A political phenomenon is pitting Amaravati against small town populists and a rural base.

Trump stands left and Brexit stands right to this strategy. In the recent US elections, Trump lost in all of America's largest cities but was carried into White House on the shoulders of rest of the country. Earlier to that Brexit leave campaign won despite losing in almost all big cities. In hopes of populist theories, political opposers of Chandrababu Naidu were spitting against Amaravati with spineless logic and trying to instigate sub-regional divide among people and same section of feckless cults talk about what's not happening in Amaravati.

Few landlords in the locality were trapped in their ideology and started agitating against land pooling by refusing to give their land under LPS scheme. Such lands amounted to ~2000 acres. Winners don’t make excuses when the other side plays the game. Probably, Able persons should have stepped in and buy off those lands in favor of LPS and avoid land acquisition.

In other words politicians, journalists, columnists, pundits, leaders of all kinds — failed catastrophically, historically, spectacularly for not pointing out the herd as dangerous social behaviour and also for not seeing the obstacles caused by those 2% non-pooled lands. Those handful of landlords can't dictate the fate of a futuristic city where millions of people would live in, indeed they should be looked down for what they did by delaying the Amaravati dream.

India had build only a handful of cities in the last 100 years and one thing we all would agree is Indian urban scape is in chaos, unimaginably dangerous with unplanned mobility. We can't live forever in chaos while the other side of world is building Internet up cities from the scratch. India needs more planned cities like Amaravati. In 2014, Sivarama Krishnan Committee (checkout Annexure VI for Landpooling timelines report supposed the acquisition/pooling of land for the new capital city would take 5 years. Time is a great thickener of things, fast forwarded to today, Amaravati is making tremendous progress despite all the odds.

• ~32,000 acres are consented for pooling out of ~34000 acres notified for pooling/Acquisition.
• All major road works in the city are in progress.

• All India service officers, MLA's, Minister's, CM & Judge's Housing projects are flooring steadily.
• Interim Secretariat is in place and governance from Amaravati has been started now for a while.
• Reputed Universties to whom the land was allocated, built their campuses and started offering courses.

I'm planning a social initiative through Amaravati People Foundation involving citizens to participate in a small construction activity in the region, will be adding more details in the coming weeks. This is our city, our land, our people! Let's join hands to make Amaravati great again!

I switched my blogging platform again, but this one is to stay here for a while.

After a couple of attempts with Blogger, dozen iterations with Drupal & Wordpress and a false start with Django, i ditched dynamic content management systems and gave Jekyll a spin. I liked the idea of a statically generated site I can deploy anywhere. That was well over three years ago. In the meantime i hardly blogged, so it actually didn't matter.

Fast forward to today, i had a sudden impulse to try something new. Ghost seems pretty lean publishing platform with batteries included, so i gave it a spin and imported old blog posts which turned out pretty painless. I have a problem to move it to live : Ghost runs on NodeJS and none of the shared hosting providers allow the terminal access inorder to install it and I really don't want to spend bucks on a VPS setup for a blog.

After a little research i found out about "buster", a python package for generating static content from dynamic Ghost. And Boom! I wrote a small shell script which generates static content from Ghost and push it to Github Pages. Best of both worlds, dynamic platform and statically generated site to host on any environment with a basic server with a capability of serving simple webpages.

Thanks Github Pages for free hosting and cloudflare for it's free HTTPS cert.

The Brexit has shown that masses are stupid when it comes to making policy decisions. While Donald Trump's campaign succeeded on cashing out the mortal imbecility on trusting narcissistic patriotism by securing nomination for the Presidential Race. Masses are prone to emotions and a crowd is always more irrational than an individual.

What i fear most is, Mass emotions plays the similar role else where in the world polity. In India, it is almost easy for any Tom, Dick, Harry to fire agitations based on caste, state-hood or religion. The likes of Mr. ChandraSekhar, Jagan, Hardik, Mudragada knew the simplicity of starting & leading one, if you have a trouble at believing. It all happens under the mask of public interest, perhaps even public don't know that before taking a side.

As Viswanathan rightly quoted, People often confuse a democracy with an Ochlocracy. Democracy doesn’t mean people having the right to decide in all policy decisions. Not always! not necessarily. If you ask people to chose between spending your excess 10,000 Crores on welfare vs education reforms, you know what people would chose obviously. (Do we really want most liked or retweeted post to be discussed at House of members? )

Discussion & debates on people's voice is always advisory whereas decisions on sole verdict is often proved extremely dangerous.
The strength of a democracy is not from its voting processes, but in its ability to bring diverse interests to discuss about a society’s future. That is the strength of a democratic system - the ability to hear diverse voices and not the ability of masses to select the best.

Democracy definitions are to be re-written in most of our dictionaries to protect the masses from themselves.

With the increasing velocity of data from all the directions, providing data scientists with the best tool is tough. Thanks to Google for open sourcing TensorFlow and syntaxnet an open source neural net framework for NLP.

Often Deep Learning demands high computing capabilities and using GPU's for computation is recommended. So how can you build tensorflow (here after 'tf') on your workstation with GPU support?

• This post explains about building tf with GPU support on Ubuntu 16.04, if you are looking for lower versions or other distro's refer TensorFlow official setup

TF needs Cuda Toolkit 7.5 and cuDNN v4 to be installed.
Install Cuda Tool Kit
The official Nvidia releases support 14.04 & 15.04 only, Xenial+ppa repo has the CUDA tool kit, to install driver & CUDA tool kit:

Add the ppa repo
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa

$ sudo apt-get update

Install the recommended driver (currently nvidia-367)
$ sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

$ sudo reboot

If you had any problem with unmet dependancies, try installing this. $ sudo apt-get install libglu1-mesa libxi-dev libxmu-dev

Everything under nvidia specific for connected understanding
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-{prime,profiler,settings,visual-profiler}

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-cuda-{dev,doc,gdb,toolkit} $ sudo apt-get install libcupti-dev zlib1g-dev

The CUDA folder is
/usr/lib/nvidia-cuda-toolkit

TF expects the default installation folder at /usr/local/cuda so puut symlinks in /usr/local/cuda.

sudo mkdir /usr/local/cuda

cd /usr/local/cuda

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ lib64

sudo ln -s /usr/include/ include

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ bin

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ nvvm

sudo mkdir -p extras/CUPTI

cd extras/CUPTI

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ lib64

sudo ln -s /usr/include/ include

Install Cudnn
Register an nvidia developer account and download cudnn here (about 80 MB)
[Users installed CUDA using above steps can bypass the below step]

If you have already installed CUDA before and not sure about the installation path, whether check where your cuda installation is at /usr/lib/ and /usr/include or /urs/local/cuda/

You can check it with ldconfig -p | grep cuda

Extract and unzip the Cudnn file downloaded and:
cd ~/Downloads/cuda

sudo cp include/cudnn.h /usr/include

sudo cp lib64/libcudnn* /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/

sudo chmod a+r /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcudnn*

add below commands to ~/.bash_profile
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/cuda/lib64"

export CUDA_HOME=/usr/local/cuda

Install TensorFlow
Check http://tensorflow.org for latest version though, be sure about GPU enabled package.
$ sudo pip install --upgrade https://storage.googleapis.com/tensorflow/linux/gpu/tensorflow-0.8.0-cp27-none-linux_x86_64.whl

PS:
TensorFlow supports GPU's which have 3.5 and above computate capability, You can find your GPU capability at https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus. [After installing everything on my workstation i realized,GPU capability of the system is just 2.1 and tf ignores GPU and uses only CPU]

Not sure your GPU model? try this:
lspci -vnn | grep -i VGA -A 12

Love to listen what you are trying to build using tf, share your thoughts.

Vijayawada Thermal Power Station makes us proud by lightening the entire state! As a organization, it completely ignores to protect the neighborhood villages interest.

Stack Emission:

APPCB (Andhra Pradesh Pollution Control Board) has set the permissible standard of 115mg/NM3 for SPM Particles, but VTPS has been violating it with heavy Stack emissions thereby causing unprecedented losses to the environment of the locality at the cost of human and wildlife health.

Proper Electrostatic Precipitators and preventive measures would have definitely avoided frequent 300mg, 400mg, even 600mg/NM3 SPM emission.

Source:
http://pcbsite.nic.in/stack_industries.aspx

Ash Pond:

Govt. of India has been insisting for 100% of Fly-Ash utilization and it has been mandatory since 2009, But still VTPS has been dumping more than 60% of Fly-Ash in Jupudi village's dumping pond with several hazardous hard-materials like magnesium etc in the coal remains.

Several times, the fly ash flies all the way to village due to inadequate watering measures and height of tailing DAM.

Still, few VTPS executives, who are suffering with moral grave crisis, making it difficult & artificial deficit to access the fly-ash for fly-ash based industries around the plant. Amaravati will not be a liveable city with such a rouge neighbour to it.

Govt GO's can be downloaded here

I consider applauding Anna Hazare at the very outset for having brought corruption to the National center stage. He encouraged a millions of anonymous Indians to come out on the streets and get voice. I closely watched few students in my university thinking about the on-going fast and corruption than themselves much.

Anna exposed a political class, suffering from a grave moral crisis, to the wider world. He empowered those who’ve felt lost in a new India where wealth is the sole presiding deity. Anna become a symbol of change and hope at a time when a scam culture has assaulted the conscience of the nation.

Survivor of Gandhian ideology?

Gandhi, the great Indian, from whom Anna claim to derive inspiration, never went on a fast unto death by refusing medication. For Gandhi, the idea of fasting was a form of self purification, a fast could not be undertaken as he said, “out of anger. Anger is a short-term madness.” Yes, there is anger in the streets today, an almost volcanic eruption of a lava that has been simmering for decades.

There have been some signs of unwanted situations in the last two months that are truly worrying. The gherao of the homes of members of Parliament may be visually appealing, but it encourages an anti-politician ‘sab neta chor hai’ rhetoric that could further destroy faith in parliamentary democracy.

How many Indians believe they also elected few good parliamentarians?

After the British colonial rule, We chose parliamentary democracy to rule our country, our people. Accordingly, People elect representatives, they are responsible to make the laws but not an individual or a civil-groups. By any luck/unluck if this uncredited govt steps down to Jan-Lokpal bill , I’m sure that will be credited as the result of Hazare’s Fasting!

Where will this take us? How many fast-unto deaths we have to see? Most of, will start a fast-unto death to fulfill their demands! (Giving away separate states, if hundred people sits down for fast-unto death??) There must be a procedure, I don’t recommend a single person/group handling the laws over and above!
In other way, Anna Team can agitate to get the government to commit to a special session of Parliament in six to eight weeks on an amended Lokpal Bill so that a new, well-considered law hails from Loksabha!!

In my understanding, We all are Dwarfs, with a magical power of knowledge. Dwarf is the person, one who develops future Intellectual pursuits by understanding the Research's and works created by notable thinkers of the past.

I would call the Scientists, Writers, Analysts, Medico's, Observers in the past as Giants and we evolved to this stage from their Observations and Experiences.

Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they,and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

Earlier mankind doesn't have knowledge on burning capability of fire, once he experience it, he knew it. So I didn't think long to say, Knowledge derives from "Experience". You won't become Astronomer, if you sit down and cry "Astronomy, Astronomy" , rather taking telescope and experimenting on the sky and stars can make you the 'Astronomer'. For that, you may need to refer what are previous Astronomer's observations and learnings!

Same way, to accomplish a task or your desire, provide yourself with known-facts, techniques & Arrange your ideas, do-able things perfectly and rapidly start your work. Remember, Avoid "Re-Inventing Wheel".

As a whole, I can say that, Knowledge is not a proprietary thing and it is a common heritage of all Mankind.

Still, If you believe Knowledge is a God-sent trait found only in Privileged, Think Again!! Again n Again.

FOSS is a matter of the User’s freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. The “free” as is used in Free and Open Source Software's refers to ‘free as in freedom’ rather cost. More precisely it refers to four kinds of freedom to the user’s of the Software:

• Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.

• Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.

• Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour.

•* Freedom 3*: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

The Idea being that once shared, the code will assist someone else — No need to Re-invent the Wheel.

I believe that, Knowledge is a Common Heritage of Mankind, and thus software, a form of knowledge, has to be free and accessible to all. And this encumbers :

There must be “Open Distribution” and “Open Modification”

ALL TIME BIGGEST SOFTWARE REVOLUTION

Coding is no longer the domain of just Software engineers. All branches of engineering use software tools, be it Computer Aided Design(CAD), Geographical Information Systems(GIS), Latex or Electronic Design Automation.

Wake up Engineers... you are different from Ordinary Mortals (Isn’t it?) Start Using Open Source Tools and Contribute to the world of real knowledge with Open Minds.An Open Document is much like a Physics Experiment to which hundreds of Researchers Contribute.

Internet Runs on FOSS:

Do you Know ? Internet Products like Wikipedia, Facebook, Drupal, Wordpress, Apache, Gmail, Firefox, Chrome etc purely rely on FOSS. Internet Runs on FOSS

For that instance GOOGLE Inc is the largest FOSS Consumption Company. and It’s Contribution to the Open Source is also Notable. More than 86% of Google Servers run on Linux based Servers. Google gives to Open Source Community through code.google.com and Google Summer of Code etc, If you look at Google, most of its products are free/ low cost.

There are many licenses are in use at FOSS Communities, among General Public License (GPL)(Most Linux Products like Ubuntu are GPL Compatible), BSD license(Google Uses most), CC-BY-SA License(Wikipedia Uses this), MIT license are Popular.