Archive for April, 2008

Hi Fedora Project!

Tuesday, April 29th, 2008

I have been meddling around with Free and Open Source Electronic CAD Tools for quite some time now by means of contributing upstream, packaging a few and evangelizing the use of these tools by Students. Sometime last year, I stumbled upon this “Fedora Electronics Laboratory” spin maintained by Chitlesh Goorah and began to like it a lot. It had almost all tools needed to learn and enjoy Microprocessor coursework, Microelectronic studies and basic Electronics too. On seeing the vast availability of these tools in Fedora and not in my favorite Distros (Debian/Ubuntu), I decided to make some of these tools available to the Debian world as well (partly successful and partly not).

Last week I was offered to help the fedora electronics laboratory project and I gladly accepted. Now, I have the official Fedora packager status and have already made couple of commits to the project. Thanks to Chitlesh and the fedora team and I am sure I will continue to contribute to the best of my abilities!

Posted in FLOSS, fedora, FEL, programming | 3 Comments »

A visit to Mumbai - Executive style!

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

During my college days I used to dream of leading a life where in I travel all over the place in flights and paying extremely short visits to far off cities. It was one such day this Wednesday, when I had to visit Mumbai for a day.

Took the morning Jet Airways flight out of Chennai Airport, found a few familiar faces sitting one row before me me in the economy class having fun! My work got finished very early than expected but Jet could not provide me a earlier flight out. Traveled in the locals from Churchgate to Andheri, visited the InOrbit Mall in Malad, returned to Airport way too early for my return flight to Chennai.

Mumbai Airport has free wifi provided by Airtel and the SSID actuallu says so “Free Wifi by Airtel” :-) ! Its got way better facilities and actually is one of the few airports that can be categorised as “Airports” in India. Spent about 3.5 hrs in the airport before heading back! Reached Chennai around midnight, took the car that I had parked in the morning at the airport and zoomed home! Wow! Mumbai in a day - Executive style!

Oops! Forgot to mention, I ate “Vada Pav”. Now thats complete.

Posted in Travel | No Comments »

The FOSS India Award medal!

Saturday, April 12th, 2008
We the GNUSim8085 folks have been given this virtual medal for winning the FOSS India Award 2008.

Thank you LFY! This is a great motivation for lots of folks out there. Its not about the money. Its the “Recognition”.
Thank you once again.

Posted in FLOSS, programming | 2 Comments »

Much needed break! Weekend at NIT Calicut.

Monday, April 7th, 2008

After 2 really long weeks of uncertainties, confusion, disappointments, chaos it was finally decided that I will head to FOSS Meet @ NIT Calicut. It was pretty late when this decision was made and hence no bus tickets (3 day weekend in BLR means its “evacuation time” :D ), no direct flights nor trains (only 2 trains per week) to Calicut. Also figured out that kart_ also was stranded and when I was again re- thinking my decision to head to Calicut, a thought struck me. May be we should take a taxi and head out! And so we did. kart_ and myself started the drive to Calicut around Friday night 10 PM. Drive was pretty long and tiring, after which we reached the place by 6 AM just to crash land on the bed. Later in the day we headed to the lab where FOSS in Schools workshop was being conducted by Pramode. I guess, this was the biggest success of this year’s meet. Lots of enthusiasm and energy from school kids.

Audience for the FOSS Contribution session FOSS in Schools Do you see who the sponsors are? ;-)

After a bit of emails, builds and blog readings, headed for lunch. Met Kiruba, Praveen, Anivar, Hiran and other folks. Pradeepto joined us late afternoon and headed straight to his talk on “Join the VISION - Kde”. Nice one it was. My talk on “FOSS for electronic enthusiasts” went very well with about 30-40 people attending. Then we (Pradeepto, Kart_ and myself) decided to head out to Malabar Palace for some Appam fest! Returned back to the guest house, discussed various things under the planet including Alternative Education, KDE, Packaging, Marriage, Life and what not.

Stickers!!! pradeepto and kart_ Rakesh Casual chat

We had a “Contribution to FOSS” talk the next day for which we had absolutely no preparation. Well when 3 guys are gonna present, I suppose we need some kind of a understanding. But guess what, the talk went extremely smooth and IMO message conveyed. We showed them Wiki, subversion, Bugzilla and also mentioned about IRC and mailing lists. The flow was impeccable for the amount of (almost nil) preparation which we did. Goes to show the understanding among the three of us?? ;-)

Enroute Wayanad Pookot Lake Finally.. Mysore Palace Mysore Palace Mysore Palace

It was time to head back to BLR. On the way back we made quick stops at Wayanad Pookat lake, lunch, Mysore Palace (JIT for the Sunday Evening lighting) and Kamat (dinner). Back and fresh again today to write this long post!

All in all a very relaxing trip. Taking into account the amount of hardships these NITC folks have faced over the last month with loads of speakers dropping off in the last minute, these guys have managed to finish of yet another good FOSSMeet @ NITC. Three Cheers!

Flickr Sets: Mysore Palace, FOSSMeet@NITC, Wayanad

Posted in FLOSS, Travel, ubuntu, Knowledge, fun, fossmeet@nitc, calicut, nit | 3 Comments »

Apple says Cheese is bad!

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

Its yet again happening… Steve’s men are on the prowl once again. This time its the other Steve. Have you heard of the wonderful application called “Cheese”? If not try it *now*

I had begun to enjoy this nice little application and then today I read this blog. Apple wants “Cheese” to become extinct! When shall all this come to an end.

Cheese was supposedly planned to become a default app from Hardy Heron onwards. But now *fingers crossed*

Posted in FLOSS, ubuntu, cheese, gnome, patent, apple, steve jobs | 2 Comments »