Delhi Chalo!

January 24, 2007

It was during my 8th standard, sometime in 1997, that I went to the capital of India. It was actually preceded by a high drama. I had my quarter-early exams yet to finish, but the Annual Integration Camp of Bharath Scout association was to start. At that time, I was a more passionate scout than a student. The reason my principal was also a member of scout movement helped in getting permission to take up the exams earlier than my class mates (but with the same question paper and a promise to keep the questions secret). It was a wonderful 2 weeks trip, with 10 days of camping with scouts and guides from all over India and a couple of days of sight seeing in Delhi. A team of 10 people with a scout master, out of which only 3 could speak some Hindi, went to Delhi.

Now, after almost 10 years, am making my next trip to that great city, this time though not as a scout or NCC cadet but as a representative of NRCFOSS. I am going to participate in a highly commercial event, hosted with a title of ‘Linux Asia‘. The weirdest thing about the conference, which has even pissed off a great % of the community, is that it is being sponsored by Microsoft. M$ is called as the ‘Interoperability Partner’ for this event, which has raised too many eyebrows and that’s one thing I will be sniffing max in this event.

If you infer that am looking for this conference, am sorry. I would rather personally prefer to go to Pune for GNUnify or Mumbai for SELF. But, I am taking up orders and making myself to Delhi. But, off late I have hit with a good news. Thanks to the Delhi Linux User Group buddies, its almost sure that there would be a kabab-and-beer meet on 3rd February and I will be meeting many of IRC buddies whom I missed at foss.in.

Am landing along with two of my colleagues on a day before the event, which spans for 3 days. Then, one of my colleagues will go to Kanpur, while two of use are left in Delhi for a couple of days. On 3rd, I have asked my colleague to go for a day tour to Agra. I have seen Taj in my life and not very much interested to see it again. But for my colleague, this is his first trip and why he got to miss this chance. So, while I will be hanging around with my buddy Nishant, he will enjoy Agra. The final day, I wish to stay in the room and watch TV if there is one. Else hang around the place and get some cool Delhi air.

If you want me to say a word about this trip, its “a week escape to a cold Delhi, before getting fried in hot Chennai summer” ;) :P

1 Comment | Happenings and Events, Linux and FLOSS, Travel and Outdoor | Permalink
Posted by technofreak

Newlines and Sed

January 19, 2007

This was actually written by floyd_n_milan, but he had some problem posting it in blogger and hence I do him this favor of posting it in my blog :)

This is a not so nice little problem.

Say, you need to rid an HTML file of all the tags. Seems pretty simple if the
entire tag is contained on one single line, like this:

<html>

Could be even two tags on the same line, like this:

<html><head>

That’s not a problem since both tags start and end on the same line. Here’s
what you can do in sed to get rid of them:

sed -e ’s/<[^>]*>//g’

It reads, substitute a pattern that starts with a <, followed by zero or more
characters that are not > and ends with a > with a blank, for all instances
on the line.

Why’s the [^>]* necessary then? Why not just <.*>?

Consider this:

<title>Hello World</title>

What would happen with <.*> here? sed will see the < from <title> and the >
from </title>, because by default it matches the longest possible match.
This’ll remove the entire line, which is not what we want. We just want to
remove the <title> and </title>, keeping the Hello World intact.

Hence, we use [^>]*. This means, match zero or more characters that are not >.
So, in essence, we’re matching the shortest pair of <>. Inside this pair,
after the initial <, there can be no >, unless its the end of the pattern.
This’ll match both <title> and </title> separately and keep Hello World
intact.

The problem still remains though. The above sed command will only work if the
entire tag is on one single line, because sed can read the file only line by
line. So, if something like this comes up:

<p><font size=”5″
face=”blah”>Blah blah blah</font></p>

sed will remove the <p> fine. Then it’ll find the <font but won’t find the
corresponding > on the same line. On the next line, it’ll remove the </font>
and the </p> at the end, but won’t remove the face=”blah”> at the start
because it can’t find the initial <.

This problem can be solved using the multiline pattern space in sed. This
script will work:

sed -e ‘/</{
N
s/<[^>]*>//g
}’

First /</ takes sed to a line that has a <. The commands inside the {} will
then operate on this line.

The N command causes sed to read in the next line, keeping the initial and the
newly read in line, both in the pattern space. So the content that sed
operates upon, now looks like this:

<p><font size=”5″nface=”blah”>Blah blah blah</font></p>

with \n being just another character in the line. The contents then match the
<[^>]*> used by the substitute command properly.

No Comments » | Bash and Shell Scripts, Hacks and Codes, Regular Expressions | Permalink
Posted by technofreak

Words of the Day - 10

January 16, 2007

After a long break, here I am back…

spartan : Adjective : marked by simplicity; avoidance of luxury.

asphyxiate : Verb :  breathing interruption caused by lack of oxygen.

acardian : Adjective : idyllically pastoral, innocent or simple.

tautological : Adjective : redundant; containing  needless repetitions.

euphoric : Adjective : elated.

fiasco : Noun : complete or humilating failure.

crescendo : Noun : climax; peak of a gradual increase; peak of loudness or intensity.

gusto : Noun : vigorous enjoyment; relish;

canard : Noun : false or baseless report; rumour.

No Comments » | Learning English | Permalink
Posted by technofreak

BOSS is out!

January 16, 2007

NRCFOSS’s prime product, BOSS (Bharath Operating System Solutions), has been released officially by Minister of IT and Communication, during EliteX2007 held in New Delhi last week.

BOSS is a Linux Distribution developed by CDAC team of NCRFOSS. It is said to be made specifically for Indian environment, with support for Indian languages and an enhanced Desktop.

You can know more about BOSS in NRCFOSS’s website and check out the photos taken during the release function in the album. :)

No Comments » | Happenings and Events, Linux and FLOSS | Permalink
Posted by technofreak

Starwars - M$ vs Others

January 16, 2007

I came across this interesting map of a starwar attack happening around us. Am not going to say more, most of you might have guessed what it is with the title ;)

Check this out, Software Starwars !! B-)

No Comments » | Fun to Read, Pointers | Permalink
Posted by technofreak

Back to FOSS Advocacy

January 9, 2007

After 2 months of inactivity, the advocacy wave has started again. Its been long time since we visited some college, spoke with the students, tried some brainwashing, etc. Last 2 months had been exam time for them, so we couldn’t go near the colleges. Now, the new semester having started as well as this one is ‘project time’ for final year students, its time again for the hunt.

To start with the season, we made a 2 day trip to Coimbatore. Forunately, its my native place and one of the cities I love to be at. We had a 2 day workshop at Sri Ramakrishna Engineering College in N.G.G.O. Colony, Coimbatore on 5th and 6th January, 2007.

Coimbatore was almost like Bangalore in the climate, damn cold in the morning, when we landed there by 4.15 a.m. And we made our way to Aarvee Hotel near Gandhipuram bus stand. It was almost semi-grandeur, espeicaly the food. We had an A/C in the room but we did not use it because it was already cold. We reached the college around 9.15 and got a warm welcome.

The first thing to make sure was that the projectors worked well with my laptop’s resolution and frequency and surprisingly it worked well. It was a very nice auditorium, with around 250 people capacity (if am not wrong). Raman started the presentation ‘Introduction to FOSS and GNU/Linux’ while I was standing along and moving the sildes. We answered the FAQs together. As we have done this presentation for almost a dozen times, though I had changed few slides, still we know every slide and every word there by heart. And, the FAQs were aways the same.

Then we proceeded with Installation, Kubuntu CD not working and had to proceed with Debian Etch. Showed them some 3D eye candy with beryl and showed them the desktop. Then, we had a very good lunch (with spices that later caused some problem ;) ). Then I did a presentation on FOSS DBMS and ended the day. We had a good interaction with the faculties from other colleges who had come for the workshop during the lunch break.

The next day started with a slight delay in getting the car and the driver taking us for a tour along the outskirts of kovai, in an endeavour to find the college :P

Right from the morning, I wasn’t feeling a bit well so asked Raman to take the day’s show. The only presentation I did was ‘Introduction to GUI Dev Tools - Eclipse and Qt Designer’, while Raman did Networking, LTSP, Linux High Availability and a quick into to Perl. I missed my Python and Collaborative Development presentations, also there wasn’t enough time. The workshop ended with Dr.Srinivasan’s speech about NRCFOSS Projects. We were gifted a small momento with a picture of lord ganesha.

We landed back in Chennai on 7th January, Sunday morning. On a whole, it was one another of the satisfactory workshops we have done. And, we hope we will recieve similar invitations from the colleges whose faculty attended this workshop and we can make similar trips to places down south of Tamil Nadu.

No Comments » | FOSS Community Activities, Happenings and Events, Linux and FLOSS | Permalink
Posted by technofreak

the typical “lawgon” witt

January 4, 2007

This happened today in #linux-india and is a perfect example of the typical ‘lawgon’ witt ;)

<lawgon> Sup3rkiddo: one thing i *never* *ever* do is configure my sound card
<lawgon> but in the ibook it is configured by default
<Sup3rkiddo> lawgon: wow..it gets configured automatically in my box no matter what distro i have used
* lawgon goes to see if it is configured
<lawgon> aparently it is configured
<lawgon> but i dont get any sound anyway
<Sup3rkiddo> lawgon: must me the mixer setting
<Sup3rkiddo> *be
<carpenterThe> yes, maybe the volume setting is at zero. Happened to me once.
<lawgon> i click test sound and nothing happens
<carpenterThe> lawgon: go to the mixer and see what the volume is set to
<kushal> lawgon, check alsa unmute
<lawgon> 80%
<carpenterThe> ok
<techno_freak> lawgon, check PCM value/state
<lawgon> maybe i need a speaker or two?
<Sup3rkiddo> LOL
* techno_freak guessed this

2 Comments | Fun to Read | Permalink
Posted by technofreak