Planet dgplug

Kenneth Gonsalves: django-addition

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 12:12:12 +0000

django-addition has moved here: http://bitbucket.org/lawgon/django-addition/wiki/Home. Reason for the move is that livejournal is not very amenable to posting code.

Kenneth Gonsalves: how to add two numbers in django

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:34:02 +0000

For people coming from backgrounds of php or of application servers, the process by which django works is slightly puzzling. Maybe a simple tutorial that does the barest minimum would put them on the right path - so here is a attempt to do this wrt a thread that came up on the django-users mailing list. Comments?

1. download django:
svn co http://code.djangoproject.com/svn/django/trunk/ django-trunk

2. symlink django to the site-packages directory
ln -s pathtodjango-trunk/django /usr/lib/python2.x/site-packages/django

3. set up django:
python pathtodjango-admin.py startproject project
cd project
python manage.py startapp addnums

4. edit settings.py to point to a database called addnums
4.5 add project.addnums to INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py

5. create the database addnums

6. create a model in models.py which will be in the addnums directory:

class Addnum(models.Model):
    num1 = models.IntegerField("First number")
    num2 = models.IntegerField("Second number")
    # display result:
    def __unicode__(self):
        return "%s plus %s is %s" %(self.num1,self.num2,selfnum1+self.num2)

6.5 create the database table

python manage.py syncdb

7. Create a form in views.py:

from django.template import Context,loader,RequestContext

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response, get_object_or_404
from django.forms import ModelForm
from project.addnums.models import Addnum

class Addnumform(forms.ModelForm):
    class Meta:
        model = Addnum

8. Create a view to display and get the data from the form

def getnum(request):
    if request.POST:
        form = Addnumform(request.POST)
        if form.is_valid:
            f = form.save()
            #return a success view with the result
            return HttpResponseRedirect("/success/%d/" % f.id)
    else:
        form = Addnumform()
    return render_to_response('web/addnum.html',
                        context_instance=RequestContext(request,
    
                              {"form":form,
                               
                               }))

9. create the success view:

def success(request,id):
    nums = Addnum.objects.get(pk=id)
    return render_to_response('web/addnum.html',
                        context_instance=RequestContext(request,
    
                              {"nums":nums,
                               
                               }))

10. create urls for django to find your views in urls.py:

url(r'getnum/$','project.addnums.views.getnum',name='getnum'),
url(r'success/(?P\d+)/$','project.addnums.views.success,name='success'),

11. create a base template called base.html:
{% block content%}{% endblock %}

12. create getnums.html:

{% extends base.html %}
{%block content %}
{% if form.errors %} Please correct the errors below {% endif %}
    {% csrf_token %}
    {{ form }}
    
{% endblock %}

13. create success.html:

{% extends base.html %}
{%block content %}
{{nums}}
{% endblock %}

14. add the directory holding your templates to the templates directory in settings.py

15. run python manage.py runserver

16. point browser to http://127.0.0.1:8000 and start learning arithmetic.

Bamacharan Kundu: Screenshot-7

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 01:50:19 +0000

I have Changed the login screen previously it was taking input User name, password, Base URL and topic or product as

Now at first User has to give the base URL which can be selected from one drop down box, and User name and password. like

After clicking login it will login to the base URL and if success full then it will go to the product selection page.

Then clicking the finish button it will load the bugs for first run depending on the selected product and continue with a screen

Once the bugs are loaded then and next run onwords it will go to the main window which will show the list of bugs already downloaded.

I have added the modify option to it if one bug is selected from the list of the bugs it can be modified with their fields and comments can be added.

Thaks.:)

Ratnadeep Debnath: rtnpro

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:58:06 +0000

Lately, I worked on fine tuning the code for wordgroupz. I fixed some bugs that I was aware of, like unable to parse data retrieved from wiktionary pages which did not have any ‘Contents’ field, error launching games when no words in db, some bugs in webster view, etc. Now, I have added a dialog which will show a message saying ‘Not enough data’ if the number of words in the db are not enough for playing games. I have also added support for parsing data from wiktionary pages which have no ‘Contents’ field. Also made some fixes in the webster view.

I today updated the RPM for wordgroupz to wordgroupz-0.3b-4.fc13.noarch.rpm

You can install the latest version of wordgroupz as follows:

1) download rtnpro.repo into /etc/yum.repos.d/

2) then as root, do :

yum install wordgroupz

You can also get the source code from http://gitorious.org/wordgroupz/

Please test wordgroupz, and feel free to drop in your suggestions.

Anurag: Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad - Autorickshaw Taxi fares

nospam@example.com (Anurag) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:39:32 +0000

Rickshaw fares for Mumbai

Two months back Mumbai's autorickshaw and taxi drivers went on a strike, demanding a steep increase in fares. While earlier the fare calculation was simple, after the new fare structure came in place, autorickshaw fare calculations became relatively complex.

I started http://rickfare.com on the day new fares came into effect after seeing the new complicated fare structure. Over time, friends pitched in for their cities and I added New Delhi, Ahmedabad, Pune and Navi Mumbai. Today Rickfare.com is accessed by thousands of commuters over a wide variety of mobile devices including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, HTC and assorted Nokia handsets.

I'd like to thank Ashish Mehta, Atul Jha, Kartik Mistry and Kamaleshwar for helping out with auto fares of their cities

Atul Chitnis: Happy 19th Birthday, Linux!

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:51:30 +0000

Today (August 25th) is the 19th “birthday” of Linux, so I thought I’d wish everyone’s favourite computing platform a Very Happy Birthday!

Why August 25th? Well, just read up about it

Kushal Das: Google video chat plugin for Fedora

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:01:48 +0000

Wait is over, you can try the rpms from here. Before installing don’t forget to remove nspluginwrapper. Working perfectly on Firefox.

Ratnadeep Debnath: rtnpro

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 05:43:04 +0000

Although, I had added the accuracy for the words in wordGroupz in the treeview, it was not satisfactory. First, the app crashed whenever I added a new word to the database. I fixed that easily. But then, the new word would show its accuracy as 0% even before attempting to answer it. I decided to set the CellRendererProgress bar text to ‘New’ for new/not attempted words.

I got some help for IRC Nick: Juhaz at #pygtk in GimpNet. I came to know that set different properties of a cell for a particular column in a gtk.TreeView, I have to set a function in gtk.TreeViewColumn.set_cell_data_func(). I got further help from the documentation at Develp in Fedora.

Finally, after some tries, I got the code up and running. Now new words show ‘New’ and after being attempted, they show their respective accuracy.

I also wrote some code to enable migration from old wordgroupz db schema to new db schema with retention of the old db contents.

I have pushed the latest code to gitorious.

If you want to try the code, you can get the source from http://gitorious.org/wordgroupz . Then, you can install wordgroupz in your system as:

#python setup.py install

Then run wordgroupz : $wordgroupz

Now, I need to do a code cleanup.

Atul Chitnis: How I use my iPad

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 01:30:02 +0000

Ever since I got myself an Apple iPad (64GB, Wifi only) in early April, people have been asking me why I bought it, and how I use it. These questions just got more common once people saw me on the NDTV techlife awards, with the iPad glued to my hand. And since Twitter is such a “smoke puff in a hurricane” medium, people keep asking the same questions over and over again – enough for me to put together this blog post. Which has been languishing for a while now, until Kishore Bhargava, who was also putting together a rather broader post about iPad usage, pinged me and asked me for inputs. I’ll update this post and link to his when he publishes it.

1. Why did you buy an iPad?

Short answer: My name is Atul Chitnis. That should completely and comprehensively answer your question.

Long answer: I have, for several years now, been studying and talking about the concept of The Next Billion Users – people without a PC/Mac background using technology the way we use our wristwatches (we don’t think of our wristwatches as “portable time computing devices”, do we?) and who have consciously stayed away from PC/Mac-type of devices, because they are “computers”.

I have been gathering information that I can share with developers who need to target this new audience – you wont believe how hard it is for a developer with a PC background to wrap his brain around the concept of “technology for non-technology-users”.

The iPhone, the iPod Touch and now the iPad (and soon to come iTV) all address this audience, not the lemming-like PC (or even Mac) crowd.

So I got myself an iPad in early April 2010 for one primary reason: I assumed that the iPad would represent a tipping point, and I needed to be able to understand it and its use by The Next Billion Users.

Oh, and it seemed like a fun device.

Both points proved to be right.

2. What do you primarily use the iPad for?

Short answer: to feed Steve Jobs.

Long answer: I don’t use it as a notebook replacement. I don’t even use it as a computer. In fact, the second someone suggests that I “try this great ssh app for the iPad”, my hackles stand up. I do have a few “computing tools” on the iPad, but I deliberately bury them on one of the screens.

I don’t do wordprocessing, I don’t do spreadsheets, I don’t create presentations. I barely create email, though I do use it for reading mail.

And I don’t take my iPad to client meetings (it distracts too much and wastes time – for that kind of work, I prefer a notebook, or a USB stick with my stuff on it).

I know that many people actually acquire the iPad for “zap value”, but the iPad isn’t a one-to-many device, it is a personal device, and though it does have a VGA out adaptor, that is defeating the purpose of the device.

I use the iPad the way I expect The Next Billion Users will use it – as a personal content consumption device, without consciously doing so.

Since I got the iPad, I have watched children, grand-dads, housewives and other people (who wouldn’t use a PC/Mac even if someone held a gun to their heads) take to the iPad like fish to water.

Clearly, Apple is onto something that the others are missing, and I want in on that.

3. What are some of the apps you use often?

Short answer: Steve Jobs ain’t gonna starve.

Long answer: I have 200+ apps on my iPad, and at least 600 more on my mac, downloaded over time.

I have been an iOS user since 2008 (ever since the concept of iOS apps and the AppStore kicked off), and I have been downloading (and often paying for) apps for ages. Since all these apps also work on the iPad, I naturally had a good selection to start off with when I got my iPad.

Some of the more common ones I use:

Safari, Email. iPod, Maps, Photos, Youtube and Videos: Built-in apps I can’t do without. In particular I use Videos to watch video podcasts (will make a separate post about that) and movies, especially when I am on the move.
iBooks: I have been reading eBooks since the mid 90′s, and hence have a HUGE collection of ebooks. Using Calibre, it was a cinch to convert them to ePub format and install them in iBooks. I think that iBooks could be done a whole lot better, but it (along with the Kindle app) is a usable way to read books.
Last.fm: LAST.FM client (only available in US, UK & DE appstores)
Kindle: I own a couple of physical Amazon Kindles, and honestly – I prefer those for reading books. But in a crunch, the Kindle app lets me read them as well.
Facebook: I don’t actually use the Facebook app for iOS on the iPad, because it isn’t native iPad, and in any case, the iPad is big enough to simply use the Facebook site in the browser. Not that I use Facebook that much.
MindNode: A very nice mindmap tool that I also use on my Mac, but it makes much more sense on the iPad. I use mindmaps a lot while brainstorming, so this tools gets heavily used.
Goodreader: The Swiss Army Knife of PDF reading and file management.
Pulse: RSS reader par excellence.
Mundu IM, Mundu Radio, Spokn and Mundu SMS: Instant Messaging, Internet Radio, Voice over IP and SMS apps from Geodesic.
Air Video: Let’s me watch videos stored on a computer on the network, with on-the-fly conversion. I’d rate this one as one of the top apps I use. Also great for converting AVI/MKV/etc to iPad/iPhone/iPod compatible m4v format.
SimpleNote: A simple note taking app that syncs to the web, and has clients for almost any device and OS. Once I make a note with it, it is available on any of my devices.
Toodledoo: Great ToDo app, with lots of bells and whistles. Replaced Things on my iPad after the Things author tried to gouge his iPhone customers.
Echofon: I have tried other twitter clients, but until Twitter/Tweetie for iPad comes out (its a iPhone-only app now), this is my top client that I also use on my iPhone.
We Rule: Think Farmville for the iPad – but no Facebook required
Angry Birds: Terribly addictive game!
Scrabble: Fantastic version of this game, and even lets you use your iPhones & iPods as “tile racks”.
Mahjongg 2 HD: What can I say – I am a Mahjongg addict. It calms me and provides me endless hours of gameplay.
Myst: If I have to tell you what Myst is, then you probably are not much of a game-player Technically a PC game, but makes far more sense on a toouch device like the iPad.
Bejeweled 2: Bejewelled has been on my mobile devices since the 90′s. Hopelessly addictive.
Cool Hunting: Find and read about cool stuff in art, tech and other things.
Nimbuzz: An all-in-one IM app that also does VoIP. I use it rarely (I use Mundu IM and Spokn far more) but keep it around to troubleshoot connections or the rare time that I use Yahoo Messenger.
Billings: I am a professional consultant. Tool of my trade.
Idea Sketch Another mindmap-kind of app. Rarely used, but useful as an outliner.
MagCloud: A great app for discovering magazines on the net.
ITC Mobile: Apple’s app to track AppStore sales.
Amazon.com: I have to tell you what Amazon.com is????
houzz: Heavily used (along with similar apps) during the design and construction phases of my house.
WebMD: OK, so we all have our little hurts and aches. This one lets me at least figure out the possible issues.
Firefox Home: Syncs my Firefox bookmarks and other info (including open tabs) with my other devices
Clockradio: Nice app to show me a clock and play internet radio when I am not using the iPad.
Dropbox: Really – I need to tell you what Dropbox is?
Setlist: App to show me songs in a setlist while I am practicing guitar, also lyrics and other useful info.
L&M Guitar Gibson’s guitar tuner, metronome & Chord diagrams
Remote: Remote control for iTunes
PressReader: My daily fix of newspapers from across the world.
Skype: Skype is… well.. Skype. ’nuff said.
Kayak: Flight timings, routes, tracking, etc.
iBanner HD: Great app for running LED banners. Good for telling people on stage that they should hurry up and finish, so we can go have food.
VNC: The only PC centric app – used to access my Macs and other VNC-capable devices.
Google Earth: Fantastic version of Google Earth for the iPad.
iDraft: Great sketching app. Especially nice for simulated press-sensitivity and variable thickness on the fly.
Epicurious: A gorgeous cookery book.
Aquarium: Does nothing but show fish in an aquarium, but the sound makes people rush to the bathroom

Many of these apps also exist on the iPhone and I use them there as well.

Note that I also bought and have installed Pages, Numbers and Keynote for the iPad, but I don’t use them for anything but demonstrating them to people who want to know about them

This is far from a comprehensive list, and keeps changing as I discover new apps. Unfortunately, no one has written an AppList kind of application that looks at all installed apps, looks them up on the appstore and creates an exportable document that lists the apps, descriptions and frequency of use. (Hint, that’s an app idea you could exploit!)

Kenneth Gonsalves: oss vs foss

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 04:44:09 +0000

பொதுவான அம்சங்கள்:

௧. மூலம் இலவசமாக கிடைக்கும்
௨. எப்படி வேண்டுமென்றால் பயன்படுத்தலாம்
௩. விநியோகம் செய்யலாம்
௪. மாற்றங்களை விநியோகம் செய்யலாம்
௫. மூலத்தை மாற்றலாம்.

வேறுபாடுகள்:

oss: மூலத்தை மாற்றி அதனை மூடலாம். ஆனால் பெயரை மாற்ற வேண்டும்.
foss: எக்காரணம் கொண்டும் மூரத்தை மூட கூடாது.

குறிப்பு: 'Free' என்றால் சுதந்தரம், இலவசமல்லா

Atul Chitnis: Raghu Dixit Project in London

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 16:14:44 +0000

Last year, at FOSS.IN, the Raghu Dixit Project performed during the event closing ceremony. People went nuts with delight.

Sadly, no video of the show exists, but Raghu recently performed in London, as part of a wildly successful UK tour, and the BBC filmed it and put it up! And here it is, straight from the BBC site:

*Video:raghu dixit oroject live in london

Ratnadeep Debnath: wordgroupz-overview

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:17:58 +0000

wordGroupz is now slowly moving to the version 0.3 release. I launched the v0.3 b quite some time back. Since then, I have worked on many new features, adding features, deprecating old features and many random changes. In this time, wordgroupz underwent a considerable upgrade in its GUI. Based on the outcome of the games, I decided to store the accuracy of the user for each word and show a bar chart for that. But that did not look good. So, I dropped it. I, instead, showed the accuracy % alongside the words in the wordgroupz tree view with the help of gtk.CellRendererProgressBar.

I did away the wiktionary browser, edit button under notes, back button over the search bar, etc.

Now, I am testing the code, and fine tuning the interface. Gotta work

More wordgroupz screenshots are available at :

http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/wordgroupz_imgs/

Here are the latest screenshots of wordgroupz:

Arun Sag: sagarun

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:17:09 +0000

Pushed emacs-rinari into Fedora repositories, Review request is at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=622002 . This is the first time i am using fedpkg. It is nice. Thank you shakthi for the review.

Arun Sag: Screenshot-Mouse Preferences

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 16:35:45 +0000

Hardware

Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 350M(2.26GHz, Dual Core, 4T, 3MB L3)
3GB (1X2G+1X1G) DDR3-1066MHz SDRAM, 2 DIMM
320GB Hard Drive, 7200 RPM

Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller
Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g wireless
8X DVD+/-RW Drive for N-Series
Dell Wireless 365 Bluetooth Module
6-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery

Fedora 13 on dell vostro 3500

Installation

Fresh installation using Fedora 13 live usb works.

Details of lsmod,lspci,lsusb and cpuinfo

Desktop Environment

I have tried Gnome, Gnome shell, Compiz fusion and sugar on my laptop everything works well.

Sound

Sound works by default.

VLC

Vlc 1.0.6 crashed initially , ran vlc using ‘MALLOC_CHECK=1 vlc’ to rectify the problem.

Wired network

Fedora uses r8169 module and it works

Wireless

Wireless won’t work by default, need to install kmod-wl package from rpmfusion non free repository.

Touchpad

Works fine. Tapping is not enabled by default, enable it by visiting System->Preferences->Mouse->Touchpad

Webcam

Webcam works. Clicked some pictures with cheese.

Bluetooth

Works. Transferred some files to my mobile.

Multimedia keys

Multimedia keys response is poor. (Play, pause,next,previous,stop,volume buttons ) I don’t know whether its the fault of my machine, because i can increase the volume with ease but cannot reduce it.

Stéphane Péchard: spechard

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 21:14:47 +0000

As I said in my previous post, I was working on this small Python script which allows you to plot some of your activities statistics as a OpenStreetMap user. The least I can say is that the code was very bad written, therefore very difficult to maintain. That’s the reason – the only reason – of this release, as no new feature are available.
Now adding some new ones would be easier, thanks to this work of rewriting and refactoring of the code. As a helper to get a cleaner code, I used Pylint. That’s a very nice (and nitpicking) tool that tells you are crappy your code is. In fact, it is quite difficult to get the maximum score (10), especially with HTML code, as OsmUserStats deals with. I used no pylintrc for this evaluation, I probably will use one in the future, in which I’ll disable the convention messages caused by HTML code. This 0.3.2 version gets a fairly good 9.81/10, with 5 warnings messages, 3 convention messages and 1 refactor messages. Warnings are caused by unused variables that have to be created by matplotlib, the plotting library. The refactor message is caused by a function that has 13 branches, one more than the maximum allowed by Pylint (nitpicking as I said).
As usual, the code is available at my gitorious account: http://gitorious.org/osmuserstats/osmuserstats
And the webpage of the project is: http://spechard.dgplug.org/OsmUserStats/

Enjoy!

Bamacharan Kundu: bamachrn

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 07:24:28 +0000

Today I have released the first version for openZilla with the features

1.At first one has to enter the User name, password the base URL means the web address of the bugzilla site (like https://bugzilla.redhat.com/). After that he has to enter the topic on which he is Interested to work on.

2. Then once the user is authenticated to the bugzilla server account the bugs will be downloaded and shown one can search the bugs depending on the field.

3.One can create new bugs from the New button or the new bug menu (Bugs->New)

To install the openZilla

1.Download http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/bama/bamachrn.repo to /etc/yum.repos.d/

2.As root do : yum install openzilla

*To install openzilla on any other linux OS:

1) download http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/bama/openzilla/openzilla-0.1b.tar.gz

2) Untar it: $tar xvf openzilla-0.1b.tar.gz

3) Change directory to openzilla-0.1b: $cd openzilla-0.1b

4) As root, install from setup.py:

$su

#python setup.py install

Feel free to report any bugs, new feature request or suggestions.

Thanks.

Ratnadeep Debnath: rtnpro

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:52:37 +0000

Finally got time to write this post.

I’ve been a lot busy lately. Had to do some changes in wordgroupz.

I was working on the output display format for wordgroupz, i.e, how to show the definitions stored in the wordgroupz database. I created a policy that whenever a word is added, wordgroupz will fetch its definition from the default “Wordnet” dictionary. Then one has the option to search for more of the word’s details on wiktionary from within wordgroupz. Once the wiktionary page is viewed online, the wiktionary data is saved in the database.

I have implemented a tabbed design for viewing the details of the word: one for wordnet and the other for wiktionary, till now. I have to expand it for webster as well. A few extra lines of code will do that. The rest remains the same.

Below are the screenshots of the new tabbed view:

Wordnet output

Wiktionary Output View

Then, I started working on the games frontend. I took inspiration from kwordquiz. I put the flash card and the multiple-choice-question in a tabbed view. I am also recording the number of correct responses given along with the attempts made on a particular word in both the games : flash-card and MCQ. This will help the user to identify the words that are difficult to remember for him. Thus, he can pay more attention on those words. Below are the screenshots for the games module.

Flash-Card

MCQ

Have to improve the GUI for games. The functional code is almost done. Now, remains beautification.

I request readers of this blog to give their kind suggestions to make the UI better.

To test the games module, you can do :

$git clone git://gitorious.org/wordgroupz/wordgroupz.git

$cd wordgroupz

$python wordgroupz.py

Note: Now you can add some words to wordgroupz

Note: run the games module

$python games.py

The post is brought to you by lekhonee-gnome v0.9

Atul Chitnis: Goodbye, TRRK! :’(

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:14:34 +0000

Dr.TR Rajesh Kumar

I just received a message from Mrinal‘s dad, Babu Kalakrishnan, that Dr.TR Rajesh Kumar, who was known as TRRK on the CiX BBS, passed away last week.

TRRK was effectively the Godfather of the CiX BBS, and in the nicest possible way. Many members of the BBS owed their online existence to him – which was amazing for someone who lived in far away Alleppey.

He would religiously dial into the BBS, participate in all discussions, help resolve differences, and generally maintain peace and order in what was then India’s only online service.

Over the years, he became an active participant in many online forums, and made it a point to stay in touch with as many people as possible.

Ongoing condolences can be found here.

Rest In Peace, TRRK. You will be missed.

Bamacharan Kundu: Screenshot-5

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 00:16:05 +0000

I have added two main things

1. The bug ID and the Short description of the bug will be shown on the top of the bug detail shown in the respective fields.

2. Added one Hide button which will Hide the bug detail if clicked.

The bug detail was previously showing

Now it is showing the bug id, Short Description and one hide button like:

The function of the Hide button is to hide the bug detail and show the list of the bugs. It will help the user to view the list clearly and select bug which he/she want to see the detail. like:

I have changed some background functions to increase efficiency.

Thanks.

Subhodip Biswas: subhodipbiswas

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:52:34 +0000

Before you start reading this post, I warn you its boring and makes no sense ..may not interest you but I am writing it because it does deserve one.

Evere since I went out of college I started looking to do something creative and something that goes with me rather than something imposed on me. I stayed in Kolkata for a while starting to look at things in a different way.The way which is completely new to me. Since this is the first time I am away from home. I started facing something which I didn’t consider a problem before, Well days past by and I had a surgery in my eyes so had to take a break .Problem is somehow I never got that interest back to go to Kolkata and start looking for what I was looking.

I joined a service MNC. I got posted to Gandhinagar, things were different again. Again lot of things happened to me when least expected. In this phase I really went through a tough time because the learning curve was way over my limit threshold.

By this time my contribution to open source is almost nill and I am almost a dormant person.

Gandhinagar period was over, I got posting in Mumbai. Interestingly this is the only place about which I knew nothing although I should have guessed something as this being such a popular place.

My friends from Gandhinagar helped me a lot. Initial days were tough out here and overall I realized that this city is so big and huge that I could easily get absorbed into it and can never be able get out.

My company has a office in almost every single neighborhood. So the next thought in our mind after getting into mumbai is where will our office be.

When every single of my friend got a office together, I was left alone to go to a different one. Later after two months I am still where I am posted while all my friends are in different offices far away from where they were staying.

This is also when I started to do experimenting with what I can and how much I can. Because of a idle last year I was how ever a little bit apprehensive with my confidence level.

I am now a software tester where all my friends are running behind development. However I am still in touch with some or the other opensource technology just as I wanted. So the experiment didn’t go wrong at all. I still in touch with coding just the way I wanted.

But somehow this “Just the way I wanted” makes no sense anymore because priorities as well as aspiration changes. So is the situation.

Mumbai taught me a lot of things in last few months. I saw people homeless in front of some of the mansions out here. I guess anything can happen in this city.

While all my friends have a fixed goal for next few years about their future. I am still in search for it. I don’t know what I will do in next few year to come. I like a lot of things that I want to do but they are completely different from each other and can never be persuade together.

Will I able to pursue any one of them? or will I have to leave them all and make a compromise with something else? Is it that you always need to make your mind understand that somethings you deserve and most of the things you don’t so dont worry be happy kinda things…….well I am completely clueless.

If this blog post didn’t make a single sense to you. well even I can’t make out what I have written.but this is what i am feeling/thinking/sleeping right now.

P.S : Tomorrow is the first time I am going for a outing outside Mumbai with my team. let see how it goes.

P.P.S. I hope to see myself working on a open source project soon with lots of if’s and but’s.

P.P.P.S: Ignore spelling mistakes.

Filed under: Blogroll, life

Kenneth Gonsalves: hourly billing

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 01:55:11 +0000

I could never wrap my head around the concept of hourly billing. It is a strange western thingie that is totally unsuitable to our culture. Possible it is realistic in the sense of purely mechanical work - like ploughing a field or writing php code - one can predict exactly how much can be done per hour and bill accordingly. But in any field that involves thought, research or creativity the whole idea of hourly billing is stupid. In both the legal profession and in programming, I may estimate 4 hours to do some work. I may do it in 15 minutes or maybe in 24 hours - so what do I bill? Traditionally in India we bill per piece of work done. And in estimating how much it costs, there are 2 considerations: how much work is expected and, more important, how much the client can be expected to pay.

Stéphane Péchard: spechard

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:36:05 +0000

Ok, it looks like this blog is dead, but here is the sound of a revival! Some news first: after several months of professional inactivity (which conducted me doing Mediaspy), I found a job last February in a small company in Nantes, called Ripple Motion. It is specialized into mobile application, and very specialized into iPhone apps. I work on a R&D project dedicated to Augmented Reality. My everyday work is a mix of Objective C/OpenCV/OpenGL code samples

The sad news is that I don’t think I will continue Mediaspy from now on. The good news is that the code is free so anyone can take it to play along! In fact, I heard there maybe are some people interested in this project! That would be great, and gladly encourage these retakers to do so. More to come on this topic, I hope.

My (not very) new pet project is called OsmUserStats. You can learn more about it at this address : http://spechard.dgplug.org/OsmUserStats/. It is a stats generator for user-based data of the OSM project. I have been an OSM contributor for about a year now, and found the project very stimulating and interesting. I mapped about 90% of my hometown and have a lot more to do. As a scientist, I like to see my work going on, as well as making summary, especially is such a big and complex crowdsourcing project. That’s why I decided to make OsmUserStats. The code is surely not very proper, but that’s the goal of the next release, expecting for the weeks to come. Again, I’ll tell more about this in the future.

Ratnadeep Debnath: rtnpro

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 07:28:39 +0000

For some days, I have not been able to work on wordgroupz. I was sufferring from fever. Apart from that, I came back to Durgapur yesterday. I am, kind of, well now.

Now, I started working on the saving the various details from wiktionary. Still having some problems regarding customizing wiktionary view. Some trivial issues like :

* webkit.WebView.load_string(), the backward_forward list doesn’t work nicely. Rather, if you jump to a new link, you cannot come back to the original load_string page.

* opening and editing html with beautifulsoup disables the javascripts.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee-gnome v0.9

Arun Sag: me

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 19:09:58 +0000

Got a ubuntu guru T-shirt for creating Tamil remix of Fedora. Yes, you read it correct “Fedora” . Thanks to amachu

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay: How would you accelerate the adoption of OLPC in India?

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 06:27:56 +0000

OLPC News has an article with the original headline (in fact I took the lazy way out and re-used it). It seems to be posted by ‘Guest Writer’ but the footer of the article says that “Satish Jha is the President and CEO, OLPC India” so I guess OLPC India is in some form involved with the content that is has.

It is an interesting piece. There’s another interesting thread on a mailing list here.

I would have expected it to talk more about the possibilities of doing OLPC stuff in India rather than becoming a somewhat neither-here-nor-there kind of non-committal response to the $35 device that the Ministry of HRD so loudly released. To understand what can bring about the adoption of OLPC India, one would have to probably go back to a post I wrote some time back.

The problem that was highlighted still remains. There is no community of any form,shape or sort around the OLPC in India when compared to OLPC efforts/initiatives and deployments in other countries (the nations that are so eloquently held up as shining examples of OLPC success). There is a significant lack of a downstream community of volunteers and participants and, more importantly, a lack of any sort of publicly discussed plans as to whether any educational institute would volunteer students for a while to keep the deployments going forward. Then of course there is the added discourse around availability of the actual XO hardware.

When I met Dr. Nagarjuna at GNUnify (that’s February this year), he indicated that he was actively looking at using the Sugar Desktop Environment on standard COTS desktops available much easily from vendors because there wasn’t much clarity about the how and when of the hardware availability. In fact, this has been a murmur that has been around for a while – what specifically is the value add of the hardware if the desktop environment is available via a standard Linux desktop/distribution. Which is where an active group of developers working on activities that would be useful in the context of the deployment is a good thing to have. And for that to happen, there needs to be work on building a downstream community – contributors who use the artifacts provided by OLPC and Sugar to develop their own thing.

A distinct advantage that OLPC/XO/Sugar has is brand recognition. Anyone who is peripherally involved in doing things around Free and Open Source Software in India know these names. They may not fully understand the depth of work or, the roadmap of the individual projects, but the name recognition is a jump-off point that should be utilized much more. For example, in a space like the College of Engineering Pune, which has a fairly active mailing list for FOSS related stuff, holding a 2 day event with the aim getting work started on new or, un-maintained activities, teaching the basics of testing/QA stuff would probably be more useful than just wishing about growing a community. I am fairly certain that there would be other institutions like CoEP where a day-long or, similar camps can be organized. Why aren’t they happening ? On that I have no clue.

Bamacharan Kundu: Screenshot-3

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:27:37 +0000

Getting the bugs:

Till now I have made the openzilla as,

>It can download the bugs of a given topic.

>A list of downloaded bugs will be shown in list.

>Details of the bugs which is selected will be show in the fields below.

yet to do the searching in field basis.

Comments are welcome.

Thanks.

Roshan Singh: Roshan Singh

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:03:35 +0000

Coin denomination problem is a very common question asked in interviews. It involves Greedy Approach, Dynamic Programming and Recursion. You may find a lot of stuff on the internet if you just google out “Coin denomination problem”.

A link that was really helpful for me to analyse the problem is http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/jaa/CSG713.04F/Information/Handouts/dyn_prog.pdf.

Some other helpful text to recollect things can be found here.

Posted from GScribble.

Ratnadeep Debnath: rtnpro

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:01:31 +0000

Now, I am working on making the flash-card module for wordgroupz. I plan to collect the responses( incorrect/ correct) for the words. This will come to use for performance stats generation. Below are the screenshots of the flash-card module.

Suggestions are welcome

The post is brought to you by lekhonee-gnome v0.9

Harsh verma: yevlempy

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 08:42:10 +0000

24 july 2010

Since few days me and kishan is working on a project/idea named spell bee[1]( named just for reference of topic, name yet to be decided). We are basically trying to develop a desktop game application based on the popular “spelling bee” game/quiz.

A ‘Spelling Bee’ is a game in which a user listens to a spoken word and tries to spell that word correctly. Spelling Bees are conducted across the globe and are widely popular. We intend to bring this game to the desktop, i.e. to develop an application which would allow one or more users to play the game on their pc, basically Spelling Bee is an immensely popular and successful concept. Having a
desktop application based on the same would be a fun, yet learning experience, especially for children.

We will be using Programming Language: Python
Interface Design: PyGtk

Database: Sqlite3
Text-to-Speech: Festival(tested)/espeak( to be tested)

A look at the app. from user’s view :

The player will have a choice to select a proper difficulty level, based on age groups OR class. The game would consist of the player (pressing a button) to listen to the word being spoken( using the TTS)
and would have to key in the correct spelling. The game is declared “over” when the player gets 3 incorrect spellings. There would be a constant score-display to the player and at the end of the game, if a new “High Score” has been achieved, the played would be asked to fill up his/her name and Records would be maintained. The user can chose to “Play Again” or exit.

As of now, we have not thought about any other language. Once we get the app working in English, we could look into the possibility of extending it to other language.

I will be updating more in details as we proceed. Till then cheers

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_bee

Ratnadeep Debnath: rtnpro

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:15:54 +0000

For some time now, I have been working on wordgroupz. Since version 0.2, I have added some new features.

The new features include dictionary support: online webster dictionary from dict.org and offline wordnet. For implementing the online dictionary support, I used the server interface of dict.org. For offline, I used the dictionary databases of the wordnet application and the python-nltk library.

I also included wiktionary support this time. I used to find it tedious opening a notebook, browser to search wikipedia/wiktionary, copy-paste notes. That’s why I decided to get them all together under one hood – wordgroupz. I include a gtkNotebook : 1st page for showing, editing details of the selected word and the 2nd page for browsing through wiktionary and downloading pronunciations if available. I had to study urllib2, BeautifulStone, pywebkitgtk for the purpose.

I also worked on the new interface, added some custom buttons to the interface. I studied gtkNotebook, gtkToolbar, gtkStockImage, etc. I also improved some logic for the interface. Now, wordgroupz allows to add words without any groups and such words are put in an “no-category” group. Now, there is a “details” field for group-words. Groups can be deleted. I have to write the code to move the words to the ‘no-category’ group once its parent group is deleted.

I released wordgroupz version 0.3b today. I have to work on machine generated pronunciation for words whose wiktionary pronunciation are not available. I have to design the games and quizzes for wordgroupz. Lots of stuff to do.

Please feel free to try wordgroupz and suggest any improvements to be done.

Details of how to get wordgroupz was given on my previous post.

Ratnadeep Debnath: rtnpro

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:29:44 +0000

Today I released wordgroupz v 0.3b.

New Features -

1. Dictionary support – online dict.org webster, offline wordnet

2. Wiktionary support – lookup details of the word on wiktionary, download pronunciations if available

3. New interface

Dependencies for wordgroupz:

1) gtk, pygtk2

2) python-nltk

3) wordnet

4) pywebkitgtk

5) BeautifulSoup

To install wordgroupz for fedora:

1) download http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/rtnpro.repo into /etc/yum.repos.d/

2) as root do: yum install wordgroupz

To install wordgroupz on any other linux OS:

1) download http://rtnpro.fedorapeople.org/wordgroupz/wordgroupz-0.3b.tar.gz

2) Untar it: $tar xvf wordgroupz-0.3b.tar.gz

3) Change directory to wordgroupz-0.3b: $cd wordgroupz-0.3b

4) As root, install from setup.py:

$su

#python setup.py install

Feel free to report any bugs, new feature request or suggestions.

Bamacharan Kundu: Screenshot-1

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 10:30:12 +0000

I have updated the Gui of the Openzilla desktop application.

I have added one login window with the main window. While running the application from

http://gitorious.org/openzilla/openzilla

with the command

$python openzilla.py

it will show the login window

here in the login window user has to insert the email id as user name and password.

then clicking the login button it will go to the main window. which will show like

with that I have updated the background features also, and on way to it.

Thanks.

Ratnadeep Debnath: rtnpro

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:43:38 +0000

Lately, I have been working on adding new features to wordgroupz like dictionary support, wiktionary support, pronunciation support. I have also made some changes to the wordgroupz gui optimized for the new features.

wordgroupz v 0.2 screenshot:

The dictionary support features online dict.org webster dictionary and a offline wordnet dictionary. I used the server interface to retrieve definitions from it.

I used the nltk library to retrieve definitions from wordnet dicitionary database.

I implemented the wiktionary support using webkit, BeautifulSoup and urllib2. Pronunciations if availale on wiktionary are allowed to be downloaded.

The new interface looks like this below:

Due to the frequent changes made in the wordgroupz repository at http://gitorious.org/wordgroupz/wordgroupz/trees/master, I have not been able to update the setup.py, README, etc. files. I also added a nltk*tar.gz in the src folder, that looks weird. I will be cleaning up the repository.

For the time being, to test the code, follow the following steps:

1) download the src code

2) do not install it via setup.py

3) extract the nltk*.tar.gz and install the nltk python module from the setup.py inside nltk.

4) install pywebkitgtk

5) Now run the new interface using wordgroupz_new.py

All the previous features have not been ported to the wordgroupz_new.py, which I wrote while coding for the wiktionary support. I will updating the file soon.

Please give your valuable feedback for improvements.

The post is brought to you by lekhonee-gnome v0.9

// //

Kenneth Gonsalves: language wars

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:19:57 +0000

recently ilugc mailing list had an unprecedentedly huge flame war regarding language. This had it's beginnings a couple of years back when one or two members started posting in Tamil. Ilugc is the biggest LUG in India and has a large and active component of members from outside Tamilnadu as well as members within the state who cannot read Tamil - in many cases do not even have the fonts installed so all they see is either junk or little boxen. Repeated requests were made that the mails be tagged [Tamil] and a brief english translation be appended. The posters expressed the opinion that 'this is the Tamilnadu state LUG and hence they have the right to post in Tamil, and also every member should learn Tamil'. At that time no one was opposed to posts in Tamil - all they asked was that the posters do them the courtesy of tagging the posts so that they could filter it out - or give an english summary so that they could know what is happening. This went on for some years - periodically requests were made for tagging/summary, and the requests were ignored.

In India language is a very sensitive issue - but in Tamilnadu by and large there is a lot of tolerance as there are large linguistic minorities - although I remember torrid times in the anti-hindi agitations of the past and the Tamil-Kannada riots in the late nineties (this was actually more a dispute over water than over language). There are fanatics like the MNS in Mumbai that wants to kick out all the non Marathi speaking people - and a few hot heads in other states. Bangalore comes to mind in this regard.

Anyway the issue flared up again a couple of weeks back - and this time due to the intransigence of the tamil posters (actually only 2-3 of them in a 2000 strong list), flames erupted and this time there was heavy opposition to tamil posting itself, along with a much more insistent demand for tagging/translation. Finally the co-ordinator ordained that any language may be used as long as it is tagged and translated. This lead to posts in all manner of languages and a general state of anarchy. In the end the list owner stated that he is willing to start language lists on request, but only english posts would be allowed. Anyone posting in other languages would be warned and then banned.

So why were they posting in Tamil and refusing to tag/translate? Simply because they wanted to impose Tamil on the members. If they genuinely wanted to promote Tamil, they should have been polite, tagged the mails and also provided translations - or even transliterations to encourage people to learn. There was even one moron who suggested that Marathi posts should be allowed in Mumbai, Kannada posts in Bengaluru and Telugu posts in Hyderabad - which shows how much he knows about the languages spoken in the respective cities and the tensions wrt to language there.

Well youngsters will be youngsters - but I hope some of them get posted to some place like Kolhapur or Kannur - then they will learn.

Bamacharan Kundu: Screenshot-1

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 09:33:04 +0000

Till now I have made the Gui of the openzilla as,

here on the left panel user will select one query for searching the bugs.

then the list of bugs fulfilling the query will be shown in the space bellow the newtab.

Then User will be selecting one bug from the list and the details of the selected bug will be shown bellow the list in the specific field.

thanks

Bamacharan Kundu: bamachrn

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 08:17:02 +0000

From the previous week I have got a idea about maintaining bugzilla in off-line and then synchronize it while being on-line. Actually the Idea was from Kushal Das, he first told me about it.

What is Openzilla ?

It is a desktop application which will download the bugs in a user account. After that it will show them in a sorted manner. One can see the bugs in tag view, means one can see the bugs on the basis of fields which are there in the bugs.

One can modify the bug field and create new bugs also.

Why Openzilla?

It seems that every one can not get on-line all the time. But if any one wants to maintain the bug reports it is almost impossible. Openzilla solve this problem in following way:
1. It downloads the bugs with all details to local computer while user is on-line.
2. For searching and viewing purpose it retrieves the data from the local pc.
3. If any modification is needed then it also stores the modified values to local data.
4. If any one wants to create new bugs then he can do it while offline, all the data will be stored locally and if net is available data will be updated.

This is the idea, I am trying to get this done

Kushal Das: More on thumbnailing and optimization

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 20:42:43 +0000

Following my last post, spent most of the of the time on different imaging libraries to find a faster way of doing thumbnails and optimization.

I tested the following libraries to create image thumbnails, GdkPixbuf, imlib2, ImageMagic, epeg. Pixbuf gives somewhat nice timings , imlib2 is fast but was leaking too much memory. ImageMagic seems to the slowest among them. Last try was with epeg which can only handle jpegs and it came out as the fastest. So wrote a C function and using it from inside vala code using extern.

Next target was to find better way to get thumbnails from RAW images, tried libopenraw and LibRaw for that. But with help from yorba developers found the way to do it using gexiv2 only.

In between tried few tools for profiling the application, sayamindu told me about sysprof which seems to be the easiest for my purpose. Using it I found gexiv2_metadata_open_path is taking around 67% of time, inside it Exiv2::TiffImage:readMetaData is taking 51% of time.

Now coming to the point of speed , 1st run is on 1GB of RAW files

real	0m2.946s
user	0m2.542s
sys	0m0.116s

2nd run is on same 36GB of images , among them around half is RAW.

real	4m0.807s
user	0m54.283s
sys	1m24.789s

Now this is fast in my textbook :D I should not forget to tell about the great help I got from #vala and Adrien Bustany in the whole work.

Kushal Das: Speed , Vala, Sqlite3 and optimization

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:07:50 +0000

All started as just another stupid idea, writing an image indexer (reinventing the wheel ). The code should do the following things:

Index images for any given folder with user provided tags
Extract and keep EXIF information from the files
Extract or generate image thumbnails for all files
Should be able to provide the thumbnail even if the original file is missing (may be in a usb hdd)

Wrote some test code to see how much time it takes to do the above for a folder with 36GB+ in size and 5044 images (both JPEG and NEF )

1st run

real 30m39.178s
user 0m45.561s
sys 3m42.557s

2nd run with out thumbnail generation but with EXIF information

real 10m14.281s
user 0m58.208s
sys 0m45.969s

3rd run with out thumbnail generation and with out EXIF information

real 14m40.503s
user 0m1.585s
sys 0m7.535s

Here I am confused, managed to find out that transaction in sqlite can cause delay, so changed the code to do everything in single transaction
4th run with out thumbnail generation and with out EXIF information

real 0m1.032s
user 0m0.216s
sys 0m0.134s

5th run with out thumbnail generation but with EXIF information

real 3m1.191s
user 1m2.525s
sys 0m34.524s

6th run with everything

real 16m47.241s
user 0m43.652s
sys 3m21.640s

So the major bottleneck is thumbnail generation, which I am currently doing Gdk.Pixbuf , for EXIF information I am using beautiful gexiv2 from awesome yorba guys.

Now to optimize I have to use some other library to generate thumbnails, which other libraries I can use ?

On the side note, I am not saving the thumbnails on disk but creating base64 encoded strings of them (I know I am bad, not following the thumbnail spec).

Atul Chitnis: The Wind of Change – Part IV

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 06:21:54 +0000

Long time readers of my diary will know that the title of this post is usually associated with my professional activities. And this one is no different.

I left my 4 year old position as Chief Products Officer and Senior VP at Geodesic Limited several months ago – April 30th 2010 was my last working day at Geodesic.

I chose not to make that public till now because I wanted to have a few months free of distractions while I went through the massive exercise of completing the construction of my house, and moving there. This is now complete, and I am writing this from my office in my new home. (More on home related matters in a separate post).

To quickly answer the obvious questions:

I left Geodesic because I felt that there was nothing left to accomplish in the capacity that I was working there, as the direction of the company was changing away from what I had joined it for, back in 2006.

I learnt a lot at Geodesic, streamlined operations (product development, information systems, etc.), worked with some really great people, and guided the development and launch of some great products (including the Mundu and Spokn range of products), on new platforms (including the Apple’s iPhone OS and HP/Palm’s webOS).

But I was getting edgy after working at Geodesic for four years. Being in a corporate environment after more than 20 years of being my own master (I was told by some people that I wouldn’t last 3 months – I lasted 4 years ) has its advantages and challenges, but it was time to move on. Also, I really wanted to focus on things that interested me.

So what’s next for me?

Obviously, with my kind of background, I have an embarrassment of options, but I will talk about these in detail in later posts.

But you can be sure that they all involve products – I am brimming with product ideas, and I love working with small, tight, passionate and committed teams, directly involved in the the actual development of products that addressed my focus for the future – The Next Billion Users – which I have been speaking about publicly for many years.

I will be writing again as well – something that had almost completely died in the past few years. And I will be on the road again soon, speaking to people about things I am passionate about (including mobile products, Free & Open Source Software, technology directions, etc.).

And I look forward to getting involved with the music and entertainment side of my life again. Some of my projects have kind of stalled, and need rebooting, others haven’t been getting the attention they deserve. All need addressing.

Anyway, beginning next week, I will be responding to a number of organisations who have been in touch. I will also start consulting on a variety of subjects.

If you want to talk to me, read up on my Linkedin Profile, and get in touch!

No matter what I choose to do – I look forward to the opportunities and fun waiting for me (and people working with me).

Wish me luck!

(Yes, I know that this post leaves a lot of questions unanswered – including questions about FOSS.IN and related activities. Patience – all will become clear in upcoming posts. Keep watching this blog, and my posts on Twitter)

“Find a job you love, and you will never have to work again in your life — Confucius”
Image Credit: Tina Phillips / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Samarjit Adhikari: @breakfast

noreply@blogger.com (Samar) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:24:21 +0000

It is Monday morning and a holiday. I got up early and was planning for breakfast. As you all know these are very difficult job for a bachelor. :-( The popular breakfast here is idly,Vara and Dhosa which i don't like always. I looked for some interesting breakfast. But what to do? Ok, lets try it. I went to some fruits shop, brought mango/apple/pomegranate then looked for brown bread and then Boost (the secret of my energy). I went back to home and started the real job of preparing the breakfast.(A tough job indeed :-( ). Now have a look how i prepared the breakfast.

Bamacharan Kundu: bamachrn

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:28:45 +0000

I got a netbook without DVD drive. For installing Fedora 13 in my box, I installed the fedora 13 live from a USB device, which was created by liveusb-creator. So I did not get the packages from that live usb. After that I got a fedora13 iso. from there installed all the packages by-default available in the dvd. For that purpose I followed the following steps:

first mount the iso in some where in the file system (I mounted to /mnt) by

$su -

passwd:

#mount -o loop /path/to/Fedora13.iso /mnt/

then copy the media repo to the yum.repos.d/ folder by

#cp /mnt/media.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

then edit the base url of the media.repo to the current the url where the iso is mounted

#gedit /etc/yum.repos.d/media.repo

add one line to the media.repo

baseurl = file:///mnt

Change the directory to the Package

#cd /mnt/Package/

now install the packages you need from the DVD by just doing

#yum install –disablerepo=* –enablerepo=InstallMedia packagename

in my case I installed all the packages by doing

#yum install –disablerepo=* –enablerepo=InstallMedia *

then unmount the iso

#umount /mnt

for reference I took the help of $man mount and $man yum

have a try

Atul Chitnis: And the blog is back…

Sat, 26 Jun 2010 05:48:45 +0000

And the blog is back – duly WordPress‘ed. There are still a bunch of things I need to port across, but that’s what I am working on right now. Things should stabilise over the weekend.

For now, I am using the default TwentyTen theme that comes with WordPress, but that should change soon. Also, until I stabilise the setup, I am keeping comments disabled – use the Contact Form to send me a message if needed.

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay: A question, a survey, a conversation and some feedback

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:52:22 +0000

During the recent elections Richard Stallman had a specific question for the candidates. Copying from the archives, here’s the question:

Here is a question for the candidates.

To advance to the goal of freedom for software users, we need to develop good free software, and we need to teach people to value and demand the freedom that free software offers them. We need to advance at the practical level and at the philosophical level.

GNOME is good free software, and thus contributes at the practical level. How will candidates use the user community’s awareness of GNOME to contribute to educating the communityn about freedom?

At a stretch the question is similar in theme to the questions/concerns around GNOME and Free Software ideals that come up from time to time. I recall reading similar questions during earlier elections and, it isn’t specifically new or, something that has come out of the blue.

I came to know of the survey when I read the micro-blog from Lefty. And, then we had a bit of conversation.

Personally, I don’t feel comfortable about the survey.

The line of reasoning is as follows – as a member of the GNOME Foundation one has the right to express one’s opinion about the direction and focus of the Foundation by supporting the appropriate (set of) candidate(s). From the perspective of a Foundation it is perfectly valid to focus on areas which are aligned with the very reason for the Foundation and the project to exist. In fact, focussing only on those areas wouldn’t and shouldn’t be taken amiss. In short, the Foundation can choose to exercise what it should work on in the near or long term future or, it shouldn’t. As long as such goals and tasks do not appear to be detrimental to the cause of Free and Open Source Software things should work out nicely.

I hasten to add that similar should be the focus of the Free Software Foundation as well. The survey attempts to somewhat codify this implicit responsibility areas and, I do get the feeling that the specific question

“In what way would you ordinarily refer to “an operating system based on a Linux kernel and using mainstream, mainly community-developed components and applications”? (Distributions representing such include Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Open SuSE, etc. Android does not qualify, nor does WebOS, etc.)”

is implicitly divisive. An “us/them” meme that has been festering on the foundation-list for a while now.

I did not participate in the survey. I don’t want to. I’d rather like GNOME to focus on being an excellent desktop environment with strong technical and technology focus going back to the times when I started using it as my primary desktop. The Board needs to work out its focus and, work on the project’s future with much more rigor than it does now. To me the survey is just a passing distraction. Mildly entertaining but probably not productive.

Kushal Das: lekhonee-gnome 0.11 released

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 10:28:18 +0000

I just released lekhonee-gnome 0.11, you can download the source from here, a yum repo for Fedora 13 can be found here.

Release Details:

Add new category button is re-enabled and it works :p
Updated translations
About dialog bug fixed

Arun Sag: sagarun

Tue, 22 Jun 2010 09:27:49 +0000

I volunteered myself for creating a Tamil remix of Fedora for the on going Tamil Internet conference.

The Live DVD is now available for download. It is named as Tamilan (meaning: person who speaks Tamil) . The default language is set to Tamil. You can switch to English if you want to.

The DVD includes (1.6 Gb)

1. KDE 4.4.4 (latest stable bug fix release)
2. Firefox, konqueror
3. Multimedia playback support
4. Pidgin,Transmission,Tucan, Pitivi video editor,Miro ,choqok Micro-blogging application.
5. Inkscape , GIMP
6. VLC player
7. Cheese
8. IBus Input method
9. Rpmfusion,livna,adobe flash (sigh) repositories are enabled by default.
10. Updates upto june 20,2010
11. GNU/Linux advocacy/philosophical videos.

The DVD will be used to demonstrate support for localization which exists in GNU/Linux Desktop. Fedora doesn’t include Tamil support for KDE by default (it’s incomplete, will be completed soon) , so we compiled the translation files into rpm and included it in the remix.

The DVD can be downloaded from : http://psgkriya.org/saga/Tamilan-Fedora-Remix/
Kickstart file can be downloaded from : http://psgkriya.org/saga/Tamilan-Fedora-Remix/tamilan.ks

Many thanks to Rahul Sundaram and Hiemanshu sharma for their timely help, Yuvraj for the hosting & bandwidth and amachu for the motivation & support.

Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay: Or, where we talk about digital future of the Bengali language

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 09:33:58 +0000

ABP Pvt Ltd has a history that goes back to 1922.

From the website

“In 1922, Anandabazar Patrika first came out as a four-page evening daily that sold at two paise and had a circulation of about 1,000 copies a day. Eighty-five years later, Anandabazar Patrika reaches out to over seven million readers, every day!

Today, the ABP Group has evolved into a media conglomerate that has eleven premier publications, three 24-hour national TV news channels, two leading book publishing businesses as well as mobile and internet properties. Touching the lives of millions of readers and viewers, daily.

We believe the legacy you leave, is the life you lead. We see ourselves as repositories of best practices and processes. And, at times, when we don’t have the very best within, we open windows to look out for expertise. Not surprisingly, ABP is associated with companies and personalities revered across the world.

In the world of journalism, we are not just a media house. We are really an alma mater.

”

Given the reach of the group and, the important role it plays in giving shape, form and direction to the literary content that is produced from Bengal, it is not too much to expect them to be at the forefront of technology when it comes to news and content published electronically. The association with Ananda Publishers, which publishes books from a variety of authors for a consumer base that spans ages, it is not too hard to anticipate that they will be heralding change and, changing for the better.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Bengali/Bangla and digital standards, the group is one of the laggards since they stick to an antique non-standard technology. In short, it is surprising that they are yet to think over adopting Unicode as a part of their online version.

This lack of interest in adopting Unicode has created an unique situation. The digital content published by the ABP group requires extremely unorthodox parser development to be encoded into Unicode and, used in any form of language study. The inability to be able to easily use the corpus is all the more important from the perspective of being able to extensively use Bengali/Bangla in the digital domain. Additionally, while browsers have demonstrated improved support for Unicode, the online content, including the shopping cart of Ananda Publishers, are unfit to be rendered on such browsers. Stop here for a moment and imagine a plethora of mobile and portable devices which may have extensive support for Bengali/Bangla at the user-interface level, the ability to input, print and render Bengali/Bangla but, would be unable to work with the content provided by the most circulated Bengali newspaper in India.

A group of folks led by Golam M Hossain have devised a prototype of an Unicode Proxy for Anandabazar Patrika. The attempt is not aimed at facilitating the reading of the newspaper, that is a happy collateral. The experiment is focused on demonstrating that it may not be difficult for Anandabazar to adopt Unicode.

Please read this page and if you desire to support it, write in with your name and affiliation to support the petition. If you know someone at ABP/Anandabazar who would be interested in a discussion, it would be good to get a conversation going.

Kushal Das: How to use lekhonee-gnome for multiple blogs with the same wordpress account ?

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 10:23:06 +0000

I was looking into this feature request yesterday, good news is lekhonee-gnome already supports this. Lets say your wordpress username is foobar.

So, in the accounts in Preferences window you add the first account with your username and password and Wordpress as service.

Then add another account with same username and password but service as other and type the full url of your 2nd blog following /xmlrpc.php (example: http://secondblog.wordpress.org/xmlrpc.php).

Now you can access both the blogs from lekhonee-gnome

Kenneth Gonsalves: billdesk scamsters?

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:22:31 +0000

I recently had to make an urgent journey - so I booked tickets by 2 different trains - when the waiting list did not clear, I also booked tatkal. 3 or 4 of the bookings ended in failed transaction - billdesk deducted the money from my bank account - but did not credit it to the railways. Then I tried air - two attempts, both times money left my account, but billdesk did not credit it to the booking site. Net result: about 12K rupees left my account and is sitting with billdesk. After lots of emails, all parties agree that I have paid the money, that the transactions have failed and that I should get my money back. Now they say 7-8 business days. Obviously there is some scam here - why should a refund take more than a few seconds when the transaction has failed? They are probably earning lakhs in interest from the money they are holding in this way.

Samarjit Adhikari: A thought on Relationship

noreply@blogger.com (Samar) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 07:58:11 +0000

I love you.

I love you..

I love you...

.. hey man ! wait wait. I am not proposing anyone through my blog. (Really?)

Rather it is the most frequent sentence used among teenagers in India.These words are primary steps to start any interesting relation ;-).

let's dig into this relationship chapter.

[Story 1]

First day of XYZ collage of Engineering. (Math classroom)

All good looking girls sat in first few chairs and all guys were back bench er.

A teacher came and started the theory of probability. As you know the theory of probability has always probability of understanding.Very few understood the theory. At the end of the class everybody started moving to corridor for next class. Suddenly some voice was heard. "Hey Sidhardh! do you have notes on the probability? Do you help me to understand it". A guy fell back from the group, waiting for the source of voice.

After few days the couple find their recognition in college. :-)

[Story 2]

First day in office. Breakfast time. There was long queue in front of the breakfast counter.

A guy, standing in the queue, looking at someone, made a comment. "These guys are delaying too much to wait. We should complain to higher authority." The reply came "Certainly. We should complain it. Do you know the contact number?". Conversation started...

After few years later, common friends find them as married couple.

There are lot of incidents through which people choose their life partners. To find life partner, the sentence "I love you" plays an important role and thus the "Love Marriage" signed it's signature.

People who did love marriage gives lots of arguments. Lets listen some of them.

"In love marriage, you can judge a person over a period time. How could you get married to someone whom you don't know. You can't take life long decision in just few hours."

"Love marriage is sooooooo sweet. Everyone should do Love Marriage!"

"Love is the strongest sentiment that keeps you young in your relationship. Love marriage is the best thing in this world!"

"We live in 21st century. We should have freedom to choose our own destiny and Love Marriage is part of it."

OK, friends. Lets do an open heart surgery of "Love Marriage" and "Arrange Marriage".

Marriage is an event to start a new relationship.Did you ever think about why most of us expect the marriage to be a memorable one? Can anybody thought of his or her marriage to be a silent simple court registration? It does not matter whether it is a "Love Marriage" or "Arranged Marriage".The answer would be 'NO'.

Some people would say ! "Hey stupid. Didn't you heard of Living together in 21st century?"

My answer would be "Hey dude! do you know the difference between Living together and a Marriage?"

You would say "Live-together is a modernize concept. If you like someone, start living with him/her. No need to do marriage. If you don't like him/her .. just leave him. No legal botheration. It is a concept from West and we can learn a lot from them.

Well friend! whatever you told is correct. It is human-mind generated. Let's looks at it from a different angle. Like in "Love Marriage" a couple is known to each other in living-together relationship.

One can admit that it is not possible to know 100% of a person in just a 4/5 years of relationship. Thus any wrong thing could happen after the marriage as well. Here 'Living relationship' comes into rescue. Here you can leave the partner. If it doesn't happen then you can live happily with your partner like in Marriages(Doesn't matter if it is a Arrange Marriage or Love Marriage)

Thus an event of marriage has a social touch along with legal one. If some misunderstanding happen after marriage it is the social and legal bond that make you compel to adjust with the situation and will taught you

the biggest lesson of life "You could not get whatever you expect." This lesson couldn't be taught in "Living relationship", thus making the divorce rate high.

So friends in "Love Marriage" you could know a person before marriage but could only understand him/her after marriage and thus it is not a different from arrange marriage .. where we start from ;-)

[Disclaimer: It is just a thought. It is not for the purpose to heart anyone]

Kushal Das: Yet another Sunset in Pune

Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:47:01 +0000

Subhodip Biswas: subhodipbiswas

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 20:24:17 +0000

It has been quite a while since I had written my last post.

There’s a lot to write about since I joined the company but I dont know how to .

Right now being posted in mumbai and trying to settle down to the new.

Hope things goes well this time.

Filed under: Blogroll, life, wow

Kushal Das: Timelapse using Fedora and D80

Sat, 05 Jun 2010 18:48:28 +0000

My first timelapse movie: /me trying to clean the kitchen

ogv or in youtube

Shot in a Nikon D80 using entangle (#yum install entangle ) and a small python script.

Resized using imagemagick and video created using mencoder.

Comments are welcome :)

Kushal Das: lekhonee-gnome 0.10 released

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 10:42:13 +0000

lekhonee-gnome 0.10 is just released. You can download the source from here.

This release comes with new translations for languages like Gujarati or Punjabi, also spell checking option is not anymore under right click menu ( something changed in webkit)

Here is an image of the right click menu used to look like.

Bamacharan Kundu: mouse-manage-aplet

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 23:47:54 +0000

I installed the fedora 13 in my Dell mini. I got Windows XP service pack 3 with my Dell inspiron mini. It is ok but running a bit slow that’s because of the low speed of intel atom processor and a lot of development aplication environments which were given with it. Lately i had installed Moblin in it. It was cool in look and was working fine. But the main problem there was I can not see more then one window at a time there, means if I want to see one window while working on another window then it was a bad option. Currently I installed Fedora 13 in it. It working fine in it. More over it is faster than the Windows which was running on it.

But one problem I got with it is the windows of some aplications are partly visible. the lower portion of the windows are not visible. And because of that if there is any button or some thing like that I can not press it. Though till now it has not made any problem but it has become a problem for me.

Here is one of the screen shots the problem which I am facing:

I think this is because of the applet size has been kept fixed even though change in screen size.

Kishan Goyal: kishangoyal

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:14:04 +0000

A Fedora Activity Day was held at the Red Hat office at Pune, India on the 29th and 30th of May, 2010. The event page can be found here and the reports by the attendees is here. I had the opportunity to be a part of the event which turned out to be a great learning experience for me.

meejan , yevlempy and /me reached Pune just past midnight on the 28th. We reached the Red Hat office the next day at 9 a.m. The day started with a session on GNU Autotools by debiansid after which everyone present there spoke of the work they intended to do over the weekend. After struggling with many typos for sometime, I finally managed to get things working.

Meejan and /me worked on gFotoStat over the two days. Since the release of v 0.2, we had got a list of around 8 bugs/features to be worked upon and I worked on shortening the list as much as possible. Meanwhile, I also submitted the gfotostat spec for review. Meejan and myself managed to kill some of the bugs and added a Preferences menu to the app. (it is not fully functional as of now). Unmanindu suggested to add an option to select the bar or pie charts to be set as default view from the Preferences menu. Also, on the 30th was his talk on OLPC as a Fedora downstream which was recorded by kushal. View the talk here (111 mb)

Towards the end of the event, there was a feedback session and discussion whether organizing such FADs did serve its purpose and FUDCon among other things.

Some work still left to do after which I will be finishing as soon as my semester exams wrap up (on the 18th) Expecting the v0.3 release of gFotoStat very soon after that.

Meejanur Rahaman: meejan

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:23:38 +0000

This weekend I had had a great experience. I went to Pune and attended FAD at Red Hat Ofice, Pune. This continued for two days, 29th and 30th May. I mainly worked on adding more features and killing some more bugs on gFotoStat.

It’s been a few months, me and Kishan working for gFotoStat and within these two days, we both worked together and succeeded to do the followings:

i)Added Year-wise bar-chart and pie-chart.

ii)Percentage of images has been changed to number of images in the bar-chart.

iii)Help -> About is working now.

iv)Clicking the Save button and while browsing the home directory is coming by default.

We were trying to add some more features but we got stuck at some point. Hoping to solve them and release the next version(v 0.3) in a very short time. It’s really a very great experience to attend such a FAD and worked together with so many people and hope to attend such in near future again:)

Sayamindu Dasgupta: Fedora Activity Day, Pune

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 13:10:33 +0000

I spent the weekend at Pune, attending the Fedora Activity Day. Apart from the usual hallway conversations and discussions, I gave a short talk on life as a Fedora downstream project, where I described some of the issues we face while building the OLPC OS (which is a Fedora derivative). Rahul has posted a nice summary of my talk, along with possible ways to address some of the issues I outlined during the talk.
Apart from the talk, I worked with Kushal to package accessx – I came up with the patches which made it build-able on F-13. Kushal and I also worked on adding support for cover images to the Pathagar Book Server we have been working on, and I think it looks good for a release at the moment.

Harsh verma: yevlempy

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 04:51:30 +0000

DAY-0 28 MAY 2010

It all started from our journying from durgapur to kolkata to catch our flight, which was destined to go at 5:30PM. We(me, kishan, meejan) started from durgapur at around 10:00AM. Everything was going fine and we were having loads of fun, with few disscussions on packaging. We reached kolkata on time, after which kishan had to go to his uncle’s place to take his identity proof for boarding the flight. Me and meejan grabed some lunch at KFC and then collectively we all went to airport. Our flight was delayed for about an hour or so . Kishan and meejan were having damn excitment as it was their first flight with butterflies in stomach too , Kishan’s face was a treat to watch when plane took off from kolkata airport. We boarded the spicejet flight and travelled almost half of india on our way to pune as it was a damn long flight i.e from kolkata to Delhi and then to pune. We reached pune at around 12:00PM and were picked up by sankarshan(Thanks ). We went to the guest house which was arranged by REDHAT people for our stay. At the guest house we found kushaldas(Thanks ) too who along with sankarshan helped us in reaching our rooms. The place was cozy and cool and we were told to reach REDHAT office at 9:00AM tomorrow morning i.e on 29th. We found rtnpro there too, who reached before us as he had an early flight. As we were damn tired, we all went to sleep.

DAY-1 29 MAY 2010

It started with meeting shrink, mether and variour other Redhat and Fedora people. The only sessions of the day was on autotools by Siddhesh. The session was pretty much informative and interactive, Siddhesh went into explaining how Makefile and Configure files are automatically generated from Makefile.am and configure.ac with his linkc program. The first day i spent taking few bugs fixing and packaging tips from rakesh, who was fixing security bugs. I spent my time looking into details of packaging, following the packaging documentation in fedora wiki.

At the lunch time, people from Bhasha Technologies who came to meet the Fedora ARM contributes had small conversation with us on their various projects. I along with Salim, kishan decided to work on suggested projects. The day finished off and we(me, kishan, meejan, Ankur) went to have dinner with kushal and mether. After having lunch we headed to kushal’s and mether’s place were we had loads of fun playing Wii.

DAY-2 30 may 2010

I started the day with packaging openEMR for fedora-medical, as listed by susmit on mailing list. The talk of the day, i was looking for was of sayamindu, who gave a talk on OLPC as a downstream of Fedora project. Meanwhile i packaged openEMR. At the end of the day we had disscussions on more upcoming FAD’s and FUDCON in india(disscussion will continue).

At night we(I, kishan, meejan, rtnpro, ankur) along with kushal, mether and salim went to Hakka for a nice chinese dinner. Again at the end we went to kushal’s place to play on Wii(i played boxing and my hand is still paining )

Ratnadeep Debnath: rtnpro

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 08:46:08 +0000

It was a great experience at the FAD in Red Hat, Pune. The FAD was conducted for two days, 29th and 30th May, 2010.

Day 01

Siddhesh took a session on autotools. The session was informative and interactive. I came to know how the big Makefile and Configure files are automatically generated from makefile.am and configure.ac (Makefile.in is first generated though, then the Makefile). Siddhesh used the linkc program for the purpose.

That was the only workshop. Then it was doing our own work. Everyone discussed what they will be working on. As for me, I decided to work on packaging python-keyring and kupfer and writing code for my application named wordGroupz (it is an app for building one’s vocabulary based on groups). My target was to get the code ready for 0.1 release of wordGroupz. For the first day, I made some changes in the python-keyring.spec as suggested by Ankur(FranciscoD) and Rahul (mether). Then I spent the rest of the time coding for kupfer, designed the GUI using Glade3. For programming, I used python, GTK, sqlite. By the end of the day, I managed to get a input from the user and store it in the database. Updating in the combobox was not achieved that day.

In between, people from Bhasha Technologies came to the FAD to meet the ARM Fedora contributors who didn’t turn up. They shared some of their ideas with us over the lunch. I along with some of my friends (Rangeen) alongwith Salim decided to work on the suggested projects.

Day 02

I wrote a spec file for kupfer which wasn’t working for some unknown reasons. I submitted a review request for that and Ankur started reviewing it. Soon Rahul joined followed by Kushal. Kupfer uses a waf build system and the wscript was broken for kupfer. It didn’t produce any kupfer package, but was a good exercise. After that, Sayamindu gave a speech on OLPC and Sugar, which is a Fedora downstream project for the OLPC. Then, I resumed coding for wordGroupz. I managed getting the combobox updated on new entry. I made some changes in the glade file. I did some reading on the treeview model and got it to display the words from the database categorized into groups. I added a search facility in the app to search for words. As the day was ending, I thought to drop the displaying of word info for the 0.1 version.

At the end of the session, we reported what we achieved in the 2 days of the FAD. Then plans for future FADs were discussed. After the session, we (rtnpro, meejan, kishan, yevlempy) along with Rahul, Kushal and Salim went to Haka for dinner. Going to Haka was another story .

It turned out to be a great day, working together throughout the day along with some fun also.

Arrangements made for our accommodation were great. Kushal took pics and recorded videos during the FAD. I hope kushal will upload them soon.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_Pune_2010

Currently, I am fixing some glitches in the code for wordGroupz. I have set a repository for it at

http://gitorious.org/wordgroupz

Debayan Banerjee: debayan

Mon, 31 May 2010 20:05:39 +0000

In the psychology of learning, operant conditioning is one technique through which we mould our responses based on the feedback we receive from our environment. For example, politicians change the subject and manner of their speech based on how they have been perceived in the past in similar public appearances.The term operant derives form the fact that subjects “operate” on the environment to get feedback. The feedback decides what they learn in the long term from that particular experience.

The kind of feedback received can be divided into 2 categories: Reinforcement and Punishment. These 2 can again be further subdivided into positive and negative.

Reinforcement is a form of stimuli or consequence which strengthens our responses either to avoid or abet the occurrence of the event or stimuli.

Punishment is a form of stimuli or consequence that weakens our responses either to avoid or abet the occurrence of the event or stimuli.

Positive Reinforcement or Positive Punishment both deal with desirable consequences.

Negative Reinforcements or Negative Punishments deal with avoiding undesirable consequences.

Note that both the definitions do not follow the literal meaning of positive and negative in the commonly used sense.

Here are a few examples:

1) Positive Reinforcement: Whenever I buy my girlfriend a gift, she kisses me. Here the kiss is a desirable event or consequence. My buying the gift is a behavioural activity. Now I am often inclined to buy her gifts because I always get a kiss in return. Hence the kiss is a positive reinforcement for the activity of buying her gifts, so it keeps strengthening the gift buying activity.

2) Negative Reinforcement: Whenever I am broke, my girlfriend screams at me. Screaming here is an unwanted stimulus. To avoid her shrill voice, I work harder and earn more money. Hence her screaming is a negative reinforcer which strengthens my activity of working hard.

3) Positive Punishment: Whenever my girlfriend discovers that I smoke, she decides not to talk to me for a week. I love talking to her so I weaken my smoking habits. Here her snubbing me is the Positive Punishment. It weakens a particular behaviour in me so I can receive a desirable consequence.

4) Negative Punishment: Whenever I talk to another girl, my girlfriend starts crying. I decide to stop talking to other girls. Here her crying is an unwanted consequence that I want to avoid and hence I decide to weaken my activity of talking to other girls.

Practical Application: A sequence of procedures that follow Negative Punishment with Positive Reinforcements have been found to be consistently successful in taming unruly horses. These horses are first punished slightly for their deviant behaviour. After a while the horses weaken their violent behaviour to a certain extent. Then the horses are given an opportunity to behave nicely. When the horse does decide to listen to the master, it is patted on the forehead. The horse hence gets positive reinforcement for its obedience. In no time the horse turns gentle.

In essence, what this means is that we tell the horse to improve its behaviour in lieu of better treatment. The point is somewhat grasped by it but not totally. Then we tell it that since it has decided to behave well to a certain extent we appreciate it. This, as it turns out, has a profound effect on the horse’s behaviour for the rest of its life.

This is a brief description of Operant Conditioning theory of learning.