Kushal , kD & FOSS » Python

Mukti 11.2 at NIT Durgapur

kd — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 09:55:14 +0000

We reached Durgapur around 3:30AM on Friday, woke up by 6AM due to the really cold temperature. The inauguration event started few hours late and after that Mether started doing his RPM workshop.

My workshop started after 6:30PM , around 60+ students. Started with basics of python as a language. I did this workshop slowly so that everyone can pick the things we were discussing.

Next day morning my second session started from 10AM and in the afternoon I had my PyGtk workshop in the lab. After finishing talking for more than 6 hours did the final talk for the night with the first year students. Total time I spoke was more than 7 hours , which is a record for me :)

3rd day again started at 10AM and I was surprised to see more than 30 students in the seminar hall where I was doing the python workshops. We discussed in details various modules in python and also discussed about projects for the students.

Generally I don’t get many mails from the students after the workshops or even if they do mail , they don’t continue. But here I found 3 students still continuing. I hope at least one of them will be able his/her journey in the path of freedom.

Photos can be found here. Will update the post with flickr set when I upload there.

UPDATE: flickr set can be found here.

Report from PyCon India 2010

kd — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 04:05:07 +0000

So I am back from PyCon India 2010. I missed last year, so was waiting for this year’s event. Met many faces after very long time and to be in a place with so many other python lovers is always a nice experience. The total attendance was around 700 but the venue was too big for that number , so except the lunch time, corridors had lesser number of people discussing. The selection of the talks were also matching the environment as they came from different directions. We saw talks with hardware accessibility to web development to GUI application toolkits, network programming, scientific computing, terminal based works etc.

Day 1 started a bit late, David Goodger gave the keynote, it was fun. Next talk I liked was from Dhananjay Nene on “Functional Programming with Python“, he managed to show many things within the short time.

I stood in the queue for lunch as soon as possible, it was late, too much crowd at the same time, but the taste of the food was delicious. During and after the lunch I was discussing with Jace about Wing IDE, I had a thought of buying that previously also but the price is high for me. Wait, not anymore, they gave a 90% discount for the PyCon India :) Started using it right away with vi mode and it works like a charm.

After lunch, thought of going in Mahendra M’s Twisted programming talk, but the room was full, no place for standing also. So hoped over to the auditorium for Vijay Kumar B.’s Device Interfacing with Python and ZIO , it was one of the best talk I ever attended.

Met DP and Jacob after long time :)

This was first time my laptop’s X crashed while trying to use the projector, so after few tries I started my talk with the black terminal on the big screen :) newt widgets looked great on that screen though :)

Day 2: I came a bit late as I had to meet few seniors from my college in the city (event was in a far corner of the city), I spent the day mostly in the corridors talking with people. I met so many Pune based python lovers there :) Strangely enough few speakers were absconding from the talks, so the organizers had to innovate to fill in.

At the very end we had first AGM of Indian Python Software Society, too much fun in that :p. I applied for membership, I still need two votes. I also resumed my work on “Python for you and me” 2nd edition. You can also read ml-IN or zh-CN translation of the book.

Any python lover from the country should attend this event, next year it will be in Chennai. Photos will come later this week.

GNUnify2010 and my python workshop

kd — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 05:53:02 +0000

GNUnify2010 was the first for me. Started a bit early to the venue, Rahul was along with me. His talk was in top of schedule. I slowly moved to the lab where my python workshop was scheduled.

The main target of the workshop was to show/teach the basics of the python programming language. I hear mostly students asking “How to start working on a project?” but as the learning curve is not so easy in most of the things, they run away. The only students we have from India who are contributing to any FOSS projects are the people who came in their own interest. I found programming with python can be an easy entry point for the general students and they can become better programmer in life. This is the main reason behind my python workshops in different places.

No need to buy books, great online community, projects working on different dimensions, all of these can generate interest in the students.

Coming back to my workshop, I generally try to follow my own book (which I have to update). Slowly going through simple examples and showing that it is not difficult. I ask the students to solve the lab works they do in any programming lab in python. This will help them to understand the basics of the language. The workshop lab was supposed to have 30 students, but many more came so I had to ask them to seat in groups in the computers (most of them was running Fedora ). The basic feedback I got, states that it was easy, but how the students are going to use this, I have no clue. Btw, most of the students in my workshop were from Pune University Maths department, I told them to attend Ramki’s workshop in the second half as his workshop was about explaining how to solve mathematical problems.

At the end of the workshop I showed few applications written in python and talked about job opportunity in market. 2 students contacted me after the event.

Full set of the event photos can be found here.

Coming month, I will be in Durgapur, doing another python workshop , I will also conduct a Django workshop.

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sparcy — command line utility for Spac Systems Limited GPS loggers

kd — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:14:12 +0000

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.

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Dependency chart for kde-settings

kd — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:59:22 +0000

Download from here.
Warning 18MB , may crash your browser and system, download and view with a desktop image viewer.

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Boog, the desktop bugzilla client for Fedora

kd — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:27:01 +0000

Few nights back I was looking for way to explain my dad how to file a bug and this starts from there. Me and mether had the initial discussion in the middle of night about the basic design and workflow.

From the project page “Boog is a desktop and command line bugzilla client that aims to provide a very easy and simple interface for end users to file bug reports. We aim to built some intelligence into the client. We will collect the Fedora version and component version information, hardware details, log output, SELinux status and other details depending on the component the user chooses to file a bug report against.”

To get automated information , I wrote some code based on this wiki page.If your package requires any other information which can be collected automatically please drop a mail to me.

I started writing a console based client for the same. For now we thought that user will know against which package he wants to file the bug.

The first screen

In the next screen, user needs to put the username and password or it will pick them up from a config file.

Next is the package name

Then a single line summary

Next it will open up your favorite editor based on $EDITOR environment variable or it will fallback to vi.

Finally it will show the report to the user , user may want to submit that to go back or cancel the whole operation.

While submitting the bug it will automatically upload the files to be attached.
After submitting the report the user will get an URL of the bug just filed.

You can see the process in this screencast.

We need help on the mockup of the Gtk based GUI. Please contact me or mether in case you want.
Any new ideas or suggestions are welcome :)

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pony 0.4 released

kd — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 06:14:52 +0000

I just released Pony 0.4 into the wild. It came out with a 2 days delay :(

Pony is a KDE based image manager. The main feature is to create Collections out of removable devices and watch/search the thumbnails offline (when the media is not attached).
New features in this release:

shortcut key ‘u’ to get the upload to flickr dialog
Hot keys: Now one can assign hotkeys using numeric key board , right now only %f (selected filename) is supported there.

Download the source or you can use this yum repo for Fedora 11.

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translation-filter 1.0 released

kd — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:05:15 +0000

A massive jump in the release number and now we have translation-filter 1.0 :) Download the source from here.
What is translation-filter ?
It is a tool to imporve l10n quality by helping in finding different corner cases. This is being developed as a part of aukur.org.in . It is having two GUI(s), one Gnome and one for KDE and a command line version. Couple of the features are only available in the command line version.
Different features of translation-filter:

It can search for word(s) in a given directory or some selected files. The result will be saved as an HTML file or can also be seen in the command line. By using this features one can check consistency of usage
It can create single word based list from the given .po files. It will contain both the term and translated string(s)
It can check for any unattached dependent vowel sign. Right now it can find that for the Indic languages. Like ি and া can not sit beside

To know more about different options read here.

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lekhonee v0.6 released

kd — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:05:46 +0000

I just released lekhonee v0.6 . Download the source.

For RPM(s) , download from koji.

New features and fixes:

Preview option fixed in the KDE based frontend, old menu based options removed
Editing option for the last 10 blog posts. Users please tell me if you need to get more
Insert Link error in the gnome frontend is fixed
Add categories is also working under gnome frontend (forgot to write code in the last release)
“Save Draft” option on the gnome frontend is also working (Again forgot to write the code)

If you want to go back from the “Old Posts” list in the gnome frontend , just select anything the list and press “Escape”, in KDE one, there is a button on top to handle this.

To edit the entries you have to double click on the post title.

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OLPC Pune meet and photo management

kd — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 05:28:22 +0000

This Sunday I went to OLPC Pune meet to give a talk on activity development. The students seem be very enthusiastic. The talk lasted for around 2 hours. Photos can be found here.

On the other side, I was looking for a photo catalogue software which can catalogue my photos on DVD or any other removable media, it should also allow me to search them based on EXIF data and tags and should show thumbnail(s) in the result.
I generally use digikam and gthumb too manage and view the photos. In digikam I never being properly able to catalogue photos on DVD (never tried on the last few updates) and gthumb is too slow in showing the thumbnail or full screen views for the large size photos I take. I prefer gthumb over over digikam to view the photos due to the simpler UI.

Finally decided to write my own app for this, which will *not* have any editing features, Gimp is the tool I use for editing. Watch this video (3.2MB) and please comment if the thumbnail creation / viewing is fast or not ?