Aanjhan RANGANATHAN's blog » fun

Happy New Year 2009!!!

aanjhan — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:29:01 +0000

What a year 2008 has been for me. As mentioned in the last line of this post, it has indeed been life changing. Top Events of my life 2008.. Here it goes..

Lost my lovely little Nikon Coolpix L2 (I miss it even now)
Became a proud owner of Nikon D60 DSLR
Became a Fedora Electronic Laboratory team member (The dev time line calls me a consultant )
Got my Ubuntu Membership Approved (Yes I have a @ubuntu.com and @fedoraproject.org email ids now )
GNUSim8085 was awarded FOSS India Award by LFY magazine
2nd time speaker at Freed.in (Will miss this year’s edition. Its like missing a family event )
NIT Calicut happened (3rd time) again. Miss that too this time around.
FOSS.IN 2008 Speaker. Was great to meet the known and unknown faces again.
Quite a few memorable trips with friends and colleagues. (I also did some snow sledging in the fag end of 2008)
Got Admitted to a World Top 15 Engineering and Applied Sciences University and shifted base to Switzerland.
I Quit my Nice Cosy Job as a senior Engineer and got back to Academic Environment and Research (Loving it!!)

And this year again, though I feel is not going to be that life changing is definitely going to be full of challenges, travel, loads of photography and a lot and lot of learning. Looking forward to 2009!!

PS: Around Christmas and New Year Abhijeet (I linked your flickr account. Happy now?? ) and I went around a few cities in Swiss and here goes their photos. Enjoy!!!

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Full Flickr Sets Luzerne, Bern, Les Diablerets, Montreux

See you later India, Bonjour/Hallo Switzerland!!

aanjhan — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:14:55 +0000

If everything goes well, in about 48 hours from now I should be aboard the flight to Mumbai (BOM) from where I will be saying “Bye Bye India” for quite a few months to come at least. Its that time when one meets up with friends, family and exchange wishes, get blessings from the elderly and the usual running around that one has to do before a relocation. When I first mentioned about this move here, it seemed a long way ahead but here it is.. Just under 2 days left.

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Last weekend was as memorable as the before one, since a couple of my good friends Ashish and Amit biked down to my place to spend the weekend. Yes!Ã‚Â You read it right, they drove from Bangalore to Chennai on Rane’s Thunderbird. We went on a drive on the Scenic East Coast Beach Highway stopping at Crocodile Bank and Taj’s Fisherman cove. A nice and relaxed weekend it was. For the entire flickr set click here (until the pic with the gun was taken this time) . Ashish has already blogged on it in his new blog here.

It was just not about food, travel and picnic last weekend. Hacking got its fair share too. Some updates below.

Commited the gnusim8085 changes done at the Bangalore Hackathon to the svn after a quick re check. Thanks Onkar.
Tested the gnusim8085.exe package for Windows. Works great with a few minor issues (like Syntax highlighting, url linking etc.). Also a installer for the same is in progress. Check screenshot here
Onkar has already ported gnusim8085 to gtksourceview 2. Seems like quite a few clean ups also done.
VHDL Emacs mode was packaged for Fedora by Rakesh Pandit and Review request even raised. But only to find out later that it was already a part of emacs-common. I was deeply disappointed at that quality of search done by me before raising that wishlist request. But then, everybody has a bad day. Sorry Chacha_Choudhary.
gResistor upstream has now uploaded a fresh tarball with the full copy of the licenses included. So I have updated the package on revu. But seems like it is already too late for intrepid. But I must thank Pop Gheorghe for the update.

ToDo : We have been hit by the Wine bug 3915. If someone has faced this issue and managed to fix this please leave a comment. If we dont get this setup right, it will be very difficult for us to go in search of a Windows machine to test our gnusim8085 whenever we have to make a release. Have attached the screenshot of the issue above. Thanks in Advance.

And finally, see you from Switzerland. And do follow me on Identi.ca as I will be posting updates more frequently there until I get settled in the new country.

Much needed break! Weekend at NIT Calicut.

aanjhan — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:13:27 +0000

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

Holi Holi Holi!!

aanjhan — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:36:13 +0000

It was one of the most memorable holi I have ever had or may be I will have for quite a few years to come I guess. Loads of fun, colours, food and more! Complete set here