In 1930, the first definitive encyclopaedia in Punjabi, Gurshabad Ratnakar Mahankosh, was published. Written by Bhai Kahan Singh of Nabha, it was one of the earliest works of its kind, and is still the standard reference book consulted by all serious researchers, who wish to know more about Sikh religion, customs, heritage and ethos. Today we can access this encyclopaedia online and a PDF version of the volume can be downloaded at http://www.rarasahib.com/ downloads.htm.

We all know that the most accessed online encyclopaedia is Wikipedia, and on January 15 it celebrated its 10 years. Wikipedia is accessed by millions of users; the site has grown from nothing to around 1.7 crore articles. Out of this, 35 lakh are in English.

Wikipedia is making a major push to add more Indian content and it has you know, there are only 67,171 articles in Hindi. Though Punjabi was an early entrant (since 2003) it is yet to make a significant presence. As of now, there are 2,803 users and 1,949 articles, but only 27 contributors to the Punjabi wiki. By the way, there are close to 1,500 articles in Sanskrit.

Why? We really can’t say, but let’s make the effort to make a difference this time by writing for Wikipedia in Punjabi and Hindi. We must generate more content that people can use and be enlightened about. The procedure for adding content is rather simple, and you will have the ‘early-bird’ advantage. Please log on at http://pa.wikipedia.org/wiki to see the Punjabi and at http://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki for the Hindi home page.

While the quality of the Wikipedia articles is not consistent, there is no doubt that the encyclopaedia is consistently the top resource for those who are looking for information. In fact, this is where you can help, you contribute to sharing your knowledge with others, and for this you get their gratitude and the pride of a job well done.

I would also appeal to various educational institutions, schools, colleges and universities, to get the students and the faculty involved in contributing to Wikipedia, in English as well as in the other languages.

Punjabi University, Patiala, is one of the few universities in the world to be named after a language. It has an excellent Advanced Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi. The department has done significant work in taking Punjabi to the world of computers.

Now, we have competence in Punjabi computing. Along with it there is a commitment to the Punjabi language, which is the core of the charter of Punjabi University, Patiala. It is thus only fitting that the intellectual resources of this university should now be harnessed to publish more informative articles, in Punjabi for the online world. The university has been working on a project to translate Gurshabad Ratnakar Mahankosh, and thus from a Mahankosh to an online Vishavkosh is a natural progression.

The Mahankosh and the Wikipedia models are very different, but represent significant attempts to share knowledge with the world and enlighten readers. If we want to to be recognized by the world, we must share what we have, so that they can appreciate it.

No doubt there will be problems adjusting to a democratic resource where anyone can challenge and change what you write, but then, this particular Wikipedia attribute has stood the test of time, and has proved again and again how even if someone mischievously changes some information, others correct it and eventually the collaborative effort brings forth objectivity and transparency.

By the way, even as far as revision is concerned, even Bhai Kahan Singh revised Gurshabad Ratnakar Mahankosh, himself, before publishing the next edition.

By contributing to Wikipedia, we will learn much ourselves and also put online knowledge about ourselves to the rest of the world. Will it make the world a better place? Let’s wait and watch!

This Bits about Bytes column by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on Januar 17, 2010

People are going to access the Internet in their mother tongue in greater numbers as it becomes more and more pervasive. In India, we have many languages that are mother tongues of our people, and in the recent centuries, English has emerged as the lingua franca, which means a language used to communicate between persons who “do not share a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both persons’ mother tongues”.

The Dainik Tribune website's homepage translated from Hindi to Urdu

Since English is also the lingua franca of the Internet, we have an advantage of a significant base of English-speaking individuals and thus we have been able to make major inroads in the world of information technology, where English rules. Here we have a distinct advantage over China, something that is now being steadily eroded because of the emphasis that China is placing on teaching the English language to its students.

In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet says: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

What about rose in any other language, it not only smells the same, it is also a major literary device used by poets in other languages with as much élan.

What would Urdu poetry be without references to gulab? But how would we read Urdu poetry if we don’t know the language? In English translation? Much would be lost. What if  we could read Urdu script in Hindi language? We would be nearer the original in culture and context. Gulab would still be gulab, but it would be written in a script that many would not be able to read.

Now, some computer scientists have been working on making people understand and read information that has been originally given in a language that is neither their mother tongue, nor English.

The Advanced Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi, Punjabi University Patiala, has recently released an Urdu to Devnagari script conversion software. It also does the reverse, i.e. from Devnagri to Urdu…and it works on websites.

Dr Gurpreet Singh Lehal, director and chief coordinator of the project, demonstrated the software here in my office and indeed, the results were impressive. We saw how the Urdu newspaper from Pakistan like the Daily Jung, Nawai Waqt and Afsana were rendered in Hindi. He also converted the Dainik Tribune website into Urdu.

One can also write an email in Urdu and it will be delivered in Hindi at other end and similarly email sent in Hindi can be read in Urdu.

Dr Lehal said that his programme had been funded by The Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF), which emphasises on applying Internet technology for the benefit of Asia-Pacific users and communities. The project was awarded to Punjabi University in 2009 after a competition in which 148 competitors from 22 countries participated.

In a credible 18 month the team comprising Dr Lehal, Dr Virinder Singh Kalra from Manchester University UK and Tejinder Singh Saini from Punjabi University, completed the project, which is now freely available on the Centre’s website (http://uh.learnpunjabi.org). We must remember that there are differences in the way Devnagri and Arabic scripts render sounds, and thus this is not a simple case of transliterating which can introduce various howlers. Dr Lehal pointed out that the main challenges had been restoring the missing diacritical marks in Urdu text, resolving the lexical ambiguities in these languages, both at the level of characters and words. Dealing with split/merged words in Urdu script and the issue of multiple/zero equivalence of characters in the two scripts also proved challenging.

Dr Lehal claims that the current system has been tested on more than 200 documents and the word level transliteration accuracy has been found to be 98.03 per cent and 99.15 per cent for Urdu-Hindi and Hindi-Urdu transliteration systems, respectively. That would make it a hot contender for the best system in terms of transliteration accuracy.

It is interesting that a university dedicated to Punjabi has become a bridge between two other languages-Urdu and Hindi. I am sure that this software developed by the university will provide a bridge between people who have a natural cultural affinity, but are divided by the ignorance of each other’s script.

The article is the latest in the column Bits about Bytes, published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on January 4, 2020.

Mark Zuckerberg is again in the news, in fact, his making it on the cover of Time magazine is news. Zuckerberg has been named the person of the year by the news magazine, despite the WikiLeaks founder Jullian Assange receiving more votes than him.

You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies

Like the most of the connected world, we all know the product that made Zuckerberg famous-Facebook. We have also been exposed to another side of him in the movie The Social Network, which opened to less-than-full halls in Chandigarh recently. For those readers who missed it, the movie paints him in fairly negative terms - socially awkward, insecure and an ego-maniac with a touch of deviousness. Is it true? We really don’t know, but movies tend to pick up historical themes and give them so much colour that they have little resemblance to history.

The Mark Zuckerberg character in the movie is negative, but others who have written on him and researched on him do not paint such a bleak picture. It is generally accepted that Zuckerberg had a girlfriend in the period which the film concentrates on, something that is definitely at odds with the movie that portrays Zuckerberg’s desire to impress his girlfriend with whom he had just broken up, and get social prominence as his prime motivation in developing Facebook.

Other critics fault many details, including the portrayal of the Internet entrepreneur and Napster co-founder Sean Parker as a paranoid hedonist, which is one-sided to say the least. The reason that I have devoted much attention to the movie is that often the celluloid character overtakes the real one. Whenever I think of George Patton, I remember the character I saw in the movie, the low-angle shot of George C. Scott who was addressing his troops with a massive American flag in the background. In the movie he comes as an irascible and egomaniacal character, which are definitely attributes he had, but were far eclipsed by his multi-dimensional personality that allowed him to come out a winner in situations that had overwhelmed lesser men.

For many, Mahatma Gandhi and Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of the man who led India to freedom are one and the same. Now, I dare say that practically everybody who reads this column has no danger of being portrayed, and thus misportrayed in the celluloid world. In that, we are safe! On the other hand, we all are leaking out parts of our lives through our online avatars as we interact with others on social networking sites like Facebook and other venues of public forums like blogs, and even through our comments on these blogs.

What we say reflects what we are, but when we do so in the real world, our listeners understand the context, and thus know what we are talking about. The non-verbal communication that takes place, plus the physical proximity of the participants in this social interaction gives it an edge, which is lacking in cyberspace.

On the Internet, we often are casual in our interaction, and this casualness leads to indiscretion. Then we pay dearly for it. There are many organisations that can piece together what you are, based on the bits of bytes that you post of yourself.

I too did something like that recently. I had a friend in New York called Joel. From time to time I had tried his name on Google with not much result, rather with too much results, since there were thousands of them. Recently, I again started thinking about him, and decided to find him, if I could. Well, this time I added bits of information that I knew about him, and was soon rewarded.

We reveal more than we want, and should do. Please be careful when you are online. It’s you life and your face on that Facebook account!

This column of Bits about Bytes by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune.

We are all proud because of the charitable act of one  —  Wipro chairman, Azim Premji, who is said to be India’s third-richest man, has committed $2 billion to charity, to education specifically. Premji has long and fairly silently been involved in various initiatives to help education of children. Now, he has upped the ante and given what is estimated to be about nine per cent of his personal wealth to the cause. The point to note is that he has given his personal wealth, not funds generated out of his company profits.

Is he alone? Not at all. Let’s look at the following instances that have been in the news recently:

• The Tata Group gave $50 million to Harvard Business School.
• Infosys co-founder Naryana Murthy and his wife Sudha gave $5.2 million to Harvard University. Murthy’s alma mater, Cornell, was the recipient of his largess earlier.
• Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and wife Rohini gave $5 million for the Yale India Initiative.
• HCL founder Shiv Nadar has promised to give one-tenth of his wealth for charity. He is worth $4 billion.

Azim Premji

You have, of course, realised that the examples given above are of people who earn their living from computers, either by using them or by making them in the last case. While IT has, by no means, a monopoly on large-scale charitable donations, it has been in the news recently, and certainly in the public eye, nothing can match what Bill Gates has done in donating billions and billions of dollars for a number of charitable causes.

By no means are the IT barons alone in this, India has a long history of businessmen giving back to society, mostly for religious, educational and medical charities. Prominent among them have been the Tatas and the Birlas, but others like the Bajaj family, and near home the Modis and the Thapars have set up various educational institutions for the public. Earlier, the Mahrajas gave liberally to educational institutions far away from their own kingdoms. Patiala was a big contributor to Aligarh Muslim University; Khalsa College, Amritsar, had various wings dedicated to the states that had contributed liberally to its construction, and so on. Even now, various alumni organisations, notably the Patiala Health Foundation, set up by Patiala Medical College alumni, contribute materially and otherwise, to their alma mater.

There is, however, a significant difference. The IT entrepreneurs are basically first generation, and they did not come from wealth. They have made money, and have demonstrated social responsibility by dipping into their personal fortunes and giving out of them.

Narayana Murthy

IT has turned out to be one field where ethical, enterprising, bright and hard-working people can realise their dreams and more. Since setting up an IT enterprise is not as capital intensive as other industries, IT has also helped many bright people with ordinary middle-class economic backgrounds achieve success. A culture of giving back to society has been nurtured in the industry and although as compared to Western standards Indians do not contribute much to charity, the IT industry as a whole has made a great positive contribution in giving back to society.

IT is slowly transforming the way things are done. Just go to an e-sampark kendra in Chandigarh and you will see how easy it has become for time-strapped people to take care of their chores, like paying bills and requesting various government departments for services, including passports. Every time a result is announced, everyone makes a beeline for the Internet, because all results are today, as a matter of course, posted online. A decade ago, this was revolutionary, and a decade before that it was unheard of. The digitisation of land records may finally help us get rid of the notorious patwaris who have a stronghold on all property matters.

However, in matters of donating personal wealth, there is still a degree of reluctance, perhaps because of a feeling that there is overall corruption and no one wants to give money unless he or she knows that it will be used well. However, here too, the change is welcome, especially when one sees it among the rank and file of IT companies.

During a visit to the Chandigarh IT Park, we saw a group of young employees teaching older people. We were told that they had taken it upon themselves to teach the security guards, employed by a contractor, to brush up their reading and writing skills. It was heartening to see the mutual respect with which people from different socio-economic backgrounds and age were treating one another.

As one sees IT transforming life, the extent of intangible differences that are coming about in our life because of IT are becoming even more obvious. And the best part is that the people at the top are leading the way, as they should.

The column by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune.

When a letter was something that you penned on the paper, you selected the paper, the pen, and devoted much attention to the words that would be inscribed on the paper. Often, it was at least a page long, sometimes longer than that.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook

Even as you were bothered with the physical aspects of your epistle, a part of your mind was already composing it, crafting the words and weighing over their message. What was written had a particular significance; it was much more than what was merely said.

The veritable Emily in her book Post Etiquette (1922) had an interesting take on the task. Says she: “The letter you write, whether you realise it or not, is always a mirror which reflects your appearance, taste and character. A ’sloppy’ letter with the writing all pouring into one corner of the page, badly worded, badly spelled, and with unmatched paper and envelope-even possibly a blot-proclaims the sort of person who would have unkempt hair, unclean linen and broken shoe laces; just as a neat, precise, evenly written note portrays a person of like characteristics. Therefore, while it cannot be said with literal accuracy that one may read the future of a person by study of his handwriting, it is true that if a young man wishes to choose a wife in whose daily life he is sure always to find the unfinished task, the untidy mind and the syncopated housekeeping, he may do it quite simply by selecting her from her letters.”

Ah, those were the days. The take on how a young man would choose a wife is particularly interesting and so outdated, but her advice is not, as we will discuss later.

The art of handwritten notes, of making yourself write neatly and legibly, of debating what colour of ink to use, has slowly been overtaken by technology, which crept up slowly. When typewriters and computers were first used for producing letters, they were largely confined to offices and thus were means of official communication, not personal ones.

However, in time, the keyboard did not only replace the penmanship of yore, and all that went with it, the romance of the craft, the laborious, yet loving efforts of those who had chosen to impart the degree of permanence to their thoughts.

Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was, in fact, a crucial tool in creating it, but with the spread of the Internet, it became a tremendous method of communicating messages practically instantaneously, and thus became what is often called “killer application”.

The introduction of e-mail absolutely changed the way people communicated. On e-mail, communications were immediate. Instead of days, it took mere seconds for your message to get through to the other party. Naturally, you expected an immediate response and this was often the way in which the recipient would respond to your e-mail letter.

Unfortunately, speed came at a cost-lack of reflection. We have already noted how what is written has a particular importance in communication. What people realised over the years of using e-mail communications with each other is that this significance has transferred itself across various mediums, even those that seem to be casual, like e-mail. It would not be wrong to say that e-mail stuck a “killer” blow to letter writing.

To play on the tag line of a modern advertisement which says, “Nothing official about it”, as far as written communication is concerned; there is nothing casual about it. Inappropriately written e-mail messages have often got people into much trouble, legal and otherwise.

Now, Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, says he is going to change the way people communicate. He believes that people are exchanging shorter and shorter messages to communicate with each other. He is targeting school students who say they find e-mail “slow and cumbersome”. He found that many are using Facebook to send messages and stay in touch.

My friend Gupi found this out the hard way. When he complained to his daughter Taran, a yoga instructor, that she had not kept him abreast with her latest trip, she retorted: “But, Dad, I Facebooked you!” Soon the telephonic conversations between Taran and her sister Daman ended with “Facebook me”. Now, Gupi makes sure that his Facebook page is open most of the time, since his school-going son Guru also appears on it from his boarding school whenever he gets a chance. The immediacy of getting in touch with his loved ones makes him keep his computer on all the time.

Now Facebook Messages blog says it wants to integrate Instant Messaging (IM), online chat, e-mail and texts. Many people have been using them over the years. They are there in popular mail packages like Gmail (Gtalk and Buzz), Yahoo! (Messenger) etc. What all of them share is an intense desire to encourage users to spend more and more time within their sites, and for this, they marshal whatever is needed-games, activities, chat, e-mail, photo-sharing, etc. Why do they do that? Because of lucrative advertising revenues, without which we would have to pay for the Internet services, rather than get them free, as we do now.

So, Facebook Messages will stay and will attract hundreds of thousands of users. Along with “revolutionising communication”, as Zuckerberg says, they will further make communication more and more informal. Well, I still take comfort from the fact that informal is not thoughtless. I implore readers to be thoughtful in their communication. The consequences of not being so can indeed be painful.

This column by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on November 23, 2010.

Data portability is certainly not on most users’ priority list. It should be. We all routinely use devices and services from many different vendors.

Different devices tend to use distinctive, and competing, operating systems. In computers it could be Windows, Mac or Linux. As for cell phones, besides the basic ones like Apple OS, Symbian, BlackBerry and Android, there are hundreds of variations, since each vendor tries to put his or her own flavour atop the OS.

Laptop

One way to escape the narrow confines of devices is to go to the Net. For example, if you use Hotmail, no matter which computer you access it from, it will function just as well. It is an application, but then, with its own set of problems. Even something as ubiquitous as e-mail is vendor-specific. Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail are all different platforms, and have distinctive ways of storing your data. Then, there are various social networking sites, like Facebook and Orkut, which also store users’ data, as do photo-sharing sites like Flikcr and Picasa. All this adds up to a lot of data from one user, stored at different places.

When we talk of data portability, we are not referring to any hardware, say portable disk drives or pen drives that can physically move date from one device to another, or store it. Today, we are focusing on the ability of the people to control and freely use their personal information across various devices and the Internet.

In the context of cloud computing, open standards and privacy issues, data portability has become a standard term in the Internet industry. People should be able to control their identity, media and other forms of personal data. While the goal is easy to define, implementing it is not.

When we need to shift our data from one application to another, that’s when we find out whether the two applications can talk to each other or not. For a long time, it was not possible, unless a person was really a computer nerd, and that too one with extraordinary patience and persistence. However, things have been changing over time and nowadays, many sites take measures to ensure data portability.

Initially, it seemed that for many applications, data portability comprised the ability to transport data from any application to the one you were using presently. It became a one-way street. However, mounting customer protests, a changing environment, and the European Commission’s heavy hand are making true data portability happen, i.e., make it a two-way highway.

The absence of formal norms regarding data portability has been an issue of concern for both users, and even governments. The European Commission (EC) recently made public its concern about data protection and portability, especially in the context of the social networking sites and cloud computing, “as it may involve the loss of individuals’ control over their potentially sensitive information when they store their data with programs hosted on someone else’s hardware.”

Noting that risks to privacy and the protection of personal data associated with online activity are increasing, the EC said: “At the same time, ways of collecting personal data have become increasingly elaborated and less easily detectable. For example, the use of sophisticated tools allows economic operators to better target individuals, thanks to the monitoring of their behaviour.”

The EC would like to give individuals greater rights to control and even delete the personal data held on them by organisations. It is thus looking closely at the so-called “right to be forgotten”, i.e. the right of individuals to have their data no longer processed and deleted when they are no longer needed for legitimate purposes, as well as “data portability”, meaning the right of a person to take their information elsewhere, such as to a competing service.

Other government bodies have not been as proactive, but big companies are savvy about the need to ensure data portability, both to and from their applications. However, the road is not smooth. Google and Facebook have recently been involved in a controversy about “reciprocity” in data portability.

Google maintains that Facebook is a data dead end, and you can’t export it out. Now, Google has changed its rules, and will not allow any website to automatically import contact data unless the other site is reciprocal in allowing a similar export. Techies would be able to do so, manually, but then, this is just a ploy of Google to put some pressure on Facebook.

As more and more data travels to the clouds, harmonising it becomes even more important. No company likes to give its hold on the data it has collected and every company likes to have the so-called “garden hedges” that keep users within its confines. Customers, however, must make sure that one of the determining factors in their choice of applications is data portability. They will need this feature more and more as they evolve on the Net and, therefore, need to make the right choice about which platform to use.

Offline, it makes much sense to devote much thought to the platform that you will use and the operating system that you will be straddled with. I love Apple products, have been using them since the mid-1980s, and still own two Apple desktops, but when I had to buy a laptop, I bought a Windows machine. Its ubiquitous convenience outweighed the undoubted elegance of Apple.

I should have the right to make a choice, and the ability to transfer my data from one platform or application to another. Is it too much to ask? I really don’t think so!

This column by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on November 9, 2010.

Please click here to read previous “Bits about Bytes” columns.

BITS ABOUT BYTES

One of the boring things you are always told is to make a backup of your work. You read it in computer magazines, you hear techies tell you about the horror stories of people who asked for their help in recovering lost data, and yet you never do anything about it!

I learnt to usecomputers and was immediately told about the need to back up, and not just once. It is probably because of this training in the past that even before I start a document, I give it a file name and save it. Now, I know that Word, that magnificent word processing programme, automatically saves your documents in case your computer shuts down suddenly, but believe me, I am not going to trust myself to the mercy of a software safeguard, when a small task will allow me greater peace of mind.

Recently, I had reason to bless this habit. I changed my computer, and as a result, I found that somehow while transferring data, a manuscript I had been working on, off and on for four years, could not be located. I had used standard software that came packaged with the portable hard disk drive (HDD) that I recently bought to back up the programme, but it was not in the drive.

I would not say that I panicked, because I did not, but I was tense-this was a lot of work that had almost disappeared. In a moment of epiphany, I understood why my father always said that he wanted to see his documents in his hands, “not inside the computer”.

With a bit of effort, I remembered that I had “cut” the file and transferred it to a pen drive I was using, instead of merely copying it. I inserted the drive and found that the computer refused to “recognise” it. I plugged it in and unplugged it, but it did not register in the computer.

A quick search on the Internet followed. I wanted to find some software that would help in recovering data. I downloaded the “trial” versions of a few of these software programmes but nothing worked. Eventually, in desperation, I called for technical help and the person who came told me that my pen drive had been damaged. As a result, there was nothing that I could do to recover my data.

If ever there was a time to panic, it was now. When I started learning how to use the computer, the commandment was not only “Thou shalt back up your data”, you were also made to back up your data at more than one location, “in case of fire or some other disaster”.

Commandments are hard to follow, but those who do so often realise their wisdom. I had backed up my HDD earlier, on a separate portable hard drive that I keep for important files. The file was there, along with the other data. Admittedly, it did not have the latest changes that I had made, but it did have the basic, all 100 pages, which was a good starting point. Much better than ending up with nothing!

Of late, with cloud computing options popping up, it is also a good idea to use online storage for important files. That way, you can access it from wherever you are.

Eleven years ago, Yahoo had introduced its Briefcase service that offered 30MB of online storage. However, it shut it down last year because of declining usage.

I was an early user of Hotmail, but now Gmail has all but eclipsed it. However, Hotmail, in its as Microsoft-owned avatar, Windows Live Hotmail, has the consumer-focused SkyDrive Web file-storage system, which gives a user 25 GB of free storage space. I have used it both to store files, as well as to share some files with some specific people. This is a nifty feature that was useful in sharing the data with specific e-mail identities. Gmail does not have anything like it, but with it you can attach files (up to 25 MB) and either keep them in the draft folder, or mail them to yourself. Yahoo, too, has the 25MB limit for its attachments, as does Hotmail.

From time to time, I have read about software programmes that allow users to treat Gmail as a drive. I have also read that Google frowns on such usage, and blocks the mail. I would rather have my Gmail account, which is a repository of a vast amount of email “conversations” since many years, and thus have not taken any risk about using it. However, I found “Google documents” an easy way to collaborate with others and while it is not in any way a replacement for Word, it is still a very good tool, which also backs up documents.

Because Google Docs now supports files up to 250 MB in size, which is larger than the attachment limit on most email applications, you’ll be able to back up large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and much more to the cloud. Google Docs allows users to upload a total of 1GB of such files.

Given the bandwidth problems in India, I, however, find that backing up heavy files like pictures and videos is not practical. Thus, I go in for offline storage in backing up data.

Digital cameras have replaced film for most users, and all your photographs are electronic. The flip side of this is that hardly anyone makes hard copies of digital photos; they are stored electronically, and just transferred from the device to a computer.

You just need to make sure that they remain safe, and for this you just have to back them up, not just on one location, but if possible, two. HDD drives are becoming cheaper by the day, and I find that portable HDDs the most convenient way of backing up data.

With the price of storage falling, it is worth to buy two drives and back up data on both. I do use two, one that I always keep at home, and a smaller 160GB drive that travels with me. I do back up my data regularly. I know that it’s a boring task that ties up your computer for a certain amount of time. However, can you imagine the void that you would have in our life if one day all your electronic data vanished? I would not like to be in that situation, and having nearly been there a few times, I think it’s worth it to have your data secure with a backup that gives you a tremendous peace of mind.

This column by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on October 26, 2010

Should Facebook be banned? Many school administrators say so; some teachers agree; some parents nod their heads approvingly at the suggestions, and most students are totally riled at the very idea of denial of what they practically regard as their fundamental right.

Which students? No, not those in government schools in various small towns and villages of India who form a majority, but the privileged ones, born in middle-class homes.

A middle-class child who is not studying in a school that is not “English medium”, or a “convent”, would be considered deprived. So are children who do not have access to the Internet.

Students use the Internet for various reasons, primary among them being browsing, communication, downloading and sharing music or videos, and gaming. They take a tremendous interest in social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut.

Face the facts, you just can’t ban an activity because it has been misused by some. Social networking sites have taken off in India and while the Google-owned Orkut was the clear market leader, now, with 1.5 crore users, Facebook has taken the Number 1 spot.

Social networks are a technological bridge for people scattered by geography and economic compulsions. They allow them to interact and share each other’s lives. Talk to users and you will find them saying that their bonds have strengthened through social networking sites.

Any new social environment poses new challenges. You have the capability to instantaneously communicate with hundreds of your friends (an average user has 130). You could post something, or merely react to what is posted by your friends. The young demographics and the newness of the media give users a feeling of informality, and thus users tend to write as they speak. Here lies the catch-in the real world, often what we say is transient because it is confined to a small number of people, and also not meant for posterity. However, even if it seems similar on social networking sites, there is a vital difference.

You talk differently if you are chatting with few friends, rather than say 130 of them. On social networking sites, what you input goes to a large number of friends, what you write is more permanent, and sometimes can come back and haunt you.

Recent headlines in Chandigarh have reflected an incident in which some school students were suspended because of their social media infraction. One student had posted something negative about a teacher, and others had commented on it. When the comments were discovered by another teacher, action was taken against the students.

While no one condones the actions of the students who have used harsh, some even say abusive language against the teacher, there has been some controversy regarding the quantum of punishment. Some parents assert that the administrators react with excessive gravity. Criticising a teacher is nothing new, however, nowadays technology enables people to sometimes do it anonymously and what they say is long lasting and public, and thus attracts more attention than it would have if the incident took otherwise.

Worldwide, there are no clear precedents to guide us when such situations arise. In one instance, Syracuse University, USA, held students accountable for what they put on the Internet, and punished them for trashing their teacher on Facebook. A statement by the school said: “Criticism can be considered a matter of free speech. In this particular situation it was the content, and the content was considered as being reviewable as a possible violation of the university code of student conduct. The language and the phrasing of these Facebook postings were extreme.”

However, in another instance, a Pembroke Pines Charter High School, Florida, student posted about “the worst teacher I’ve ever met” after apparently clashing with her English teacher over assignments. She took down her post a few days later; meanwhile, a number of those who viewed it responded with remarks defending the teacher. She was disciplined two months later.

Her case went to court, and a few years later, a judge ruled: “It was an opinion of a student about a teacher, that was published off-campus, did not cause any disruption on-campus, and was not lewd, vulgar, threatening, or advocating illegal or dangerous behaviour.” Thus she won the case.

However, there have been many incidents of students who have been suspended over blog entries that mentioned drinking alcohol, or pictures showing them drinking alcohol, or indulging in other acts that had been specifically proscribed by the school administrators.

There is a lot of difference in the way the young people and adults view social networking sites. For the young, they are just a mode of expression. They expect their peers to participate in it and use it extensively for all kinds of social interaction, including communication.

What they don’t realise is that their privacy is nebulous at best, that what is posted has a nasty way of coming to life at a time when it is most embarrassing, and even though they may not like it, the best advice that can be given to them is “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it all, certainly not on Facebook or Orkut.”

Parents and school administrators too need to loosen up a bit. No one should overlook the use of abusive language, or any other inappropriate content. However, many a time, youngsters are just venting off steam. The context should be looked into and only serious violations punished. There is a strong case for providing counselling and teaching children dos and don’ts about using social networking sites. Children face various threats from people who abuse social networking sites, and thus they need to be sensitised to these dangers. As for abusive language and other issues, many Indian parents have found a solution by making their children accept them as ‘friends’ and thus keeping an eye on their cyber adventures.

Banning Facebook for schoolchildren is simply not possible. It is worth considering that an exponential growth is expected for such sites, with the increasing number of people accessing social networking via their mobile phones. By 2014, the number of mobile social network users in India is expected to be 7.2 crore. This does not include the people who use the Internet through their computers.

Social networking sites are a reality. What we need is greater understanding from both the users and the administrators. We need to have fun, and at the same time, we must remember that we are responsible for our actions, whether we are online or off line.

A shorter version of this article by Roopinder Singh was  published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on 12 October 2010,

A Palm V was the first touch device that I was the proud owner of. With a black and white screen, it was an organiser, a calendar and phonebook. I caught many envious glances as people saw me tapping the touch-sensitive screen with a stylus. This was in the mid-1990s and Palm had made quite a name for itself, so much so that the brand had become a generic expression for personal digital assistants, or PDAs.

Palm V

Eventually my cell phone replaced the PDA. It had a phone book, a calendar, and various other applications that I used the Palm for, and moreover, you did not have to look up a number and then dial it. That was taken care of here, something the Palm itself realised when it launched Treo and other phones that tied in the redoubtable Palm software and ease of use, with a cell phone. However, by then the world had moved on, other systems were cheaper and more interesting, and you could migrate your Palm data easily to another platform. Many did that and so did I, successfully. The Palm V joins my Hall of Fame of “Great gadgets that I can’t use, or give up”, one that includes a couple of Nikon film cameras and the good ol’e Mac SE.

I use a virtual keyboard for my cell phone but a real one for my laptop, and I am typing this column on an HP TX 1000 which has a touch screen that operates with a stylus. Ah, the stylus. It is interesting that Apple, the very company that first introduced the stylus in 1993 is also responsible for it being phased out. The “Multi-Touch” experience became a reality for millions of users with the introduction of the i-phone in 2007. The touch screen became much more than what it was. It changed rules of the game, since the consumer’s expectations were sky high now. You could zoom photos with a pinch of the finger or use the flick of your thumb to spin through your music collection. In short, just use various intuitive gestures to get your phone to respond, no more stylus; you could handle the phone with only one hand.

Now everyone is looking for touch, be it in phones, desktop computers, laptops, or even television screens. Touch is attractive. It is also useful, and surprisingly easy to migrate to. In fact, touch screens are especially useful for control and automation systems, because they help to save workspace and simplify operations and save time. Thus operators simply touch the screen to monitor processes, or to give commands. Many people have difficulty in using keyboards and other input devices, and for them touch screens are a boon.

It is almost impossible to buy a latest gadget or use one which is not touch screen based—jukeboxes, gaming devices, kiosks, you have them everywhere. Even somebody like BlackBerry, an avowed advocate of the keypad, is now offering touch screen phones.

Both Dell and HP have introduced their latest computers with touch screens. Dell’s latest in the Inspiron family, is a touch-enabled Inspiron One all-in-one desktop featuring a full HD 23-inch WLED-backlit LCD display with built-in Wi-Fi, Webcam, DVD drive, and HDMI interface for connecting to television tuners, cable and satellite set-top boxes and videogame consoles.

For HP has been in the touch screen game since 2007 when Bill Gates introduced the HP TouchSmart, the first mass market touch screen desktop PC. The latest in its range include TouchSmart 310, and 600 desktop PCs, which have been well received.

For a long time, a computer’s memory dominated the mindscape of users. Random Access Memory or RAM was expensive and thus computers were compared on the basis of how much RAM they had, and later, on what speed it was rated at.

Hard Disk Drives were expensive and I still have my Macintosh SE which has the then state of the art HDD, a 40 MB Small Computer System Interface, or SCSI drive. Today we use 500 GB drives, and no decent computer has less than 2GB RAM. Now that we have taken the processing speed out of the loop, the next frontier is the touch screen and its integration with computer operating systems. Here the hardware and the software come together to give the requisite user experience.

Yes, computers are all about user experiences, not just hardware or software. That experience is what a multi-touch screen enhances, and this is where the future is. We have it in our hands with various small devices, now it will dominate our desks and our laptops too.

The article by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on September 28, 2010.

Not all of us are proficient at the keyboard. Since my initiation into the world of computers was on a Mac and not a DoS machine, the most painful things about learning how to use the computer was to learn how to type. I had no formal training, and had to learn from Tarsem Singh, who was a trained steno-typist.

He could not find work similar to what he had done in India before he migrated to New York. He thus changed his job and was a building superintendent when I met him. It was under his tutelage that I practiced my ‘Quick Brown Fox…’, and to him I owe my ability to type at a reasonable speed.

I used an electric typewriter to practise, and like most users, learnt on the typical QWERTY keyboard, which was designed by Christopher Latham Sholes in 1873 for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter. Remington bought it the same year, and since then it has been the standard for all Remington typewriters. The keyboard is named after the first six characters in the far left of its top row of letters.

The main reason for designing this layout of keys was to prevent the typebars of various letters from clashing with each other as the typist typed them. We have all seen such typewriters, and can still see them outside courts and other such institutions.

Now, in the case of computers, the original reasoning did not hold good because of change of technology, but since this was the standard keyboard, most people continue with it, especially since the jury is still out on whether alternatives give very significant advantages.

There is, however, truth in the statement that since when the QWERTY keyboard was designed, the primary requirement was to prevent jams while typing fast. Thus, decisions on the layout of keys were taken to distance commonly used pairs of letter, and this, in effect, slowed down typing.

While the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard is considered technically superior and easier to learn, there are very few keyboards that use it. However, you can map it in many computers, using a special mode setting. The Dovark keyboard, however, has a small, devoted and vocal following. It is not too small, over a lakh at least, but not big enough to have any impact.

Laptop

The latest buzz these days is Google Instant, a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. It uses Google’s “black magic” algorithms to offer predictions based on what you type, and as you input more letters, the predictions become better. Google had gone to town on the time saved, which is measured in nanoseconds for many of us, and no matter what the hype is, I really don’t see how these nanoseconds add up to a discernable saving of time.

Now saving effort is another thing and that’s where Instant really scores! Since the predictive mode works reasonably well, we can scroll down the choices and our query to the search engine faster. For slow typists, such predictive help is a tangible gain.

All of us who use mobile phones have got used to the T9, named after the nine keys available for inputting data on a mobile phone. Nokia, LG, Samsung, Siemens, Sony Ericsson, Sanyo, Sagem and many others use this system, which has rivals like Motorola’s iTap. BlackBerry’s SureType is a system that combines a traditional phone keypad with the computer-type QWERTY-based keyboard quite innovatively.

What about computers? In my expanding search for ways to avoid typing every word, I visited the site that often gives us answers - Google! Their ongoing efforts to improve their performance have resulted in various experiments, which have been performed in Google Labs. The Google Scribe feature is described by Google as ‘a text completion service’. Using information from what you have already typed in a document, Google Scribe provides related word or phrase completion suggestions. In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe’s suggestions indicate ‘correct’ or ‘popular phrases to use’.

I typed out the preceding paragraph in Google scribe, and in spite of a reasonably fast Internet connection, I found that I was typing much faster than the Scribe, which was offering alternatives. Tarsem Singh had taught me too well!

When I slowed down, I realised that around 50 per cent of the options were the correct ones, just what I wanted. I also found it distracting. While I opted against it for the moment, there is no doubt in my mind that it will be refined more and at some time in the future, I would be using it.

I am sure that it will be of major help when used on mobile phones, even for those youngsters whose thumbs seem to have specially evolved for typing on those small keypads. As technologies evolve, so do we…of course, our demands increase, too, and that spurs additional effort to meet them. I love having a ringside seat in this fast-paced electronic evolution, don’t you?

This article by Roopinder Singh was printed in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on September 14, 2010