I love those days, I just want to go back.  Was looking in the videos ... The three groups we had in college (they still exists) :

FOSLA: Frustrated One Sided Lovers' Association ABA: All Bachelors Association LA: Lovers' Association

Here is a video of a dance performed by my batch mates.

/Me and kart_ was discussing on this and the answer came out:

Don't write Java, write Python :)

Last couple of days I saw some mails in my college mailing about summer trainings offered by various training companies. In my personal experience of the meeting the students who attended these trainings, most of them are with void knowledge after the training. The companies will just take the money from the students and they will provide the certificates no matter the students attend the classes or not.

After thinking on this I thought of going ahead to provide a summer training course at dgplug. You can find the course structure here. As the local lug from Durgapur , we are trying to catch students from different colleges in the locality. The main target behind the course is simple , after finishing, the students must be capable of working on different Free Software projects. All classes will be on IRC :) I already got couple of applications.

So, if you want to learn some cool technologies and want to make the world a better place, apply now. Seats are limited. Hurry !!

Was having breakfast , rice and fish curry was in menu. Suddenly understood a bone stuck inside my throat . Tried to  swallow it inside by having balls of boiled rice (old Bengali way). But never helped.  Then  I went to the nearest hospital and they said they don't have a ENT dept, so again I ran to another big hospital .

The receptionist asked me to fill a form , but after looking at my condition, she took me to the doctor fast. He did local anesthesia and after couple of minutes manage to remove the bone. It was a broken piece , very small.

This is actually second time in my life. Last time same happened around 7-8 years back.

I am trying to make this , thanks to Vivek Khurana for the design and css. I messed up few videos I had, so wait for couple of weeks to get it ready.

Tomorrow I am going back home :) So, almost no internet for next one week. my first task in the todo list is to visit my doctor as the right arm is still not in good shape.

Next week I am going to move around in few engineering collages in the locality , will be giving talks on dgplug , and Fedora. I am also going to visit Bijra. I don't remember if I posted this link before or not.

My target is to get some more contributors. Congratulations to Soumya for joining the team. I am sure he is going to be a good recruit (he is still waiting for his net connection ).

This blog entry is a continuation of Soumya's entry.

When I started Linux User Group of Durgapur (dgplug) , the main idea was very simple , learn and teach others. By saying teach others I meant teach your fellow class mates or juniors or sometimes the seniors also. Soumya started working with me almost from the beginning. After I came to Bangalore for job , he took all charges in Durgapur. He tried to get few juniors to whom we could give the batons for the coming years. But suddenly we are feeling that those guys also left the collage sooner than we expected.

It is always good to see people working on the upstream projects, but for that completely forgetting the base is not good as I think. Our motto is "Learn yourself and teach others" but they made it "learn and don't teach others".

Maintaining a LUG from 2000km apart is not easy. I had to spent a lot on my phone bill to do so as Internet is not an option for most of my lug guys. I used to call them and explained over phone different technical stuffs. Again I started doing so as the local guys are not at all interested in helping peers. Basic rule is still same: give them software, tell them how to install , tell them to how to use them. Being a Fedora Ambassador I believe that is helping me to make a larger user-base. I got few more people into Ambassador project and thought they will keep the good things going. But it seems they are only using that identity while asking leaves from the collage authority :(

In the same time I had opposite kind of experiences too. Ramu , who is a colleague of mine is doing nice work. Today Prashad is also agreed to join the team :)

For me getting new users is more important than new developers as if users grow, the developers will grow automatically (my personal opinion). In last night I am being able to help a new dgplug member to successfully using IRC, Inkscape (as she is an artist), python and create a new blog for her. Today I found she went to her other friends and then introduced them to the same technologies and they are on to it. It is always fun to see them playing with these new tools :)

But the whole thing sometimes looks like an educational institute, new people -> they learn -> they get jobs -> they forget about the institute !!

We will keep trying to get new people, tell them the nice things from the Free Software World. I am going to West Bengal in March to visit my doctor as the right arm is not in good shape (I can not feel anything in few parts of it). During my staying I will try to spend as much time as I can with these new comers, will try to spread the message that dgplug is just not another website or just few people, it is a personal relationship which help us in every ways of life.........

In the last weekend , I had the best trip of life ever. I went to visit a place called Bylakuppe. Bylakuppe is the location of "Lugsum Samdupling" (established in 1961) and "Dickyi Larsoe" (established in 1969), two adjacent Tibetan refugee settlements in Karnataka in India. The trip was arranged by Dr Vivek M of the BWS group. We met at Mysore Bus stand around 3:30PM on Friday. I never been to Mysore before, so I was kind of excited for the trip. We took a volvo bus and reached Mysore around 6 in the evening, had some dosa and started the next bus ride to Kushalnagar. It was kind of strange that the place and /me both are sharing the same name :) After we crossed Mysore city, suddenly rain started and the next thing came in kind "What will happen to the next morning shoot ?". Luckily there was no raining at Kushalnagar. We reached there at 9:53PM , the last couple of minutes of the bus journey shaked everything in my body, the road was really bad. The city was already almost dead, very few people on the streets. Vivek booked a hotel couple of days back , so we went straight into hotel, came out again for the dinner. There was one international hotel with national price :P I also saw couple of strange hoardings , like "Hotel Top in the Town" , "... Hi tech dental clinic" . Had a good sleep after that :)

Woke up at 6 next day morning , got ready, and went for Namdroling. It is around 5-7Km from Kushalnagar. It is famous for the Golden Temple.

Started clicking and kept going on, after 9 we met two other fellow BWS member , Anita and Sandeep. Next stop was Sera Je. On the way went to small temple in Old Camp 3. The priest and some other members of the local community to have some prashad , I had Chang (read about it in "Tintin in Tibet" ).

At the end we went Kugyudpa monastery and found one interesting football match is going to start. The monks changed their cloths and become football superstars.

Next day, at Golden Monastery , one special event was there for losar (the tibetan new year). Never saw such colourful cloths before. They chanted the mantras, did the puja and then there were few dances by local camp 4 people.

We also found the surprise of the trip, Steven Seagal was in Golden temple on a personal tour. Never thought of finding him so near :)

As I said earlier this trip is the best so far in my life and more important the place is so beautiful. Anyone can simply forget all the worries in his/her life there. I had peace in my mind , irc or email never came to my min. I want to go there again and again. Trying to fix another trip on April. You can find the full photo set here.

From the time I got a broadband connection, I always tried to do "yum update" regularly. I tried packages from rawhide only once or twice. My friends complained me before on Fedora updates, the new packages had a tendency to break the stuffs. Now I am telling shouting the same thing. The updates are not working most of the time. If I install the same updates freshly on a Fedora 8 system , they work really cool but if we have a old F8 box and then try to update it then many stop working in the way they were supposed to do. Same result goes for the packages from Livna too. I don't remember all the names as I formated my system and did a new install. The names I having with me now :

pitivi

recordmydesktop (gtk-recordMyDesktop)

Kino (from livna )

Kmail (Volker was also confused on this:p )

Inkscape

I am really sorry for my misbehavior on #linux-india. I wrote that thing don't know why, I understood I made one of the biggest mistakes  (don't know any other word) in my life. It will not happen again.

Please forgive me people, if you can. I am sorry.