Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

February 17, 2025

Some additional context around the 300km long traffic jam in India

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 2:13 AM

If you have been following the news I am sure you must have heard about the massive traffic jam that happened a few days ago on the way to Mahakumbh mela in Prayagraj, UP. Vehicles coming to Kumbh via Madhya Pradesh were stuck in a long traffic jam over 300kms long. This is a world record that beat the previous record holder (100kms) by a significant margin. This incident has caused a lot of people to raise questions about the arrangements and the usual suspects have started putting India down.

The previous record holder jam happened on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway where traffic was stalled for over 100 km due to roadwork heavy vehicle traffic, and breakdowns. It took China 12 Days to clear the jam with the folks stuck having to eat, sleep and manage in their vehicles. Contrast this with the Jam in India where the entire thing was cleared out in ~48 hours (2 days), The government made arrangements to provide food, water, and shelter for the affected pilgrims, according to a report by The Hindustan Times.

There are a lot of lessons to be learnt from this and how to avoid such situations in the future, but when pilgrims numbering more than 50 crore (500,000,000) have visited Prayagraj since Jan 13th and ~92 lakh (9,200,000) had taken a dip in just one day there are bound to be issues that show up. To give some context, this number is larger than the population of any country in the world except for India and China.

It is a massive achievement by the organizers that such a big event has been held with such good arrangement and a lot less issues than what I was expecting. Could we have done better? Of course. As I said earlier, there are some major issues that need to be addressed such as the stampede that caused multiple deaths. The root causes for those need to be identified and addressed going forward. The lessons learnt from this will also help with other large scale events and mobilizations (such as during emergency situations).

Press Release: Maha Kumbh 2025 Witnesses Record-Breaking Footfall

– Suramya

February 9, 2025

Taking calls on Speaker in a French station will get you a €150 fine

Filed under: General/News — Suramya @ 10:05 AM

I find people who watch videos, listen to music or have phone conversations with their phone on speaker mode to be quite annoying but unfortunately it is a fairly common behavior across the world. I have read online that some folks have started carrying cheap disposable headsets that they hand out to folks who are doing this. I personally just ask them to put on a headset if they are next to me. (Had to do that in a flight where a guy next to me was watching a movie on speaker). The french have a different way of handling it which I quite like: they just fine the person. 🙂

A few days ago a passenger on the French rail network SNCF was issued a €150 fine for using his phone on loud speaker within a train station. He was asked to switch-off the speaker but instead argued with the official so was issued a fine.

The passenger, named only as David, told French TV channel BFM that he was on the phone to his sister while waiting at Nantes station when the SNCF staff member told him to switch his phone’s loud speaker off, or risk being fined.

When he argued, he was served with the €150 fine, which has been increased to €200 because he did not pay it immediately. David says he intends to hire a lawyer to contest the fine.

SNCF confirmed the fine, although its version said that David had been in a waiting room of the station.

A company spokesman told Le Parisien that he was issued with the fine for disturbing other passengers, saying: “If he had played music at a high volume, it would have been the same thing.”

It would be awesome if we can have the same thing in India as well. I doubt it will get implemented in trains but I definitely want it for Airports and flights.

Source: Slashdot: French Train Passenger Fined $155 For Using Phone on Speaker

– Suramya

February 8, 2025

Reserve Bank of India launches exclusive domains ‘bank.in’ and ‘fin.in’ for Indian Banks to reduce cyber fraud

Filed under: Computer Security,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:49 PM

A big problem in online security is verifying that the site you are accessing is the authentic version. As techies we have a bunch of ways to check if the site is valid but for regular users it can be a hard problem to solve. I personally know a few folks who have been scammed out of a lot of money so it is a pretty prevalent problem in the industry.

One of the ways people get scammed is that they are sent a link to a site that looks like the official bank site but is instead a cloned version of the site that hijacks the entered password and OTP to steal money. To combat this issue and the problem of banking sites not having a verifiable URL / Domain name, the Government of India has announced the launch an exclusive “.bank.in” domain for banks starting from April 2025.

Similar to how the .gov address is a known domain name for US Government and .gov.in for official Indian Government sites this new domain will be for verified/validated banks only. The Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) will be the exclusive registrar for the new domain and will start rolling out in April.

In addition, the RBI is also planning to launch a “.fin.in” domain for non-bank entities in the financial sector. This will cover entities like paypal/PhonePe and other Fintech firms in India.

I think that this is a great idea and it would be awesome if we have have a global official .bank domain. But something like that would take a lot of time and coordination to implement so for now we will just have the India specific domains.

Source: Times of India: RBI announces exclusive domains ‘bank.in’ and ‘fin.in’ to enhance cyber security in Indian banking

– Suramya

February 6, 2025

A Linux Distribution which runs directly within a PDF file

There is a semi-serious joke in the IT industry that anything that can compute is eventually used to play Doom and then run Linux. Now you can do both from inside a PDF file. Since the PDF specification supports Javascript a highschool student who goes by the handle ‘ading2210’ has implemented a RISC-V emulator in it which can run a barebones Linux distribution within the PDF file itself. This builds on top of the work done to get Doom to run inside the PDF file.

The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridiculous things like the ability to do 3D rendering, make HTTP requests, and detect every monitor connected to the user’s system. However, on Chromium and other browsers, only a tiny subset of this API was ever implemented, due to obvious security concerns. With this, we can do whatever computation we want, just with some very limited IO.

C code can be compiled to run within a PDF using an old version of Emscripten that targets asm.js instead of WebAssembly. With this, I can compile a modified version of the TinyEMU RISC-V emulator to asm.js, which can be run within the PDF. For the input and output, I reused the same display code that I used for DoomPDF. It works by using a separate text field for each row of pixels in the screen, whose contents are set to various ASCII characters. For inputs, there is a virtual keyboard implemented with a bunch of buttons, and a text box you can type in to send keystrokes to the VM.

The largest problem here is with the emulator’s performance. For example, the Linux kernel takes about 30-60 seconds to boot up within the PDF, which over 100x slower than normal. Unfortunately, there’s no way to fix this, since the version of V8 that Chrome’s PDF engine uses has its JIT compiler disabled, destroying its performance.

For the root filesystem, there are both 64 and 32 bit versions possible. The default is a 32 bit buildroot system (which was prebuilt and taken from the original TinyEMU examples), and also a 64 bit Alpine Linux system. The 64 bit emulator is about twice as slow however, so it’s normally not used.

You can try out the implementation of LinuxPDF here. More details of the project and the code used to create it is available on the project’s GitHub page.

– Suramya

February 4, 2025

India’s tiger population has grown by 30% in the last two decades

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 5:56 PM

India’s national animal is the Tiger, which made it even more unfortunate that the population of Tigers in India was at an all time low a couple of decades ago. To counter this the government of India started multiple programs to encourage the tiger population to grow. Now after two decades of effort India’s tiger population has grown by 30%, which is a pretty big deal.

Recovery of large yet ecologically important carnivores poses a formidable global challenge. Tiger (Panthera tigris) recovery in India, the world’s most populated region, offers a distinct opportunity to evaluate the socio-ecological drivers of megafauna recovery. Tiger occupancy increased by 30% (at 2929 square kilometers per year) over the past two decades, leading to the largest global population occupying ~138,200 square kilometers. Tigers persistently occupied human-free, prey-rich protected areas (35,255 square kilometers) but also colonized proximal connected habitats that were shared with ~60 million people. Tiger absence and extinction were characterized by armed conflict, poverty, and extensive land-use changes. Sparing land for tigers enabled land sharing, provided that socioeconomic prosperity and political stability prevailed. India’s tiger recovery offers cautious optimism for megafauna recovery, particularly in the Global South.

In a research paper published in Science last week researchers discuss how “Tigers persistently occupied human-free, prey-rich protected areas (35,255 square kilometers) but also colonized proximal connected habitats that were shared with ~60 million people. Tiger absence and extinction were characterized by armed conflict, poverty, and extensive land-use changes. Sparing land for tigers enabled land sharing, provided that socioeconomic prosperity and political stability prevailed. India’s tiger recovery offers cautious optimism for megafauna recovery, particularly in the Global South.”

Assuming this trend keeps up, we can look forward to having a stable Tiger population in India once again.

Source: bsky.app: samillingworth.com

– Suramya

February 3, 2025

Road Trip to Kanyakumari for a wedding

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:49 PM

Jani’s cousin got married last week in Kanyakumari (which is the southernmost tip of India) and Jani flew there on Saturday (25th Jan) for the event. Since I couldn’t take the whole week off I got there later by driving down from Bangalore to Kanyakumari. (Basically it was an excuse to do a solo road trip).

In total I drove 1640 kms in 4 days with ~22 hours of driving in total over 4 days. I started from Bangalore at 6:15am on Wednesday and reached the venue at ~5:30pm. The road was well maintained throughout as I took NH-44 most of the way. There is construction ongoing in places for flyovers which required minor detours/bad roads but other than that I could consistently drive at 100 without having to worry about random obstructions. This was the first trip where I drove for such a long time alone and before I started I was a little worried that I would get bored on the way but once I started it was really zen to just listen to music and drive.

One annoying aspect of the trip was Google Maps. It used to be really good but slowly Google has been removing functionality from the app and that gets annoying. Cory Doctorow calls this process Enshittification and this was a prime example of it. Earlier when you searched for directions between two points the app would allow you to drag and change the route. In addition it would also show all routes we could take everytime but now it will randomly select a path without the option to change or even see how long other routes would take. This time Google decided for some reason that NH-44 was closed for all traffic and kept insisting I take another route that would add ~3-4 hours to the travel time. As first I was able to force it to show the NH-44 path by putting the phone in Airplane mode before asking for directions (I had downloaded the maps locally) but even that stopped working after a while. Thankfully by then I was on NH-44 only so I just ignored the instructions to turn off into random directions and forced the map to update. Not a super critical issue in this instance because it was a straight route and I knew the way but could have been a big issue if I was going to a new place. I think I am going to explore openmaps in the near future to see if they give a better experience.

Jani and me at the Engagement
Jani and me at the Engagement

Jani and me posing in Traditional clothes
Jani and me posing in Traditional clothes

I reached Kanyakumari just in time to go change and head out to the Engagement which was a simple event. Usually I end up wearing suit’s for weddings but this time I wanted to wear more traditional clothes so I wore a Kurta instead of Jeans which had an added benefit of being a lot more cooler & comfortable than a suit. I was pretty zonked out during the event as it was in Tamil but still managed to stay awake for all of it.


The wedding party in pure white

The next day was an early start for the actual wedding. It was an interesting experience since it was the first Christian wedding I attended. My expectations were based on what I have seen in the movies but as both bride and groom are Pentecostal Christians the wedding was quite different than what I was expecting. It was an extremely simple wedding with no jewellery or bright color clothes. In-fact the entire wedding party was dressed in White on the day of the wedding. I had initially planned to wear a Sherwani for the wedding but decided to wear a golden kurta instead as it was just too hot to wear a Sherwani. Even then I was one of the few spots of color in the wedding.


Wedding selfie with cousins, niece and grand-daughter

After the wedding during which they didn’t allow any photos to be taken we all changed to more casual clothes and then drove from the venue to Tuticorin which is where the boy’s side of the family is based. We ended up starting quite late due to the various events/ceremonies and reached Tuticorin really late night after 11pm. After another photoshoot I went and crashed while the rest of the folks stayed up really late to chat and hang out.

Posing in traditional Vesti & shirt combo
Posing in traditional Vesti & shirt combo

Next morning we had a relaxed start of the day as the reception was scheduled for 11am. For this event I wore a traditional vesti and short combination. We had planned this as a surprise for the rest of the family. I was a bit worried that the Vesti would fall off but the new versions have velcro so it was safe and I didn’t flash anyone 🙂 . Funnily enough I was the only one wearing a vesti because for the rest of the folks it was daily-wear so they all were wearing suit-tie combo while I was in a Vesti. I think I was a lot more comfortable because a vesti is as per the local climate and quite well ventilated. I was feeling sorry for the folks in full suits.

Group pic on the way to the reception
Group pic on the way to the reception

After lunch and getting our pics taken we and Jani’s cousins decided to step out for a bit because by then it was just folks coming on stage for pics with the couple and that got boring after a while. Thankfully for the reception folks were dressed in colors other than white. The beach was nice but I couldn’t go in the water as I still had to go back to the reception afterwards. We spent about a hour at the beach and then headed back to the event by which time the newly weds were more than ready to head back home.

Jani and me at the Beach
Jani and me at the Beach

We dropped them at home and changed into more comfortable clothes. At this time all the functions were done so a few of us stepped out for a bit of shopping followed by dinner. Post dinner I again crashed early because I had an early start planned while Jani hung out with the rest of the family.

The next day started really early and I left by 6:15am which was a good thing as I avoided most of the inner city traffic. The drive back was uneventful and I reached home by 3:10pm which was a pretty good time and had lunch after which I crashed and only woke up the next day morning.

– Suramya

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