back and look at my article on Windows System Programming from 2003. I talk about a lot of stuff including message queues, context switching, semaphores and mutexes, BHOs, TSRs, etc. I doubt if people use them application layer programming anymore (atleast I don’t). It is long and quite interesting. The unedited article follows.

I almost forgot about it. Yes, I had my own embedded developers yahoo group. Since the last 5 years it has fallen into decay and I was thinking of deleting it from the face of earth (I mean Yahoo!). I was going through the list of messages and realized that I had started my blogging career way back in 2003. I will now start with rejuvenating my old articles and publish it here. And maybe I am not going to delete that group but will just purge it of useless members. Below is my article from way back in 2003 and I think it is still relevant. Also note the use of the word “Floppy”. I know, I was still using it back then. Nowadays, “Floppy” and “CD/DVD” would attract the most hilarious article ever award!

I am very disappointed in the manner Indian public has been led astray over the whole JLP bill. All the people more or less wants to bring a collective end to “Democracy” in India. Introduction of JLP is handling over of all our secular organizations to an entity which does not hold any accountability to anybody including the Supreme court, Prime Minister or President. Before turning on the flames, lets discuss a bit about JLP. I am 99.9% sure that most of you haven’t read a single letter in the proposed JLP. Before I proceed, let me tell you that the current constitution and the laws proposed are fully capable of tackling the corruption that India is facing. Creation of a new extra-constitutional authority will not bring an end to corruption. Infact with the proposed JLP, it will bring in a new era of super dictatorship, an era where the ruler can crush his/her opposition very easily, and an era similar to the emergency that was brought in by Indira except that it will not be called emergency. All voices which would be raised against the Lokpal will be effectively annihilated. Lets read and understand how. A simple Google search will reveal the proposals in the JLP. Without copying text from that bill, I will jot down the main points proposed and how it will manipulate democratic behavior.

I know I am going to be widely criticized and will have to face a lot of flames from my fellow Indians after having written this article, but as Lord Krishna says, “Karmanneva dhi karaste, ma faleshu kadachana”, I will do my duty and jot down my thoughts on the whole drama that is going on since February 2011. I have been closely following the events and have been exchanging a lot of information with fellow bloggers. Some of my tweets also reflected my doubts. But until now, I did not think the whole political drama needed my own words and thoughts since quite a few bloggers have already discussed and brainstormed on various aspects of the bill and the “Jholawalas” who are promoting it. But today, I do feel that I need to chronologically list the events that have been happening since February 2011, put my own thoughts on what is the motive behind those events and also induce my readers to think a bit more and not be taken as a “mere sheep for the spin”.