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*
Hola folks! The Ubuntu community has unleashed the Brainstorm page. It is a interface for people with any kind of thought to just add those as “ideas” and let the community brainstorm over them. We are already having about 2400 Ideas in just 5 days of its existence. Wow! Add your idea now.
As I was browsing through the ideas and some mailing list, a idea that just popped out of my head is that students can use the Ubuntu Brainstorm project as a platform for getting involved in Free and Open Source Software. What they have to do is just pick up an idea which they find interesting and start working on them. What more with Google announcing “Summer of Code 2008” edition, one can propose or develop on any of these ideas and go ahead implementing them. Whats really special about such an approach is that, you are picking up a “project” which the “community” has asked for, commented already. So there are better chances that you find more mentors who are willing to help, more users who are willing to test and ofcourse more chances of you becoming a “r0c|<$t4r" in the Free Software world.
What more?!! You can also help promote an Idea in your blogs and websites like I have done below. So.. what are you guys waiting for. Unleash the hell of ideas right *now* and students/developers pick your favourite idea *now*
My “photographer’s block” mentioned in this post, continued into the second and third day of the event. The days were filled with exchange of ideas, knowledge. Conclaves had heated discussions on Proprietary vs Free Knowledge. Food on the second day was like a “kabab fest”. There were rumors after this fest that freed.in would be renamed again to food.in from next year.
The best talk of the second day was “Hacking the Airwaves with GNU Radio” by Rakesh Peter, a talk which I am attending for the second time (attended it during foss.in 2007). Very impressive and great to know the work that is going on. Shreyas came out with his “dormant” idea of setting up a Radio transmission during foss.in 2008. It sounds like a very nice idea to me. The day ended with loads of quotes flowing from the mouths of various people. Details are here in this post by Sankarshan.
Day 3 begins with me feeling the OLPC XO laptop for the first time (Courtesy: Sayamindu). Initially, I was feeling very uncomfortable with the Sugar interface but eventually started liking it. Then it was my turn to take the stage and in my opinion the talk went pretty well with a few questions asked. The slides of the presentation can be found here. The find of the day was “Purisia font”. I think I will use this font for most of my presentations from now on. Flight back home was very relaxing with me getting a seat right after the First Class cabin. Good leg room and the food served was nice.
Freed.in and the ILUG-D folks always make me feel “At home”. This is the second freed.in for me and the feeling while leaving the place just is the same. Hats off folks!! I will mark my calendar every year for this wonderful event and just the thought of meeting up with the folks brings in loads of excitement. I had pretty good discussions with Runa, Sankarshan and Pradeepto and I take home great memories from the same. Special thanks to Gora (who drank H2O), Andrew, Kishore, t3 (for lending his hair to a bunch of people), Old monk, Tirveni, Shreyas and all those who were involved in providing the entertainment. It was great fun!
Reached Delhi yesterday by 2000 hrs. Waited for pradeepto’s “spicy” flight to land. We then called up Gora only to be asked “Who pradeepto?? Oh! Aanjhan is also coming?! He never gave me any details”. *sigh* Standard Gora’s funny side. We also became one of the “neem tree” victims. We had to wait for 1 hr under that damn neem tree outside the airport. We reached our hotel by 2100 hrs. Joined by the rest of the folks in about an hour and we had some OT stuff along with Pizzaish Dinner.
Today sat through the talks by Sankarshan Guruji (have my own reasons why I call him so ), Samiah and now listening to Valsa Williams, Intel. Its loads of fun. Spent a good time with cray3, a person who I admire a lot and thank her for those cute Ubuntu stickers I just got (pics soon). Freed.in is one conference which gives me that homely feeling. I feel I belong to this family. Its a lot of fun and learning here. Looking forward for the kebabs…. I am freed again.
Btw, I have not clicked a single picture. Looks like I am having “photographer’s block”?? Lets see how things go the next few days. My talk seems to be shaping well.
Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls…. GNUSim8085 has been named in the winners list of FOSS India awards. Announcement can be found here.
I happened to browse through my set of “list” emails and as usual was about to delete the LFY mail sent to some lists. But then something told me, “read” that mail. Opened the mail, and it spoke of FOSS India awards and some winners list. Then I scroll down the winners list to find this name “GNUSim8085″ on that. Now, where on planet earth did that come from???
GNUSim8085 was a project started by srid in his college days. He decided to orphan it at one point where Onkar and myself pitched in and took over the development and maintainance. I guess, its been one year now almost after we joined the project along with Srid and this is a big surprise. A welcome recognition and hope this triggers contribution from students to this project. We have a plethora of feature requests that has poured in suddenly. Students, grab this opportunity.
Its back. This time a bit fast. Yes! Freed.in is now moved to February and this time its happening on 22-24th of this month at Jawaharlal Nehru University Campus, New Delhi. Following foss.in (Theme: “Show me the code”), gnunify (theme: getting new users) and Fossconf Chennai, this year’s freed.in ’s theme is “Knowledge shall set you free”. Interesting. Knowing the evergreen folks of ILUGD, I am sure the conclaves are gonna be full of h0t and fruitful discussions; and the dinners even hotter
Not many people whom I expected for this year’s event are turning up but neverthless a few folks are still packing the bags to Delhi. I am there on all three days and also talking on “FOSS for Electronics Enthusiasts!”. By any chance you happen to be around Delhi at that time, drop in and say Hi!!!
Get ready to be Freed!!!
Recently, I have been reading the book “How to think like a Computer Scientist - Learning with Python“. Its a ebook published under GNU Free Documentation License and one can grab it here. This book, it seems, was based on a book written for teaching Java (!!! God knows how and why ). Python seems a better fit here as the author himself quotes in preface as follows.
Python greatly simplifies programming examples and makes important programming ideas easier to teach. The first example from the text illustrates this point. It is the traditional “hello,world” program, which in the C++ version of the book looks like this:
#include
void main()
{
cout << "Hello, world." << endl;
}
in the Python version it becomes:
print “Hello, World!”
Yet another point which the author makes which impressed me is the following..
There are thirteen paragraphs of explanation of “Hello, world!” in the C++ version; in the Python version, there are only two. More importantly, the missing eleven paragraphs do not deal with the “big ideas” in computer programming but with the minutia of C++ syntax. I found this same thing happening throughout the book. Whole paragraphs simply disappear from the Python version of the text because Python’s much clearer syntax renders them unnecessary.
Hence one can concentrate more on “programming concepts” rather that worrying too much on language syntax and confusing the students mind. Eventually the student will also learn to choose the language best suited for his work and learning a new language will not be difficult any longer as his programming concepts foundation is pretty strong. This methodology, if incorporated in our education system, will do wonders and India will soon erase its image as Software Consumers and create the image of “Creators of future products”. We will not rely any longer on “outsourced” jobs. We shall have our own markets.
This book begins with a simple “hello world” program and goes till explaining a few data structure concepts. A few algorithms are also discussed en-route. To cut things short - Just Amazing! Must read. Hats off to the author.
As I had mentioned in this post about the top gear packaging activity that is going on for a few Science tools (more specifically Electronics), one review point that the packager comes across instantly is that “Do not change upstream code”. This is a Golden rule for packagers. Making these changes as patches in debian/ (for debian based distros ofcourse ) is highly recommended. One such tool for achieving this is DPATCH. kart linked me to this nice page which has a few details on dpatch. Still the page did not have a step by step how to, instead has tidbits. So here goes my how-to or just a documentation of what I learnt.
1. Install dpatch. sudo apt-get install dpatch
2. Go to “your_packages_top_directory”/debian and create a directory “patches”. (mkdir patches)
3. Inside this debian/patches directory create a file “00list”. The reason for this file is explained in the coming points.
4. Open up debian/rules in your favourite editor (I expect it to be emacs ofcourse ) and do the changes mentioned below.
* Add this line “include /usr/share/dpatch/dpatch.make” without the quotes at the top.
* Append to the config.status section “patch-stamp” before “configure”. This shall let the package know that there is a patch stamp that needs to be checked.
* In the “clean” section add “unpatch”. This ensures the patch is reverted when a make clean is performed.
5. Now save the debian/rules and execute the following command. “dpatch-edit-patch {patchname}”. Say for example the patch name is fixing_foo then the command is “dpatch-edit-patch fixing_foo”
6. This opens up a temporary shell where a copy of the source package is ready. Make the changes that you would want to do and exit the shell. Patch is created. Wow! (Check debian/patches directory)
7. Update this patch name in the 00list file that we created in point 3. This file will have the list of patches that needs to be applied in the specified order. Repeat this process until all the necessary changes to upstream is done and patches are ready.
Now give the package for a build. Sit back, relax and enjoy the pbuilder experience!