Kushal Das

FOSS and life. Kushal Das talks 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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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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Pony v0.3 released

I just released Pony v0.3 , you can download the source from here. Pony is an image manager written in PyKDE4.
If you are using a previous version of pony , you should remove the old db by $rm ~/.pony.db

This release is having many bug fixes and also new features.

Like:

  • One can create media catalog (DVD or removable medias)
  • Search media catalogs based on tags
  • Flickr image uploading is now smoother
  • While in FullScreen image viewing one can use mouse whell to browse through images

Here is a preview of the new catalog options

Pony v0.3

If you are using Fedora 11 , you can add my repo as building and pushing to the Fedora repos may take some time. To do so just drop this in your /etc/yum.repos.d/

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Removing my feed from planet KDE

As I write about many things (which includes all my PyKDE or PyQt apps) some people are seem to be very much offended to read them in Planet KDE.

So, I am just removing my feed to make the planet junk free.

Though I used to get highest number of hits on my screenshots and photos in flickr from planetkde.org :)

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Webcast on FOSS

Update: Direct link You can watch it live here. These talks are part of the National mission on education through ICT. More information available here.

Date: Friday, July 10th, 2009 Time: 2.30 pm IST ( 09:00 UTC )

Talk 1: 10 things a FOSS developer should know

Abstract: FOSS development is easy. A simple set of rules and protocols would get anyone started on FOSS development. In this talk, the 10 essential things are discussed in a form that is easy to remember and, easy to tell others. Mostly interactive and example-driven, the talk builds on the fundamental principles of Software Development and provides relevance within the FOSS model of doing things.

Speaker: Ramakrishna Reddy is a Sr Software Engineer at Red Hat. A self-confessed Python fan, Ramakrishna is currently involved in authoring a book teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computing. He is a regular on various Python forums along side NLP related forums. Ramakrishna maintains various eclectic packages in Fedora and, is also active in the Debian community.

Talk 2: How to use infrastructure for FOSS Projects

Abstract: Infrastructure is an important part of a FOSS project's lifecycle. In this talk, Prasad talks about how to set up a development environment for a developer and, how best to set up a development/project infrastructure. Touching upon the essential infrastructure aspects, Prasad takes an example of his own project to demonstrate how important infrastructure is for projects.

Speaker: Prasad J Pandit is a Software Engineer at Red Hat. A developer who professes a love for Perl and C, Prasad maintains packages in Fedora. He also provides guidance to new participants in FOSS development showing them how to get their feet wet.

Talk 3: Communication in a FOSS Project

Abstact: Any project is based on communication. Clear, precise and accurate information at the right time helps to build communities around projects. Rahul delves into his experience as a Fedora Community Wrangler to talk about the ways and means to maintain a dialogue with an evolving community as well as how best to build up communication skills.

Speaker: Rahul Sundaram has been working within the Fedora community for close to 5 years now. He works as a Software Engineer at Red Hat and, provides inputs and guidance in various aspects of The Fedora Project ensuring that concept of collaboration is well established. He also writes in various publications and online journals. His profile is available athttps://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram

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