FOSS
FOSS.IN 2009 in a total
5 days of full of excitement and fun. This year I tried to break/arrange my times in few things I wanted to work on. So the first decision was not to take many photos , I tried to keep my camera inside my bag only. The idea worked, I found more time on hand than last few years. From the speaker’s list I already knew who else is coming so fix up my mind according to that.
On the first day we took charge of the Fedora booth. Kital, Heimanshu sat on the table, /me and Sayamindu sat on the ground behind the table and started discussing many things. Next table was full with KDE-IN team with many swags. Day 1 I spent mostly meeting old friends and talking. It was nice to meet Kital once again 
I managed to find Girish Ramakrishnan in a table in the first floor. So asked for his help to have a long waiting feature in pony. I wanted to view images with a semi-transparent background just like picasa does in windows systems. While working on it Prashanth Udupa also joined and helped to visualize what I was trying to achieve. Finally it was done with 2 lines of code
I also had a plan to sit with Sayam and discuss two of projects , Jukebox and Lekhonee. Got couple of unknown areas cleared in sugar activities. In lekhonee-gnome I tried to have a WYSIWYG editor using gtkwebkit and later also tried libabiword. This work is not completed yet. Will see which one comes out better.
Meanwhile 2nd day of the event was Fedora Project of the day. Mether, Kiltal, Kedar, /me, Shrink, Susmit, Ankur, Heimanshu many others were there. I gave a talk on python-newt module and tried to show how easy to use that while developing console based applications.
This year was again special as Milosch and Brita came again to FOSS.IN. Russ Nelson also joined along with his talk on arduino boards. /Me and Sayam bought two boards from a Bangalore based firm in the same day. Milosch gave an inspirational talk on how one should start working hardware based projects. He bought me couple of cool gifts so that I can start working of my own. He and Russ had great workshop on 8 bit and 32 bit (OpenBeacon) small computers. I spent the last two days of the event with them only learning small small things. One of the biggest outcome of the event is computerclub.in (not ready yet), a group to work on hardware-software related stuffs. We have our initial mailing list and sf.net project created. Please join if you are interested. The Bangalore group already fixed their first physical meeting.
The event ended with a great performance trdp. Enjoyed the show too much, never took out my camera
All shots can be found here.
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8
Fedora Project day in foss.in started
Kital is giving the first talk on Fedora Security Spin. The room is not full yet, people are still coming in slowly. Kital just a very nice example of robbing bank and how one should go ahead to plan and execute that
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8
sparcy — command line utility for Spac Systems Limited GPS loggers
Few days back I bought a new GPS data logger from Sparc Systems Limited , GDL 3204. It comes with a nice 3 page manual. The last page explains the data format of the logs.
The device works in a very nice and easy way, it is having 32 channels.
We already had a nice python script to parse the log and create gpx files. But for me , every time “cat”ing the device and then convert the log is a difficult task.
Sparcy , which can get the data from the device and convert them into gpxfor you. If you already have the raw data, you can convert them to gpx too. People from #osm helped me a lot to understand how latitude and longitude calculations are done.
RPMs are available here.
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8
lekhonee-gnome 0.8 released
I just released lekhonee-gnome-0.8 . This is actually a splitted source from the main lekhonee project. There are two major changes in this release.
- i18n done properly
- Error messages are now being shown properly
The first point means now you can run lekhonee-gnome in your mother tongue. Some translations already submitted through fedora transifex.
You can get it from my yum repo.
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.8
Fedora Workshop in IMPS Malda
Last week I was in IMPS Malda doing a Fedora workshop. The event page can be found here.
Starting from Kolkata: I started from Kolkata on Sunday 11th October , 9:30pm Gour Express to Malda. Harsh also started from Kolkata in the same train. Other team members (Ratnodeep, Meejan and Kishan) were supposed to join us from Burdwan station after midnight, they booked tickets in different compartment. The journey was smooth. Reached Malda Town just after 6am. Found the college car , it dropped me to the hotel, rest of the team went directly to the college, they stayed in the college hostel.
First Day (12th Oct) : The car picked me up around 8:45am, reached college within 9:10am. The college is in a remote place, not many options for travel. We divided the students in groups according to their year. The days were divided into two sessions. First day it was for 4th year IT in the first half and 3rd year IT dept in the second half. We got a computer lab with around 30 computers , all had F11 installed. Only problem was no internet connection, so we couple of the items from the list.
I started speaking about Free Software in general and few lines about communication and project works. After me Ratnodeep spoke about Fedora for few minutes. After that all 4 of them spoke about different projects they work on and how they started. Then we started with Python. They took it fast but indentation made them confused as they mostly write everything form the first char in every line. Used the projector provided to demo few lines and then was asking to solve small small problems. Like many other final year batches I saw in different colleges, they also almost lost their programming skills. Went out to the college hostel for lunch.
Started the second half at around 2:20pm. These 3rd year students seem to be in far better state. They were fast and much more accurate in solving problems. We even found couple of students who don’t do lab works much but solved the problems we gave faster than others. This batch is having couple of good people including 2-3 girls. They can do far better if they wish .
The day ended around 3:50pm as the college bus was supposed to leave the campus by 4pm. I came back to hotel and slept early.
Day 2 (13th Oct): The day started as usual , reached college by 9am. 4th year IT was in the first session. We did vi tutorials and gave demo of git. Showed them how they can work on different kinds of projects within Fedora, also demoed PyQt and PyGtk apps. There was also a small part Django , we demoed the ORM in particular. Students really liked the Django ORM
After the lunch we started with 2nd year IT students. They just learned writing their first few programs using C in the last semester and they are learning Data Structure in this semester. So when we demoed how easy it is to implement different DS they are learning, their faces were bright. They had some real fun with python. For them using Fedora and doing lab works in gcc and then solving the same problems using python was fun. As I thought earlier many times, using python to learn how to solve problems seems to be much easier than teaching them the syntax of C and then problem solving. Don’t know why the colleges still follow this old rule of teaching C as the first/primary programming language.
Day 3 (14th Oct): It started with 3rd year IT students. We finished python bits first then went into vi and other things. This session went a bit longer 9am-1pm. We discussed things on how to choose projects and how they can go forward to become a contributor. The join page always helps. In the second half we spend more time with the 2nd year It students and python.
During 3 days we saw people enjoying solving problem, we saw teachers fall in love with python after attending the workshop. Some students brought their laptops and installed Fedora. As I do always, I asked them to use Fedora in a regular basis, not only for programming but also for daily life usage. The event went very smoothly due to help from their IT HoD Manasija Bhattacharya and Arup.
But we can all this a success only when I can see students coming back to the community and start contributing. I have good hope. The teachers there are also going to play a big role in this along side the college management. They should encourage the students in positive way.
You can view all the pics here.
Sunset in IMPS
We came back in Gour Express again up to Burdwan station , it reached there at 2:45am, stayed awake in the station to catch the first train to Durgapur at 4:10am, finally reached home at 6:30am and slept for few hours and started again for the journey to my college. But that is another story and will come in another post.
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7
Need translations for lekhonee gnome frontend
$TOPIC says all. You can find the pot file here. Lekhonee is the a desktop client for Wordpress.
To get it all $git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/git/lekhonee.git
Please send me a patch or .po files directly to kushal AT fedoraproject.org
The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.7