Kushal Das

FOSS and life. Kushal Das talks here.

kushal76uaid62oup5774umh654scnu5dwzh4u2534qxhcbi4wbab3ad.onion

University Connect at SICSR Pune

Last Thursday, I visited SICSR, Pune campus as part of University Connect program from Red Hat Pune. This was the second event in the University Connect program. Rupali, the backbone of all community events in the local Red Hat office, is also the primary driving force of this program. Priyanka, Varsha, Prathamesh and I reached office early morning and later went to the college in Rupali’s car. Sayak came to the venue directly from his house.

The event started with a brief inauguration ceremony. After that Rupali took the stage and talked about the University Connect program, and how Red Hat Pune is taking part in the local communities. I will let her write a blog post to explain in details :)

Next, I went up to start talking about the journey of Red Hat, various upstream projects we take part in. Discussing the various product lines Red Hat have. We discussed https://pagure.io and how many Indian students are contributing to that project with guidance from Pierre-YvesChibon. Because Python is already a known language among the students, I had many Python projects as examples.

Priyanka took the stage after me; she and Sayak are alumni of SICSR so it was nice for the students to them speaking. She talked about how contributing to Open Source projects can change one’s career. She told stories of her own life, talked about various points which can help a student to make their resume better.

Sayak then took the stage to talk about how to contribute to various open source projects. He talked and showed examples from Mozilla, Fedora, and KDE. He also pointed to the answer Sayan wrote to a Quora question.

At the end of the day, we had around 20 minutes of open QA session.

Hackerspace in Pune

More than 10 years back, I met some genius minds from CCC Berlin at foss.in, Harald Welte, Milosch Meriac and Tim Pritlove. I was in complete awe mode by seeing the knowledge they have, by looking at how helpful they are. Milosch became my mentor, and I learned a lot of things from him, starting from the first steps of soldering to how to compile firmware on my laptop.

In 2007, I visited Berlin for LinuxTag. I was staying with Milosch & Brita. I managed to spend 2 days in the CCC Berlin and that was an unbelievable experience for me. All of the knowledge on display and all of the approachable people there made me ask Milosch about how can we have something similar? The answer was simple, if there is no such club/organization, then create one with friends. That stayed in my mind forever.

In 2014, I gave a presentation in Hackerspace Santa Barbara, thanks to Gholms. I also visited Hackerspace SG during FOSSASIA 2015 and made many few friends. I went back to the Hackerspace SG again in 2016 after dropping our bags at the hotel, I just fall in love with the people and the place there.

Meanwhile, over the years, we tried to have a small setup downstairs in the flat where Sayan and Chandan used to live. We had our regular Fedora meetups there, and some coding sessions for new projects. But it was not a full-time place for everyone to meet and have fun by building things. We could not afford to rent out space anywhere nearby, even with 4-5 friends joining in together. I discussed the dream of having a local hackerspace with our friends, Siddhesh and Nisha Poyarekar, and that made a difference.

Birth of Hackerspace Pune

Nisha went ahead with the idea and founded https://reserved-bit.com, a hackerspace/makerspace in Pune. Last month I had to visit Kolkata urgently, it also means that I missed the initial days of setting up space. But as soon as we came back to Pune, I visited the space.

It is located at 337, the Amanora Chambers, just on top of the East Block at Amanora Mall. The location is great for another reason - if you are tired of hacking on things, you can go down and roam around in the mall. That also means we have Starbucks, KFC, and other food places just downstairs :)

There are lockers available for annual members. There is no place for cooking, but there is a microwave. You can find many other details on the website. For now, I am working from there in the afternoons and evenings. So, if you have free time, drop by to this new space, and say hi :)

Note1: Today we are meeting there at 3pm for the PyCon Pune volunteers meet.

Updates from PyCon Pune

PyCon Pune

This will be the first year for PyCon Pune. This will give us a chance to meet our friends, discuss, and work on the language we all love :)

Event date: 16-19th February, 2017.

Location: Pune, India

Format: 2 days of main conference, 2 days of devsprints.

All Keynote speakers have been announced

We finally managed to announce all of our keynote speakers. I am putting up the names below. But you can learn more about them from the speakers page.

CFP is still open for two more days

We have our CFP still open for 2 more days, till 30th November, 2016. Feel free to submit any talk you think you want to present. The event is a single track event, means everyone will get a chance to see all the talks. This also means we have a tougher job in selecting talks :)

Registration is also open

The registration for the conference is also now open. As expected, the 4 days tickets (including devsprints) were sold out super fast. We still have main conference tickets left. Currently the only way to register for devsprints is through supporter ticket, which is also very limited in number. So remember to register fast :)

Event report: Fedora 24 release party Pune

Last Saturday we had the Fedora 24 release party in Pune. This was actually done along with our regular Fedora meetup, and in the same location. We had a few new faces this time. But most of the regular attendees attended the meetup.

Chandan Kumar started the day with a presentation about new features in Fedora 24. We tried to see a few those in our laptops. During the discussions Parag , and Siddhesh pointed how important is self learning for us. Siddhesh also talked about a few project ideas on Glibc. In one of the previous meet, many of the attendees sent PR to the Fedora Autocloud testcases. We talked about those for few minutes. From yesterday, I am actually merging them in master.

As a group we decided to work on to make a modern version of glibc documentation. There is no git repo yet, but I will provide the links when we have something to show. As a group our goal is to do more upstream contribution. One thing I noticed that most of the attendees were dgplug summer training participants.

Fedora Pune meetup April 2016

I actually never even announced the April meetup, but we had in total 13 people showing up for the meet. We moved the meet to my office from our usual space as I wanted to use the white board. At beginning I showed some example code about how to write unittests, and how are we using Python3 unittests in our Fedora Cloud/Atomic images automatically. Anwesha arranged some soft drinks, and snacks for everyone.

Praveen Kumar, Chandan Kumar, and /me were helping out people. Everyone tried to take one command, or one usecase in Fedora, and then tried to implement a test case for it. I still have 6 pull requests in the Tunirtests repository. I will go through them later on, and make sure that we merge them after the required clean ups. We always wanted to have such meetups so that people get something out of them, I hope last month's Fedora meetup was helpful. There are 5 reports in the event page of the wiki.

Btw, we are meeting again on May 14th.

First January Fedora meetup in Pune

Last Friday we had the first Fedora meetup in January here in Pune. This was the first of the many upcoming meetups/workshops. The venue for this meetup was moved to Sayan's apartment as we never found a free meeting room in the local Red Hat office, and as it seems that we will continue to use the same venue for the future meetups.

I thought we will have around 8 people for the meetup, but we ended in having 18 people. This is pretty good as we spread the news of the event only in few places. There were 4 Fedora Ambassadors present in this meet, /me, Sayan, Praveen Kumar, and Siddesh. The day started with an introduction of all the participants. We found many first timers in the group. Next /me and Siddhesh explained about programming in FOSS in general, and why it is important to stick to any project while contributing.

As our first technical talk, Sayan explained his bugyou project. This is a new service in the Fedora Infrastructure which listens to any failed test runs in Autocloud, and files appropriate bugs in the system. He is coming up with a blog post with more details. Next I explained the Automated testing of the cloud/atomic images in Fedora. We went through few basic tests we have. Most people agreed that this can be a good starting point for any new contributor who is willing to write some Python 3 code :).

Because we never had any projector, couple of us went to my apartment in the floor above, and brought down the TV. Praveen Kumar then started his hands on session about Ansible. He demoed how to have Apache installed, and configured on any system. After that all participants wrote their own playbook to copy a file to a predefined location in their system.

At the end we discussed about what kind hands on sessions people want. In general we will be having 1 or 2 talks for 1 hour at max, and the next 2-3 hours should be hands on session where everyone will work on what they want. Our next meetup is on 22nd January, from 5pm onwards. We have a request to discuss rpm packaging, Python 2 to 3 migration, and a special session on C programming from our in house glibc hacker.

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 ?

MH - 12 DS 228 , the drunk driver who hit my bike

First of all, I am safe. Front part of the bike broke. I was coming back home from office , around 11:50pm, in front of Koregaon park chouki, a whitish car in front of me slowed down and stopped, so I also stopped more than a feet behind. Suddenly that car started coming back in reverse, and it's behind portion came on top of my bike's front tire. I was using my bike's horn at full , but he never listened , and then I understood that he was drunk. He came out of car with 1 male friend and girl. The driver was drunk , aged less than 40 started shouting at me, twice I went back few steps as he was almost in  a mood to hit me. He threatened me of police, when I said lets go to police station he suddenly ran to the car, his friend followed him and the girl went to some other car in different direction. The number of the car which hit my bike is MH-12 DS 228 .

I tried to do an F.I.R. to the police station nearby but no one was there. So I went to Shrasti nagar police station, they asked me to go to Koregaon park police chouki , so I went back again. There they just took the details in a white paper and asked me to go home, they said they will check later in the morning.

Yes, I am a bit upset with the police's behaviour. But more than to that drunk driver, he looked like some manager kind of guy (from clothing) , and he thinks as he is having money he owns the road. I am lucky nothing happened to me physically but things might went different. In newspapers we regulary read how people are getting killed by drunk drivers.

My kind request to the responsible people don't drink and drive. And also please help me to find this person, if you are in Pune, try to see if you know this car or ask your friends if they know anything. Give them the car's number.