Kushal Das

FOSS and life. Kushal Das talks here.

kushal76uaid62oup5774umh654scnu5dwzh4u2534qxhcbi4wbab3ad.onion

New release of lekhonee

I am happy to release lekhonee-0.3.1

New release of lekhonee

lekhonee is a desktop client for Wordpress. The new features of this release are:

  • Add Category
  • Spell Check enable/disable
  • Edit last entry

I never blogged about a few last releases, I moved the codebase to PyKDE4. It is using KWallet service to store the password. If you don't want to use kwallet (like you are a gnome user), it will ask you to type-in the details every time.

Download tarball, F-10 rpm (pushed to stable), F-11 rpm

OLPC Pune meet and photo management

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 ?

Summer training 2009

You can find the wiki page here. This year we want to make groups such that there are two students in a group and make them work on any upstream project or  a new project. They should start the work of finding the project ideas within first two weeks of the program.  Comments/suggestions are welcome.

We have added a few buzz words in the poster to attract students. Generally students prefer to go to different small institutions to do summer project where most of the times they pay a good amount to get a certificate. Trying to change the situation slowly.

Thanks to Nicu for the poster.

How to install Soas on your regular box

Soas (Sugar on a Stick) is a LiveUSB system with sugar on it. It is based on Fedora. You can carry it and boot anywhere as you want like any other live system. You can download the ISO from here.

I was using it on a Eee PC (4GB model), suddenly thought of installing it on the system.

The other Fedora based systems have an option on desktop to install on hard disk, but this system is running sugar so no desktop means no such option. From the #fedora-devel I found the command is "liveinst" which is part of anaconda.

So I installed anaconda ( #yum install anaconda ) and then used the command "liveinst" ( without quotes) , this will fire up the installer for you. Then go through like any other installation. After finishing the installation I found X was crashing, tried with many different config but nothing helped. Finally decided to install gdm and gnome on that box ( #yum install @gnome-desktop gdm ),  also installed system-switch-displaymanager using which I changed the display manager to gdm. Next task was to change the init to 5 in inittab. Rebooted and found gdm , chose "sugar" as the desktop option and logged in :)

If you want any help come to #sugar on freenode.

Yet another accident

This time I am ok, but my 400GB external HDD is gone and along with it I lost all the photographs that I took in the last two year and the videos including meetthegimp and inkscape and bijra related videos. I somehow managed to kick it while it was connected to the system. It fell from 1 and half feet above the ground.

From /var/log/messages

Mar 1 15:02:15 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: USB disconnect, address 17 Mar 1 15:02:17 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 18 Mar 1 15:02:17 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice Mar 1 15:02:17 localhost kernel: scsi19 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices Mar 1 15:02:17 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=0d49, idProduct=3200 Mar 1 15:02:17 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3 Mar 1 15:02:17 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: Product: Maxtor 3200 Mar 1 15:02:17 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Maxtor Corporation Mar 1 15:02:17 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 2CAHFJJP Mar 1 15:02:28 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 18 Mar 1 15:02:33 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71 Mar 1 15:02:43 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 18 Mar 1 15:02:59 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 18 Mar 1 15:02:59 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 18 Mar 1 15:03:10 localhost kernel: usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 18 Mar 1 15:03:10 localhost kernel: scsi 19:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery

Right now I am singing in joy(?). Is there any chance that I can recover the data ?

Another accident

Today my light stand (for my vivitar 285HV) fall on my left leg, X-Ray says nothing , tonight and tomorrow totally on bed, no movement , have to visit doc again on Monday.

Down with jaundice

On complete bed rest, will not be able reply to mails on time.

bilirubin in my blood is around 4 whereas it is supposed to be 0.1-0.2, it may go up as jaundice is detected in the ea1rly stage.