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Zee Studio is showing a series of International movies. Today was the first day. Zee studio beamed a movie named “On The Other Side” today. I am not sure about the language but I think it was Arabic.

The movie starts with a small girl child asking about her father to her mother. Her father is working in Malaga, Spain. Knowing this, she decides to go and find her father and leaves for the coast, alone.

In the city, she steps into the trap of a racket involved in illegal trafficking of girls. They transport her to spain where the pimp looking at her age refuses to take her along but accepts other seven girls. The seven girls are then transported to some other place and the little girl child is left with the goons.

But later the pimp decides to take her home. At her place, the girl manages to convey the pimp that she managed to travel this far in search of her father Abdul subduing language barriers. The pimp’s subconscious drives her to help the girl child to find her father. Abdul who came to Spain illegally to earn money leaving his family back in Morocco. The pimp after a little search manages to find Abdul who is living with his Spanish girlfriend. The pimp leaves the child with her father. Despite the girlfriend’s pleadings not to leave the place Abdul decides to move back to Morocco.

The movie also shows two parallel stories of boys whose fathers lured by the wealth left the country leaving their family behind. In one of these stories, a boy tries to cross the ten-mile-wide Straight of Gibraltar which separates Morocco from Spain with his friend. They try to cross the said straight with a tyre tube and two brooms. One of which drowns in the effort, the other manages to survive. In the second story the boys from a small town also try to go to the other side in search of his father. In the effort their boat sink in the water but a mysterious lady save one and other manages to swim back.

The movie points out countless children growing without their fathers who fell for lures in Spain. It underlines several deaths in effort of going to “the other side”, problem of illegal trafficking from poor countries and glimpses of humanity existing within perverts.

Saddle up your imagination. This is a unit to measure distance traveled per unit of fuel. You might ask what the hell is relevance of rods and hogsheads with distance and units.

Well, a hogshead is designed to hold volumes equal to two barrel worth of wine or gasoline (petrol as we Indians call it). Two barrels is exactly equal to 63 US gallons (1 US gallon = 3.7854118 liters) or about 52.5 imperial gallons. So a hogshead is exactly equals to 63 US gallons.

Rods: A rod is a traditional unit of distance which equals to 5.5 yards (16 feet 6 inches or exactly 5.0292 meters). This has nothing to do with ‘khamba’ as we call it in slang Hindi ;-).

The Parliamentary Statute of 1592 defined a mile to be 320 rods.

So to calculate rods to hogsheads from miles/gallon we use this..

Miles/Gallon * Gallons/Hogshead * Rods/Mile = Rods to the Hogshead

If your car runs 44 MPG then you would convert it like this..

44/1 * 63/1 * 320/1 = 887040 rods to the hogshead

Rod: Historic background

Before the Norman conquest of 1066 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Conquest) the rod and furlong were the basic distance units used by the Anglo-Saxon residents of England. The Anglo-Saxons called it the gyrd, the name which is derived from other unit, the yard. The word rod means pole or a perch in Saxon. The Norman preferred to call the gyrd a pole or a perch (a word of French origin, meaning a pole; see perche).The length of the rod was well established at about 5 meters at least as early as the eighth century. Scholars are not sure how it was related to shorter units. It may have been considered equal to 20 “natural” feet (actual foot lengths; see foot), or it may have been measured “by hand” as 30 shaftments. In any case, when the modern foot became established in the twelfth century, the royal government did not want to change the length of the rod, since that length was the basis of land measurement, land records, and taxes. Therefore, the rod was redefined to equal 16.5 of the new feet. This length was called the “king’s perch” at least as early as the time of King Richard the Lionheart (1198). Although rods and perches of other lengths were used locally in Britain, the king’s perch eventually prevailed. The relationship between the rod and the other English distance units was confirmed again by the Parliamentary statute of 1592, which defined the statute mile to be either 320 rods or 1760 yards, thus forcing the rod to equal exactly 5.5 yards or 16.5 feet.

furlong: A furlong equals 40 rods, which is exactly 10 chains, 220 yards, 660 feet, or 1/8 mile. One furlong is exactly 201.168 meters, so a 200-meter dash covers a distance very close to a furlong. The length of horse races is often stated in furlongs.

perche or perch: a traditional unit of distance in French North America. The perche equals 18 pieds or 3 toises. By legal definition in Canada this equals 19.1835 English feet or 5.847 13 meters.

shaftment: an old English unit of distance equal to 2 palms. A shaftment is the distance from the tip of the outstretched thumb to the opposite side of the palm of the hand. The ending “-ment” is from the old English word mund, hand. The shaftment was an important unit in Saxon England, where it was equal to about 16.5 centimeters (6.5 inches). After the modern foot came into use in the twelfth century, the shaftment was reinterpreted as exactly 1/2 foot or 6 inches (15.24 centimeters).

On day 3 we had a few visitors till lunch. The start was slow but towards the end of day we had some visitors who were not familiar with FSF and GNU. Some of these were interested in Associate Memberships provided by FSF-I. We directed them to gnu.or.in for memberships as we did not have any receipts.

In the afternoon Nikhil Prabhakar (nipra) started taking signatures of GNU/Linux users and collected quite a few. There was a photo session at all our stalls. As always Karunakar was our resource of photographs. There were guys from Fedora, Hindawi, IndLinux and other stalls in the photo session :). We had a nice time near the end of the day as guys from stalls in .ORG mela came together. There were few like Ramki, Sankarshan, Niyam, Vivek, Abhishek, Amol, Vinod, Bir, Milind etc. At around 1730 Hrs in the evening we had to close the stalls and hand over stalls and other things to LA people so we peeled off all the posters collected all our stuff and walked to have tea/coffee.

On the tea table a discussion started on localization and native language support at command level in GNU Linux, ways to achieve it and related problems. Abhishek was very enthusiastic about porting Hindawi on GNU systems. Also Vivek from sarai was there passionately presenting the issue of mentor-ship of OSS projects in Delhi and NCR. The discussion stretched till almost 8 in the evening. We were all tired till then, so we concluded the meeting and called it a day with promises to meet online.

Some work at office held me back till 1400 Hrs today. Handed over the distribution CD of Hindawi to Abhishek Choudhary as he forgot to bring it along. There is no Internet Connection available at the conference so I had to download it at office. It would be great contribution if Hidawi could be ported on GNU Linux.

Met Karunakar G. of IndLinux at his stall. In foss.in IndLinux aroused considerable interest so this time I was determined to take a look at the work they had done. Many applications have been translated in Hindi and other languages. Many more still to be translated. This is a good indication that localization projects are maturing slowly. A lot of people have already came forward for mentor-ship of these localization projects. Sarai (sarai.net) is one of it working in Delhi-NCR region.

In the evening there was a meet arranged by ILUG-Delhi with Klaus Knopper of Knoppix and Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu. I reached there at least 15 minutes late as there was no one at the FSF-I stall and we had a few visitors.

The discussion with Klaus Knopper included the OSS movement in Germany and EU, different laws in Germany and the software patents. How OSS community is fighting against software patents in EU and Germany. The discussion also drifted on the efforts to make computer usable for disabled people. In the discussion a surprising fact Klaus told is that there is a syndicate of publishers who force writers to sale all their rights to them and won’t let you sell it to anyone out of Germany. Meaning they won’t let writers have share on royalty. He called them ’sort of publication mafia’. He also discussed the future of Knoppics and shared his views.

In the meeting with Mark Shuttleworth, he gave a small presentation on Ubuntu Linux as a part of his Asia Business Tour. He mentioned the goals of Ubuntu are to make it easy to use for desktop users and general computer users, build good user base of Ubuntu by providing full commercial support, translations and device drivers. Ubuntu is already providing certification programs for techies. Ubuntu is acquiring or have already acquired certifications from companies like IBM, Oracle that Ubuntu is ready for their product, told Mark.

This meet made day 2 memorable.

As Amol told, it was a gross mismanagement. No one was available there at 0930 Hrs. We reached Hazrat Nizamuddin station, Delhi @ 1000 Hrs. It was 1300 Hrs when we reached at the India Habitat Center after getting fresh. The stall was set up by Amol and Vinod. We started attending visitors. Yes, there were a few. Most did not know about GNU and FSF-I.

We got too late for lunch so we had to grab food at one of the pub in India Habitat Center “The Diners Club”. It was expensive but food was good none the less. It was already 1700 Hrs. I got back to the stall where I met Abhishek Choudhary who wrote “Hindawi” which is a programming system for Indic languages (scripts). Though it is not a GNU system it is worth mentioning here. Abhishek is currently looking for volunteers to help him port it on GNU Linux systems. More info can be found here.

In the evening all of us attended “Meet the Gurus” corridor party. We had an interesting discussion with David Axmark of MySql about current MySql status, its port on FreeBSD system, its current feature set and other future plans. In all the concluding part of first day was interesting.

While leaving we met Ramki, Sankarshan and other Fedora guys.

No merchandise. We had to scrap the Idea of T-shirts. Posters are ready, FSF-I and SPACE handouts arrived today; pretty much in time. Stall space confirmed. 5 volunteers: me, Amol, Nikhil (nipra) Prabhakar, Vinod, Birchandra Singh Sanasam are all set for the event. Probably Milind Paralkar will also be there with us.