Kushal Das

FOSS and life. Kushal Das talks here.

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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.

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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.

lekhonee-gnome in Bengali

You can get it from my yum repo.

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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.

Malda IMPS College

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.

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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.

With the 3rd year IT dept

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.

The Team

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 Sunset at 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.

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Boog 0.1 released

Download the source, Fedora 11 rpm, srpm.

Few things to be noticed:

  • You must run it as root
  • Before using it you may want to fill in authentication details in /etc/boog.conf
TODO:
  • Use policykit
  • Users should be able to select/unselect files to be uploaded (advance use)
  • More use cases for indivitual packages
TODO list is actually too big, will push it to the repo later.

If you are an application developer and want to have to some kind of default information from the users please drop me a mail [kushal AT fedoraproject]

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Boog, the desktop bugzilla client for Fedora

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

boog screen 1

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

boog screen 2

Next is the package name

boog screen 3

Then a single line summary

boog screen 4

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

boog screen 5

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

boog screen 6

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

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

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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