Lisbon - Week1

It is one week since I arrived at Lisbon (the 23rd of August)! I have started settling down. Since I got two Portuguese speaking apartment mates, and a friendly Portuguese landlord, I am pretty sure, I will be able to learn Portuguese pretty quick. It is my first time staying away from home for a long period. My longest was the recent stay of 10 days in New Delhi.

I was the first to arrive. Since this is a vacation time, the university, including the university bank branches, is closed almost completely. Probably since this is the end of summer, the weather in Lisbon doesn't feel like a summer, rather it was mildly cold with 20°c, along with long days. The Sun sets around the 8.20 p.m.

We were able to grab some useful and interesting tips from the landlord. In the supermarkets, the brands marked as "%" are the own brands of the super market, and are generally cheaper, though are of the same quality as the others. Pingo Doce and Minipreco, the two super market chains of Lisbon, provide the economic options.

We will be provided with a SIM for our phones by the university, where we will be able to call anyone in the university network free of charge. That will surely be fun, as we will be calling our friends free! Apart from the regular grocery shopping, we also did minor road trips. The upcoming days will surely be more interesting, I feel. :) boa noite!

Year 2012 - a year of changes

Opposite to IST, Alameda, Lisbon

Time has gone pretty fast. When I was selected to follow the Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing (EMDC) in the first half of this year, going to Lisbon seems to be far away. But sorry for repeating the phrase again - time has gone pretty fast. I was selected to DMKM (Erasmus Mundus Master Course in Data Mining and Knowledge Management) as well, where the first year will be at University of Lyon Lumière Lyon 2 in France and the second at University Polithenica of Bucharest in Romania. Distributed Computing and Data Mining both are my research interests. Considering the advantages of both the courses, finally I decided to follow EMDC. I quickly accepted the offer for EMDC, and started working on that.

Getting the Portugal study visa of course needed a considerable effort. It also made me travel twice to New Delhi. I utilized my first trip to New Delhi in summer as a sight-seeing tour in New Delhi. It was a great experience, including the negotiations with the three-wheeler drivers. The second trip made me float. I was even worried whether my travel documents got wet by the heavy showers, on my way to the Portugal Embassy in Chanakyapuri. Thanks to God, my bag was strong enough not to let the water in.

I was working at WSO2 for the last 2 years, and it was my job since I graduated. Interestingly I was an intern too at WSO2. It was a great learning experience, as my first job. For some unknown reason, the Emirates decided to send me in the business class, though I had bought a ticket for the economic class. That gave me a positive feeling (Feeling lucky.. :D)

Lisbon seems pretty cool, and started to settle down here. Along with these changes, Llovizna too is facing a few changes (may I say, improvements?) I foresee, the completely new set of blog posts dominating the blog, along with my traditional mixture of technical and personal posts. I see a few posts on my experience on studying abroad, and related tours. Hope that will make Llovizna sexier. ;) To match with this, I have enabled the Google ads into my blog, as I feel they give provide some advertisements that are related and useful to the readers. For example, I could see the advertisements of the European scholarship programs in the blog post that mentions about the European Study visa. Hope the overall reader experience is made more positive.

I hope the upcoming days will be more exciting, as the course is starting on the 17th of September. I will keep the readers updated on this. Tenha um bom dia!

Diaspora - an open source alternative to facebook?

I recall, one of my tweets, two years back.

hopes #diaspora* (http://www.joindiaspora.com/) will become a nice alternative to #Facebook soon, as ppl hav started to realize fb's tricks. May 29, 2010  

Diaspora is supposed to be an open (open source) alternative of Facebook. As the same case with Windows, we claim Facebook too an evil, regardless of its popularity, and regardless of the fact that all of us use it. Nevertheless, nothing hasn't overtaken Facebook yet, and the attempts to mimic or replace it have generally failed. Google+ appeared to be a competition. Still it seems to be a mere cross of Facebook and Twitter, while not causing the much expected stir. Many of the users haven't failed to notice when Google+ follows what Facebook already does. For e.g., the cover photo. Facebook fanatics have already started claiming Google+ a failure.

An interesting fact of diaspora is, as a community run, distributed social network, it tends to have so many installations online, where you can register for one of them. joindiaspora was the first of them, and https://diasp.eu
and https://wk3.org are two among the other few. Much attention to diaspora is not given from the general user base. Probably because of its community driven and distributed nature, it lacks a central location or network to evangelize about, except the excitement from the open source enthusiasts.

For me, it seems it is not that easy to replace Gmail or Facebook that easily. All the gmail-killers or facebook-killers that have been introduced lately failed to grab the attention of real users, except the reviewers.

Micronations and ocean colonization

Two years back, I got to know about the Republic of Rose Island. An engineer, along with some professionals, gets creative, and decides to build an island nation in the mid of the sea. However, later it was dashed by Italy, due to the legal violations of Italian law. Probably he could have implemented it legally.

Stories of micronations resemble fairy tales, and in the worst cases, they sound like a mere hoax. After 2 years from this, recently I read about another micronation, known as Sealand, which also seems to be active till present. Interestingly, the Principality of Sealand has been selling the titles of Lord, Lady, Baron, Baroness, Count, and Countess through its website. 

I still feel, ocean colonization is interesting. If living in these artificial islands in the mid of the international sea borders is possible, living in another planet won't be that hard either. Let's first colonize the ocean, and secondly we can colonize the space!

Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing

God Ganesh was kind enough to relocate to Lisbon, with me!

To begin the next episode of my journey, I am joining the European Master in Distributed Computing, starting the 10th of September 2012. As a joint master degree under the Erasmus Mundus, the first year (the first two semesters) of this course will be at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal and the third semester at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, followed by an internship for the last semester.

Degree outcomes

IST, Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal:

Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing

KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden:

Master of Science (120 credits)

"The Erasmus Mundus programme in Distributed Computing is a cooperation between KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain. It is a two-year Master's programme including compulsory mobilty for the students."

Llovizna is mostly a technology blog, that often comes with the personal touch, on topics varying from open source technologies, cloud computing, web services middleware, to end user applications. It often has discussed the general topics, deviating from this niche as well. As a postgraduate student following an Erasmus Mundus Master Course in Europe, I will also blog on the modules that are taught in the lectures, as well as some posts on my travels.

I guess, I have already started blogging on this. Thanks for following. Hope to see you again here. até logo.

The road to Lisbon..

Lisbon, 23rd of August 2012.

Getting a student visa to the Europe for a Sri Lankan (or any other 3rd country citizen) needs a considerable effort. Since I got selected to follow my masters at Portugal, I started the visa application process on time. I am blogging the entire procedure here, due to the number of requests I received from my friends. This will be particularly useful for Sri Lankan students applying for their higher studies in the Europe, specifically, Portugal.

1. Getting the documents ready.

You will be required to send the academic transcript and the degree certificate, either a scanned copy of them, or a photocopy that is certified by your university, by post, to the university that you are applying. At this point, you should take more certified copies (say, 3), and not just one, as these will be required again for the visa application process.

Apply for the police clearance certificate on time, as it may take any time from two weeks to two months. It is advisable to have the certified copies of the birth certificate and its official translation in English, as well, though not required generally. 

2. Attesting the documents.

Once all the above documents are in hand, you have to attest them at the consular section of the Ministry of External Affairs. You can reach it by any bus that goes to Fort/Colombo/Pettah from south, by getting down at the halt that follows World Trade Center. It is close to the Cargills. Reach the 5th floor, before 8 a.m. to avoid the queue. You can get it done in 2 hours, but if you reach there around 10 a.m. you will see a very long queue making you stay for 5 hours. 

You can even send a direct family member of yours for this, along with the document proof that they are your relation. Matching surnames in the identity cards or a birth certificate would be perfect. You can even send someone else with a power of attorney (POA). Make sure to take a document proof (the national identity card is sufficient) of yourself, in any case. Once documents are checked, you will be given a token. Batches of 50, will be sent to the 3rd floor, after a waiting period. Pay attention to the announcement, which is in Sinhala. In the 3rd floor, the numbers are displayed. Once your number is displayed, you can submit your documents to the respective counter to attest. Make sure to have the original documents with you, as you will be required to show them to get the copies attested. You have to pay 500 LKR, for each copy that you are attesting.

Once submitted the documents, come back to the 5th floor with your receipt, and again wait till your number is shown at the display. Read carefully, as the display shows the numbers in a random order. Once your number is shown, you can collect your documents from the front desk. This facility closes at the 3 p.m.

3. Documents for the Schengen visa

You will require insurance letter covering your stay, the accommodation letter from the place of stay in Lisbon, financial proof, along with the admission letters from your university/universities in the Europe. Make sure to start on accommodation hunting on time, as this may take some time. Your university should be able to provide more options. If you are receiving a scholarship, that should be a sufficient proof of finance.

4. Travel Itinerary
For visa purposes, you will also require a travel itinerary. This is often issued free (or for a very minimal charge) by the travel agents, in a good hope that you will finally buy the flight tickets through them. Jetwings is my regular travel agent. Once your visa is finalized, you can buy the tickets. A few facilities are provided by your credit card provider, if you pay the flight ticket using your credit card. For example, when bought using an HSBC credit card, your journey will be insured. You may also be able to get a letter stating this for the visa purposes, from the bank. However, a service charge of 2.5% is included into your bill for most of the credit cards, as banks charge the travel agents with the same. If you want to avoid paying this additional amount, you will prefer to pay just by cash.

5. Visit to New Delhi

Since Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Maldives, Bangladesh, and Nepal do not have a Portuguese Embassy, the nationals of these countries should go to the Embassy in New Delhi to attend the interview. You may be exempted from facing the interview and send a travel agent or a family member as a POA, if you have been to a country in the Schengen region in a Schengen visa in the last 24 months, and returned to your country on time. However, you should confirm this from the embassy, and I don't recommend this, as it is better to be safer, and attending the interview will surely increase your chance of getting the visa on time, as you are the best person to explain your intention of applying for a study visa.

6. Indian Visa

Sri Lankans require a visa to go India as well. You may go New Delhi in tourist visa, and apply for the visa. For the Indian Tourist Visa is issued in 3 working days from the application. It requires only the location of stay in India. Hence it is not that of a difficult procedure. However, the Schengen student visa may take from 2 weeks to a month. So if you are not ready to stay for a month, you can attend the interview, and come back to Sri Lanka (this is what I did). In that case, you will have to go to New Delhi again to get the visa endorsed to your passport. You will be notified by email and phone, from the Embassy of Portugal, once your visa is issued.

Update as of 2015 June: The Indian visa application process has been simplified recently, with just online application to many nationalities including Sri Lankans.

7. Stay at New Delhi 

I have discussed my first stay at New Delhi in A culturally rich summer at Delhi.. It was a summer. But when I went again (20th - 22nd August, 2012) to endorse the Portuguese visa, the falls had begun, and it was raining cats and dogs. The road that connects Panchsheel Marg to the rear entrance of Portuguese Embassy even started to flood. Portuguese Embassy is located in 4, Panchsheel Marg in Chanakyapuri. But you should go through the rear entrance for the consular section for the visa purposes. Go early to the Embassy, at 9 a.m., to both interview, and to submit your passport again to get the visa endorsed, unless specified otherwise. Passport collection time is usually the same day around 4 p.m. But  to be safer, I had one additional day stay at New Delhi.

8. High Commission of Sri Lanka, New Delhi

It is located in Kautilya Marg, in Chanakyapuri, pretty much closer to the Embassy of Portugal. You have to attest your Degree certificates and Police Clearance Certificate again here. It costs 2100 INR for each document. The staff are very friendly, and you may feel free to seek their assistance, if required.

9. Scheduling the interview at VFS

You have to schedule the interview by submitting all the documents from the VFS, which is located in Nehru Place. The Visa fees (which is usually 6000+ INR) is exempted for the students who receive a Portuguese Scholarship. In that case, you will just have to pay the VFS fees, which was just 607 INR. You can schedule the interview after one working day. For example, if you submit the documents on Thursday, you can have your interview at the Embassy on the coming Monday.

10. Transit Visa

However, you can't go to India in tourist visa more than once within two months. If your travel day is closer, you should just apply for an Indian transit visa instead. In this way, you can stay up to 3 days in New Delhi, on your way Lisbon. A transit visa usually takes 5 - 6 working days to process, and also a confirmed travel plan. Buying the tickets for your journey to Lisbon, with a transit at New Delhi up to 3 days, at this moment, is perfect. Make sure to apply early. It is valid for a month, and you can use it for any 3 days. Mostly given is a double entry transit visa (assuming you will go via Delhi, and also will return through the same route). Once you have endorsed your visa from the Portugal Embassy, you can travel to Lisbon, from New Delhi. Since this is a transit visa, you can't return to Sri Lanka, by definition. You are just transiting at New Delhi on your way to Lisbon.

11. Traveling

The travel luggage allowance for the economy class is usually 30 kg checked in luggage + 7 kg hand luggage. It costs around 700 LKR/kg for any additional luggage to travel New Delhi from Colombo using Sri Lankan airlines. Similarly, each airline has its own rate, considering the distance, the location, and the weight or number of extra items. It is better to avoid paying that much of money, as you can of course buy the same from Lisbon for the money. You can take your coat, laptop in its laptop case, camera, a book, and travel documents out of the hand luggage, as they are excluded from the allowed 7kg allowance. In this way, you can take more weight in your hand luggage. If you are sure to exceed this limit, it is cheaper to buy additional weight online before your journey, than paying at the airport.

12. Lisbon

Unlike many other airports, Lisbon International Airport is centrally located in the Lisbon city. That means, within a few minutes, you will be able to reach your apartment by a cab, or using the red metro line. The airport staff are very friendly. Lisbon gives a hope for a wonderful stay. 

Disclaimer: This blog post is based solely on my personal experience, and I have no affiliation with any of the formal bodies mentioned above. This information is blogged in my personal blog "Llovizna" in a good hope that this will be useful for others. If something is not clear, missing, or incorrect, please comment below, or send me a message, so that I can fix it. You will be able to find these information from the respective entities, and are encouraged to do so. I hope reading this post was still useful.

New Delhi by tuk-tuk..

Three-wheelers are very handy option to travel in New Delhi, as you can find them everywhere, and they are pretty convenient and cheap too. However, you should be careful to avoid paying more than what it deserves. If you are clueless, you will be left paying 5 times the amount that it really costs.

Negotiations!

One important point is beware of the three-wheeler drivers. Unless you speak Hindi (or the local language of the region. I noticed a similar behavior among the drivers in Hyderabad, where they mainly speak Telugu), they will try their best to charge as much as they can (You will be charged 250 INR, where they charge 50 INR normally for the locals), and they may even tend to cheat. Ask for an estimate from the friends, before going out. All the three-wheelers are metered. The meters either do not work, or the drivers just do not obey them. Don't ever dare to get into a three-wheeler without negotiating the price beforehand. That will just get you ripped off. Moving three-wheelers tend to charge lesser than the one who park, specifically the ones who park as groups on the road sides.

Some three-wheeler negotiations

The typical success scenario.

/Me: *Stops a moving three-wheeler*
Me: "Chanakyapuri..."
3W driver: "xdsve cwsnujfe mxiwwemo huer?" (Hindi that you won't understand anyway)
Me: "Vinay Marg!" (I assume his question is, "Where exactly in Chanakyapuri")
3W: "Hundred rupees!"
/Me: *gets in!* (My assumption was right!)

Now the failure scenario.

/Me: *Stops a moving three-wheeler*
Me: "Chanakyapuri..."
3W driver: "xdsve cwsnujfe mxiwwemo huer?"
Me: "Vinay Marg!"
3W: "fehus feua feuh"
/Me: *confused* *What does he say* :-o
Me: "How much?" (Had to ask the price now.. :()
3W: "Two Hundred Fifty!" (Since I asked in English!)
Me: "That's just too much" *Walks away*
3W: "Hundred fifty" *shouts

/Me *ignores and walks to find another threewheeler.

A good negotiation

/Me: *Stops a moving three-wheeler*

Me: "Chanakyapuri..."
3W driver: "xdsve cwsnujfe mxiwwemo huer?"
Me: "Vinay Marg!"
3W: "fehus feua feuh"
/Me: *same expression, as the second 3W guy above. Let's ignore.
Me: "Ninety" (Saying my own price!)
3W: "Hundred Twenty!"
/Me: *Walks away slowly*
3W: "Hundred ten" *shouts
/Me: *gets in!*

No random tourist guides!
Never let a three-wheeler driver be your tourist guide. They try to offer their own tourist packages, "I will take you to India Gate, Lotus Temple, and Connaught Place shopping area, round trip - all Delhi covered - 2000 Rupees." He said, 100 INR to Birla Mandir, and he would wait for 20 mins and pick me up for a round trip with 250 INR. Any child would understand that I have no real reason to accept this offer, as I can just get down and get another three-wheeler for 100 INR, which is way cheaper. When I explained him this, he came down to offer the trip for 150 INR. Still it can't go above 70 INR. If you are from a developed country, you of course can ignore the above issues, as both 50 INR and 250 INR will be like 1 - 3 USD, which you can safely consider negligible.

Why you should wait more to upgrade to the next LTS..

Notify me for long-term support versions

There are still a few of us, who prefer to be safer. We often upgrade only when an LTS of Ubuntu is released. However, not most of us realize that we should wait till the point release is available, letting the critical bugs found by the users fixed. The point releases are usually made available around the end of July. Ubuntu 12.04.1 will be available this month. Update manager will list 12.04 as available for the 10.04 users, only when 12.04.1 is released. That means, it won't be shown to the users who have set their system to notify only when LTS is released, till the first point release is released.

However, if you are still in a haste to go 12.04 from your stable 10.04, you can do this by "update-manager -d" I tried above, and it was a failed attempt, and hence will discourage anyone else to go to 12.04, directly from their 10.04, for their mission critical systems. Once 12.04.1 is released, it will be listed as 12.04 in your update manager, and that will be the ideal time to upgrade. I tried as above, which successfully downloaded the upgrades (took 26 hours in a speed of 60 kB/s), installed, and restarted. But it failed to restart, even after attempting all the suggestions on the Internet. When I tried with the 11.10 DVD (I didn't have 12.04 DVD with me, and I didn't have time to download and burn one, or get one from someone else), it showed the current operating system as 10.04, and from there I picked the option to "Upgrade" using the DVD. My file system was safe, along with all my documents. Some of the applications I had in my 10.04, had to be reinstalled for my new 11.10. Anyway, I smoothly upgraded 11.10 to 12.04, as expected, within 5 hours. I then installed the missing applications. Everything is safe, and now I am with 12.04.

Now I am just analyzing what might have happened initially to cause failure in my upgrade. It seemed to be an issue that happened when upgrading the Operating System during the final restart, as the operating system was still detected as 10.04 when I inserted 11.10 DVD. (It considered it an upgrade from 10.04, and not an installation replacing 12.04). I like that installing on top of 10.04 option, without formatting the entire disk, or without leaving the previous data in another partition, wasting the space.

Post-mortem

The page started to show the below message after the restart.

The disk drive for / is not ready yet or not present. 

Continue to wait; or Press S to skip mounting, or M for manual recovery.

Clicking S complained missing /tmp. Further S lead me to an empty black screen that takes nowhere. Go for M 

Root filesystem check failed.

A maintenance shell will now be started.

CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and reboot the system.

Give root password for maintenance 

(or type Control-D to continue):

and the manual fsck attempts did no fix.

fsck -f /dev/sda1

vi /etc/fstab 

showed

/mnt/4096 Mb.swap none swap sw 0 0

and

vi /etc/mtab

showed

/dev/sda1 / ext3 rw 0 0

Copying the contents of fstab to mtab and restart did no help, though suggested in some forums.  

mount /dev/sda1 /

mount: /dev/sda1 already mounted or / busy

mount: according to mtab, /dev/sda1 is already mounted on /

Remounting with rw permissions to follow the below commands as suggested.

mount -w -o remount /

dpkg --configure -a

apt-get install -f

dpkg --configure -a

gave

dpkg: error: parsing file '/var/lib/dpkg/status' near line 28305 package 'xmind'.

blank line in value of field 'Description'.

Removed the paragraphs defining xmind from the files /var/lib/dpkg/status and /var/lib/dpkg/available. It also complained about virtualbox-2.2, which I eventually removed as well.

Further fix attempts took me to the below shell.

Gave up waiting for root device. 

Common problems: 722988907ca

-  Boot args (cat /proc/cmdline)

- Check rootdelay = (did the system wait long enough?)

- Check root - (did the system wait for the right device?)

ALERT

/dev/disk/by-uuid/c67309e6-6099-40db-8b1b-1722988907ca does not exist. Dropping to shell.

Removed the UUID definitions,

root=UUID=.....7ca

from the entries in

/boot/grub/menu.lst

Making 

/boot/vm......generic

root=UUID=.....7ca ro quiet splash

to 

/boot/vm.....generic

ro quiet splash 

in the entries, as discussed here.

However, these fixes eventually took me to the shell from all the kernel images, letting me explore further issues. I finalized, installing from DVD would be a smarter option, as nothing I will lose.

Conclusion 

Lack of documentation or help is surely a frustration for an average user, in case of a failure like this, though it is not so common. We should focus more on community documentation to avoid turning the users off. My suggestion for a normal user to take a backup before upgrading such, and in case of failure, try if you can fix it, and if not, go for reinstalling on the same partitions, without formatting.