tuxmaniac’s blog

gResistor is a Resistance calculator tool written in Python. I saw this tool in FEL and found out its absence in Debian/Ubuntu. Its a tool with no active development as of now (no bugs, no maintainance required) but very helpful in calculating resistance values fast. A brief description of the tool as described here follows:

To allow for identification, resistors are usually marked with colored bands. Often refereed to as color codes, these markings are indicative of their resistance, tolerance and temperature coefficient. gResistror is a great program that will help you translate a resistor color codes into a readable value. All you have to do is watch the colors on the resistor and then enter them in the program. As you enter you’ll see that the resistor value is changing according to the selected color.

Its one of the fastest packaging I have ever done and uploaded to REVU. If any MOTU is reading this post, it would be nice if the package is reviewed and sponsored.

REVU Link:  http://revu.tauware.de/details.py?package=gresistor

LP Bug report: #251919

We have got a new mailing list for FEL. Feel free to join https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-electronic-lab-list and post your views, wish lists and comments. As Chitlesh has already pointed out here, the FEL team is growing fast and me being one such recent recruit was having troubles communicating the issues to everyone involved/interested. Mails were being addressed to specific people and were lost in the process. Also we were having severe time difference problems (though thats a temporary one for me as I will also be in Europe in a short time from now ).

Already, solutions for problems have started coming in seeing the mails I forwarded to the list for archiving. Am sure from now on things are going to look much much better. Thank you Fedora!

As part of the FOSS India Awards, GNUSim8085 was selected in the top 20 projects as reported here. This month’s (July 2008) edition of Linux For You (LFY) has a nice little article about this project.

GNUSim8085 was one of the first FOSS Projects that I started contributing. Now this is enough motivation to close the three bugs still pending by this weekend.

If you have a Fedora Account, signed the CLA and is a member of an additional group in the Fedora Accounts System, you can cast your vote to help decide the next Release Name of Fedora 10 here

I casted mine for “Whiskey Run” for obvious reasons What about you?

After successfully managing to resist the temptation to join twitter for more than 6 months now, I gave in to identi.ca

Follow my microblog at http://identi.ca/tuxmaniac

After killing two dogs, I just managed to reach Cafe coffee day (Blame my ISP for no internet for continuous 3 days) at 2100 hrs on July 12th 2008. But then, the topic read “Session starts at 2130 hrs”. Wtf! I was early.

All these dramatic prologue apart, the session started of with me welcoming all the participants and taking them through what was coming in the next few weeks. Yes! We are planning quite a few interesting online sessions and a few surprise ones too which will be announced on the Ubuntu India Mailing list as it gets finalized. These online sessions, I must admit were inspired from Kushal’s amazing work at dgplug (more on that later as a separate entry). After the brief round up of whats coming, the agenda of the day was put forth. It was mainly on Bug Squashing basics. People were asked to create their own Launchpad accounts and a briefing of what LP is all about was done. Later Parthan took over the stage along with Onkar, to describe the basics of Bug Squashing. They started of with what a triage is, then moved over to explain the severity levels of bugs, bug life cycle, responsibilities of a bug triager, etc. During this time, I was busy collecting some basic bugs which could be thrown at the participants for practical exposure and helping both of them to answer a few questions that were being asked.

I was sure the session was a success when quite a few folks suddenly started disappearing from the channel when bug 247861 was thrown at the participants for triaging . They returned to cheerfully say that they have reproduced the issue. Great! Most of them were becoming greedy for triaging and confirming bugs, when we realized that it was already past midnight and it is better we “officially” stop the session here before the greed becomes uncontrollable.

The logs of Day 1 have been updated in the wiki page here and today is Day 2, where we will be concentrating on packaging related issues. Onkar has already mailed the list with some details. Looking forward to it and be there at #ubuntu-in-classroom by 2100 hrs IST. As usual a plain “Hello” is most welcome!

You guys must have already heard about the Global Bug Jam that is planned around the month of August. If you haven’t yet read about it, Go Read it NOW!!! As a build up to the mega event, we the Ubuntu-IN folks are organising a Basic Bug triaging session this weekend. If you want to start squashing bugs or help out others be there. Or you just wanna say a Plain “Hello” to the folks, you are most welcome too!!
Venue: #ubuntu-in @ irc.freenode.net

Date: 12, 13 July 2008 from 2100 hrs.

More details are here -> http://ubuntu-in.org:81/wiki/Events/BugJamPrepSessions

Flew from Mumbai (BOM) to Chennai (MAA) on 9W469 Jet Airways today. The Air hostess reset the in flight entertainment system and lo and behold I see the above screen. I managed to catch some specs too. It runs on one of those AMD Geode procs with 256 MB of RAM. Uses Redboot as the boot loader. More details when I travel next or feel free to add to the specs as comments if you have more details.