All Sorts Of Things

Planning FUDCon Pune

2011-10-18T18:04:00.000+05:30

I'm in charge of Wireless and Charging Points at FUDCon, Pune.

http://openetherpad.org/fudcon-pune-planning contains the ongoing planning details.

Pycon India 2011, Pune

2011-09-20T23:59:00.000+05:30

So I attended Pycon India for the first time in three years it has existed. It was held in Bangalore the previous two years, and I was being lazy.
Ratnadeep was put up at my place. I had originally decided not to attend the tutorials, but then since Ratnadeep wanted to attend, I decided to show up as well.

Day 1

Tutorials on Friday was a bit boring, considering they were long, and I wasn't exactly the student types. Navin Kabra had a session about Web API Programming using Python where I lingered for a while. I did however attend a part of Anand Chitipothu's session on Functional Programming. I liked the slides he made using Landslide. Must check that out sometime.

Day 2

Raymond Hettinger had his keynote on why Python is awesome. His talk highlighted what makes Python different from other languages. Then Anand Chitipothu had a talk on pyjs, which is a way to compile python code into JS. The talk was good, especially the AST parts. After lunch I went to attend Sajjad's talk on developing Android apps using Python. Track 2 was jampacked with more people waiting outside, so the talk was moved to Track 1 which was more spacious. Noufal then took the stage with his talk on using Emacs as a Python IDE, which then got side tracked to org mode. The rest of the day I spent chit-chatting.

Day 3

Sunday meant, my talk had to be delivered soon, and my slides were somewhat ready. Nevertheless I spend some (a_lot_of) time retouching the slides and doing up code examples. I was there, half-attentive to Jace's talk on the LastUser Service. It looked interesting and I am planning to use it for the FUDCon COD installation. After lunch and coffee, (and an indecent where I mixed up my laptop with Anurag's, and spend multiple attempts trying to log-in into his system), I gave my talk, on developing Django Apps based on REST Architecture (slides| video). For what it's worth, it wasn't very well received by the audience. Also this was the largest audience I ever had. Met people and photographed then the rest of the day.

All in all a good conference. Kudos to the organising team.

Below are some of the pictures I took at the conference.

The rest of FOSS.IN (and some of noname.conf)

2010-12-21T18:13:00.005+05:30

Last you heard me talk about day 1 at FOSS.IN, while day 2 was in progress.

Now I will talk about Day 2 and Day 3 and noname, way after they all got over.

Morning I was feeling fit and I found myself at FOSS.IN just in time to catch href="http://0pointer.de/blog">Lennart talking on Open Surround Sound and href="http://www.pulseaudio.org/">PulseAudio. After that we went Upstairs (that's the phrase I will use for each time I had no interesting talks to attend and I would sit with the others, laptops open and chat[i.e. not over network]). Oh wait, no, we set up the Fedora Booth, and were clicking pictures there, of the booth, and media, and buttons and the White Fedora Table Cloth and us. Two things which I noticed at the Fedora Booth:
1. Media was more popular than the buttons.
2. x86_64 media was in high demand, and we did not have any (maybe next time [not next FOSS.IN though{as maybe they wont have it next year}]).

Post lunch I went over to Hall 3 where the Fedora MiniConf was running.

While I was blogging about the previous day, Amit Shah talked about Virtualisation in Fedora, Aditya Patwari talked about Fedora Summer Coding and his experiences of it, Arun SAG talked about Emacs, its plugins and how to get them packaged, then he announced that he was doing the packaging workshop upstairs and he took most of my audience away with him(despite my protests), I talked about Four Seasons of Code(that went fast as there were very few people and I did not want to linger as they showed no interest), Neependra talked about using ftrace and Suchakra talked about using embedded linux via a web-browser(he mentioned he was a Soft Hacker). There was half an hour left so Rahul started with his famous Fedora Packaging from Scratch workout. All was well.

After that I went Upstairs. I guess.

No, I was in James Morris' talk on Linux Kernel Security. Later in the evening Fahrenheit (with guitarist being Gaurav Vaz's brother) performed, some covers and some own songs. I enjoyed the show.

After the show me, Saleem, Sheela and the group of foreigners ended up at a lounge called Don'tRememberWhat. Had fun talking to Olivier Crete of Collabra. The best part was when he asked me why weren't they playing Bollywood music and that he likes the song and dance sequences, and I told him those don't happen in real life. Suddenly the DJ started playing Bollywood music and then the family at the other table got up and started dancing. Sheela joined in, and so did the rest of us. Lennart preferred to remain seated though.

~ * ~

Next day, Day 3 I was early to catch Dimitris talking about scaling web apps. It was informative, I took a few notes (just a few?). For the next hour I was Upstairs though I managed to peek into Mahendra talking about CouchDB apps.

Post lunch I was generally lost, maybe Upstairs. I realised something must be happening in the Wikipedia miniconf, so I dropped in. Erik was talking about intresting wikipedia stuff, I was feeling drowsy, so I went to get a cup of coffee. By the time I returned, he was over with the talk. I went back to being lost, Upstairs. I was waiting for Aanjhan's keynote.

His keynote was titled "A Hackaer's Apology". It was an interesting collection of stories and stuff from Aanjhan's stint with FOSS. Atul Chitnis took the stage next. He talked for a long time and (among other things) thanked all the people associated with FOSS.IN over the years.

The Raghu Dixit Project came next with an awesome and mind-blowing performance. Having heard them for the first time last year FOSS.IN, I had listened to their songs over the year. I enjoyed the show a lot.

Me, Saleem, Rahul and Ram had dinner at Subway. We spend the entire night discussing about FOSS, Life, God, Human Beings and among other things, concluded that I was an anarchist. :-O

~ * ~

Next day I was at noname.conf at Jaaga. The place is a bit strange looking with plants growing on watery rotate-able walls, a metal structure with hardware hanging in a bunch in the middle. I met Roshan and Vignesh there. It was pleasant to see them. Saleem was also there. For the time I stayed at noname.conf, it seemed like a Barcamp of sorts with mainly startup crowd. I left with Roshan and Vignesh, had coffee at Cafe Coffee Day and visited UB City, with all it's grandeur. There I had the idea of XKCD on your wallpaper and dicussed it with Roshan and Vignesh. It works now.

Night till the next afternoon I stayed at Souvik's place, and met up with Gaurav, Rangeen and Saikat. By Sunday mid-night I was home.

XKCD on your GNOME background

2010-12-20T16:02:00.006+05:30

Hi,

I wrote this little script which would download the latest XKCD comic and put it centred onto your GNOME Wallpaper.

It screenscraps the latest XKCD homepage and looks for the image URL, it then downloads it to /tmp and uses gconftool-2 to set it as your background.

Try it out and lemme know if you like it.

I have put a cron like
0 15 * * mon,wed,fri /path/to/xkcd.py
That will update my wallpaper at 3 p.m every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

#TODO:
* Would like to make it Desktop independent.
* Would like to have the mouseover text below the comic.

#UPDATE:
Thanks to andy(see comments) this script uses JSON to get the data, and avoid screenscraping.

Day 1 at FOSS.IN/2010 (and maybe some of Day 2)

2010-12-16T14:45:00.004+05:30

(Yes, I am blogging after a long time.)

And I am blogging about FOSS.IN, Day - 1, while I am almost halfway though Day 2. Well that I because I am now sitting through Aditya Patwari's talk on Fedora Student's Contributing a.k.a Fedora Summer Coding, and waiting for my talk which would start soon. Yes, I am nervous, as I always am before my talks, and I wanted to do something to take the pressure off. ;-)

(Aditya is a surprisingly good speaker.)

Coming back to yesterday, I was sick. I took some medicines in the morning which kept me going through the day and I did enjoy a lot yesterday. I went in and met old friends from last FOSS.IN, and Ramkumar with his huge desktop-like-laptop with the heavy-expensive-doubleUSB-nonprinted-keyboard. With a cup of coffee we went to attend the talks.

(I see people leaving.)

Kishore Bhargava kicked-off with the opening ceremony (read lighting of diyas). Danese Cooper had her keynote on Wikipedia technologies. She started off with "Wikipedia != WikiLeaks". The talk was a good insight into the tools and practices that wikipedia uses to manage its backend. I took a few notes, for later reading.

(Arun SAG is telling the audience how to package emacs plugins. Arun is an engaging speaker.)

I had lunch. The queue was long, for the lunch and outside the men's. I had less food because I wasn't well. After lunch I went into Balbir Singh's talk on Operating System Caches in a Virtualised Environment. I wasn't very interested in the talk, I was waiting for Lennart's talk on systemd, hear from the horse's mouth. The talk was good (and the confetti dropping from the ceiling), I could understand most of what he was saying, and I even managed to ask a question. ;-)

(The hall always starts getting empty before I am to talk.)

I didn't want to know about hacking LibreOffice. So I spend the hour chatting. Next I went into Philip Tellis's talk on Boomerang, which was a client side JavaScript code that measured latency on the client side and send it back to a central server. The software looked good, but fishy.

(Arun is still going strong with the specfile for emacs-identica plugin)

Rahul had his keynote next about the Failures of Fedora, and I was looking forward to that. It was informative, interesting at parts. After the talk they were starting off with a video interview of Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. We the Fedora Public decided to skip that and do a dinner party of our own.

(My talk of Four Seasons of Code is next, and I'm nervous)

The dinner party went good. Food was nice with all the beer (I did not drink) and the drunk brawls about git behaviour with pipes. Back at the hotel it was another war to get the wireless running with one faulty router.

(That's all, Arun is done with his talk, I'll go up now. Bye!)
(My talk's over, I'll just add a few links now and submit this.)

FSoC Weekend Hack Sessions

2010-08-02T12:56:00.002+05:30

This weekend me and Gaurav sat together and had a look at how FSoC had been shaping up and where it was headed.

Lots of issues were tackled over two days. Listing some of those down here:

Saturday:

• Revised method of setting values and admin credentials in app_settings.yml
• Revamped Admin Dashboard.
• Image upload issue for Certificate.
• FAS registration Module as a Plugin.
• Customisable approach to development.
• Comments and Journal sharing the same Model.
• Calender displaying task deadlines.

Sunday:

• Edit settings.yml from Admin Dashboard.
• More work on the Admin Dashboard.
• Program name Abbr. year. in settings.
• FutureFeature: Project description markup.
• Task date checking for Summer Coding mode.
• data_file should go.
• Summer Coding dates to be moved to a settings file.
• URL validation.
• Tabbed/Ajaxified Dashboard, Projects, Users view.
• Failing tests.
• Access Controls go to Models.

These are only the points I got to note down, other than this there were more minor issues handled. Next weekend we plan to sit again and hack. :-)

yum install sup

2010-06-17T13:39:00.004+05:30

I am happy to announce that sup has now been pushed to the Fedora updates-testing repository.

Now you can do

yum install sup --enablerepo=updates-testing

It took packaging three rubygem dependencies
* rubygem-net-ssh
* rubygem-rmail
* rubygem-lockfile

The package is rubygem-sup. Apparently all rubygems have to be named this way, regardless of whether it is an application or library.

Use it, test it and provide karma to the package, so I can push it to stable. :-)

rpmcat

2010-06-10T23:31:00.005+05:30

One of the ideas that came out of packaging rubygem dependencies for sup and sup itself, was a need of a script that would cat a specific file from an rpm. Since rpmls exists, the next logical step would be a rpmcat.

Rahul told me to go ahead and write it down. He also gave me a few pointers.

Here it is.
Copy it to your /usr/bin/ and do a chmod +x

Usage:
$ rpmcat <RPM> <full-file-path>
(get the full-file-path from rpmls)

Don't try random stuff. It will break! :-P

FAD Pune, haml and sup

2010-06-02T14:15:00.005+05:30

I was supposed to be working on and talking about Dorrie. But that meant I had to sync the F13 repository, which I was not prepared with.

So I started checking out haml and converted one of my FSoC templates to haml. That was fun. Takes some time to get the hang of, but it makes your templates really clean and beautiful. Here's a before/after.

Rahul then asked me why I was not packaging sup. I said that was because I had never packaged anything for Fedora before. He said now would be a good time to start.

So we started packaging sup. We made a rpm spec from the gem spec of sup. I found out that a lot of sup's dependencies were not packaged for Fedora. So I started with them first.

For the rest of Day1 and entire Day2 I spent making spec files and doing review requests.

I have two packages under review now. Another is on the way.

Hoping to get sup packaged for Fedora soon.
Yours,
Shreyank.

Sync RailsCasts

2010-05-17T18:56:00.001+05:30

Since Kushal has a local copy of Meet the Gimp, I decided to sync Railscasts locally.

I wrote a script. It's available on my github.

Do sent in comments.

Posted from GScribble.

Four Seasons of Code

2010-04-29T18:26:00.001+05:30

It started after a discussion with Sankarshan, Rahul and Kushal. We needed a system (a web application) to manage student projects. Google Summer of Code was using this framework called Melange. So I was thinking in the lines of developing a similar application using Ruby on Rails, which could be used by Fedora Summer Coding program or similar programs like the DGPLUG Summer Training.

I thought it up as in idea for this year's Fedora Summer Coding. But then I thought maybe I could start up on the project and develop some existing funtionality, so that the student coding on it would have an idea of what's in the books and get something to start on. Maybe add some new features or something.

I have been developing it for the past three weeks. I have some code which I have hosted on GitHub.

Here us a list of the features the web application currently has:

User Management:

* Authentication of three different types of users:

0. Guest user (unauthenticated user)

1. Admin

2. Mentors

3. Students

* Project listing and About page available to unauthenticated user.

* User listing.

* User profile with information about project activities.

Projects Ideas

* Mentors and Students able to add project ideas.

* Mentors can volunteer to mentor a project of their choice.

* Project proposers and mentors can edit project ideas.

* Project proposers can delete project ideas without any mentor.

* Admin can add/edit/delete all projects.

Proposals from students

* Students able to submit proposals for all projects.

* Students able to edit proposals.

Dashboard

* A user dashboard having current logged-in users project activities.

A lot more work needs to be done. I will soon create a task list for Fedora Summer Coding.

If you are a students who wants to work on FSoC as a part of Fedora Summer Coding follow guidelines mentioned in the wiki.

FSoC is liscenced under GNU AFFERO GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE version 3.

Posted from GScribble.

Defining various roles via ActiveRecord Associations using Ruby on Rails

2010-04-20T22:22:00.002+05:30

I have a User model. and I have a Project model.

Now a User could be associated with a Project in three ways,
* It could propose as project
* It could mentor a project
* It could be a student working on a project

I had added three foreign keys in my Project model,


  t.integer  "proposer_id"
  t.integer  "mentor_id"
  t.integer  "student_id"

Now how do I associate the three foreign keys with the User object?

Solution:

Add the following associations to your Project model:


  belongs_to :proposer, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "proposer_id"
  belongs_to :mentor, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "mentor_id"
  belongs_to :student, :class_name => "User", :foreign_key => "student_id"

Now you can access your user from the Project instance like this:


  @proposer = project.proposer
  @mentor = project.mentor
  @student = project.student

where project is an instance of Project model and proposer, mentor, student would be instances of the User model.

Foreign keys changed to match Rails conventions as proposed by Shakthi Kannan

Updates:

To access the assiciations from the User model, use the following associations:


  has_many :project_proposals, :class_name => "Project", :foreign_key => 'proposer_id'
  has_many :project_mentorships, :class_name => "Project", :foreign_key => 'mentor_id'
  has_many :project_internships, :class_name => "Project", :foreign_key => 'student_id'

From your user model you can access the associations from your User instance like this:


  @project_proposals = user.project_proposals
  @project_mentorships = user.project_mentorships
  @project_internships = user.project_internships

Posted from GScribble.

gscribble + blogger

2010-04-19T14:54:00.001+05:30

Hi,

Its been long I had been expecting Blogger support for Roshan Singh's gscribble.

This weekend Roshan sent me an RPM, and told me to test it. So that is what I am doing right now.

It fetches all my recent posts, and gives me an option to edit it. Although I do not get to see pictures in the 'Visual' mode.

Also it would have been great if I was able to write/edit my posts directly from the 'Visual' tab.

I see the gscribble logo I had made for Roshan on the notification area. Clicking it hides the gscribble window. Clicking it again, revives the window, but the tab switches to 'Visual' and the 'Categories' pane has to be resized again.

Now I'm going to publish this blog, but I see two buttons below: 'Post' and 'Publish'. Which one to click?

Posted from GScribble.

HTML attachments in sup

2010-03-26T15:25:00.005+05:30

For all those who don't know I've been using sup to read my office mails.

Sup has a terminal based UI, and like all other terminal based UIs it hates HTML attachments. Even I hate HTML attachments. But some people don't, and they continue to send mails in HTML.

Keying 'enter' on the attachment tells,

'Couldn't execute view command, viewing as text.'

It shows the entire HTML code and, that's ok if you know how to read HTML, but who wants to read html?

So enter pipe.

I press pipe '|' key which invokes the shell pipe on the attachment. Then I type in 'elinks' and press enter.

Voila.

P.S. : On Fedora, yum install elinks. Elinks is a terminal based web browser. :-)

RubyConf Day 2

2010-03-22T16:29:00.002+05:30

Sunday, March 22nd
Bangalore

I reached some 15 minutes late. Nick Sieger was already taking on "Exploring Rails 3 through choices". He was taking about/demoing some cool features coming up in Rails 3. I like the lazy querysets part, which was missing in Rails and was already available in Django.

Pradeep Elankumaran, a US based entrepreneur, then took the stage and talked about the huge trend of startups in India. The session was very interactive with Pradeep talking on "The Startup Mindset" and the people in the audience chipping in with their views/experiences on the startup trend. I was listening intently and reflecting why I am not ready to do a startup at this stage of my career. The discussion ate into the lunchtime.

Pradeep also mentioned and thanked Satish Talim and his efforts in spreading Ruby as a language in India.

Lunch was good.

Post lunch I sat through Sarah Taraporewalla's session "Taming of the View". She talked on how/why Rails erb templating sucks and mentioned other ways of developing good Views including a tool she developed called Slippers.

Vineet Tyagi talked next on how he build his Web Application Server, WebROaR. It was cool how he compared building an appserver to building a house and went ground up. He was very good at explaining stuff, it was like slitting in a classroom.

I then took a coffee break. I later realised I missed an awesome talk by Brian Guthrie on Advanced Ruby Idioms. The next talk "Hacking and learning from Open source Ruby (Open source Rubyisms)" by Sreekanth Vadagiri went totally over my head.

The last show at RubyConf India, 2010 was ThoughtWorks Founder/Chairman Roy Singham. I looked up Ry on the internet and found that he does not have a significant online presence, quite a surprising thing for the leader of a Company like ThoughtWorks. He talked about agile and other recent trends in the software industry and how they have been producing good results. There was a minor flame war between Roy and Obie when he mentioned the split between the Ruby and Rails community. He mentioned that the 28 women at RubyConf India was the maximum attendance for women at ant Ruby/Rails conference in the world. He wanted us to use our enthusiasm and help the not so fortunate people in India.

It was 6pm and I had to run to the BLR Airport for my flight at 8:30pm. What happened there is another story.

That's all.

RubyConf India, Day 1

2010-03-21T01:43:00.002+05:30

Saturday, March 21st
Bangalore

Arrived yesterday(Friday). Staying with my friends at BTM Layout. Its a bit far from the RubyConf venue.

Reached a bit late to the conference, (due to some venue location problems). I got my speaker/delegate kit. Ola Bini had already started with his talk on "The Future of Programming languages". He was talking of various programming languages and different programming paradigms, with special reference to Ruby.

Obie Fernandez came next with his talk titled - "Blood, Sweat and Rails 2010". His talk was pretty fun. From what I gather he worked with ThoughtWorks and now has his own company called HashRocket(both RubyConf India sponsors). His talk was filled with anecdotes from his work experience and their work culture. He also talked about Rails best practices. He used a lot of 'expletives' and was reprimanded for that.

After lunch(which was very tasty), I could be found sitting at the Sessions Hall(Track 1) looking through my slides and writing notes. There were a lot of people attending at the room, so I was a bit nervous. Ivan Porto Carrero could not make it to India so they set up a Skype video call for his talk - "IronRuby: The Ruby &.NET Love Child". There was a lot of technical glitches and the talk finished fast. I was next.

Because of all the confusion in the previous talk, the attendance had rarefied. I was feeling a bit more confident as a result(don't ask me why). I did not screw up much during my talk(except for the RoR requires a steep learning curve part, which the audience did not approve of; followed by a heated discussion). I had made my slides using Latex+Beamer(was an interesting experiment, came out good). I have shared them here.

I rushed to the main hall, where they were setting up a video call with Yukihiro (matz) Matsumoto, the developer/designer of Ruby. His talk was called 'Ruby 124C141+'. The name referred to a science fiction novel of a similar name. 124C41 meant "one to foresee for one", and he was basically all about the future of Ruby Language. His talk was interesting and informative. The audience went crazy.

After that I attended Sitting in Sai Venkatakrishnan & Hari Krishnan's talk "Concurrency patterns with Ruby"(which I did not pay much attention to) and "Mortal Kombat" presented by SlideShare Designer, Arun J and Lead Developer, Kapil Mohan(which was pretty interesting, and they addressed the code-embedded-in-template problem by using hquery).

I had lost my Relience Netconnect Datacard which I found mentioned on Gautam Rege's tweet.

Pre and during dinner I spent my time talking to the other delegate/speakers. Interacting with them was good fun. I had to leave at 8:30pm, otherwise I would not have got a bus back.

Stay tuned for Day 2.

GNUnify '10 or How I managed not to screw up my talk on Dorrie

2010-02-26T14:54:00.004+05:30

Kushal Das just came out with his blog post on his Python Workshop at GNUnify '10 and I realised I hadn't published any on my experiences.

So here goes.

I sent in my proposal for GNUnify '10 on 5th of Feburary, which was apparently the last day. So when the first schedule came out, I wasn't listed and my proposal showed a "Pending" status, so I thought maybe I would visit as a delegate.

By some twist of fate the proposal suddenly got accepted, and since my talk was on Dorrie, I realised that meant I had to add some more features to it so that my talk is not the same as the one I gave at FOSS.IN/2009.

Unfortunately there was little time to do that and combined with my sudden realisation the day before GNUnify was to start, that it would start on Friday(the next day) and not Saturday, I found myself at the event without any slides or new features.

Day 1, GNUnify I could not do anything useful as my laptop was being used by Mr. Amit Shah, the KVM developer. I however attended both his talks and found them quite interesting. (Was wondering why KVM is never demonstrated as an example by professors teaching Computer Science students about Virtual Machines and how much interest that would gather from the classroom.)

That night and the next morning (Day 2), I spend trying to add proper spin building messages into the web interface and getting a "Download ISO" link up. Then I updated my slides.

Right before my talk Hiemanshu Sharma was talking about "Building your own Fedora Remix" and I thought that would be an apt introduction to the next talk (which was my talk on Dorrie), which dealt with a "Web interface for building your own Fedora Remix". Unfortunately, Hiemanshu's talk was predominantly lacklustre and lost quite a bit of the audience.

I went up next with my talk on Dorrie. This talk, as compared to one I delivered at FOSS.IN, was went pretty awesome. I was talking and not blabbering and managed to connect with whatever people were present in the audience.

Here is a picture of me waiting for the "Download ISO" link to turn up.(Courtesy Kushal Das)

You can download my slides from here.

Mallus, Fish and Coconut Oil

2010-01-31T02:32:00.003+05:30

It's been two weeks since I moved in with Minto and Praveen and I am having quite a bit of fun.

For starters I have cut down heavily on Outside Food and am having more home cooked food. Simple but tasty home cooked stuff. Bliss.

I always liked cooking. I never could, because I'm too lazy to learn. I never would because I do not like cooking for just myself. Life gets only as good as you can share it, I believe.

So I cook some stuff now and then. Recently I have specialised in the art of cooking Dal Khichdi. The Mallus like it, so I am happy.

We have unwritten rules for the kitchen. For each food item, one of us is the Head Chef and the rest have to listen to him and help regardless of all conflicts. Almost always yields good results (and we know who to blame if something goes wrong).

Today we got some Sardine and a Surmai Fish from the Hadapsar Mandi. We cooked Dal Khichdi with Sardine fried in Coconut Oil for lunch. It was strange because I had always heard Mallus had food cooked in Coconut Oil and I had only used Coconut Oil on my hair, body and door hinges. Putting tablespoons of Parachute Coconut Oil in the frying pan, watching it melt and thinking that I would soon have food cooked in it was, you know..

Lunch tasted good.

A nap and a shower later I took my Mallu roomies to Pune University road, which is quite far from Magarpatta City, to a Bengali Restaurant called Radhika for a taste of some good Bengali Cuisine. We ordered a platter with Mutton Curry and Fried Rohu fish. I also ordered Shorshe Ilish when Praveen declared he does not like the mustard taste. Even Minto found the taste a 'bit intense'. So I ordered another Hilsa without the mustard gravy which the Mallus enjoyed (probably). We finished up with Mishti Doi and Jolbhora Sandesh.

Surmai is waiting the Freezer to be cooked tomorrow for lunch.

New Look for Dorrie

2009-12-17T18:17:00.005+05:30

Thanks to Hiemanshu, Dorrie now sports a cool new look.

FOSS.IN - Day 5 and TRDP

2009-12-07T21:39:00.003+05:30

Hey all,

Apologies for the late blog, but since there is no FOSS.IN - Day 6, I could write this at my leisure.

Rahul said that he was sick and would be coming later. I was late and I had missed the bus and so had Debayan and Kedar, so we took an auto. I went there and started hacking Dorrie. I was surprised to see that Hiemanshu had committed a new template for Dorrie already. With that and Glezos's patch I had a lot of code with me and the changes needed to be committed. Meanwhile Rakesh pinged and asked whether I had any work for him. ;-)

Soon I realised I should be attending some talks as well. There was nothing that looked more interesting than the Gnome Project of the Day. So I went into the auditorium and continued coding in there.

There was Tobias Mueller giving a talk on Gnome bug triaging. Then Dimitris and Sayamindu shared the stage talking about the advantages of localising one's software. Their slide had a great title! They ranted for quite sometime on the existing translation workflow and advised using Transifex.

A lady (whose name I cannot recollect) gave a talk/demo on Anjal that turned out to be a intuitive mail client based on Evolution and had cool features like tabbed browsing. Next Olivier Crête talked on Telepathy and Empathy. Meanwhile I had managed to commit my changes to the dorrie git and thus I left the auditorium.

Mrinal Kalakrishnan's gave the closing keynote on Open Source Robotics. He talked about ROS also known as the Linux for Robotics (or something like that). He showed some cool videos and code demos to an applauding crowd. Then Atul Chitnis talked for sometime.

And then The Raghu Dixit Project started performing. I had never heard them before. They was just awesome. They sung Kannada and Hindi Folk-Rock fusion. I was at the very front, head-banging to whatever I could head-bang to. Someone had this idea of playing the live twitter-stream of #fossdotin, and it worked out well. Raghu Dixit was exceptional with his crowd interaction. He would stop playing to get back-benchers to come forward and he would scold if people clapped along to an emotional love song. I loved the performance!

Dinner was quiet at the Dosa Place (which had a sign board written in only Kannad [you get a lot of those in Bengaluru] and served Masale and Rave Dose).
We chatted until two. Then we went and slept.

I had truly an amazing time at FOSS.IN

Day 4 - FOSS.IN

2009-12-05T00:33:00.002+05:30

Friday, December 4nd 2009,
NIMHANS Convention Centre,
Bangalore, India

Today was the best day (so far) in FOSS.IN 2009.

I got up in time, had breakfast and reached the venue in time. Rahul Sundaram said he was a bit feverish. I got onto hacking Dorrie as soon as I could. Hiemanshu was very enthusiastic to contribute to Dorrie UI and I gave him commit access to the Dorrie git.

I then attended Krishnakant Mane's talk on Pylons. He is visually disabled. I liked his enthusiasm towards open source. He demonstrated to us the Pylons framework with the help of his a11y tools. I found Pylons quite similar to 'my precious' Ruby on Rails. That was cool!

I came out and had lunch. Hiemanshu and Jeorg Simon wanted to go to a Shiv Temple at Old Airport road. They asked me and I went along. The temple was awesome with a huge Shiva Idol and an unmelting ice Shiva Linga and all. It was a good place to visit. Me and Hiemanshu gifted Jeorg a Laughing Buddha.

Back at FOSS.IN Dimitris Glezos had already downloaded Dorrie code and was giving me some useful tips. He pointed me out to a paid mockup building tool. Before long he told that he was sending me a patch. He was ranting away to glory about GIT and advised me to use Mercurial.

I then went to the day's keynote by Philip Tellis. The talk called "Shut up and hack!" was awesome. Its inspired awe, it demo'd bits and pieces of code and showed how useless-but-awesome they were. And he got the audiance involved in his l33t shell piped commands.

Then followed an outstanding Rock Performance by the band "Blues before Sunrise". Sheela Sequira did a good job as the lead singer. I liked it! :-)

We then came to the top floor of our Pai Viceroy Hotel for a dinner party. Beer was aplenty. Highlights were Ramkumar Not Knowing Who/What Jane Is/Was And People Taking His Case, Lenny/PulseAudio Rocks/Sucks and Kusal Dash Can't Pronounce His Name Right Says Kishore (# apt-get me -a beer) Bhargava.

Was fun! ;-)

Day 3 - FOSS.IN

2009-12-04T01:16:00.003+05:30

Thursday, December 3nd 2009,
NIMHANS Convention Centre,
Bangalore, India

Dear folks,

I went and started hacking Dorrie straight away. I am a bit drowsy today. So I'll open up my twitter stream to check what I was upto.

Wait.

Ok. So we were all wearing the SaniSoft sponsored KDE Hoodies today. A lot of us, thanks to Pradeepto. He was being quite generous with the swag last evening. It was KDE PoTD today, so it made sense.

I was getting livecd-creator to work for me, when I decided to check the schedule and discovered that I had missed a lot of Lakshman Prasad's talk on Django internals. I went in just in time to satisfy my RoR ego. :-D

Then I spent the next hour switching between Ramkumar's talk on cPython and Lennart's talk on Pulse Audio internals. He was 'crappy'fing quite a lot of libraries and advertising his own libraries as the best ones to use. Guess a lot of people hate him for some obvious reasons. He is a good speaker though.

Lunnh went quick. I spent a lot of time trying to convince Susmit and Gang why I was not wasting time and waiting for my livecd to build. tThey compared it with "My code is compiling". #strange folks

I went into Rahul sundaram's talk on Package Kit post-lunch. It was pretty good. I got to meet Debayan again, he was busy preparing slides for his workout-listed-as-talk. I wrote some code for Dorrie there.

Debayan took the stage next. His talk on Indic OCR was exceptional. His work in the field has been very impressive and so has been his initiative. He had just returned from Chennai with a Round Table on "Technology for the disabled( or something on those lines)". He is an awesome speaker and he left the little audience in the auditorium dumbfound and crying awesomeness. (Am I being a bit over the top here?)

*break*

[Meanwhile, I stole a visit to the KDE PoTD. It was like totally stuffed with people. Apparently it wasn't because of the free swag(as much as I'd like to believe). It was the real deal. Of what I was following on Twitter, they were doing some real cool talks and hacks and bug-fixes. Kapital-K Kudos to the KDE folks and Pradeepto the uber-Kool KDE Rockstar!(not to mention the KDE folks jumping around outside the venue for a photo shoot by Gopal and Devdas).]

I spend most of the rest of the time hacking around the Fedora Booth. There were a few eager folks asking for F12 ISO's and repos(??), which I sincerely provided. A cool dude called Mourya popped up and clicked my pic and twitpic'd me. That was awesome!

I did not attend Miloch's talk. I was sitting outside and following the reviews on Twitter as usual. It was too hardware-ish anyway :-P. When Debayan came out we went for a drink at a dingy bar.

Nothing important happened after that except that me and Rangeen managed to convince Debayan to get his Indic-OCR packaged for Fedora.

Heh! :-)

Day 2 - FOSS.IN

2009-12-02T23:12:00.003+05:30

Wednesday, December 2nd 2009,
NIMHANS Convention Centre,
Bangalore, India

This time I woke up early enough to catch the bus! :o)

The bus discussion was mostly taken up by Ramkumar's rant of how crappy Pulse Audio was and the idea of rewiting it, and Rahul Sundaram arguing how we sometimes need to shut our eyes and deal with crappy code. A classic argument between Usability and Good Code followed. The discussion continued until we reached the venue and it was time to start the Fedora Project of the Day.

We were assigned Auditorium 3. We started with Jeorg Simon's talk on the Security spin. Though I did not understand most of the technical details, I found that Jeorg was a good speaker. Though he frequently ranted about his English, I found that it was pretty OK and the German guy did a pretty good job.

[The Fedora Project of the Day mainly comprised of talks, and introductions to workouts. As the FOSS.IN workouts were flexible, it made sense for the speakers to use the auditorium to give the attendees a idea about the Workouts which then could be hacked for the next three days.]

Rahul Sundaram followed next with his Workout on "How to integrate a Free and Open Source software into Fedora". He demonstrated a live package build on the stage. The internet was a little slow and so was the Fedora Project wiki due to some maintenance issues, and Rahul kept up his constant rant.

It was followed by lunch. After lunch I got a multi-colored LED stuck to my collar, just like Kushal and a lot others had on their FOSS.IN Cards. We also spent a lot of time talking with the Greek (Dimitris Glezos) and the Germans (Joerg Simon) about Indian Cusine and how it differed from their food.

We wend back into the auditorium where Kedar Sovani was giving his talk on "Fedora ARM". I wasn't very interested in that so I spend most of the time updating my slides and getting nervous about my upcoming workshop.

Kushal Das took the stage next Combining his "Deadly Combo" talk with his b00g workout. I was then busy building a repo for my Dorrie workout. Soon it was Rahul Sundaram on the stage trying to build a Fedora Remix 'Live in Concert'. The talk about the Kickstart and everything was really nice, except that it stuck infinitely at the place where he was actually supposed the build the Live CD.

I went next. It was my first Talk in a Conference of this stature. I was nervous and fumbled a lot of times. But then I gained confidence and I demo'd my stuff live. It did not break (It never does, but knowing Murphy...) *I thought Glezos wasn't paying attention*. People were mainly concerned when was Dorrie going to be deployed, Susmit and Himanshu helped me out here saying it was a Fedora Infrastructure decision and I added that it still needed 3-4 months to gain enough maturity.

Susmit followed next with his Workout introduction to "Redefining the Fedora Distribution Process". I Liked the idea of using GeoIP to point a person looking for Fedora Media of a place closer to his home, instead of him going through the entire list. I suggested we could ask the user his/her location on a World Map, as GeoIP is not always reliable. I don't thing Susmit liked the idea, but anyway.

With this we wrapped up the Fedora Project of the Day with the promise of workouts later today and tomorrow onwards. I spend some time idling away, building a Fedora repo on my External Hard Drive, reading Tweeviews (Tweet reviews) on Herald Welte's talk and eve's dropping on the two BoFs going on around me. Kinda felt pleasant and sleepy. Sayamindu hacking on something beside me looked tired too.

An hour and a lot of shouting/screaming Kushals later we found ourselves having a nice dinner and beer at a place close to our Hotel called "Gufha". We billed 18,000 INR. Damn you Kushal!

[*I thought Glozos wasn't paying attention* to my talk on Dorrie but then he spent some time with me after dinner discussing web frameworks and why he liked Django and liked that I used Django for developing Dorrie.]

Somewhat tired/drunk/sleepy now. I guess no late night BoF in the hotel room today. Rahul Sundaram snoring away as usual.

Ok. Good Night!

FOSS.IN - Day 1

2009-12-01T21:34:00.004+05:30

Tuesday, December 1st 2009,
NIMHANS Convention Centre,
Bangalore, India

As usual I woke up late, not very late, but late enough to miss the cab that took FOSS.IN speakers from Pai Viceroy Hotel to the FOSS.IN venue. I had to take an auto rickshaw to the venue. Not surprisingly the rickshaw dropped me at NIMHANS Hospital and said that "there are wards inside". I paid him 20 bucks and asked/walked my way to the Convention Centre.

There was a line for delegate registration starting to form outside one of the gates. I went straight in. Kishore Bhargava was waiting at the door. I went in. There was a group of early arrivers that formed a huddle just inside the gate. I recognised Ramkumar Ramchandra a.k.a artagnon whom I had met once before in Barcamp Kolkata and had been following on Twitter. It was cool that I knew a lot of folks almost personally, although had never met them before just through Twitter.

I caught up with Kartik Mistry and Pradeepto, whom I had met before. Soon I found myself a part of a BoF on the 1st floor (also in the sense that we were sitting on the ground).

Then we went into the Opening ceremony where Atul Chitnis was speaking. I kinda spend most of his talk trying to mimic the "Talk is Cheap, Show me the Code" style into my spoof poster (meet me if you want to see how it stands). Me and Rahul Sundaram had the idea of making a T-shirt out of it, but that did not happen (yet).

Atul was being quite strong in his opinions which was kinda OK but not necessarily necessary(you know, just for the effect!). Atul was followed by Sayamindu's talk on "Reading, discovering and publishing e-books". It was ok. I was hungry because I had skipped breakfast. So me and Vignesh went out and got egg-puffs.

After I came back the talk was almost over. After that I was kinda roaming about when I found myself in Anant Narayanan's "Making Identity on the web rock" session. I was planning to attend the workout, but did now know it would be staring so early and without informing me (??!!). Anyway the audi was so full that Anant decided to make it into a talk. It was interesting. Siddhesh Poyarekar came in with his libyahoo workout next. But I went upstairs to participate in Anant's workout. We were meant to hack Weave. This is what I chose to work on.

Soon it was time for the day's keynote by Dimitris Glezos. The talk was ... wait for it ... Legendary. I was sitting on the last seat of the auditorium, twitting and following the #fossdotin search trend. Glezos was all over!

After that we had lunch at the venue. When Sheela came and asked whether we wanted to leave or not, I thought it was 11 p.m. or something, turned out it was just 7:30 p.m. We came back to the hotel.

Rahul Sundaram is already asleep. A lot of us are in Pradeepto's room, having a BoF of FOSS.IN Day 1, and me blogging.

Enough. Bye.

Dorrie

2009-11-26T16:57:00.003+05:30

Hi,

I take pleasure to announce that the First Cut of Dorrie is out.

Dorrie is a Web Interface to build customised Fedora Spins and Remixes.

It now allows users to:

Select a name of their Spin.
Select a Kickstart File to base it upon.
Select Language and Timezone.
Select Individual Packages as well as Package Groups.
Build and Download the modified Kickstart file.

I will also take this opportunity to announce that I will be conducting a workout on Dorrie at FOSS.IN. The workout wiki is nothing more than the default template as I write this blog, but I will fill it up with essential details as soon as I get the login details from the organisers. Do watch that page if you wish to attend FOSS.IN and do participate in the workout if it looks attractive.

The workout will mainly focus on building and downloading Live CD from kickstart but I would also appreciate Interaction Designers to help me out with the Workflow Design.

A lot of work needs to be done to make Dorrie a success. I hope the FOSS.IN workout acts as a catalyst in its development.

Peace,
Shreyank Gupta.
Developer - Dorrie

Fallback

2009-08-22T00:56:00.002+05:30

Rahul (mether) Sundaram proposed this idea of a web-application to make Fedora remixes/spins.

I had decided to implement it using Ruby on Rails (surprising?).

I had already parsed the comps into a MySQL database schema. I then filed a ticket to the Fedora Design Team for a mock-up UI. I am still waiting for a response on this.

The name of the application is yet to be decided.

The next hurdle is to parse/build kickstart files. There are two ways of doing that:

Writing my own kickstart parser in Ruby.
Using the already existing and extensively used pykickstart - a Python library for manipulating kickstart files.

While the fate of the project was already decided at this point, I decided to give it another shot by asking around in the kickstart-list.

Well now its final. The web application would be developed using Django.

Hence I would not only be able to use pykickstart and thus avoid writing a parser from scratch, but I would also be able to integrate the application with FAS.

P.S. - This is the second time a missing or poorly written Ruby parser has let me down. While I am all for the far-more-superior framework of Ruby on Rails when building web-apps, I can't help but admire the advantage Django has when it comes to integration with existing and awesome Python libraries that do cool stuff.

Tab Auto-Completion in Python Shell

2009-08-21T15:19:00.004+05:30

Strangely enough, I discovered that I do not get bash-like auto-completion in my python interactive shell.

Looking up helped.

Just need to have a file called .pythonrc in your home directory containing the following:


#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys

try:
 import readline
except ImportError:
 print "Module readline not available."
else:
 import rlcompleter
 readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")

Apparently, that was not enough. I also needed to add the following line to my .bashrc file (in my home directory again).

export PYTHONSTARTUP=~/.pythonrc

That's all. Open a new shell and start the python shell.

And enjoy auto-completion!

Dear Juniors,

2009-08-15T17:47:00.003+05:30

Its the start of a new academic year and I know you feel very fresh after a long stretch of summer vacations. Hope you enjoyed them to the fullest.

But now that you are back to college, the usual worry crops up:

"Will I get a decent job?"

You tell me "Placements are poor!". I say it was inevitable. With the software companies having more on their plates than they can eat and the recent economic chew-up, this scenario was more than expected. Lets say its sad luck, so now what?

For those in final year, my advise is don't let the last few fun days of your lives go to waste looking for a job. Its not time yet. This can be your most productive year in college. There is another whole year of you life you can learn.

Yes, learn. And don't just learn something because you can learn. Learn because you need to. So how does that work?

Think of something you like. Something new you want to develop. A brilliant idea. Its natural you may not have the requisite knowledge to get it done. List down the ways it can be done. Google up. Ask for help on IRC, drop mails to mailing lists. Communicate. Get people to appreciate your idea and contribute to its enrichment. Use other's experience. Chalk up a plan.

Once you have a plan in place draw up a time-line. Make it flexible. A time-line is very important as it keeps the idea afloat. List down the minimum things you need to learn in order to make something which minimally resembles your idea. Learn.

This way of learning is fun as you have a motivation for learning stuff. Its as if you are building a stair in order to reach up. Always keep the goal in mind when learning. Relate how each and every detail fits in with your goal.

Once you think you can start with building your stuff, start on it. Put the rest of your learning as and when you require it. There'll be obstacles, many of them. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Before asking questions, look up and try gathering information yourself. And ask valid, strong and complete questions. The stronger and more complete a question is, the more easier it will be for the other person to help you out. Never look of spoon-fed solutions. Read up, understand the context. You will feel as if you solved the problem without help. Its a different level of excitement altogether.

As a developer one can never stop learning. There is just too many stuff to learn. Its a whole world out there to explore.

Well then coming back to the problem at hand. Once you have something minimal ready, release it. Do not wait for the correct moment. "Release early, Release broken" as they say. Its natural to have snags and edges. You will get enough feedback to help you sustain your motivation.

Where you go from here onward is entirely upto you.

Join a community you want to be a part of. Communicate with people. Build reputation. Discuss matters. Ideas are just waiting to be born and implemented.

Enjoy the journey, do not worry about where the path leads to. Wherever you reach by the time you finish college, I'm sure you'll have found your place.

This is why we love python!

2009-05-28T13:40:00.000+05:30

Well, this is what Kushal said, and I agree completely.

I wanted to sort a dictionary by value. I asked Kushal.
He said, "I don't know. You can sort it by key. Maybe you have to do manually!"

I went ahead and googled...

And this is how we do it:

alist = sorted(alist.iteritems(), key=lambda (k,v): (v,k))

Nightro

2009-05-21T08:29:00.002+05:30

This is perhaps the most interesting way I have blogged!

I am sitting outside my flat door because I forgot to take the keys to office yesterday. Actually I couldn't find it. So I went without it. Why did I do it?

I returned back to my GusetHouse/Flat at 1 a.m. and knocked incessently. No one answered. I called the caretaker again and again (over the phone, which is switched-off now because its out of charge; and before it got out of charge it got out of balance [I won't say how]). He didn't receive my call. So I went down and asked the guard. He said "Kharak singh does not live here, woh lamba rehta hai (he lives tall??)". Anyway he called another guy from the security cabin, and he tried calling some another guy with my phone. No one was picking up.

So I told him I would go up and try knocking again. And if no one answers, I would go back to my office. I came up and knocked, no answer.

Ten minutes later the guard and the other guy(Kamal I guess, or not maybe) came up and saw me squatting on the floor outside my flat door, with my laptop on my lap trying to connect to the Wireless Broadband Modem inside. They laughed and asked me to come along. They would try and get me a room for the night.

So together we went around the buildings of the Sophronia Society Complex, waking this guy up and that (mostly caretakers of different GuestHouseFlats in the Society, looking for a place where I could spend the night.

Finally when the group has increased to a Five, they got me a room at some S1-302, air-conditioned.

And I slept.

I woke up at 7:30 today hoping someone would be up in my guesthouse by now....

KNOCK!! KNOCK!!!!!
OPEN UP FOR GOD'S SAKE!

Ah, I hear footsteps! :)

Into the Wild

2009-05-17T15:09:00.001+05:30

Yesterday while walking my way back from Koregaon Park to Kalyani Nagar, I lost my way. I walked some three kilometres extra. Total of five kilometres. Alone. At the dead of night. After midnight.

Things I saw on the road were strange. My thoughts, however, were different.

The last four years have been so happy. Stuck in a small place called Durgapur, with nothing more important to do than organising some fests, with your friends all around you. Bunking classes. Studying a day before the examination. Visting home once_in_a_while. That was so unrealistic. So not RealWorld.

This was so inevitable that you did not want to realise it before. But now when reality comes and hits you hard on the face, you can all but ignore it.

High time when you realised the importance of hard work. How there is no second chance in this real life. How values you had assumed to be something have totally different values than what you can possibly imagine. Plans you had made for the future were actually fantacies and differ a lot from what is actually in store for you.

Friends you had taken for granted, made for free, that you have left behind. Now now that you start afresh with a clean board you realise the effort that goes into earning the trust of someone.

Now that you have enjoyed your dream, wake up. Brush your teeth, wash your face, wear your specks. And when you look out of your balcony, you'll notice that the world below is much more stranger than you had always wanted it to be.

Punics

2009-05-13T17:51:00.004+05:30

Puja Vacations of 2007 was the time I had for the first time taken a train journey across the country from Kolkata to Pune with a guy called Souvik Ray for publicity purpose of a failed thing called Mukti '08. Puja Vacations of 2007 was the time when I fell in love with this place called Pune and decided that if I ever got a choice of where I would work, I would choose Pune.

Summer of 2009, here I am at this place called Kalyani Nagar in Pune working at a company called Red Hat.

Its been roughly 75 hours since I landed up at the Pune Airport. Seems like a week already. Not that I have done a lot of things since I landed here. But I certainly can do with some more company (no not another employer).

I am liking the work here. Time passes quickly if I'm working. The clock slows down when I'm idle. Speaking of clocks I can just see the time but actually have no sense of how its running(thanks to the time meridian difference from Kolkata [India should seriously think about having two TimeZones]) and certain other reasons I'm not sure of).

First night at the guest house was a ghastly experience (I would blame it on a properly timed BlackOut and the thought of a DeadBody floating in the bathtub planted in my head). I'm living alone in the 3 BHK(new term, means 3 bedrooms + 1 hall + 1 kitchen) guesthouse-cum-flat.

Kalyani Nagar is a costly place, more so to a working man (ye, I'm a MAN now) like me who has not got his first salary yet. More so when there is a MacD + BigBazaar + CCD + SubWay + KFC + MORE + ShoppersStop and a whole lotta other brands just near my office+GuestHouse. But wandering around the place without a companion is really sad. :( (I sound desperate when I really am)

Third day at office is about to end. I really and sincerely hope I make some friends here and fast. Without that I guess I won't last here long (figure of speech).

Wish me luck! :)

Last Hug

2009-04-27T03:17:00.003+05:30

I guess its safe enough to assume that I won't get a supplee in my VLSI Design paper and I won't miss my supplee exam to become a college dropout.

Thus it can be logically concluded that today from 9 am to 12 noon I'd be giving the last exam of my life(finally I have learnt the difference between a Test and an Exam).

This means a lot of things:

1. No more studying something just to get good marks in a Exam, although that subject may have no other practical significance in my future life.

2. No more wasting about 3-5 days in the lead up to the exam and getting down to study the evening before. That too interlaced with FunnyStuff ( FunnyStuff has assumed values of Water Fights[this is not a computer game], Counter Strike, Age of Empires, Gtalk, Head Banging Sessions, Blogging, Bong Tutorials etc. through the semesters).

3. No more WarOnConscience before, during and after the Exam.

4. No more "Song you listened to before leaving for the exam hall" stuck in your head when you couldn't recall what you studied last night.

5. No more Souvik Ray trying to teach me a topic so that he could get his concepts revised, while all I heard was a crazy combination of Latin and Greek.

6. No more waiting for the Question Paper to know the Subject Name and Subject Code to write on the Answer Sheet.

And of course no more of a lot other things.

I really want to hug all my Department Mates after the examination tomorrow.

GLUG, NIT Durgapur Annual General Meeting

2009-04-14T23:17:00.003+05:30

Originally posted on http://kknundy.blogspot.com by Kaushik Nundy, Journalist, GLUG NITD.

This write up took a long time coming. My apologies to all concerned. Nevertheless, this AGM took a long time coming too. When it did come though, it had little if any scope for complaint. The Annual General Meeting, 2008-09 of GNU/Linux User's Group, NIT Durgapur took place on Wednesday, the 8^th of April, 2009 at the conference hall of the D.M.Sen Memorial building. It was finely attended, and the faculty was represented at the meeting by our very own S.Chowdhury sir, Sajal sir & S.Das sir, all from the I.T. Department. The meeting, scheduled for 6p.m. started in time. We were addressed by our teachers who shared a few kind words with us and assured us that their blessings and advise would always be with us. S.C. Sir told us that we should keep setting higher goals for ourselves, and be ready to overcome newer frontiers. He gave us examples of various people who had done pathbreaking work despite roadblocks and lack of support, including the illustrious work of S.Das sir. He also spoke of how our GLUG had, despite opposition from various quarters and a non-supportive administration, risen from a low to become a respected FOSS awareness hub, reaching new heights that had never been contemplated earlier, to become one of the best known GLUGs in the country. He praised the vision and tenacity of both the student members and the faculty advisors which had made this possible, specifically mentioning Debayan and Mayank among students. Sajal Sir encouraged us to turn our GLUG into an even larger entity, which would change the face of computer usage and the image of GNU/Linux as a geeky OS, at the least in our state, at the most...well, you know. He spoke of 4 things that had changed the recent world, namely Google, Wikipedia, MIT OpenCourseWare and Youtube! videos, and how we could very well be the fifth. He was followed by S.Das sir who spoke of the various opportunities we have and get and how we should go out and use them to our benefit.

This was followed by a presentation by Debayan, the outgoing head of our Software Development Unit. He spoke of the various shortcomings of GLUG in it's earlier avatar, which had caused it to partially collapse and how it had risen from that low, thanks to the undying enthusiasm and support of the concerned teachers and students. He spoke of the plethora of work done by GLUG, NITD in the past two years and of how this work can be carried on by it in the coming years. He spoke of the grand success of Mukti '09 in achieving it's primary goal, not that of pulling in huge crowds but of reaching out to the right places where spreading FOSS awareness mattered. Thanks to Mukti '09, new GLUGs have come up at several places like NIT Agartala, NIT Jamshedpur and KGEC, Kalyani. The working of GLUG, NITD has matured over its 5 year life, and it has grown to become a resource hub of sorts for the entire region, with other close-by GLUGs calling in for technical and logistic support. He spoke of the extremely helpful role of IOTA, Govt. Of West Bengal, in providing us with psychological and financial support when we were facing difficult times, and in its usefulness to the future plans and functioning of GLUG. He also gave us an idea and useful advice on the future tasks and responsibilities of GLUG, with plans like the FOSS helpline and Freedom toaster. We realised how much we had done recently and how much more needed to be done yet if what we did was really to bring about the change we wanted. Thanks to Varsha's efforts and survey, now 75 of 228 girls in our college used one distro or another of GNU/Linux, a positive tendency, to say the least, at the grassroots level. It was clear from his words that to make Free Software a true success, the basics were where we needed to go back to. The 3 mailing lists(well practically two,)received the much deserved attention in their role in popularising GNU/Linux, both in and outside the campus. The list of common interest would be groups.google.com/group/nitdgplu g .

Shreyank, or Shrink as he likes to be called, spoke of his 4yr tryst with GLUG, from its early days to its current state. Entwined though his words were in his characteristic PJs, his dedication and love for GNU/Linux and Free Software was hard to miss. It's people like him, with their delicate balance of sanity and dedication, that our GLUG would miss the most.

The Director shared a few kind words with us, about our future course of action and priorities.

Following this, the new GLUG committee was announced and the outgoing committee was issued certificates of appreciation.

The committees are as follows :

NEW: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgt7ftmz_32w522kgh&invite=692183710

OLD: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfxc9dkf_14dpv742zt&invite=293702772

The meeting was then concluded at around 8.

In Your Face

2009-04-11T03:09:00.006+05:30

An 'in your face' to all the Windoze Box users! I'll tell you why my GNU/Linux box is better...

We have a huge syllabus, and we get a lot of class notes. I earlier used to photocopy the notes from others, which used up a lot of my allowances. It would have been welcome if I had studied from them. So spending huge sums of money on something I won't be using so much is, well, a Waste!

So came up the concept of scanning/taking pictures of the classnotes into a bunch of JPEG files. Its difficult to study from the JPEGs because the continuity is somewhat lost (assuming I am studying from the notes)

So here is what I need to do. Convert a bunch of JPEGs to a single PDF.

Last sem what I did is I copied the pics one after another to a ODT file on OpenOffice.org(that's the GNU/Linux alternative for MS Word), and then I convert it to PDF.

But that was too tedious...

(ODT/DOC to PDF is easier. Just open it using OpenOffice.org amd use the "Export to PDF" option in file menu. Its fast!)

Today I found an awesome tool called ImageMagick(well not technically today, I have used it earlier when I created graphs on my Ruby on Rails app [The Free Market] ).

I installed ImageMagick (its free) into my Mandriva box by doing a simple

urpmi imagemagick

as root user.

Other distro users can substitute urpmi with apt-get/yum install/zypper install or whatever package manager you use.

Then I used command line to move into the folder where I had the JPEGs ( cd path/to/images ) and here is how I converted my images to pdf. Wait for it.... wait for it... ok, here goes..

convert *.jpg sanyal.pdf

Beat that Windoze users!!!

Dolphins

2009-04-09T23:38:00.003+05:30

I had been leading a life on Auto-Pilot for the past few months. Things were happening as they were supposed to happen. But when I switched off the Auto-Pilot, things got stranger.

Finally after an year of dirt and mess, just when a few days are left, I clean up my room. It feels better!
I try to install a new distro. I tried out Fedora 10, Ubuntu 8.10 and OpenSuSE 11.1. None worked. Finally I install Mandriva again, but just for a change I settle down with KDE 4.1 (ok, that was by mistake)
I have paid my semester fees, but I am yet to pay my Mess Dues (cos I have spent some of it)
I have let go of some of my bad habits. I don't know whether the end result is better or worse!

Time when I noticed:

I am out of all money, and I am in deep debt(read shit).
My college life is coming to an end and in a few days (which won't take long), I will lose contact with most of my friends.
I have a whole New Life, New Places, New People and many more News ahead of me.

In the course of these four years, I have made some great friends. I would like to thank those friends heartily for making my college life worth remembering.

(I deeply apologise for the lack of humour in this post. I guess I have lost it permanently.)

The Drawing Room Incident

2009-03-16T01:58:00.008+05:30

When I was young and in School, we used to have a Art and Craft class taken by Mrs. Das. Mrs. Das had a very close resemblance to Usha Uthup (I like resemblances...).

Mrs. Das was a wonderful Art and Craft teacher, who gave us nice crafts to make.

Once she announced in class, "Boys, you will have to start collecting match-boxes from now on, because you will need them in a craft after the summer vacations. So you have 3 months in hand. Tell your mummy not to throw away the match-boxes..."

"... and I'm supposed to collect them. We are going to make a craft after summer", I told mummy. "I would be needing a saree-box too. And lots of coloured velvet-paper."

After summer I took the things to school. Ma'am Das showed us how to cover the match-boxes with velvet paper and make furniture for the drawing room. She also covered the saree-box with the velvet-paper to make the floor. Her Drawing-Room looked nice and good.

We did not do any thing in the class. We were to do that as a home task and bring it to her next week.

The day before we were supposed to show it in class(I was always the last-minute type), I went with Mummy and bought the things required. Lots of different coloured velvet paper and some adhesive.

Back home mummy was busy with dinner, so I had to do it myself. I wanted to do this all along but some help from mummy would have been appreciated. So I sat down with the things...

... it was 12 midnight, and all I had was a saree-box with lots of damaged velvet because it stuck with the adhesive to my fingers, damaged match-boxes with more damaged velvet and lots of adhesive here and there.

I started crying....

Papa came and told me to go to sleep and start afresh early next morning. Then he would help me. I did not want to sleep unfinished. After trying for sometime I gave in.

I had a silly dream, I don't remember what it was!

Next morning no one woke me up before time. I woke up late, and suddenly realised I had an unfinished craft. I could not go to school with an unfinished craft. I'd bunk. Say I was sick in the absent notice....

... I didn't want to miss school. I started crying again!

Mummy brought out something from the top of the cupboard. It was beautiful!

Mummy-Papa had stayed up all night and made it. It had a black and white chequered floor (they had cut black and white squares out of marble paper). It had a sofa set done in white with black rhombus cushions with cotton inside. It had a black and white centre table with a black and white TV on it.

The best part was that it had a Dendrite man, with a white shawl, sitting on the sofa and watching TV.

I was very happy. Mrs. Das said my craft was the best in class.

My Parents have always loved me. And I love them too! :)

AAROgance

2009-03-01T18:54:00.013+05:30

Well I had intended to write a blog on how good Aarohan was this year how much better it was from its previous incarnations.

Turns out, as always, things never happen according to the plan...

A bit of what happened over the last 4 days.

Thursday, 26th Feb 2009: Aarohan 2k9 begins. I go to see the inauguration. The shadow show was good. I was supposed to come back to room right after the inauguration and not participate in Aarohan. But I ran into Rahul and Nisha. We sat for the Graphiti prilims, Nisha, Rahul and me. Only Nisha had registered for Aarohan.

Friday, 27th Febraury: Rahul and Abhiyan come up and say they want to participate in a event called Brand Promo. I go with them. We register for Aarohan, participate and have fun. Night we qualify for the graphiti finals. We participate. Rahul, Nisha and I. We miss the General Quiz. Abhiyan teams up with a RandomPhD guy and wins the quiz.

Saturday, 28th Febraury: Bitan comes along with a junior and Indradumna, wants to form a team with me for the Sports and Entertainment Quiz. I say yes. The junior wants out as he already has a 1st year team. Then Rahul and Abhiyan happen along and say I ditched them. I think and form a best-fit team out of us. Bitan, Abhiyan, Rahul and me. We clear the prilims and with the Quiz. I am happy. Abhiyan is on a roll.
We go on for the Biz Quiz with the same team. We don't clear the prilims.

Now a note about the quizzes for those that don't know. Exquizzit is this quizzing event in Aarohan(Our Official Annual Tech Fest), comprising of four quizzes. They have prilims and stage rounds for the General Quiz, the Sports and Entertainment quiz, the Biz Quiz. The top 6 teams from these 3 quizzes directly qualify or the Final Frontier Quiz. The General and the Sports and Entertainment Quizzes are hosted by Parnab Mukherjee. His questions are tough. The Biz Quiz and the Final Frontier are hosted by some guy name Arnab, an IIMC passout.

Sunday, 29th Febraury(oh sorry, 1st March): Final day of Aarohan 2009. We were sure to qualify for the Final Frontier Quiz. But we didn't.

The reason: They added up each teams scores for all the three quizzes and on the basis of the cumulative score, let teams up on stage. So a team who stood 5th in the Biz Quiz with a score of 77 and did not qualify for the rest of the quizzes, qualified for the Final Frontier, while my team which stood 1st in the Sports and Entertainment Quiz with a score of 70, did not qualify. It's natural that the winners of the 3 quizzes should qualify. Maybe it's not that obvious for them.

A better method could have been to give teams point on their ranks (1st -> 10, 2nd -> 8, 3rd -> 5) and then add them to see who qualifies. Maybe logic is a bit too tough for these people.

When shown the obvious flaw in their method of qualifying teams for the Final Frontier Quiz, The Convenor, Aarohan 2k9 said, "I will organise MY Fest in MY way, if you want to participate, do, else please go back to your rooms".

The reason that hurt me was: I was responsible for two events, one FREE-P-L in Mukti '09 - a National Level Technical Symphosium on GNU/Linux and Free Software, and another Formula Won in Motor Zundung - The AutoFest, both similar events which I made the software for. In both cases we had to scrap and redo the event from scratch because there was a minor error in the database of the matches.

With Great Power...

2009-02-28T04:41:00.003+05:30

...Comes Great Reponsibility!

And this is what I have realised the hard way in the past few days of my life. (I like learning to walk the Walking-Falling-GettingHurt-Crying-GettingUp-Walking way)

When you have reached such a position where what you say or do affects so many other people, most of whom are dear friends, you gotta be a li'l more reponsible!

It is when people look upto you and you are doing wrong things and setting up a bad example, you are doing so much bad. When people respect you and you wonder what you did to earn that respect, you may come up with all sorts of reasons to satisfy yourself. But the hard truth is that you don't deserve it!

You think why are people not stopping you when you are doing wrong, its because they want to enjoy the show. Only the ones who really care, the very few, will confront you and show you the correct way. You are a fool if you still can't see the correct way, you are a bigger fool if you can't identify your 'friends'.

And you thought you were alone...

How an Alien can contribute to FOSS

2009-02-21T00:54:00.004+05:30

It all started after Codecracker last year...

Debayan came up with the idea of a Software Development Unit. We called it the NITDGP LUG SDU. We formed the first mailing list I actively participated in, the SDU mailing list, whose mails started with:

"Calling all sDUDES and misSDUs,"

Then came up the great day when Kushal Das of DGPLUG(this is the Durgapur Linux Users Group), came up from somewhere and showed us the first insight to the FOSS Development world. The event included the famous "a, b = b, a" portion of a python tutorial. Great day...

Soon we were all supposed to be participating in the Google Summer of Code, for which I joined the Mixxx mailing list because the project seemed interesting to me. But I never applied.

The next time did not miss the opportunity. I applied to NOSIP (Novell Open Source Internship Programme) to work on the LDTP project. There were two more options to work on: Evolution and Mono, but I choose LDTP because it sounded uncommon(what a reason!!)

Summer 2008 came and I was working on LDTP. Under the guidance of Naggapan a.k.a nags at #ldtp on freenode (current maintainer of LDTP and working at Vmware in the U.S.), hacking was a great experience. Here are the steps I went through:

I studied the manual of LDTP.
I played around with it. My guinea pigs ware Pidgin (poor bird), Evolution and XChat, the three internet tools I used extensively during the vacations.
Playing around with Pidgin I found that we had some bugs with LDTP recorder which I reported and followed how Nagappan went about fixing them, giving him ideas as we went ahead.
Playing around with Evolution, I found a bug which happened to be a bug on Evolutions side.
With Xchat I got an idea of a crucial enhancement which I implemented with a bit of new GUI, some code and a new file called appdata.
Later when College reopened for 7^th sem, I had no other work but to watch 7 Seasons of Scrubs and work on an enhancement which Nagappan suggested, and implement ed it with the help of some more code and a ldtp.conf file.

I am yet to combine the appdata file from 5 and the ldtp.conf file from 6 above.

I am also to work on the at-poke feature for the LDTP GUI for which my workout got selected for FOSS.IN but never saw the day of light (sad).

I still don't get why Debayan keeps calling me an alien...

Creative Adaptation

2009-02-14T03:40:00.003+05:30

The title is a bad pun!

Long ago (don't remember how long ago) my speakers' adapter fell and broke. It just did.

I have three plug points, one for my moniter. one for the CPU and the third is shared between a lot of things(Creative 2.1 speakers, miniature water heater[I don't drink black coffee any more, so it just lies around], my phone charger, mosquito repellent [its not been refilled for the last four months].. etc.). The adapter was a little unstable so one fine day(well, not so fine day) while I was watching a movie(don't remember which), it just fell by itself and broke into pieces.

Pieces... :(

Then I got Samar's Altec Lansing speakers which did not have a sub-woofer, but its fine.

Many a times Samar warned me to get my thing repaired. But why take the trouble when you have a working system.

Samar gave his GATE exams and his 3rd sense( 3rd????) says it wasn't good. But he took his speakers back.

I had also broken and lost my Rs 60 worth Philips headphones the other day in Mukti. I have another iBall headphones that dosn't work. The mic is broken but that apperently still works.

But the thing was that I was music deprived!

I had to get some sound, somehow. I borrowed an adapter from Mama(that's his nick), but had to give him back to him again and again. I had to do something.

So the day-before-yesterday I went to bench with Mama's adapter. I roamed about Bench asking this shop and that of how/where to get something like this(mama's adapter). I found out none had it but they could get the broken one repaired. The Matrix(its a computer shop) guy was of the same opinion.

His number is 9332305812 :)

Dunno how I forgot to bring the broken one along!!

Finally Dadu came to rescue. Dadu is this nice and good old person who had made splitters for me twice(a splitter is this thing I use for DJing)

I got a shop which had exactly the same adapter. I brought down the price from Rs 250 to Rs 200 (I never knew I could bargain!).

I came back and gave Mama's adapter along with a polythene bag to Mama. When I checked my new Adapter, I found that it was not working.

But the guy who sold it to me said that I could get it replaced if it does not work. So when I was leaving for bench, I found that the adapter was missing. Not to mention the fact that earlier I had gone half the way without taking the adapter along.

I thought....

I remembered that Mama took the adapter from me today morning, and I gave it to him. So maybe he may not have remembered me giving him his adapter last evening, and maybe it didn't cross my mind as well. I must have given him the not-working-matrix adapter to Mama as well.

Mama wasn't in his room. From what others said I deduced that Mama was eating at jhups. I ran to jhups. I met Mama there. He helped me remember that I had come to his room earlier and ask his adapter when Mama was half asleep. So Mama had only his adapter, not the not-working-matrix adapter.

I came back to my room. My adapter was on the shelf!

I returned the bad adapter and got my money back. Dadu said he could do something to make the adapter workable. (dadu is just awesome, really). It had something to do with a box, lots of wires, and a not-so-compulsory switch. The whole thing would cost me Rs 80. I went to get it the next day. Which is today....

Ahhh, Beatles! :)

Day 3 || Finally Mukti

2009-02-09T07:02:00.003+05:30

Maybe I'll have breakfast before going to sleep! Maybe its because of the two double Espresso shots!

Kushagra didn't wake me up! I was half awake, so when he called up I answered on the 1st ring. It was 10:30 am. Linquizator was about to start at 11:30, so I had time. I disconnected and went to sleep. By 11:30 I was there at the Mukti Arena. GATE exams were going on, so Linuquizitor had been postponed to after 12:30. We had time.

I sat about. The chubby-good-looking-first-year-girl turned out to be named Kanupriya. We shared some bad jokes. Then I had lunch at LH More.

Quiz began more or less as scheduled, and inspite of a few TugAtYourHairInFrustration moments, we qualified the prilims. Me and three 2nd year guys named Kushagra, Atri and Anuj.

On stage things were great. We were 2nd at one time. Then we went to joint 2nd, then joint 3rd and then finally finished 4th. Atri had some very good answers. Really, great guy! Debayan in between was SMSing, "F*** the quiz, and lets judge Pen-GUI-In (a GUI designing event, christned by yours truly, even Linquizitor[I like naming things]) entries", but I ignored it and switched my cell off.

I went off to the IT dept after some confusion on where to head next. There I helped a girl named Varsha Agarwal (dark-good-looking-first-year-girl-who-hits-on-all-guys) make some cheque like thingy on OpenOffice.org. Then I went along with Rajat to jhups.

At jhups the other competitors from Linquizitor were eating too. I ordered SweerFrench(toast) but then the eggs finished. So I ordered ChanaFry but then they had enough just for Deepu. So I had to do with Maggi.

Back at hostel I could not find my pseudo-leather jacket. It was in Nitin's room (idiot). So I took my NIT Durgapur embossed sweatshirt, which I din't wear because it wasn't that cold.

I missed IndraDG's talk because of all this. So I went to SAC. They had this confetti gun (name Party Popper[not pooper]), which I hung around with. Then Rahul Jha came along and I started clicking 'nice' pics with his 'good' camera (nice and good are alternate words for awesome I'm trying to use instead).

The Validictory Ceremony started and I clicked a few more pics. It was better without the flash. Then the ceremony finished.

We then had fun!

There is this GPL(bum-kicks) trend we have in college. Every one was being hit, and then thrown up in the air. I clicked pics of people in air (I missed myself). Then people were dancing. I danced a lot. We were having a good time. And lots of cameras were involved as well. I was doing this thing of spoiling every pic as the ghost that was present unsuspecting in all the pics. And there is this ramp-walk video that is awesome (sorry.. Nice!).

I was very hungry! So I asked this girl Varsha to accompany me to LH More. She tried to hit on me on the way there.

But its fine... children!

After dinner we came back to SAC, where everyone cornered me and asked me to crack my bad jokes. But it doesn't work that way, does it? I don't have a database of PJs. Its always according to the situation. So I was lost. So they started to tease me. There it was... my situation! I was in form... I cracked some real poor humour. Anima, Kumarjit and Kunal proved good targets.

More parathas arrived (like really more) and we ate our hearts out. I didn't, I had had dinned.

At midnight Rahul, Nisha, Debayan and me headed to CCD for a nite-out!

We discused and talked and ate and drunk (coffee) and then requested to sit inside (they usually don't allow us inside). Inside Debayan fell asleep. Then we talked more. Debayan woke and gave us some cash and headed back to the hostel. We talked more...

Turned out the bill was the exact amount of cash we had.

Finally after a trip to City Centre and few photos under the Mukti hoarding, we headed back to college. We withstood some 'pressure' to get Nisha into her hostel.

Great that Mukti '09 is finally over now. I can breathe.

And sleep maybe! :D

Day 2 || Mukti '09

2009-02-08T02:28:00.003+05:30

I woke up late! Maybe because I blogged till late night! At 11:00 am. No phone calls today, just that 1st year girl shouting on the speakers again!

I did my morning chores. I rushed to the Sun talk going on at DM Sen Hall. It wasn't that good. I missed the part when he demonstrated Sun SPOTS. I then moved to have lunch at jhups.

From jhups I went back to SAC and found that I had no work. I have had no work since long. I was useless. So I found myself work. Things were a little confused w.r.t time and place, the events I mean. So I took the reponsibility so getting the timings correct!

We had a lot of events, talks, prilims etc overlapping. I had to run about a little ( a little? my legs are dead!!) and finally I had all events in place. I got the chubby-good-looking-first-year-girl to announce all of it. She though I looked confused, but I was just catching my breath after all those running (ok, maybe a bit confused).

My phone battery was complaining (it makes funny sounds when low), so finally I came back to my room to charge (me, my cell) in between the In-C-anity prilims. I had put my phone on charge at night, but had forgot to switch it on ( the switch on the switch board).

Wait... ya, its on now!

So half an hour later I was back to collect the answer sheets. I went back happy!

Then I moved to Pradeepto's talk on KDE at DM Sen. I don't know exactly whether it was boring or I was hungry (Pradeepto looked sad when I told him this later, but who wouldn't be). Anyway I decided to visit jhups before I died of mal-nourishment in the auditorium. There was a parallel talk going on by Ananda Deb, our college web admin, on Windows vs Linux at the IT Lab. But just because both talks were after In-C-Anity prilims, both saw decent participation.

Next we had the Ruby on Rails workshop at IT Lab. Anurag Patel, one of the developers of Cleartrip.com and the guy whose name I forgot yester-blog, took that workshop. Some of his methods of doing things were tedious and primitive, and could be done a bit faster. But I think he did a great job. I was there for sometime, but a little later I found myself outside talking to Pradeepto and Debayan on stuff. Stuff... Then Roshan joined in. A little later the workshop ended.

The whole day Mayank and the rest were busy with a few Canadians (Canadians sound so much like comedians) who were going to do some sort of a laser/light show in SAC tonite. They were also asking for a lot of projectors(suddenly projectors went missing from all over), and so there was some curiosity and anticipation about it. I really wanted to see it. So after a trip to the guest house, Anurag, Pradeepto, Debayan, Mitesh and me went to SAC. We were just in time.

SAC was looking strange. All chairs were facing the back of SAC. And some of the audience were sitting on stage. On the back of SAC, they had 3 projections( from 3 projectors). The one on between were bigger that the ones on the side.

The show was awesome! It wasn't very awesome (now what's that??) but it was good.... Mmm, you know what I mean...

They were using some colourful lights. Then they were shooting ( as in recording using a video camera) what they were projecting on the screen. And they zoomed in and out, reduced and increased the aparture, and rotated the camera to create some intresting effects. There was two bald guys dancing and we had some music. Thats it! But it was good...

Then Debayan, Anurag, Mitesh, Pradeepto and I moved to Samrat and had a nice dinner. After dinner, we had sweet lime soda (Pradeepto had salty) and we had a toast to Debayan.

Then we walked back to the guest house ( we had gone to Samrat in a car, but dunno how it went missing). We took the shortcut through Hall 5. On the way Anurag and Pradeepto signed the GLUG NIT Durgapur banner (we have the signs of all the tals/workshop people, even RMS).

At the guest house we bid each other good bye. I didn't shep any tears! On the way back me and Debayan discussed some future plans. Also Kushagra is waking me up early morning at 10 (10 is early!!) so that I can participate with him and his friends at Linquizitor tomorrow.

Yes, its Tomorrow... and I am not explaining Why again!

Day 1 || Mukti '09

2009-02-07T02:59:00.007+05:30

We had the inaugural ceremony on 2nd Feb, but we can safely state that today, (6th Feb is still today, until I go to sleep) was my Day 1 or Mukti '09. We had a few talks and workshops and a the Bidding of Free PL in the past few days, but the festivities started just today.

After the Free PL (a game show based on IPL with teams like KDE Knight Riders and Kings XI Pythons) fiasco yesternight and Free Beer with Abhas Abhinav, I was too sleepy today morning. But 5 calls in half-an-hour along with the helpdesk girl's repeated announcements on the loudspeakers follwerd by a first year taking away my monitor and keyboard to the Mukti Arena ensured that I reached just in time, unbathed for Abhas' Talk on FOSS startups.

The talk was good. I asked a stupid question.

I met Pradeepto after the talk and then he, Abhas, Sandeep, Vignesh, Mitesh and me showed each other (each other??) around the college. Oh, Rangeen BRC was with us too. Then a curious looking car appeared out of nowhere (I could make out Yu Yu Din in it) and took Pradeepto away! Then the rest of us went to Jhups to have lunch.

Debayan appeared at Jhups with Satya Komaragiri. She appeared quite good looking for an intelligent girl. I headed to my room after food. Apperently Satya had lunch at Ananya with Debayan and Darsana.

After having a bath I headed towards the Mukti Arena. It was great to see a lot of activity outside SAC. I had no good work for a while so I kept moving randomly. Finally I went to attend Satya's talk on "How to contribute to FOSS". I dunno why I was feeling very sleepy in there ( I am sleepy now, but this need to be done when I have started it, the blog I mean). Avishek Basu Mallick called me in between and I went out of the auditorium. We had some changes to be made in the Free PL database so I had to move to SAC to get a first year guy to come with me to Hall 4 to help me get my CPU to SAC.

(I am the only guy in college who uses my Desktop like a Laptop)

I hung around until I got a guy. Atikant accompanied me back and helped me do the needful. I also withdrew Rs 200 from the ATM on mmy way back. I forgot to take the power cord along on my way back to the arena and we didn't have a spike there so I went to check "A Day with Fedora" workshop in the meanwhile. I also had a hot Latte from the CCD stall (awake!!) and paid Darsana Rs 50 I borrowed from her yesternight.

I made the changes in the Database sitting in one of the stalls. Then Satya came along and we talked for a while. She helped me get the 'Revised Free PL rules into one page so that we could save money in the photocopies. I also showed her my RoR apps. Debayan said I was trying to impress her. Then he took her away.

I was roaming about when I found Vignesh and Abhas talking. Apperently they wee talking about me. So I joined in. Then Debayan and Satya returned and we had a Domino's Pizza.

We then moved to the Guest house. We had everyone there. We had Pradeepto waiting there. Then Indranil (IDG), Yu YU Din, Subhodip and Arindam(MAC) came along. We also had another guy, whom I didn't recognise but later deduced him to be the developer of cleartrip.com and here to take a Ruby on Rails workshop. I forgot his name. We had lunch at the Guest House. I repetedly cracked a lot of bad jokes for which Debayan repeatedly apologised to everyone, but I have no regrets about. :P

After dinner everyone moved to the DM SEN audi for Yu Yu's talk on "How to maintain your online profile" which I figure out was good one, but I could not attend because Free PL would be resuming then.

It was mainly Rahul, Anuj, Basu Mallick and me conducting the rest of Free PL. Avishek Ray and Nagpal appeared late (after their team had been knocked out) with a 2 ltr pet of Pepsi which everyone had a gulp from. Incidently no one knew before drinking that it had Whiskey mixed in it. The rest a Free PL went a bit drunk. Avishek mentioned Dev D is Awesome. Gotta see!

Finally at 1:30 am we finished with the event for which I had to make the software from scratch just because I couldn't port what I made last to GNU/Linux. I have got my desktop back in one piece in my room.

Unfortunately Satya and Abhas would be leaving early morning tomorrow (7th morning is tomorrow) before me waking up I would not be able to tell them tata.

But all in all, a happy day!

My Right Eye

2009-01-28T00:00:00.005+05:30

Its all blurry...

I went to see a doctor today at Benachity. She said I had some viral infection in my right eye, and minor conjunctivitis in both eyes (I think the latter is not true, but I won't mention why I think so)

I had to take an injection and my left arm was stiff for some time. I have been prescribed a whole lotta medicines and eye drops which I am to take till Thursday when I am to visit the Doc again.

I have been advised not to wash my eyes, and complete eye rest. I am not supposed to be sitting in front of my Computer (which makes me useless), but still I am blogging.

I will make a pirate-like eye-patch for my left eye, and maybe I can do some work then. I am not getting an elastic strap to make it.

Hope it inspires a fashion statement...

A lot is going on...

2009-01-27T17:52:00.005+05:30

... and I need to clear my mind if I am going to survive in this mess.

Yesterday I came back from Spring Fest at IIT Kharagpur, and it was an awesome experience (hard to find other adjectives these days). I thought of writing an entire blog post on the happenings at SF but that would not do enough justice to it, so I have decided to do no justice to it at all! Would like to mention the 3rd prize our drama team won (again), though I thought it deserved better; and our college winning the SF Chamionships (an In-Your-Face to the professors who did us no good). Not to mention a lot more things which a lot of the readers of this post know already, something to do with three and a half days at SF and three and a half years in college... to be honest I found it funny!

And then I would like to count the damages. One, finacially I am BROKE! Two, my eyes hurt. Add to that my inherrent lethargy, and we have a LOSER!

To top that the college fest season is coming, and that means my workload is at a maximum. My pending work includes:
1. Fast Lane online quiz app for Motor Zungdung, the auto fest.
2. Free-P-L, the IPL based game show for Mukti, of which the software I made needs to be ported to GNU/Linux, or remade (gosh!!)
3. The Free Market need to be made extra-feature rich to make the ongoing game more intresting.
4. Hoardes of other Mukti work...
5. I'll have to start attending classes!

Time is less, and all I'm doing is sleeping, 'eating sandwiches', sleeping, doing stupid stuff like drawing with charcoal on the terrace, and sleeping.

My mind is full of distractions. I'll have to clear it up and do some actual work now...

Riots!

2009-01-10T04:05:00.005+05:30

When you come to look at it, we have always been divided!

There has always been some discrimination on the basis of race, colour, case, religion, region, language. There has always been division. Be it the Hindus and the Muslims in India, the Whites and the Blacks in the States or the Bangus (Bengalis) and the Non-Bangus here at NIT Durgapur.

There is always this communal clashes. When you look closer there are no differences at all. Just this tension, that has always been there since we noticed and promises to be there till the end.

A person on one side may be as good and logical as the person on the other side. We are just forced to believe otherwise. It is my belief that there is no Good or Bad, there are just preconceived notions, some baseless conventions to force people into illusions. The problem is the submissive nature of the greater population. No one is willing to step up and challenge these stuff.

Because once someone does that it will be clear that it has been meant to be this way. We have been forced into this differences so that we so engrossed in fighting between ourselves, that we overlook some greater forces at play. Because they don't want us to question, we are just meant to blindly follow!

They use their DivideAndConquer policies to seed differences between us, and instil RIOTS!

Once people come to the realisation of peace, they will create some other distraction. Like conjure some words like 'Terrorism' out of thin air and call
Them That Stepped Up To Question, 'Terrorists'. Anything to keep prying eyes away from the real truth...

They have been ruling over us for a long time. They have been controlling every aspect of our lives and we are nothing but means of profit to them. Its not their fault, that is what they do. Its how our society has been set up, Maximizing Profits have always been our ultimate aim!

Its upto Us now. We can either keep fighting among ourselves for illusive reasons or we could unite ourselves, and identify the real enemy. Or they will continue to use us like slaves, and we will always be too busy resolving differences between us to notice.

The Free Market is in Business!

2009-01-07T10:19:00.007+05:30

THE FREE MARKET

The following blog may not make much sense as its after 20 hours of sleepless frustration, but I finally managed to get The Free Market up and running without breaking anything in my room or on my body!

After a month long of coding on Ruby on Rails, an experience which deserves more than one blog entry, and more than a hundred adjectives(lame), its still a lot buggy and feature-less, but its working nonetheless.

The url still shows the port number in the end, but thanks to Kumarjit's novel idea and some ruthless parsing, we managed to authenticate a user with the Mukti '09 Registration Database! So make sure you register with Mukti '09 if you want to participate!

The first 5 days is the Initial Public Offer (IPO) period, so do register by then. You may register after that as well, but then you will not get the feel of a bidder! :P

The application is still in its initial stages so don't plan to assassinate me if you find it behaving absurdly. Just drop me a mail and I'll do the needful!

Happy Trading!

The Dance

2009-01-05T16:59:00.003+05:30

Remember the very embarrassing thing I used to go home last semester for...

Well here's it:

And a very Happy New Year to Everybody! :)

A Million Words!

2008-12-13T03:12:00.005+05:30

Some wise man once said (as all wise men sometimes do), "A picture is worth a Thousand Words!"

Another Wise man said, "A Movie is worth a Thousand Pictures!" (fine that was me again)...

So where does that leave us?

Anyway here are two really CrAzY videos

Thanks! :)

Keep Talking

2008-12-01T15:14:00.007+05:30

"For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals
Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination
We learned to talk"
-Stephen Hawking

Here is my plan on how to make the world a better place:

Phase I : Conquer the world

By some means I conquer the world, and I don't mean 'figuratively' conquer the world, I mean 'Alexander the Great' conquer the world.

One possible way is to somehow make some kind of earth destroying weapon, and threatening the world into submission otherwise I'd blow up the World.

(earth blowing up scene)

Then getting a few frightened Scientists to make me a Robot manufacturing plant, from which I'll manufacture Robots to form my army and some robot workers. I'll make the workers make some more manufacture plants which will manufacture more robots. So I make a huge army, and robot work force. Then I send out the army into the world.

(scene of someone playing AOE)

I proclaim me master of the world.

Phase II: Development

With the Robots, and the scientists I make a World Development Team out of all the people in the world. It will consists on Managers, Engineers and a HUGE work force. All the rest not in the Team can just sit and relax.

I abolish money.

All the things currently in the world can support the world for some time into the Development Phase. I first make a support system for the world for sustaining it through the development phase.

With my WDT I make my world similar to the Venus Project. For those that does not know what the Venus Project is, it's a awesome place with no money, and where things are in plenty. Everything that man needs to survive, and comfortably survive. Everything from Food, Transport, Shelter, Clothing, Communication, Power. Everything. Because you have every thing in plenty, you need not buy anything, its just there. And its possible with today's technology. If you don't believe me watch Zeitgeist Addendum.

So we do it.

The cost of doing this however cannot be calculated, because such a project has never been undertaken before, and therefore stats are not available. Other methods I dont know, because I left that portion in my preparation for my test.

We do some Testing. How we do I have not figured out yet but I will figure that out soon.

Then we deploy the project.

Phase III: A Better Place

People live in harmoney. There is less crime because most crime were due to want of profit. It will be a Resourece Based Economy. It's a futurely looking world. Everything runs on Solar, Wing or Geothermal Power. Transport is through Mag Lev Trains faster that Aeroplanes going some 4000 KMPH. Everthing is in abundance. Life is comfortable.

People dont need to work for money, but they work for advancement of their race. People develop things, people create, people innovate, people discover, people invent. And people teach. Robots do all the boring manual work.

And of course everyone uses Free and Open Source Software.

And I retire to Develop Software For the rest of my life. And DJ sometimes!

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

- John Lennon

Of Talks and Workouts

2008-11-29T23:08:00.004+05:30

As a follow-up to my last post, I would like to announce that I did not attend foss.in because it was conflicting with my semester exams. On that note I should be studing now, but suddenly, as it often happens when I sit down to study before an exam, more interesting things pop-up, like why the money system should be abolished, how to integrate chat to giver (a file sharing program for linux which unfortunately does not run on my system, yet shows other users that I am online) and what should be the latest status message for my chat client!

After putting a lot of thought, I have decided on:

Hyd Talk canceled as well! || http://mukti09.in

"Hyd Talk" here refers to Open Summit 2008 at IIIT Hyderabad organised by Twincling Technology Foundation, where I was invited to give a talk on LDTP, and my contributions to it.

Things were going fine until yesterday, when I was talking to Saifi Khan from the organising team, and informed him that LDTP was NOT ready for testing and automating KDE/Qt applications as of now but works well for Gtk/Gnome. He was (very unpleasantly) surprised at this news and told me that it had to be brought to the notice of their team, as all their work was on KDE/Qt based applications.

On this I confirmed with Nagappan tonight, and I have mailed Saifi the following,

"Hi Saifi,
I am very sorry to inform you that KDE/Qt applications cannot be tested using LDTP as of now!
I have talked to Nagappan on this matter, and he says that development on both ends (KDE a11y and LDTP) is required to get that done and we would be working on that very soon!"

I am waiting for Saifi's reply, but I'm sure that my talk will be cancelled or at max rescheduled to some later event. As of now, Hyderabad seems distant!

The Degree of Freedom

2008-11-09T05:13:00.009+05:30

Here is how the story goes.

About a month and a half ago, Debayan, a friend of mine wrote a blog entry, in which he casully enough mentioned foss.in. That was when I heard of the event for the first time(although the name felt slightly familier). I made a note mentally.

About a month or so ago he advised me to register to foss.in as workout lead of LDTP (workout = sort of combined development activity also known as a 'hackfest'). He said he was doing the same with Tesseract OCR. I did not pay him much heed then. When he repeated his advise I came out with an escuse that, I was quite inexperienced to become Workout Lead, but I will tell someone on the #ldtp channel to register so I may join in later(which infact was true).

So I caught up with Nagappan, and asked hm for advise. That incedently turned out to be the last day for registration for talks and workouts. He advised me that as no one was available, I may register as Workout Lead, and Varadhan may join in later. Nagappan lives in the US.

I did that as I thought it was our best shot. Although I knew that I would not be able to attend as my semester exams, speculated to start from 24th Nov may collide with foss.in dates 25th to 29th Nov.

About 10 days later foss.in released their first shortlist. I was in it!

My first reaction was that I would not go there as exams were way more important. But then some congratulatory SMS's later and seeing my name being flashed in the College Media (read mailing lists, gtalk status messages) combined with the 'rebel' spark reminiscent in me, I decided to bunk exams. Better if I get a green flag from college, if not I was stiill going.

Back to the college, I started delving deeper into the situation. I asked for "some official letter" from foss.in. A guy called Harsha (another LDTP enthusiasist) added me on gtalk, and advised me strictly against missing my exams, and encouraged me to sort some win-win way out. The discussion at the #foss.in channel was sort of the last blow to my plans.

Now I was confused!

Till an hour ago when I found a leather bound file inside which was a certificate. On is was written the following words in running calligraphy:

National Institute of Technology

Durgapur, India

The Board of Governors of the Institute upon the recommendation of the Senate hereby confers on

Shreyank Gupta

the degree of

Bachelor of Technology

Computer Science & Engineering

with

First Class

under the seal of the Institute given at Durgapur on this Eight day of November Two thousand and Eight

(perticulars changed on request)

Below was a cool embossed seal of the college with the signature of the Chairman of the Board of Governers and the Director.

And I decided not to go if I have to miss even a single exam.

True Story!!!

The Awakening

2008-11-08T10:09:00.009+05:30

Not that I have never been up this long, but just for the records, I have had just 3 hours of sleep during the last 45 hours. One hour while going back home in the bus, one hour at home and another one hour today in the train on my way back. Neither have been particuarly comfortable!

Kumarjit is complaining that I took all the credit of making the brouchure in Rahul Jha's room(he was useless that night). I don't remember doing anything useful that night except for getting Rahul's door to open, as even I was pretty useless that night! It was all Kumarjit and Kunal's efforts that we have the Mukti brochure ready!

I have just taken a short trip to back home where I did nothing impressive except of straining myself. Now my brain has lost the power to think, and my body is fatigued. On that note I also really really want to attend the 4th (or 5th, no 4th I guess) Convocation Ceremony of NIT Durgapur, where some scientist from CERN, and having to do something with some ALICE is coming as Chief Guest (or Guest of Honour, or something on those lines). It is my last chance to attend it as a student, and I never bothered to attend it before. I hope I can pull it off.

I am writing this Blog on autopilot-mode, and perhaps may not remember writing it when I wake up, that is after I go to sleep, that would be hopefully after attending the Convocation.

Also my phone has been off since last night, as I forgot to take my charger back home.

NOTE: the title has no implications whatsoever with spirituality.

The Free Market

2008-11-01T23:16:00.003+05:30

Kunal was all jumpy about doing a Stock Market Stimulation, but Mayank did not want it to be a copy of WoodStock and neither did I.

But after the Global Economic Meltdown and then an hour of Muhrat Trading on CNBC, I found that having a Stock Market for Mukti '09 was too good a thing to resist!

Why not make a Stock Market, in which people buy and sell shares of ... yes... Open Source Softwares.

While it will help in publisizing those softwares, if will also help increase traffic on the Mukti website. Here are some salient features:

1. Named "The Free Market" after the style inspired by the Hippies. Tagline "Share with shares" (if you have a better tagline please do tell me, although I'm not compromising with the event name.) :P

2. We start with 20 companies named after Open Source Softwares, we decide the Market Cap for each and the no. of shares to distribute in the Market.

3. Initial Public Offers of duration one week. People register as users and are allotted a sum of 1 Lakh. They are to bid for the stocks within the mentioned price band.

4. Allocation of the shares are to be done. If shares are over-subscribed, they are distribited as a percentage of the no. of shares available. If under-subscribed, the rest of the shares goes to an Under-Writer (in this case the admin). The admin can then sell the shares back to the market when he thinks fit.

5. Trading to be open for 2-3 weeks from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. Traders are to react to random dummy news clip marquees, to buy/sell the shares. The price of the shares are to go up/down depending on real-time buying/selling pressure.

6. There will be a ticker to show live prices of the shares. Also past performances of the shares may be tracked using graphs(difficult task to implement until I get the right tool for it). The Free Market Index or freemex is a measure of the movement of the Free Market and is calculated and displayed real-time on the basis of the weightages of the stocks.

7. Events such as Splits, Stock Mergers and Acquisition, New IPO's and Delistings may be incorporated to make the game more fun!

8. Brokerage will be charged at 1% of each transaction.

For this I am going to do the Ruby on Rails Learning Curve, which may save some tedious coding.

More on this later.... Suggestions are welcome!

And we'r back...

2008-10-19T01:25:00.006+05:30

I tried hard to not blog for sometime, but trust me it IS difficult.

So after spending half my Durga Puja Vacations getting sick and the other half recovering (not that I did not have fun in the process, and believe me A Lot of Fun) I decided to come back the Wednesday before classes start to begin(old habit).

While it was mostly because of the fact that the IT minister of Bengal and Prof. Sanker Sen of IOTA were going to visit my college on the 16th (they didn't), I always love to tell myself that I came back early because of a number of other reasons. Its always like that, there are always a number of reasons for making stupid decisions. Like me staying back this weekend, although I did not have enough money, clothes, warm blankets (ya, winter's approaching), a Mozilla Goodies Pack that just arrived home to bring to college (I can bring that next week but the thought of staying away from it one whole week..) and had a dance practice back home(no explanations for this one), I always like to believe I have better reasons to do otherwise, though I have none.

And I just bought a whole lot of Contact Lens Solution. More that I will ever need. I just finished a 60 ml bottle (which cost me Rs 100) in 3 months (and I just bought a pack of 360 ml+360 ml +60 ml = 780 ml of Lens Solution just because it was available for Rs 400(the pack had two Lens Cases too ). What am I going to do with so much of solution and no problem (OK, bad one!).

The black t-shirt I brought was good. Though mom's never going to pay for it. Nor the Lens Solution.

Anyway, guess I'll go back to watching the 3rd Season of "How I met your Mother". Let down as it is to everybody who asks me which episode I'm watching (they mean which episode of the Currently Airing 4th Season and I answer them I'm watching the 2nd Season) at least I'm watching the 3rd season now. Hope to be at par with the present by the time the weekend ends. (see again)

Cya!

Leaving for Home

2008-09-30T05:02:00.002+05:30

Ok, I have 15 mins before I leave for home for the Durga Puja Vacations. So what better way than to blog away the time.

I have my bag (read rucksack) all packed. Its got my dirty clothes, my contacts (I want to sleep in the bus and its a bit difficult to sleep with contacts on), placement goodies ( one Amazon Mug [the other one stays back], two Novell Bookmarks, the Microsoft Backpack and Notebook), Deja Vu [Thats the Official College Newsletter with more Bakar than News], my towel and slippers.

Ofcourse I will take back the Sound Scapes CD as well (Music composed by Hari Prasad Chaurasia and Shiv Kumar Sharma).

And I have this voice in my head that speaks above the Music why I wasted the last week in College. Not to forget the two Opposite Personalites one happy to be going back home after a long time, the other sad and GoingToMissCollege.

And I just remember to put in my cell charger in the bag. Also I just remember I am Rs 20 short of the mney I need to get back home, as I didnt get maney from Debayan for buying him Veg HotDog. Dosn't matter I'll take some money from Anish.

Anyway... Peace Out Guys!

Firefox Survey

2008-09-30T04:31:00.003+05:30

Love using Mozilla Firefox?
Show your loyalty by taking the following survey... HERE

Vervy

2008-09-20T03:44:00.005+05:30

Its the 4th and Final Verve of our College life (lets face it how many people get to experience VerveLike Events in their College Life)... And I just finished doing the Software for one of their Events...

The event's called GPL and its loosely based in the Indian Premier League (IPL)... Cosisting of Bidding and matchwise contests. I did it in JSP as that is the only server side scripting I know of.

It was tough, the implementation... not because the task was difficult but because a lot was to be done in too less time. And it had to be Bugless. Not necessary full of good features, but one minor bug on stage could throw he entire event heywire.

But still I have done what I could to make it easy to use, and work with. And with only half a Dry Run... I don't think its totally tested. But ya, it contains no bug we (me and Manish) know of.

And it has taken some (read Three) sleepless nights, not to mention Code Cracker 2.0 Episode 2 on Wednesday Night(which I basically did not admin, but had some hand in it starting 30 mins after Scheduled Time) and the Big DJ Fiasco Thursday Night(which consisted of me going totally unprepared on stage to perform with a non-perrforming set of Headphones, a WontWorkOnJustAnySurface Mouse and a Laptop with no charge, and the Power Man not switching on the Power resulting in two mid performance Sleeps[the lappy slept, not me], also included a trip to Benachity to get a Old Guy prepare me yet another set of Splitters as I had lost my last one).

Because of a Class test that didnt happen I have had only 3 hours of sleep Last Night (read Morning) and accompanied by lots of development (Software wise) and Verve 2k8 starting of today with All Sorts of Things (ya thats the name of my team as well) qualifing the Word Smyth

Prilims but coming in last two and getting WildCarded and DartDefeated out.

Just Finished with the software (oh did I mentioned that already), and now going of to sleep. Events start tomorrow (read today) morning at 9:00 and what's me doing blogging I have no idea.

Anyway(s) off to sleep, and hope me having the best knowledge of the GPL rules help us a bit Tomorrow. Cheers!!

Error running Firefox 3

2008-09-14T14:07:00.002+05:30

This is a tech blog:

One of the reasons why people should use Linux .. is that although you get stuck here more than you do in windows.. help is more readily available for Linux.

After a useless one day I spent on Windows (in spite of the fact a deadly virus was circulating through Gtalk, and me answering everyone affected who stumbled upon me for help to use Linux)... I had to run Firefox (outdated) 2 again as Firefox 3 just wouldn't run on my Mandriva system.

A little history:
The Mandriva installation before last had a smoothly running Firefox 3. I was then unaware that Firefox 3 was available in the URPMI repositories as well so I always installed from source. After reinstalling Mandriva however, Firefox 3 just wouldn't run (nothing would happen when i clicked the icon). So I tried running from the terminal and I got this error:

Error: in guard: symbol required but got: Error: fatal: looped fatal error

I googled this and found out that this was a very common error... but no one had the solution for it.... ( i mean there were a few solutions mentioned but none worked for me)

That day I discovered that URPMI had Firefox 3.0.1 and I installed it. Soon the system closed my Firefox 2 window and there it was Firefox 3. Up and running.

That evening when I reopened my Firefox 3 browser, nothing happened.... I tried it from my terminal,

Error: in guard: symbol required but got: Error: fatal: looped fatal error

That was it... I did not have any more enthu that day to pursue this any further.

So back to today:
I decided to give the situation another try when I was downloading a funny video I liked called Benny Lava which was actually a Tamil Prabhu Deva song some guy called Buffalax had thought would sound in English. Download speed was slow for the video so I had to use DownThemAll (the download manager for Firefox).

Google was having the same set of search results as the lst time so I used Mibbit to connect to #firefox in irc.mozilla.org and placed my situation. Someone called mzz replied and he looked for the source of the error message. He first checked the Firefox source code, then the Gtk and finally the shell source code.

The solution:
Then he came up with a search result that said uninstalling uim (whatever that was ) would help... I did that .. and voila Firefox 3 is up and running again...

Thanks mzz. (whoever you are)

My Browser

2008-09-07T23:16:00.006+05:30

This time I AM serious...

But as both a web developer and a web surfer, I feel someone needs to take the initiative and and do something about stuff.

I will start with browsing. There was the Internet Explorer 6, we all knew, before I learnt Linux existed. I also used browsers like Opera and Netscape Navigator... but they never stuck. IE was this simple thing to use without much complicacies.

Then I discovered Mozilla Firefox 2 (of course that was before Download Day). I discovered tabbed browsing.. which meant a cleaner taskbar (I hate messy taskbars). It let me go of Internet Explorer instantly and no matter how it tried (Internet Explorer 7, with tabbed browsing and more)... Firefox was there to stay!

Meanwhile I discovered Mandiva Linux, and found that I never had to worry about IE again....

But fate had other plans... I became a Web Developer...

Because as a Web Developer it is your duty to see that the website you create runs (and looks ... and more often looks) equally good on all platforms and resolutions... and leaving aside small players.. I had to take into account both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

So, the last one year (I have been developing websites) this has been a constant irritation... people say its a part of a web developers duty.. but I beg to differ...

Why I start ranting about this now... because :

1. Firefox 3 that so far was running absolutely fine in my system.. (and I was loving and recommending it as I was in love with its Awesome Bar) dosn't run anymore... no matter how hard I try... and always gives the following error :
Error: in (function call): procedure or syntax required but got: Error: fatal: looped fatal error
[heart break]

2. Making the Orkut app for Muziboo.com I had the most difficult time as a developer... because as a developer our goal should be being creative and productive... not taking care of the glitches in the browsers...

3. The new and in Chrome is actually good but not as extensive as Firefox is .. and it is not yet out for Linux.

4. Today I saw an innocent little boy suffer making the CodeCracker interface just because what was appearing to be perfect on Firefox... was getting messed up in IE. Of course I was suffering with him... but I was quite used to this. But am I? Incidentally it was not always IE that screws up... because of a div which was there in Firefox 3 .. was missing in Firefox 2.

I mean what is this. Some freaking company comes up with a new browser of its own.. and now we Web Developers have to tune in to the innie minnie idiosyncrasies of that new browser too. Wasn't Web Designing all about productivity on web? Why do we have to be slaves to these browserish nightmares?

I think someone (some individual/ organisation/group) needs to stand up for this. We need to have some well defined rules, something that all browsers have to comply to, for them to legally call themselves browsers. And Web Developers should not care about illegal browsers, when illegal queries are what they should be taking care of. There should be some norms for all browsers that will take care of this cross-browser hell, so that we as Developers get more time and energy to whet our creativity...

The Internet is a great place... Why do these clients have to to spoil the experience ?

Training and Placement Representative

2008-09-02T00:59:00.002+05:30

Today we have an exciting personality with us. We all may know his as the DJ Shrink or as the One Day GS of NIT Durgapur, but today we ask him all about how it is to be a TPR for CSE. Ladies and gentlemen please welcome our guest tonight, Shreyank Gupta...

[Clapping]

Me: So tell us how was it that you became a TPR?

Shreyank: That is a huge mystery even to myself. One moment I was asked by Anish to maintain the database of the CSE students, the next thing I know, I am working as a TPR.

Me: How do you feel being in such an important position?

Shreyank: At first I loved the job, but with time I found how incompetent I am as a TPR.
1. I don't have nor do I care to find out the information about the companies that are coming, nor the other details like their criteria, cut-offs and packages.
2. I even if I found out, thanks to my super-awesome memory, I forget it the next minute.
3. I am very irresponsible, careless and and lazy, thus giving me all the three characteristics you would never love to find in a TPR.

Me: Ok, that was one helluva insight. [laughter].
So do you think the students are happy with you as a TPR?

Shreyank: Oh yeah, they are. At least they behave as if they are. I mean, you have absolutely no idea about the things people ask you. "Heard company XYZ is coming" (strange, I just heard its name for the first time). " Hey, you know the package of ABC? " (strange, I swear I knew it just moments ago) "Oi, what is the cut-off for PQR?" (They haven't announced yet, but why do you ask? You are in even if its 8 and above).
Some people have this silly habit of asking the same questions again and again, twice a day, even if they know they are never getting a proper answer. I always get rid of them with vague answers, vague enough to be true, but I don't get why they never call my bluff.
Oh ya, I just am a part of a department consisting of the strangest bunch of people. They fight over things like a lost sheet that was supposed to be taken from the HOD's Office, why some people who were supposedly eligible for a PSU, now don't want to sit for it, when even they won't sit for it now, and who takes dummies along with them to written examinations. And when I am having fun reading their rants (in a forum thread) some guys get all sentimental about it. I guess they love their department a bit too much.

Me: And what about the companies that are coming?

Shreyank: And that is a different story altogether. We remember starting off in the middle of 6th Sem, making list of companies that may visit the college. Now the condition is so bad, companies that have been coming for the last few years decide not to visit NIT Durgapur any more. What seems to be the biggest problem is our Head, Training, Placement and Students Welfare (TPSW). Frankly I don't know how he managed to rope in the companies that ARE visiting, because if I had been an HR "in Dialogue" with him, his excellent communication skills will force me to decide at that instance that this is a wrong NIT to visit for campus recruitments.
Inspite of that we did have a few good companies visiting our campus this year, but I really don't know what will be the case the next year if the current Head, TPSW decides to stay on.

Me: And what about the other TPR's?

Shreyank: The other TPRs are awesome (no I am not being sarcastic this time). All of them (unlike me) are hard working and sincere. The only problem is lack of organisation. If we could have been a little more organised, we would have had better results. They are the ones I turn to when I am in deep shit, and they almost always are helpful.

Me: What do you intend to do about all the problems on the Training and Placement field?

Shreyank:(Are they really listening to what I am saying or do they just have a pre-determined set of questions the need to get over with! I hate Interviews! )
Well as I have mentioned, we are working hard towards getting more and more companies to visit our campus, inspite of all the troubles and hurdles and companies backing out. As for me I just do what I am told, though I am little careless sometimes, and mess up things.

Me: Well, thank you and all the best!

(That didn't go as bad as I expected!)

Stream of Thoughts

2008-08-14T01:53:00.004+05:30

Just gave Scrubs Season 3 DVD to Nitin to copy it for me into my pen drive, because its getting stuck in my DVD drive. Episode 1 was running good, it stuck somewhere in episode 2. I hope he is not having problems copying or else I will have to look in the LAN again, which will be tough considering the fact that my linuxdcpp client is crashing all the time, and I am having trouble installing the valknut client Debayan and Vignesh are using as its not there in the Mandriva repositories.

Scrubs Season two was good. I finished the entire thing in one night, except that in between I had to work on some bugs that my last work on ooldtp support for ldtpeditor had. Getting rid of the bugs were harder than implementing the feature. Its now fixed in GIT.

I have also applied for developer of LDTP to freedesktop.org. Hope it gets approved soon.

Speaking of getting approved Prateek Dayal wrote a great blogabout our Muziboo App not getting approved by Orkut.

Just one another Feature to implement in ldtpeditor after which I will move on to either Mono or the Red Hat Internship. Hope those will help me in getting a better job.

As for college placements, I don't think I will be studying for any companies considering the fact that most good companies are either getting canceled or postponed due to some reason or the other.

Tomorrow we will go to S.N. Sarkar our "Professor and Head, Training, Placement and Student Welfare" as he likes to be known to "talk" about the bad placement of CSE, IT and MCA Departments, but I don't think anything good will come out of it.

In any case, I will go back home tomorrow as its been a long and disppointing (in most ways) stay out here. There is a three day weekend with Independance Day tomorrow, so I will be back this Sunday.

I was terribly homesick, sad and depressed Yesternight, mainly because it was my friend's birthday back home, and I had no idea what I was doing here in college, as everyone of my colony friend circle was enjoying. Very childish and immature but that's that. My apologies to everybody with whom I was rude or ignored.

I really hope that the Linux InstallFest we are planning come out good, as most people are having apprehensions, not that its bad as it does help in bringing out the flaws and avoiding them, thus helping into a better InstallFest.

Episode 2 is not getting copied so I guess I will have to look somewhere for it.

My Desktop

2008-08-13T16:50:00.000+05:30

ooldtp with scrubs

2008-08-10T20:49:00.003+05:30

tanmaya gave me all four seasons of scrubs on four dvds, and because the season 1 dvd wasn't reading, i decided to download the lot from lan.

also it had turned out once again how futile studying was, so i got back to my ldtp work, latest being adding ooldtp support to ldtpeditor.

but then i had 24 episodes! (ofcourse there would be more but i thought i'd aim for completing the season 1 first). episode 1 was interesting, the whole concept and the humour, i saw episode 2 as well. thats all for now!

then i talked to nagappan, he had just once mentioned ooldtp and i had procrastinated saying that i had novell to prepare for... and no, i am not going into crying how futile studying for novell was again. so nagappan mentioned what was to be done and he also suggested some string formatting changes to be done, which i targeted to do that night itself.

but before that episode 3, 4, 5... scrubs was awesome.

at 5 am i sat with the formatting, it was done within minutes, but i didn't sleep that night... slept after having breakfast and attending two early morning classes.

next came episodes 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, ...

nagappan pings that he had committed the string formatting changes to the CGIT. so i say to myself, thats enough... lets start with ooldtp now.I checked out the new code at GIT, the changes are not there, he must have made a mistake... so i mailed him, he replies he forgot to push the code back to origin (whatever that meant) so i had half a day until he did that.

episodes 11, 12.... 12 again... so sorry the last episode was episode 22... my mistake.... so now 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.... hey its melodramatic as well!

nagappan replied that its done now so on with the work. this time i started with the gui first and then moved on to the implementation. it was showing some errors and it was early morning.. so i went on to...

19, 20, 21 ...ZZZzzzz....

sat down again with it that evening... it was working but then nagappan said it wasn't sufficient...(window contexts needed to be created only once for each window and not again and again, which was fair enough as it spoiled the whole purpose of using ooldtp) so i did what was necessary.... fixed all errors... the patch was ready and i mailed it...

episode 22... oh i had seen this before.... 23, 24. wow, what a season finale for a comedy. can't wait to start season 2...

filed for another enhancement that will allow ldtpeditor to save user preferences in a local file so that they don't have to be selected again and again(frankly i was quite tired of checking "generate ooldtp script" in the preferences dialog again and again. looking forward to implementing that as well! soon...

p.s. the caps-lock key of my keyboard is not working, and i am too lazy to use the shift keys. (ok, i'm too lazy for the caps-lock too) ;)

Work of Fiction

2008-08-05T02:46:00.006+05:30

I had screwed my Novell Written Test and was sitting sulking in my room when they called....

"Where are you? Your interview starts in 15 mins!"

That meant I had qualified my written... after all there were no negative marks for wrong answers, I had answered a lot on guesses, they must have paid off!

13 mins....

I hadn't taken a bath yet. But that had to wait. I almost emptied my deodorant on me, out came my ironed formals, my tie, my file and in five minutes I was locking my room door.

Oh no, I still hadn't got my updated C.V. printed. I went back in, at least I had in my Pen-drive. Some blessed soul took the responsibility of printing it from the Computer Centre. I had to run....

The C.V. arrived just in time when they called my name. I put them in on top of my old C.V. I entered the interview room adjusting my tie.

The tech guy asked a few formal questions and then jumped straight to hard-core stuff. I passed most of it. Then he asked me tell him move about my work at LDTP. I had never rehearsed it, but the words came out well rehearsed. The tech guy seemed impressed.

The H.R. Ma'am asked me to get comfortable, which I tried but failed miserably. She asked me about this and that and what I wanted to do at Novell and I explained. From her expression I could not understand what she thought of my answers.

I was pleased to see two more gifts, a leather CD bag and an OpenSuse 11 DVD. I hopped back to hall 4, waving and trying to ignore queries of how my interview went.

I came back and had a bath, felt releaved. In my heart I knew I had cracked Novell. But the tension was stomach squeezing. Three times I had to visit the loo. Finally they managed to take me to the mess to get some food.

After the missed call I swallowed what I had in my mouth, washed my hands, and ran to the Insti Building. There was a small circle in front of the notice board. Even if I saw people eyeing me I failed to perceive any meaning out of it.

There were three names, one of it looked like mine.

Shreyank Gup.....

Why is it that people fantasize about things that never happened....

Bullets !

2008-08-01T01:22:00.013+05:30

I think its a long time since I blogged last, but the reasons were not lack of materials!

So i decided to jot down a few observations, thoughts and recollections which I hope you will consider a valid blog entry! (The heading does in no way refer to the shiny and streamlined metal objects that kill living beings when shot from a gun).

The night I arrived to college was interesting considering the fact that the bus Me (yes, M capital) and Souvik Ray were coming back to college on broke its front-right tyre somewhere midway Kolkata and Durgapur. Even more interesting was the fact that both of us were carrying their luggage and computers(desktops) in that bus.

In a span of 10 days I have spent over Rs 1000 and all of it was spent and not lost. All I can account for is that most of the money was spent on Food and yet I have lost a lot in Body Volume.

Contact Lenses are sometimes comfortable but most of the times hurt the eye.

I am drinking more water here than I was back at home.

I did not qualify for round 2 of the Google Code Jam.

I inducted two juniors, Roshan Kr Singh and Shailesh (surname unknown) into LDTP and feel happy about it. They seem to be making great progress!

On my 2nd week back at college I have finally changed my sleeping patterns. I now go to sleep at about 4 am (instead of 6 a.m.) and wake up at 12:30 pm just in time to catch lunch. I have not however tasted breakfast at Hall 4.

Single-seater rooms are boring.

I am staying for the 4th year in a row beside the stairs, though that is not what I am complaining about.

I went out to buy a bucket but ended up buying everything except a bucket (a soap-case, a pillow and a net-thingy to keep dirty clothes in) none of which I really needed. I still don't have a bucket.

I did not understand anything of the movie Mullholland Drive.

I was not studying for Novell when I was seemingly eligible for it, but from the time there is a doubt on my eligibility, I have started serious (well somewhat) preparations.

Switched to windows only twice for an hour each to play Counter Strike. Rest of the time I have been running Mandriva on my system.

A frog sits from 11:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. on my doorstep at exactly the same spot every night. I am not worried about the frog but about the snake that may come looking for it.

Mamma, I'm leaving home...

2008-07-19T23:38:00.012+05:30

Although I have made a trip to college after college reopened on 14th (yes, July), it still doesn't count as re-opened for me until I move to college with all my belongings and my computer(yes, even that falls under the category of belongings, but I love to emphasize). That's tomorrow (today... by the time I finish writing this!)

So I thought I should be writing something down, something like a farewell blog.. umm.. farewell note to home, about how much I loved staying here and what I did (mainly the latter).

It won't be chronological, because some of the things I did overlap each other!(oh no, what have I got myself into, this is gonna be long!!)

1. Gym:
This was the first thing I did when I came back from college. O.K. this may send out wrong signals, but at that time I thought the holidays were going to be very boring, and so let's have something to keep fit while killing time. I was regular for the 1st month, got irregular in the 2nd month and then one fine evening I decided to quit. (quite predictable)

2. Broadband:
First two weeks I spent getting connected, and the rest of my holidays I spent infront of it, surfing, working, downloading and what not( ignore the 'what not'). Except for one time when my modem wasn't working and the person I went complaining to was bewildered seeing my Usage Data.

3. LDTP:
Working on LDTP was fun, and so was working under Nagappan. At first it was gibberish, but slowly as I got to know the code, working became easier. So was learning Python, a dream-come-true language. Finally it was a drean come true to see my name in the AUTHORS list of LDTP.

4. Muziboo.com
Don't remember what I had in mind when I applied for the internship, but sure it was nothing to do with building an Orkut app. The weeks I worked for the App were sure hectic, and it was all me when I am stressed, not a care about the world or surroundings, just working day and night on the app. Was very satisfying to see it take shape, while learning new web technologies, and then in one moment of grief, it all came down when I read the mail that said that Orkut was expecting something a more user interaction. But then, all that was not to be for nothing, there would be more work to be done.

5. Rakesh Kedia, his Mama and Aarkay International a.k.a Ektaa Enterprises:
This was one helluva earning opportunity, messed up! When Amar approached me with the proposal of making a website for Rakesh Kedis's Jute Export Company, and there was supposed to be lots of money involved, it sounded like a Bank Job. But then his Mama came in, a crooked fat lump, unable to walk. He had a totally different notion of perfection - hideous. Our initial talk to him was unbearable enough, and then work got stuck because he couldn't decide on his Logo for 3 weeks, and finally when he made up his mind, they decided to change their company name. The new logo took another 2 weeks. Finally when they contacted me back, I wanted to quit because we were developing a website and taking a page out of the Logo episode, I rekoned I did not have a year to waste.

6. Movies and TV shows:
Encouraged by the idea of free downloads from 2 a.m to 8 a.m. I started downloading lots of movies. Here is a list of them in no order:

Memento
Harold and Kumar go to White Castle
Harold and Kumar go to Guantanamo Bay
Primal Fear
Identity
Godfather 2
Godfather 3 - yet to be seen
The Oxford Murderers - yet to be seen
American Beauty
The Other Boleyn Girl
Strange Wilderness
Rambo [2008]
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Reservoir Dogs
The Usual Suspects
Street Kings
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
A Clockwork Orange
The Forbidden kingdom
Cassandra's Dream
In Bruges
10000 BC
Alvin and the Chipmunks
Pathology
Vantage Point
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover
Mystic River
Casablanca - yet to be seen
Goodfellas - yet to be seen
The Eye - yet to be seen
The Cronicles of Narnia - yet to be seen
The Sawshank Redemption (repeat)
The Pianist
Sin City - yet to be seen
American History X
Untracable
To Kill A Mockingbird - yet to be seen
The Lives of Others (German)
Taxi Driver
Semi-Pro
My Blueberry Nights
The Superhero Movie
The Onion Movie
Twenty One
CloverField
12 Angry Men
DrillBit Taylor
Transformers
Hourton Hears a Who (animation)
Zeitgeist
Be Kind Rewind
There Will be Blood - yet to be seen
Over Her Dead Body
Kill Bill I
Kill Bill II
Once Upon a Time in the West -
Mad Money
Rush Hour
Rush Hour 2
Rush Hour 3
The Kingdom
The Bank Job
Wargames - The Dead Code
Step up 2 - The Streets
Jumper
Definitely Maybe
Saving Private Ryan
Fool's Gold - yet to be seen
Mulholland Drive - yet to be seen
Loaded - yet to be seen
Hero Wanted - yet to be seen
Penelope - yet to be seen
Stoploss - yet to be seen
Sweeney Todd-The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street - yet to be seen
Into the Wild - yet to be seen
Never Back Down - yet to be seen
Atonement - yet to be seen
Lost Highway - yet to be seen
Leatherheads - yet to be seen
Indiana Jones - all 3 with their long names !

I also saw the whole of Coupling 1-4 and Simpsons 18 and 19.
Special thanks to Torrentz, IMDB and Anish for their kind co-operation.

7. Outside Home:
12 weeks of holidays and I just went out five times, two movies, twice with college friends and a marraige party. Gone are the days of addabaazi OnTheRocks and movies and malls and resturants and treats. Yet I can't say I didn't have fun in the holidays.

8. Sleep:
First two weeks I was on the Healthy, Wealthy and Wise regime, I went to sleep early and woke up at 6 a.m. to an early Gym. Post-Broadband, I shfted my sleep at after 2 a.m. so as to start the downloads, which soon went up to 4 a.m and the settled at a regular 6 a.m. When I woke up varied from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. with the last two days as exceptions ( 4:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m.)

9. LUG Server:
Working on the LUG server was fun and with the high speed internet, I felt as if I was using it from College LAN. I worked on NTP, SSH accounts and then finally on the new LUG Website with Debayan.

10. Blogging:
Blogging was a whole new thing this summer. Writing blogs down, showing it off and then reading comments(no matter how scarce) was one of the highlights this summer.

11. Cricket and Soccer:
Yes... me and sports do not go along very well, but supporting the Kolkata Kight Riders in the IPL 20-20 and supporting Germany in the EURO 2008 had its moments. While KKR went down early (when the most part of the series were the exhaustive league matches, early is an understatement here), Germany gave a little more than hope until that fateful Finals in Vienna.

To sum it up, I had a blast!!!
Catch ya in college!

My Best Friend's Uncle's Wedding

2008-07-12T15:17:00.005+05:30

I left home at 3:00 pm yesterday, and came back at 6:am today. Its been a long day !

Had been to Nitin's uncle's wedding yesterday. After my experiences I have compiled a list of DOs and DON'Ts people should keep in mind in case they get to organize a Wedding.

Here goes:

1. Never demand too much from your friends and call them at the engagement too which you schedule a day before the Wedding. Else they miss the engagement and then they get so over-burdened with the load of responsibility that they would have to buy new Contact Lenses in case they break their spectacles the night before (more so if they are miopic sporting -5.25L and -6.50R )

2. Never tell your friends to come at a time at which you would never be able to reach yourself. Even if you know your friends are always 2 hours late, don't forget that they would go to buy their contact lenses at the same place where you have the wedding, and they may just as well arrive in time.

3. If they call you and tell you that they are there and where are you all?? - dont ever tell them to come over to the guest house you are staying, because it will be another hour before they leave, so they can all leave together.

4. Even if you make all the above mistakes, don't hand them a Brittle-Handle-with-Care type of object which is so heavy they can barely hold on to it.

5. Don't put them in a taxi's front seat with the driver on their right, a girl he barely knows on his left, the gear handle under him, 3 aunties behind him, and the huge Brittle-Handle-with-Care type of object (which turned out later to be 4 lavishly decorated mirrors) on his lap.

6. Always predict beforehand whether there is going to be a electric-fire to greet the guests accompanied by huge bellowing clouds of smoke, and people running all around with gas cylinders lest they explode. So much that the Bride and Groom and a few other people have to take refuge in the Bathroom-Fittings showroom opposite the Wedding spot, watching fire-fighters fight the fire.

7. Never start the wedding 4 hours late(fire or no fire), in a partially burnt down lobby with 14 A.C.s none of them powered on, and a undamaged-by-fire conference room with all A.C.s in full power.

8. Have just starters and desserts for food. No need for the main course.

9. Have loads of coffee, so that your friends don't turn up pestering you every 15 minutes whether the coffee is coming or not (even though you are on the Groom's side and have no idea what is on menu).

10. Never end the marriage at 2 a.m. so that people who have no idea what's going on have to stay on as there is no way they can go home that late.

11. If your friend wants to go home at 5 a.m. in the morning, don't ask questions, just let him go, he's already had enough.

Gosh I'm tired...

The G.U.I.

2008-07-10T01:35:00.008+05:30

After a month's break from LDTP ( reasons include a bad modem, Muziboo.com, and fear of PyGtk) ... seems like I finally did it.

For all those who had missed my last post on LDTP here's a Quick Recap (more for me than for the readers) :

A series of bug-reports and their respective fixes by Nagappan which combined with a few other bits of development let to LDTP 1.2.0 (reports of which can be found here, there and here-too [dont forget to spot my name in the report :D]).
I had filed a enhancement for LDTP Editor that would allow it to execute recorded-and-converted scripts even if the name of the window the script is executing on changes during execution (which generally does change).
I had implemented the logic behind this enhancement using RegEx and a user-editable database of Supported Applications.

What remained was to add a GUI to support this feature which required knowledge of PyGtk which I sadly lacked.

So after getting my modem replaced and my Mandriva reinstalled (dunno why it wasn't booting, maybe something to do with the frequent Power-Cuts) I sat down with a fresh copy of LDTP (installed through GIT). Took me sometime to bring it up-to-date with my last work. This time instead of looking through PyGtk.org I browsed through PyGtk - GNOME Live! as recommended by Nagappan a month before.

A day (read 6 working hours) later, I had the GUI running fine.

(I told you it wasn't that scary!!!)

So a few more screenshots for the readers...

The Screenshot !

2008-07-04T22:12:00.008+05:30

There it is!!

The Muziboo App!!

I just submitted it for the Orkut team to look through...

Should be out for public consumption in about a week !

Feels satisfied...

Compatibility

2008-07-01T22:21:00.007+05:30

So I make the whole App... everything is working well and good and then suddenly when I decide to check it on Internet Explorer 7, nothing's coming.

Oh no... where did I go wrong??

Luckily, Mozilla Firefox allows for a handy debug tool for JavaScript Programmers called FireBug. Internet Explorer on the other hand sucks cos its so developer unfriendly. After a lot of trouble I found something called DebugBar which was supposed to help me debug... but all it did was showed me errors in a more flamboyant way with no information whatsoever about its cause.
“Object doesn't support this property or method”

INTERNET EXPLORER SUCKS !!!

By doing a lot of try-catch, I finally zeroed down to the cause of the error.
(What I had been doing was, I had used a XSPF(XML Shareable Playlist Format) JSPF parser written by Chris Anderson (which he had put under GPL V3) which actually converted a XML to JSON which i then used in my App.) The line that caused the error was the very same line in which I did the parsing thing. Now what was i going to do?

Prateek came to the rescue. He suggested using XPath to get data from the XSPF Playlist("After all its nothing bu XML"). Only that I did not know how it was used.

Google refered me to w3schools.com.

Just when I started to get the hang of XPath, I decided to check out its examples. w3schools has those innovative Tryit Editor which lets you edit the examples and see the results alongside. Well I had not even touched the examples. They just wouldnt show results that w3schools claimed it would do.

I decided to copy-paste the examples and try it myself... no result. I tried it on IE7 ... there it was XPath at work... But not working in Firefox 3... generally its always the other way round. What was happening... things working on Internet Explorer 7 not Firefox...

FIREFOX NEVER SUCKED !!!

Even Firebug turned me down. Just the good ol' Error Console with a huge error the gist of which was :
"Node cannot be used in a document other than the one in which it was created"

A thread in a googlegroup said that that was due to a security fix in Firefox 3 and then gave some links that apperently had the solution to my problem... but sadly I could not make any head or tail out of it.

Prateek insisted that we realease Muziboo App v1.0 with a Flash Widget doing all the parsing and playing... but I was adament... cummon... all this hard work just to see a worthless Flash Widget take away all the glory. I'd rather parse the playlist myself... but that was kinda tough.

And then he told I should write a Parser myself! What am I ? JavaScript Coder Of the Year or Something??(I could parse the playlist to get what I wanted, but to make a parser that would parse any playlist, work on any browser was asking a lot out of me)

And in all the quarreling I had an idea. I had already written enough XPath to parse the playlist for IE7 only the error was on Firefox 3 (only?? Its already so popular, its on the verge of a World Record).

So what I could do was I could check which browser was running, If I was Internet Explorer I parsed it myself otherwise I did it the Chris Anderson way...

P.S. We are going to apply for submission of the App tomorrow night. Only some CSS alignment issues to me taken care of which should be done with by then.

Rewind

2008-06-25T17:40:00.005+05:30

Is your Work Stress killing you?

Do you feel its all getting a little too much than what you bargained for?

Do you wish each day had 30 hours instead of the customary 24 hours?

Then you have come to the correct place because we seem to have the solution to all your problems.

The REWIND technique from All Sorts of Things, is a completely FREE and Open Source way to a tension free lifestyle. Moreover it is 100% tested (well not 100%), and has absolutely no side-effects(except a bit of drowsiness).

REWIND- the All Sorts Of Things way:

1. Get your Broadband modem to stop working ( I was lucky, mine stopped working by itself.)

2. Start watching all the movies you had downloaded all these days, but couldn't watch because every time you tried it, a hidden far-away voice in your head said, "Hey, you have WORK pending".

3. Sleep more.( Like if you went to sleep at 5:00 am, make sure you get to bed by 4:00 am, and wake up at 2:00 pm instead of 1:00 pm.)

4. Whenever there is a power-cut, don't sit there like a moron, waiting for it to come back... Get a nap.

5. Visit your dying Great-Grandmother. A few extra blessings won't hurt.

6. Catch up with the news papers. Start by that day's paper, finish only when you reach last week's.

7. Help your brothers with his Biology project on Cells. Get nostalgic with stencils that used to be your's someday.

8. Sit in front of the computer and stare at the Television..... Simultaneously !!!

9. Visit the Telephone Exchange everyday to get your modem replaced. Run around, make them feel your presence.

10. Finally when they say, "Sorry kid, Type I Modems are out of stock" and "I have no idea when the new stocks are coming!", give in to that little voice in your head, get a friend who'll be out of City for another 4 months, Go to your dear friend's house, whether his parent's allow you or not ...Get His Modem!!

Oh my dear Internet, 3 days without you is like a lifetime in misery!
(I should be seriously considering writing poetry)

Klose'r to the Semis !!!

2008-06-20T03:14:00.007+05:30

Semis... Here We Come.

Ever got a feeling that you are more German than an Indian. Well that's victory for you!

First Bastian Schweinsteiger and then Miroslav Klose with a CoolAsIce header in quick succession. Well Portugal had their share of luck as well in the goal by Nuno Gomez.

The Second Half saw Micheal Ballack kick in another spectacular goal, from another of those awesome (no other way to describe it) pass from Schweinsteiger. Portugal struck back to make it 3-2.

But that was the 87th minute... and though not always, but in this case ....too late.

One of those matches in which you cannot restrain yourself from a "I knew they were going to win, I knew it from the very beginning."

OpenSocialite

2008-06-20T02:17:00.003+05:30

And then I decided I wont be Orkuting again.

But you know how it is. We cant just suddenly let go of something. Especially if that something is a Social Networking Website like Orkut, and especially when you have 440 odd Friends, most of 'Whom you do Know'.

I tried tricks, I changed my pic so that no one would know that was me.. even my name on the profile. I stopped being 'online' if you get what i mean. I stopped replying to random 'Hi's and 'Ssup's. 'Course I had Gtalk, and for the sad few who did not have Gtalk or don't know how to use it, Sad Luck.

Still I'd end up in there once in a fortnight, but that was improvement.

In the middle of all the commotion, Orkut released the 'Apps' feature, I thought maybe it was trying to get level with Facebook(which i think is better that Orkut, just that the Heart is where Friends are).

So when Prateek Dayal of Muziboo said that I had to make an Orkut app, I was just as apprehensive as him.

Ingredients:

JavaScript
OpenSocial Spec provided by Google.
Ruby on Rails
More Stuff as and when required.

Had to request for a Orkut sandbox account first. That took some time. Started out with the Opensocial example, and guess what ... It Worked!! So I changed it so that I could send people G.P.L.'s( and I don't mean the GNU General Public License )instead of peanuts and hazelnuts that the app allowed me to send.

Then I Got started with the Muziboo app.

The first step was easy (Oh yaa ??!!). I had to fetch data from a XSPF (funny how that's pronounced, 'spiff') playlist and display it in the app. Me being ignorant and impatient as always started out wrong with using the AJAX XMLHttpRequst (oh, I love the thing) and failed miserably, again and again before realizing that it did not allow cross site requests.

Prateek pointed out that I should be reading the Opensocial specification closely, and .... Voila, the thing was working. I had made my first Orkut (useless but good for a start) app.

Way to go !!!

Back In Ballack

2008-06-17T02:33:00.003+05:30

Hearts in our mouths we watched until Germany were through.

Date :17th June(in India)
Time :12:15 a.m. - 2:15 a.m.
Venue :Television Set
Play : Germany vs Austria
Cast :

The German Football Team
Me
Anish (on Gtalk)
and other people in the world supporting Germany

First Half:

Very uneventful, until you count Gomez-missing-a-sitter-pass-served-to-him-on-a-Plate-by-Klose and both-the-coaches-sent-off-into-the-stands as Events.

The first event (if you have agreed to call them so) had forced Anish to consider buying Tickets to Vienna and assassinate Gomez (such is how much we love our Players, or I may be in the wrong direction altogether).
And the coaches were reportedly having a scuffle, and on their way back they were shaking hands. The few minutes of the First Half that followed was even less eventful.

Second Half:

Started glum. Anish had lost hope, I had switched off my monitor, and was lost in the television. So much was I lost that I completely ignored the foul, and ignored my prayers that maybe Ballack will take the free-kick, and will score a awesome Goal.

The next thing I knew was that Ballack had scored an Exceptional Goal. It was the 49th minuite....

...but I knew that we had made it to the Quarter Finals.

Them wild card's

2008-06-13T14:47:00.012+05:30

Dear Johnny,

Regarding my last mail, I have been working on bug 16282
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16282

I had implemented the enhancements and had mailed to Nagappan. He suggested a few improvements in the coding technique which again I have done and mailed back to him. His response is awaited.

Only GUI support needs to be added into the implementation which I will start working on after Nagappan's response.

Regards,
Shreyank Gupta.

Oh damn it ... I guess this requires a little more justice....

Ok.. Here goes...

All this time all I was doing on LDTP was looking for bugs... and then i would suggest to Nagappan, the Project maintainer of LDTP, how those could be dealt with... and he would solve them, sometimes following my suggestions sometimes not.

Well now, with a better and a little less buggy thing, I thought the software could do with a little enhancement, to make it a little more user friendly. So what I did was give Naggapan my little suggestion, and he suggested I should straight away post my little enhancement as a little Bug report and get to work with it.

The Enhancement:

LDTP editor is a program, written in Python with a Glade GUI which records things you do on your GNOME desktop, things like starting application, open new tab in a window, save as a file, and even send a mail on Evolution.

What it basically does, is that it records the name of the window where things are happening along with what is happening there. It then has an option to convert the recorded stuff to a python code, which when run, would do exactly the same tasks as it had recorded.

Or at least it is supposed to do that.

But in reality what happens is that the name of a window changes as things are done in it. As for example in Firefox the name of the window depends on what page is showing in it, for now what its showing is 'Blogger: All Sorts Of Things - Edit Post "Them Wild Card's" - Mozilla Firefox'.

So when you run a converted script in the Editor is ceases to run if the name of the window is changed. Fortunately the LDTP engine that runs the python codes the has a feature that enables window names to be passed with wildcards and if we would pass '*MozillaFirefox*' the code would know we mean the Firefox window.

So my little suggestion was why not use this feature, so that the converted python codes would run even if the window names have changed.

This was my little enhancement....

To solve this problem I wrote a little program in Python, which would input lines with the full window name, and would search an array (a list in Python) of all supported window-names and replace the long window name with a short wild-carded window name. (you get the idea, right)

I showed the program to Nagappan, and he advised me to use the re library - the RegEx Library in Python, to do it. I did that, it took me a while to figure out the correct RegEx but when i did, the code had shrunk to some 5 lines. Python Rocks!!!

The next few steps were easy, I made the program get the list of supported window names from a separate file. The idea was that there would be a copy supplied to the user, which would be kept in /usr/share/ldtp/appdata and if the user wanted to add or remove his own window names he could do it with a GUI (that part is still left to be done) and his personal copy would be kept in $HOME/.ldtp/appdata. So the program would 1st give preference to the user's personal copy (that would be the latter one) and in the event it couldn't find it he would look for the mother copy at /usr/share...

Also the file was to read once only if the list was empty, and then once it had a populated list, it would continue to work with it until the program ended.

I then broke the program into 2 functions, and a few global variables ( I wanted to make it into a class, but i don't know what kept me from doing that).

The part that i feared the most turned out to be the easiest, putting the functions into the main software itself. All this time I was writing those programs, I couldn't help diving into the codes and see where I could put in my modules, but as soon as I had it ready, the place suddenly sprang in front of my eyes, and I wondered how I could have overlooked it. A ctrl+C , a ctrl-V and a compile later, the enhancement was done and working. I couldn't believe it !! ( OK... That was a bit dramatic !)

With the job done, I mailed things back to Nagappan, and he replied with a few suggestions on how to improve the coding style mainly to maintain to continuity of the existing code.

That was not asking a lot, I did that too, and now the balls back in his court. Tonight maybe the enhancement will be accepted, and after the implementation of the GUI to add user defined window name support... RESULT !!!

And even ignoring the fact that I did not know any Python a week back, that is an achievement... PYTHON ROCKS AGAIN !!!

Stay tuned for more !

LDTP

2008-06-10T01:31:00.003+05:30

Sorry to scare you like this but this is what I have been doing on my LDTP project in NOSIP.

Won't seem much, but that's because it ain't. :D

Report On Work on LDTP [NOSIP]

Sent from : shreyankg@gmail.com

Sent to : jjohnny@novell.com

CC : nagappan@gmail.com, vvaradhan@novell.com

Dear sir,

So far I have been working mainly on testing LDTP Editor with different applications.

I have started off with Pidgin and found a few bugs which I have reported to Nagappan.

One bug was when newline charecters in Pidgin tabs were not recognised.

That bug was solved by Naggappan.

The 2nd on which I was given to work on was special charecters like the music sign (♫) not getting recognised. I found out the fix to that and reported to nagappan, which he has now apperently implemented.

I have filed the bug reports at Bugzilla.

Here are the links:

Bug 16201

Bug 16202

For the next few days I am to continue looking for bugs on LDTP Editor which either Nagappan or I would be solving.

Thanking you,

Regards,

Shreyank Gupta.

Dear Nagappan,

Here is the 3rd bug report:

16203

Regards,
Shreyank.

Dear Jony,

This is updating on what I am doing on LDTP.

Following the bug reports on the last three bugs I filed, most of it has been solved by Nagappan and the latest software is compliant of them, except of a few minor glitches which I’m sure will be dealt with. There is some problem regarding on where the output of the LDTP editor is being displayed and though I have come up with a temporary solution for that, its not very acceptable and an alternate solution will be fond for it by Nagappan.

Following that I have suggested an enhancement for the LDTP Editor and filed it as bug report

16282

This is the enhancement I will be working on now.

Regards,

Shreyank Gupta.

And im serious !!!

2008-06-03T15:29:00.008+05:30

On 1st December, 2007 Shreyank Gupta (now who's that?) posted the following in a forum he had created in his own highly unsuccessful community "We the PeeJay Crackers". very few people received the opportunity to read this piece and it had just one comment following it- "Bakwaas band kar". (it means "stop your rubbish"). Just think it deserves a little more attention:

 I was not born a PJ cracker ... but circumstances made me one...

Its a very normal human reaction to detest a joke thats cracked on him.... u gotta say its a bad joke...

thats wat happened with me all the time... needless to say some people with no thinking power of their own went with them... sumtimes forcing me to beliv them....

thus this went on.. until it forced me degrade the quality of my jokes....

this may make u belive that PJs are a threat to socity... but its not.... actually its a the product of a very innovative mind.... a mind that is bend on cracking jokes that will force sumone to kick him ....

it forces people stuck in the surreal humour of reality to think out of the line... to move away from the Cover Story of life... it leads them to criticize humour...

it also takes them to a state of unhealthy competition... cos sumone who has just made the most disgusting face known to mankind at my PJ will now crack another PJ ... which he thinks will be a worse one...

but only in its dreams can a mortal soul think of surpassing the class of the PJ king....

Drupal

2008-05-31T02:58:00.004+05:30

That's the most one could ask for.

A new running website, in just 3 days, thanks to drupal.

It all happened suddenly. Souvik who was originally supposed to do the website, suddenly called me and surrendered. He had lot more in his hands to worry about.

That night Debayan sends me a link to another CMS platform Plone. Says he has seen the videos, this one looks awesome, so lets make the website with plone instead of drupal. I told him no, cos i had been going through the 1st few pages of a Drupal manual I had downloaded and I didn't want it to be for vain.( it was not the 1st time I had gone through the 1st few pages of a book, but you know how it is!! )

So we dowloaded a few drupal videos that night,( it was after 3 am), mine being slower I was busy watching "The Usual Suspects"(nice movie believe me) and he had within an hour already seen them and installed the Website. Within 5 am we had a working website.

The next day Debayan was missing so I did a few things with the website( my favorite being changing the theme every 1 hour). The night I was asleep as Debayan worked.

By noon today we had all the correct modules and blocks and nodes is place, and with all the user management taken care of, I had already started publisizing the new website.

People pestering me about the theme: heres for you, this is just a for-the-time-being theme. Rahul Jha is supposed to have made a template for the website. I will change that into a drupal theme and trust me( if you trust Rahul, and trust me you can trust Rahul) it is going to be a treat for the eyes.

All people reading this: please register, you need not be a LUG member in order to register, and in case you are contact me or any other moderator, and they'll give you the necessary permissions of a paid LUG member(ofcource they enjoy more facilities).

A lot more work is to be done on the website and we will be ready to replace the old one. Please drop in comments on what you like and what you don't, we will try to follow most. (Arjun Lath your wishes have been answered!!)

I think me and Debayan have doen a great job with the website(and if that sounds as if I an bragging, well can't help it :D).

And as a wise man once said, "Give two Linux enthusiasts a Web Server and remote access to it, and get ready to see them do Magic".

.... Okay, that was me !!

secure shell

2008-05-28T18:54:00.015+05:30

just for the records(that's what blogs are for you idiot !!!)

???!!!whatever...

seems that i have successfully configured the LUG server to manage SSH accounts. debayan was planning from a long time since after he had made the repository. the plan was to make ssh accounts for everyone in the core committee and the SDU, who was intersted for one. what the hell, he was not going to do everything and me just sit (read: sleep) and watch.

suddenly i discovered that logging through SSH as shrink@lug.nitdgp.ac.in meant I had to provide the password of my personal username instead of the root password ( took so long for you to figure that out, you air-head).

just ignore the person in brackets.....

thus i had discovered that i had found a way of creating SSH accounts. but i kept implementing the thing for later.

later debayan pointed out that all users should be limited to a certain disk space or we would soon be facing space constrains on the server ( as if...).

so i researched a bit. linux adminstration handbook (ok i got it from the library to study in the vacations) mentioned a command:
#copy disk quota settings from protouser to newuser
edquota -p protouser newuser

which was no use as we did have a protouser to copy from. it aslo mentioned that using disk quotas was obsolete because disk space has become cheaper (i am a proud owner of desktop too and take it from me: HARD DISKS are not cheap)

other than this it had no other opinion on the matter. so don't pester me about getting a book to read from the library because the only book
(only ????)
!!!shutup...

so where was i ... ya only book i got from the library was useless. (hope that was a sufficient enough excuse)

so i googled( should have done it earlier).

googling is a tedious but a sure method. none of the pages had complete information. but 4-5 results together and i had a idea what it was all about.

i also learnt that /home and /var/www/html had separate mount points. it involved me editing the /etc/fstab file to include quota support in those mount points and remounting them. also i had to make a aquota.something file in those directories to store quota info. (reminds me a lot of my youth for equality days)

i saw that the rest of the steps had me editing the quota for a user file using specific commands you don't wanna know about. so i did a good thing. i made a user named sshidol (inspired by indian idol which in turn was inspired by american idol) and i edited that user to allow it 20 mb of space in /home and 10 mb in the www folder. thus i could use the 'edquota -p' (see above) command to copy the settings to any new user ( so that was useful in a way).

i have the settings copied for my and debayans account. so its out for a test.

soon we would be making SSH accounts for all concerned. if you think you deserve an SSH account in the lug server, please do contact me. (after the testing is over).

p.s i was on windows while i did all this and i used putty a SSH client for windows. so if you get an SSH account and don't have linux do try it out.

ps. ps. ill not be using capital letters as punctuations anymore, its better to type this way (you lazy @@!!@##!)

!!!??aagghhhh....

Emulated

2008-05-18T01:06:00.008+05:30

Finally I achieve what I had set out to achieve right from the middle of 3rd sem. Combining my two biggest passions after DJing...

LINUX and Counter Strike

I had found both at almost the same time.

Fire in the Hole:

The Hall 1 LAN was not connected to the outside world, neither the other halls nor the internet. They had put up a switch in the common room that would connect all the different wings to a single network. I had heard or the thrill of counter strike on LAN (bots had become very uninteresting then) and i wanted to taste it badly.

I remember how I had taken the initiative of buying a switch for the wing. I held a wing meeting and the joint decision of a switch being bought was passed.Considering the fact that there were only 3 computers in a wing of 8 rooms consisting of 24 people, that was a great achievement.

I had some Rs 1000 saved with me then (another of those great achievements) and the next weekend home I bought a 8 port hub. It cost sum Rs 650, Rs 50 lesser than what they were charging in Durgapur(yupp, I had done a market research as well).

Money collection after the thing was bought was what I didn't want to get caught in. I knew that once I start collecting money for what had already been bought I would get stuck in this great never seizing infinite loop and would never get my money back. So I had an idea !

I told my wingmates that I was still to buy the switch, (only Souvik and Abir knew the secret, others reading the blog... sorry !!!). I had my money in one day itself, roommies paying for their non-present mates.

And then the switch was installed that day itself!!

Having a computer at that time would mean you would use the LAN for just two things, file sharing using LAN surfer(movies & music you perverts) and Counter Strike.

Counter Strike was awesome. There was these group of pre-finals who played really well including my personal favorites:- RAVAN, KUMBHAKARAN, YKAS, 21st Pulikesi etc. I loved playing with them. All day (and night) I would be looking for new servers to join into.

Then one happy day all the hostel LANs were connected. And net came.

And I suddenly lost most of my enthusiasm towards CS.

Mandriva:

Right from the time I had installed windows on my computer I was looking forward to install Linux.

Mukti '06 had had a great impact on me including my favorite tagline:

I worked like a Slave for Mukti '06

I knew what Linux was all about. Somehow I had ended up on the Mukti helpless in 1st year and that was a minimum requirement for the job.

The 1st Linux installation I got was Ubuntu Live CD.

Within hours I still had the Ubuntu CD in my disc drive and my windows drive lost, never to be found. Apparently Ubuntu cound not detect my hard disc, and in the process of making it detect, I had somehow deleted my C drive.

Then 2nd year came, and with it the prospects of better distros for my computer.

About 3 new windows installation and 4 distros later, none of which could detect my hardware properly (Suse 10.2 DVD could not detect my DVD drive, the same one in which it was spinning) I was finally about to give up when I found Mandriva 2006 in 4 CDs.

An issueless installation and I had my 1st Linux system running.

I was quick enough to find out that I could do everything on Linux that I did on Windows, except for Counter Strike.

That was the beginning of my eternal quest.

I had set up a target to install Counter Strike successfully on Linux before Mukti '07 so that people could play CS instead of Quake 3 in the gaming compitition on Linux platform named C9H13NO3 which was the chemical formula for adrenaline (don't have a clue why it was named that).

http://www.cstrike-planet.com/tutorial/1/6 had an opinion on the matter which I seriously considered.

Installation was successful. But I had no idea how the game could run.

I could even read rounds start and finish, but there was no graphics. That was not Counter Strike. A Counter Strike which was running but I couldn't play was no valid game. Sorry.

People suggested WINE (no I wasn't yet frustrated enough to go alcoholic). WINE stood for "WINE Is Not an Emulator" which fell under the category of those Linux softwares whose developers weren't capable enough to give them a name which was NOT recursive in nature (GEEKS... I hate being one!! ).

Wine unfortunately is an emulator (a software which allows things from one platform to run in another; of cource with degraded performance), so this one allowed me to install the windows version of Counter Strike 1.6.exe on Linux. It's very ingenious though, how Wine created windows C drive, Program Files, Registry etc to install a windows software.

Installation was one thing, but the game actually running was me asking too much of it. Another failure.

Quake 3 was a major attraction at Mukti '07. Counter Strike on Linux stayed a distant dream.

6th Semester, things were quite different now. Even Mukti '08 has passed.

ENTER Stage Left : Debayan Banerjee with a LUG repository.

Jealous of Debayan's OpenSuse Drive, I had Mandriva 2008 downloaded on the LUG server. And I had people installing it.

The twist came when I learnt that a group of Counter Strike enthusiast had installed Mandriva 2008 for playing Counter Strike !! And they looked upon me to make it possible for them.

I went back to http://www.cstrike-planet.com/tutorial/1/6 . I installed Counter Strike again, but I was quick to perceive this time that I had actually installed a Counter Strike 1.6 Dedicated Server, which could only host a game on LAN which others could join on Windows and play, but you couldn't play on Linux itself, which put me back to square one.

Then people mentioned Cedega. Cedega is a derivative of Wine itself meant specially for emulating games. But the problem was that Cedega is a Propritory software, and it kept asking for a Transgaming(that would be the company that owns Cedega) username and password. I hate it when they do that, asking for things I didn't have and would have to pay for to acquire.

It also had no option for installing games and supported only mountable CDs which I didn't have for CS.

And finally, RESULT:

I stumbled upon this package named "Windows in Linux.zip" in my hard disk in one of my cleaning sessions (that's what I do to find space in my Hard Disk, find and delete trash from it) which I suddenly became aware of, and have no idea where I got it from. I was trying out all the stuff in it, when I stumbled upon Cedega, and this time it had a engine upgrade that came along with it.

I installed it as the manual directed, installed an upgrade, ignored all queries for transgaming account, and suddenly there is an option to install games from windows installers alongside the "Mount CD" option which I had written off earlier. I installed Counter Strike 1.6 digizone, had to look for the main exe, and there I was shooting terrorist bots at sight.

The graphics was not good enough compared to the what we find in windows, but it certainly was playable.

Sometimes I find it sad how intersting stories like these have such boring ends!

NetWorked

2008-05-16T00:52:00.008+05:30

Dear all,

Its finally time when I blogged again, and because this is after a long time, this is going to be long.

Loads of interesting things happened from then to now. But I´ll try and stick to the main features.

1. Raha Travels Pvt. Ltd.

To start it off was the 10 hour long bus journey from Durgapur to Kolkata in an AC bus (which was basically no use as most of the time we spent outside the bus( we as in me and Mayank Daga the new LUG NITDGP president). The journey consisted of a non stop 1.5 hour ride from Durgapur to Saktigarh(that´s midway) and the rest of the time on the other half. There were times when :

we had about 20 lorries with drivers-in-deep-sleep that had to be woken up and requested to move their vehicles out of the way so that our bus could move ahead.
ten of us tried in vain to push a trailer that suddenly finished all its fuel and refused to move further disrupting more traffic.

We had experienced about 8 jams that day within 8 hours. Some people stranded with us were of the opinion that the traffic disruption was because of the IPL T20 match between Kolkata Knight Riders and the Mumbai Indians but none could explain how that jam could extent, more so devided among 8 smaller jams to midway between Durgapur and Kolkata.

Not to mention KKR lost the match that evening.

2. Error 678

The first thing I had done after returning home for the holidays was to apply for a BSNL broadband connection. The whole Cossipore Telephone exchange knows me by now. Mine was a special case. Not that no one applies for a HOME 500 plan, no, but then I required the connection within a week (that was some 7 weeks before normal) and I would be surrendering it within 3 months( dunno what´s the norm in this case! ).

So there I was practically almost everyday at the Exchange making my presence felt personally or over phone.

I managed to squeeze out a DSL modem within 3 days... my dream of getting an internet connection close. Was maybe only 2 days more till I got my username and password. Meanwhile I was trying all different usernames and passwords even Anish´s valid ones with the same result.

Error 678 "The remote computer did not respond"

There came a time when I finally got irritated of the error message. But I did not stop connecting.

3. Mantra: The Lifestyle Management Club

And here´s the part which we were all waiting for. I joined a Gym.

As of now I have already been Gymming for 2 weeks. But the 1st day there was awesome.

I started off with funny-named and funny-looking Streaching and Joint Movement exercises.

Funny named ones

Tadasana
Pec-Dec-Fly

Funny Looking ones

Butterfly : involved joining your feet together close to your crotch and flapping your legs like a, ummm.... butterfly!!??
Crocodile : you lie on your front and put your palms on your face with elbows on the ground which makes you look like someone in deep thought and nowhere remotely close to a croc.

Then came the aerobics. I was to do 2x5 mins of cycling, 5 mins on the jogger and 5 mins on th treadmill.
I stated off with cycling followed by the Jogger keeping the relatively easy treadmill for the end.
I don´t know from where I got this notion that all treadmills were automatic. Turned out this wasn't.

After what seemed like hours of sweat-dripping and leg-numbing walking I glanced at the watch- only 1 minute had passed.

To top it all I was made to do 100 crunches and had to walk home( The gym is some 20 minutes from home by walking).

It was a miracle that I had managed to return home in one piece and somewhat 3-dimensional.

4. #2, Church Lane:

This year will be my happiest ever for at last I was able to resolve my Identity Crisis.

Now I have a Birth Certificate, a Ration Card, a Bank Account and the newest in the line, my Voters ID card.

A year ago I had none of those.

Came to know that they were handing out new Voter ID cards at Church Lane for new applicants whose name had appeared in the voter´s list. Mummy and Daddy told me to grace them with a visit.

So I went there with by application form´s counterpart. I had expected a decent office. Instead it was an accountancy firm converted into an election office. People were like normal people are in such a place. No matter how many times they were told to sit and wait and not line up before they were called, just one person had to move in the direction of the office and there was a whole queue behind him. Then they had to be told off and they would come back and sit down.

This continued for an hour. Finally were were asked to make a queue and fortunately I was right at the beginning this time. Minutes later I was heading back home with a new 4 GB Flash Drive( I lost the last one I had brought a month ago spending Rs 50 on the new one) and a Samsung DVD writer.

The Voter ID Card lay forgotten in my pocket.

5. Wipro :

Ms Bhardwaj had me in her cc whenever she sent a mail to our TPO regarding Wipro Internships. Except when she mails the final selected candidates, she decides to leave me out.

So just 2 days before the students are to report at the Wipro I come to know that such a mail has been sent.

Times when I wish I had an internet connection. I spent 2 hours in the hot cafe sorting out names and sending the selected candidates emails.

That´s ok. But when a Week ago both our TPO and asst. TPO decides to call at 8 p.m. remind me one after the other what a lazy idiot I am while I am watching The Sound of Music, that really got irritating. I had to contact all the TPR´s most at home without Internet like me and some even in the train. But Fortunately Layek got whatever he wanted by the afternoon next day.

6. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps :

It was 10 days since I had applied for the Broadband connection. The person I was in contact with me had assured me action within 7 days and was not answering my calls. So I made another visit to the Telephone Exchange.

This time they checked it up and told me that my application had been sent to Bangalore and it will be at least 7 more days before I get my Username and Password. This gave me time. (didn´t stop me from trying to connect with ´all sorts of ´ usernames and passwords though).

I licked thought the entire 4 seasons of Coupling twice and all of The Simpsons once.

I liked Coupling. It had this rare sense of situational comedy that appealed to me. The character I liked the most was Jeff, with hair all spiky (but that isn´t the reason of me liking him).

I am not including excerpts for fear of censorship which I very much wanted to. But I would like you to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Murdock#.22Jeff_concepts.22

7. Eden Gardens:

And when you would be least expecting it, a friend will come up with 8 tickets to the Kolkata Knight Riders vs Delhi Daredevils match at Eden Gardens. As usual I will First agree to go along, then when I find out no one else is going I would say no and go to sleep. Then the rest of them would call me up and say that everyone is going as it will be fun, and again I agree. Then when I look at the watch its just 10 mins before everybody leaves for Eden.

Nevertheless I go along. I get in and am excited to see the cheerleaders up close, more excited when I learn that I get to sit close to them.

The first half is boring with KKR scoring a low total. But when you start having doubts that you wasted Rs 325/- Shoaib bowls and steals the show.

I saw every ball of the match except of the over when I was busy searching where Shah Rukh Khan was.

KKR had won the match, we were ecstatic. So much that we missed all the buses returning home.

A few more misadventures later at 1 a.m. there we were on a bus passing Sovabazar when I saw them for the first time. They were standing in groups along the road. The bus conductor was having his share of fun calling them names like Champa and Bulbul. But I was too tired to give them an afterthought.

8. Broadband:

I had bunked gym for the first time after joining. Coudn´t help, no possible way I could wake up at 5:30 am after a night at Eden. I woke up with an sms. It stated my username and password. I had an Internet connection last.

After trying in vain to connect the normal, I had to try unknown techniques of getting connected. And at last I did.

A lot of things were pending since I left colleges.

1. Cleared my inbox of the 200 or so mail that had come up after leaving college thanks to orkut and all the mailing lists I had enthusiastically subscribed to.

2. Finished downloading Mandriva 2008 Spring on the LUG server and Put it up on the repository for download.

3. Mailed and chatted up the NOSIP people on the IRC. Started up on LDTP.

TODAY

4. Set up and configured NTP on the LUG server. Applied to the NTP site as a pool server. Was accepted. Initial score of the LUG server was -5 at 12 noon today. At 12:30 a.m. it has current score 11.7. For a NTP server to be among the recognized ones it should have a score of above 5. No wonder India had just one NTP server in the morning.

Now it has two.

5. The broadband guy came up at 9:30 p.m. (is Bengal suddenly getting so nocturnal, makes me feel good) and configured net correctly for windows. Then I find that its not running on Linux, so I had to reset the modem to factory defaults. Now everything is back to normal (normal- depends on how you define it).

6. And of course I wrote this blog.

P.S. And the Results:

Finally out of the 6.5 loop as Souvik correctly puts it. Somewhat happy with my marks, but ....