Planet dgplug

We interrupt the regular ramblings on this blog_service to bring to you two mails from the ilugc mailing list about why an institute lab made a move from RHEL to Debian. Original reference is here.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/subhodipbiswas/2636228037/ Saw this bird in a lake ..but cant remember the name ..its called Pankouri in bengali afaik ..

So I deleted my Twitter account and joined on to Indentica. Identica runs on the AGPL'ed Laconica and I am hoping Rakesh keeps his promise of packaging it for Fedora sometime soon.

Its raining here like crazy since last few days though today was day off or something since it rained only "cats and dogs" today. Its nothing unusual for people living in this part of the country. We have seen this in 2005. I like many others have were in the middle of it back then in 2005. I know that my good friend Anurag just managed to escape drowning that day ( check the link and see the pics that Anurag took with his cell phone ). He took shelter at one good Samaritan's place with some others. We didn't know each other back then. I used to stay in Kandivali as a paying guest, some 15 minutes walk from my previous work place. 3 of my colleagues stayed over at my place that day since it was impossible to go back home. They even tried to go back home and managed to survive the rains and came back from Borivali station. Next day when the rains stopped ( for some definition of stopping ), me and my friends went back home. It took me some 9 hours to reach Panvel instead of 2.5 hours or such. One of my friends reached the day later since he wasn't allowed to enter his town Kalyan and took shelter in some temple or such. The story didn't end there, I came to Panvel right after the flood was over but the effects remained there to be witnessed. There were many buildings which had mud marks above their ground floor level and just below the first floor balcony lever. Imagine the rise of water level. I remember cleaning atleast 2 of my friends house along with their family. Rooms full of mud, cupboards full of mud, books, wedding gifts all soaked in muddy waters. Some of us volunteered at a relief camp at "Kali Bari" organised by Bharat Sevashram. We didn't have any electricity for next few days. Joined work exactly 1 week down then line Yes, that was back then in 26th of July 2005.

So electricity in Panvel is in a better shape than what it was few months back but still I would like to go back to 1993-2004 or even 1986-2004 ( all my years in Maharashtra ), when there was no such thing as daily power cuts. Occasional failures yes. That is why I think we need the Nuclear Agreement with USA. Because about time we solve such issues and stop relying on Oil for everything. As it is inflation at 11+% - which is at all time high in many many years is not helping at all. Solving the energy issues might help the cause a lot.

But the polical parties are busy doing politics over the whole issue and other issues as well. Some call for nationwide bandh, others just do a "rasta/rail roko andolan" and some others do something else. I know, all this will stop soonish. Its election time in few months anyway - maybe sooner thanks to the Indo/US Nuclear Deal.

Anyway, after such a grim post - expect some good news in a day or two - thanks to friends in Bangalore, Mumbai and Allahabad ;).

Well this year I am spending the semester gap in a special way.  The summer training is of great help and the trainers are sparing a lot of time in making us understand each part nicely. Gradually we progressing with the shell commands,FHS,gcc. The best part is to attend the session of Shakti Kannan, who is guiding us to develop the communication skills, providing project guidelines etc. I am looking forward to learn much more stuffs and hope to succeed at the end of the course.

Dear Lazyweb,

I have been stuck with a problem for quite sometime now. The new account system for getting Gnome SVN accounts - Mango - behaves a bit oddly at times. The following are the problems that I have seen happening in the past:

#1: There was no option to request an account as a Translator. It got fixed eventually.

#2: A voucher is required for a Translator, when she/he requests for an svn account. The voucher is essentially the Translation Team co-ordinator and to ensure that happens, the person requesting the account has to select the Translation Team from a dropdown menu in the New Accounts page. Sounds easy? Well not exactly, if your team is not present in the dropdown list.

#3: So up next, one has to file a bug against Mango to get the team listed.

#4: The team is not listed on the dropdown menu if the Team's coordinator does not have an account. Pretty valid. But then how does the co-ordinator request an account, if Mango is the way and the language team will not be listed until she/he actually has an account. Chicken-egg....gaah!

#5: And even if the co-ordinator does have an account, things might not be all that rosy. ( Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali-India have valid co-ordinators with existing accounts. In case of Kannada, the account stopped working for Pramod one fine day. Marathi has a somewhat similar situation.)


To be honest, I am completely frustrated. It is understandable, that with limited number of volunteer sysadmins things might run slow. However, the complaints need to be addressed some way or the other. Here in India, most of the language groups are close to each other and the problems come across too starkly.

I don't know if anyone from Gnome actually reads my mails to the mailing list (most linked above). I was really hoping that someone who could help out would read these words and do something about it. It would be much appreciated around here.

regards
Runa

I didn't realize that the Fedora podcast called Fedora reloaded has been restarted by a new group of (rather young?) folks who have already published three podcasts. Other than the initial annoying music, it is pretty interesting and newbie friendly. Take a look and offer your feedback.

Sometimes can be too boring in your office premises. The Internet access is also blocked , few of the thousand sites open  :(  By studying the logs of yesterday’s session just spending some time out here , today is a low work day here at office and I am not enjoying that

Waiting for the office timings to end so that I can move home and start doing my own work. Till then reading the gcc online docs in the office, Hopes this helps me to get out of Boredom.  

• I am not going to GUADEC (Istanbul) this time. I figured sometime early this month that I won’t be able to take in the travel bits and really do justice towards being there. Perhaps next time …
• Met Matthew Szulik at FUDCon Boston. Or, just outside where FUDCon was being held #305. Wow !
• Mark Cox is an interesting person to chat with
• Met Max Spevack, Paul Frields (this time for real, the meeting at Westford office was a mirage ), Tom Callaway, Karsten Wade and the wonderful person called Seth Vidal. Small note exchange with Max regarding activities planned. Met Greg downstairs at the Red Hat Cool Store. Managed to miss the meeting about Fedora - Community - APAC, but I am told that it was good and FUDCon may be at foss.in this year. [Note to myself - ask foss.in organizer’s about dates and provide information as early as possible]
• Ensured that I get a photograph of Jack “I can be Jim Whitehurst today” Aboutboul
• Small chat with Harish about Fedora, JBoss and Community Development in APAC
• Need to initiate discussion on fedora-india list about “what to do at FUDCon”
• Sat through a masterfully led discussion (by Mo) on Spins. Learnt a lot about Spins and learnt most about how best to harness good grey cells when they cluster in a room.
• Observed the testopia related discussion at FUDCon and for a particular reason (which would not be obvious to those who were not there the first time) it was deja vu. Felt good.
• Made sure to be there at Jim’s talk at FUDCon. Interesting bunch of questions that he faced and in a somewhat loose way all were threaded into a more “what’s Red Hat planning to do now, where’s Fedora placed for you” meme. Karsten had fairly pointed questions around “what about the ISVs”
• Watched first hand the sheer exuberance of the Spacewalk team and the smiles which accompanied every query related to RHN and Spacewalk. That logo is too cute for good. Mo ensured that the RHN team back at Pune have a few T-Shirts - and made doubly sure that I carried them back. Yay ! for her.
• Drifted in and out of a few talks at the Summit. Interesting experience, unlike other ‘big ticket’ events one is used to.
• Had a rushing-past-each-other-in-the-corridor meeting with Gayatri S from LinuxChix. Now, that was a surprise
• Initial mail to GNOME Marketing India list about foss.in2008 plans in place. Next step to be an IRC meeting once bits and pieces begin to take shape. We need speakers and primarily we need someone to step up to the plate and volunteer to coordinate between mother_ship and foss.in presence.
• In somewhat queer co-incidence, managed to miss meeting Sayamindu (who was at Cambridge while I was at Boston / Newton)
• Hampton Inn & Suites at Westford suck big time. They have managed to charge my card over and above the billed amount for around 200 USD and it is taking them more than 15 days now to figure out the why-what-how-when_to_tell_card_company_to_reverse_charges bit. Sheesh.
• On the LHR -> BOM leg of the flight, gentleman near me had 11 bottles (the small ones they hand out in British Airways) of red wine. Ahem !!
• Finished reading Wikinomics, now to get hold of Patent Failure. Indiaplaza pretends they can deliver it in 16 days.
• Ken Follet’s World Without End is turning out to be a not_so_fast page-turner compared to Pillars of the Earth. Ahh well !! guess that kind of novel happens once.
• We (at Red Hat, Pune) are hiring Software Engineers again…
• Debayan has been making progress on Indic OCR stuff

Now too many paperworks left to be finished. I hate to circle these Govt. buildings everyday for them

Day 3 saw a great start from Shakti Kannan [ irc nick - mbuf ] with his ideas really helping to guide in building effective communication skills and learn the mailing list etiquettes. I was totally impressed by the style of his teaching and loved the session. Next at 10.30 pm IST there was a class by Prasad [ _pjp_ ] , and he really carried out the class very well by which i got to learn much about the gcc including step by step procedures followed from writing a C/C++ program to getting the output of it. I missed the 1st half of the session due to unavoidable power cut and thus was quite unlucky. From today morning I followed the irclogs to get through the gcc session and I really loved it.

Day 4 started today and I will update the blog by tomorrow with its details !!

Btw, I am happy I made my Hackergotchi , will update it by tomorrow in the blog.

কি আনন্দ আকাশে বাতাসে

আগামি কয়েকদিন আমি বেকার

my third attempt to learn blender - and looks like I'll be a guru soon. Thanks to Essential Blender which is the first really good blender resource I have come across

On Saturday a few of us hired a car to visit Raigad Fort. On the way, we stopped for a bit at Mulshi Dam. We wouldn’t be meeting Aanjhan and Barkha for a while now and so, even though the day wasn’t perfect for photography, it was the day for fun. More pictures are here.