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.
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!
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.
Off late, all blog rolls seem to be talking on the OpenSSL vulnerability in Debian based systems. Well, I took it a bit lightly given the lazy goose I am. But some of my work for the weekend threatened to come to a grinding halt as most of the servers which I access, disabled my blacklisted ssh key. So had to regenerate the keypair and re upload to all the servers. Man!! I seemed to have access to shit loads of servers. I recommend this article by tonnere which gives a very nice gist of the actual problem and the affected systems.
Also the Debian folks have released a package to check whether your key is vulnerable or not. If you are on any Debian based system, just run “sudo ssh-vulnkey -a” to check for all existing key pairs to find out whether they are blacklisted.
Simple steps to update your ssh keys
1. $ssh-keygen
2. Copy the ~/,ssh/id_rsa.pub to the server you wish to update your ssh key.
3. Safeguard your ~/.ssh/id_rsa private key.
For all those VLSI enthusiasts, Magic is now debianised. For people who are still wondering what “Magic” is all about here it goes..
Magic is a venerable VLSI layout tool, written in the 1980’s at Berkeley by John Ousterhout, now famous primarily for writing the scripting interpreter language Tcl. Due largely in part to its liberal Berkeley open-source license, magic has remained popular with universities and small companies. The open-source license has allowed VLSI engineers with a bent toward programming to implement clever ideas and help magic stay abreast of fabrication technology. However, it is the well thought-out core algorithms which lend to magic the greatest part of its popularity. Magic is widely cited as being the easiest tool to use for circuit layout, even for people who ultimately rely on commercial tools for their product design flow.
For folks on Ubuntu Hardy Heron add the following lines to your sources.list, do a sudo apt-get update and then install as you would do any other application
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/aanjhan/ubuntu hardy main
For people on other Debian based distros you can directly download the .deb from the below link.
http://tuxmaniac.com/work/packages/magic/magic_7.5.129-1_i386.deb
The package has been uploaded into Debian Mentors for review and a few review comments have already been closed. But one major hurdle for this package to enter Debian is a licensing issue. One can read the entire thread on magic-dev here and I would be more than happy to accept suggestions as to how I can get this issue resolved.
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!
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” 
), 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.
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.
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?? 
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
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*