Back online from BCB4

Its going to be 10 days since I turned up online. Just finished checking loads of mails and fetching the planet feeds for the past 10 days. For those who were wondering where I have vanished to, I just moved my arse to Bengaluru, as in moved to a job here. Last 8 days were spent on finding a decent house for a decent rent (don’t ask me to define “decent” now :P).

At last I have got a nice double bed room flat at Indra Nagar and will be moving there on August 5th. Till then have to keep shutting between friends’ and relatives’ houses. Will be joining Comat on August 1st. Indra Nagar more or less looks like Adyar in Chennai, with lots of shops all over the CMH road. I even have an Adyar Ananda Bavan near my home, so I can have some TN food when I feel so.

Am blogging from BangPyper’s Python Collective at BarCampBangalore 4 at IIM Bangalore. Day 1 has so far gone smoothly and our Python collective has just started. Thanks to BCB4 that I could turn up online and write this post. Its been raining quite frequently since I landed here and it indeed rained a bit hard some 30 minutes ago. The stairs got wet and I even had a little slip, not much hurt though. The interesting things today are a Biking collective, which is about going to office in bikes or bicycles, and photography collective. Still to figure out where am going to stay tonight.

Will write more once I get an Internet connection at home or from friends’ place once am there.

meeting - the different kinds

Today I happen to search for a synonym for the word “meeting”, for a group description in facebook and I wanted a really catching word for meeting. When I looked through the synonyms at dictionary I found there are lots of options but each one was unique. I remember those days of being a copy editor, when we used to find people just replacing a word with its synonym but not worrying to check whether the meaning remains appropriate. Hence, in addition to “words of the day” which I have been posting in this blog for long, I wanted to add another category “the different kinds” under “Learning English“. Here comes my first post, different kinds of “meetings”,

assemblage, noun - a group of persons gathered or collected in one place; the social act of assembling.

assembly, noun - coming together of number of persons for a particular purpose, mostly religious, social or political.

clambake, noun - a picnic or social gathering at the seashore at which clams and other sea foods are baked; a very noisy social gathering.

conclave, noun - a private or secret meeting; a gathering that has special authority, power or influence; the body of cardinals.

concourse, noun - assembling in a huge open ground; an area for sports or related gathering; an act of running or coming together.

conference, noun - a meeting for consultation and discussion; exchange of views among a large gathering; an assembly of consultation mostly with a formal agenda.

confluence, noun - a coming together of people, thronging, similar to flowing together of two or more streams.

confrontation, noun - a meeting of persons face to face; an open conflict of opposing ideas; a clash of groups with opposing interests or beliefs.

congregation, noun - an assembly of people brought together for common religious worship.

congress, noun - a formal meeting or assembly of representatives, for the discussion on matters of common interest.

conjunction, noun - the state of being conjoined or united; a combination of events or circumstances.

convergence, noun - two or more groups coming together at a point.

convention, noun - a formal assembly for deciding action on something or for making agreements; a general agreement generally accepted as a standard by all related parties;

encounter, noun - to come upon or meet unexpectedly; unexpected meeting of conflicting parties; to meet with or content against.

engagement, noun - an appointment; an arrangement to meet; betrothal; getting occupied with something.

get-together, noun - an informal, small social gathering.

huddle, verb - to gather in close mass; ,noun - a closely gathered group.

juxtaposition, noun - the state of being close together, side by side.

nooner, noun - an activity undertaken during lunch hour, mostly a sexual encounter.

parley, noun - an informal conference between enemies under a truce.

quickie, noun - a short time encounter, mostly for a drink or a hurried sexual activity.

rendezvous, noun - an agreement between a few people to meet at a certain time and place; meeting of two or more space crafts in the outer space; ,verb - to assemble at an agreed time and place.

reunion, noun - a gathering of relatives, friends or associates at a location, after a separation.

tryst, noun - an appointment to meet someone at a certain place and time, mostly secretly by lovers.

sit-in, noun - an organized passive protest, where a group of people peacefully occupy a premises and refuse to leave.

turnout ,noun - the gathering of persons who come to an exhibition or party.

union, noun - a number of persons joined or associated together for some common purpose.

Gobuntu, go freedom!

A surprise post by Mark Shuttleworth appeared in Ubuntu Planet today, beginning of a new flavor of Ubuntu called as Gobuntu. I am not sure about the reason behind this name, but the idea behind this new flavor is have an “official” freedom focused flavor of Ubuntu.

I was very much like what you are thinking now, “What about gNewSense then?”. As what I infer from Mark’s post, this will serve as a upstream reference for all such distributions like gNewSense. Or in a more technical term, Gobuntu will serve as a base for freedom oriented distributions based on Ubuntu.

Gobuntu is available under Gusty daily build here.

Indeed, there were people inside the Ubuntu community to bounce back with questions. One important question, which I too would like Mark to answer is, whether a freedom-focused Gobuntu is going to use Canonical’s closed source applications like Launchpad and Merge-o-Matic. I join Jordan Mantha in asking the question to Mark. Shouldn’t it something bad to use a non free tool to develop a freedom oriented distribution? Though I have been somewhat agreeing to use of those for Ubuntu, where the ultimate aim is to provide a Linux distribution which “just works” for the user, I have this question when the total aim behind Gobuntu is removing all those controversial non-free drivers, firmware and apps out from the Ubuntu and offering a complete freedom GNU/Linux distribution.

Let us once again wait to hear from Mark.

Got my own - technofreak.in

I always envied my buddies who had their own websites in their own names (or nicks). Though having own web sites are no more big things in the world which is more and more becoming web oriented, there were few things which held me back in getting one for myself.

First, it was still a luxury to me; spending for the space, registering the domain name once in a mail, etc.

Second, I did not find a real need to have one. I had a blog in wordpress.com and that was enough for me to have my presence online. What ever I wished to let others know were done with the weblogs I had. I did not have much to host online, such as codes or documents. For photos, flickr was enough for me and that too with a pro account, it was all I could wish to have.

Off late, I have been again lured to the idea of having my own web site, mainly due to a lot of people I know coming up with their websites. Whenever I went for a seminar or workshop, all I had was my blog and email to show as my presence in the internet / web world.

A couple of days ago, tazz was setting up his web site and he was making #ubuntu-in lively with all discussions going about domain name selecting, hosting provider, etc. etc. I too wished I could get one up, but enquiring tuxmaniac let me know that it will cost me around 3000 INR over all for a decent web space. For my current situation, it was too much to spend on a web site.

The next day tazz introduced me to argo.nipl.net (NIPL), and in the next few hours with the help of tazz, grub and prudhvi (you can find us all at #nipl @ freenode.net) I got technofreak.in up and alive. As not to deviate too much from the focus of NIPL, I plan to host only contents and information pertaining to FOSS and GNU/Linux in my web site. This is much like a container for hosting documents, codes, presentations, files and other information I would like to share. This will also help me, from next time I go to seminars and workshops, to share my presentations with the audience. I also plan to host the examples and tutorial codes for python ( DIP examples are already there), pyqt4 and a few others.

As of now, technofreak.in is a very simple, bare bone HTML site with some CSS trying to improve the look. Am working on improving the CSS and make it look more better. Hope to make it happen in another few days to come. I am also open up to host stuff from others, mainly presentations, codes and documents, provided they fit into the scope of FOSS , GNU/Linux or Programming (mainly Python, Qt, GTK, Perl, Ruby and Scheme).

GNU Units - for conversion between units

Again Planet Ubuntu has introduced me to a new tool, may be not new for you, which is very useful in day to day life. Its `units`, which helps in the conversion of one unit to another. It can be invoked from the command line (aka terminal), either by passing the input and output units as arguments or using the interactive mode. It supports 2438 units, 71 prefixes and 32 nonlinear units.

When you just call the units, it fires up the interactive mode,

$ units
2438 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

You have: _

Now we have to enter the input unit, that is the unit we want to be converted. Say “1 inch” to be converted to cms. For this “You have:” is “1 inch” and “You want:” is “cm”.

You have: 1 inch
You want: cm
* 2.54
/ 0.39370079

It gives two outputs marked by * and /. The first one (marked by *) is the forward conversion, i.e., inches are represented in cms. The second one (marked by /) is the reverse conversion, i.e., it is the representation of 1 cm in 1 inch.

Let us look at some common conversions which we might me interested in general.

You have: inch
You want: cm
* 2.54
/ 0.39370079
You have: feet
You want: cm
* 30.48
/ 0.032808399
You have: feet
You want: inch
* 12
/ 0.083333333
You have: meter
You want: inch
* 39.370079
/ 0.0254
You have: meter
You want: cm
* 100
/ 0.01
You have: kilometer
You want: inch
* 39370.079
/ 2.54e-05

We have looked at conversion of units for length|height. Now lets see for weight and volume.

You have: kg
You want: lb
* 2.2046226
/ 0.45359237
You have: liter
You want: m^3
* 0.001
/ 1000
You have: gallon
You want: liter
* 3.7854118
/ 0.26417205
You have: gallon
You want: m^3
* 0.0037854118
/ 264.17205

There is one more common conversion left out, degC to degF and vice versa.

You have: degC
You want: degF
* 1.8
/ 0.55555556

These are basic conversions where we compared one unit of input to corresponding output. Now lets looks at different values and the corresponding results. There is an interesting thing to note here.

You have: 5 inch
You want: cm
* 12.7
/ 0.078740157

A inch is 2.54 cm and 0.39370079 cm is one inch. Looking at the current conversion, 5 inches is 5 *2.54 cms= 12.7 cms. But what is the second value “0.078740157″ ? This is nothing but the 1 cm with respect to 5 inches, or how much 1 cm is a part of 5 inches (1/(2.54*5) = 1/12.7 = 0.078740157). It might be a bit confusing at the beginning, but this is useful at times when we want to know the reverse ratio as well.

You have: 8 meter
You want: inch
* 314.96063
/ 0.003175
You have: 400 feet
You want: cm
* 12192
/ 8.2020997e-05
You have: 72 kg
You want: lb
* 158.73283
/ 0.006299894

Now, let us try to convert between units which do not have much relation.

You have: kg
You want: liter
conformability error
1 kg
0.001 m^3
You have: kg
You want: m^3
conformability error
1 kg
1 m^3

Though it shows the conversion, it says conformability error. Lets try again with mutually incompatible units.

You have: liter
You want: ohm
conformability error
0.001 m^3
1 kg m^2 / A^2 s^3

What it does is convert it to common base (m^n) and try to match them. But still, it doesn’t conform to standards conversions.

What if we are not sure of a unit or do not know how to spell them exactly. Just enter the first few letters and press tab, it shows a list of related units.

You have: kg
You want: l
Display all 102 possibilities? (y or n)
You want: li
li              lid             line            lithium
liang           light           linenyarncount  lithuanialitas
liberiadollar   lightminute     link            litre
libra           lightsecond     liquidbarrel
librae          lightyear       lira
libyadinar      ligne           liter

Another interesting feature of this tool is that we can obtain quick definitions of units. For example, if we want to know about ‘tablespoon’ then enter it in the “You have:” option and just press `Enter` without typing anything for “You want:” option. Then you get,

You have: tablespoon
You want:
Definition: ustablespoon = 1|16 uscup = 1.4786765e-05 m^3

Another good example will be definition of ohm and volt.

You have: ohm
You want:
Definition: V/A = 1 kg m^2 / A^2 s^3

You have: volt
You want:
Definition: W/A = 1 kg m^2 / A s^3

Thus, the interactive mode of GNU Units is very useful tool and we can play around with it. When we exactly know what we have and what we want, and just want the answer, the command line mode will be preferable. The basic syntax is,

$ units [options] [from-unit [to-unit]]

For example,

$ units '8 meter' 'inch'
* 314.96063
/ 0.003175

When the same command is invoked without the second ‘to-unit’ option, it just displays the definition of the given unit. For example,

$ units 'feet'
Definition: foot = 12 inch = 0.3048 m

Thus `units` is a versatile tool which converts quantities expressed in various scales to their equivalents in other scales. More information and options can be got from `man units`. The home page provides more information about the tool.

Units is available in Debian and Ubuntu, in the `universe` repository for the latter. So, its all an ‘apt-get install’ away. Thanks to lucas for posting this on the planet. Have fun!

OSS Camp in Delhi ??

I got to know about this a few days ago and was actually asked to find more about this. Does anybody, especially those in Delhi, know about this ?

OSS Camp is based on philosophy of Bar Camp. Barcamp is an ad-hoc gathering born out of the desire for people to meet up, share, exchange ideas and possibilities in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. OSS Camp is organized by the community and strictly not for profit. More than 300 Geeks from across the world are expected to participate. Participation is free of cost! A number of MySQL & PHP specific tracks are being presented by different speakers. For the first time in India, PHP Camp and MySQL Camp is being organized as part of OSS Camp. Participate in these Camps by being speaker and share great work that you are doing. You may also like to join in the organizing committee. If your organization is willing to sponsor this event, this may be a right opportunity to attract great talent, brand building and showing your support to Open Source Movement. Come Over and participate in Open Source Magic and meet the best brains from the industry! You can also send a word around your organization and write blogs to make this unconference a great success!

The OSS Camp, Delhi, is a step forward towards the facilitation of the Open Source Community in India. It will be the premier platform for the Indian Open Source community. The objectives of the conference are to:

1. Create a platform to discuss the current scenario of Open Source in India.
2. Facilitate the community with sessions on the various Open Source Technologies and available Tools
3. Create a community for the propagation of the Open Source Philosophy in India.

The event is scheduled for September 8th & 9th, 2007. We expect the final number of participants to be around 300.

The target audience for the event include:
* Members of open source communities all over the world,
* IT Professionals,
* Students of Management & IT, and,
* Technology Enthusiasts.

Over the two-day period, a number of sessions will be held at the event venue. The topics include: Open Source Licensing, Building Communities, Open Source Technologies, Open Source Philosophy, etc.

For more details you can visit:

• OSS Camp, Delhi Website at http://www.osscamp.in/OSSCampDelhi
• Complete list of Sessions at http://www.osscamp.in/OSSCampDelhi/index.php?title=Topics
• Complete list of Attendee or Registrations at http://www.osscamp.in/OSSCampDelhi/index.php?title=Campers
• Our Sponsors at http://www.osscamp.in/OSSCampDelhi/index.php?title=Sponsor

Contempt, not Content

When they say the name PSG, everybody evaluates it to a technical institute as good as IIT or at least the next berth. I too had a similar opinion as some of my relatives were from this institute and they have achieved great heights in their careers and attribute their success to the basement this institute had imparted in them. With this image, we made our trip to this prestigious institute, participating in a fortnight long Staff Training Program organized by the CSE department.

We were representing the NRCFOSS team, which is a mixture of NRCFOSS employees and the Chennai LUG members. It was the least day of the program and I was accompanied by Aanjhan and  Bharathi from ILUGC. Our original plan was Bharathi will handle Qt, followed by me handling Glade, followed by Aanjhan’s VLSI talk, then my Collaborative development talk and finally the day ends with a Panel discussion about FOSS and GNU/Linux in general.

We are expecting mainly staff and a moderate amount of students. Bharathi was there a day before us and evaluated the situation. We got a feedback that the interest amongst the audience was very minimal and they were still blank about the basics. So, we stopped our full fledged preparation and decided to manage with our current level of preparation.

I landed there yesterday morning, with a gentle drizzle making the climate seem awesome.  The hostel room where we stayed was ok, though a bit of cleaning up would have impressed us. We had our breakfast, in a steel tray and this made us remember central jail. Bharathi felt that taking both Qt and Glade would be way too much for the uninterested audience and hence we changed our plan to Qt, followed by VLSI and finally my Collaborative development. We finished the day by 3.30 pm and had a small chat with the organizer of the event. We were literally wondering why the basics haven’t gone into their brains with almost a week of interaction and talks preceding ours.

We then spent the next few hours talking random stuff, mainly dominated by Bharathi’s experience in IITM. In between, Aanjhan’s Deccan airways flight got postponed two times and finally his 6.45 pm flight was scheduled at 8.45 pm. We left the hostel by 7.40 pm and had a confusion of where to go first, drop me at the bus stop or drop Aanjhan at the airport. With high drama surrounding the next half an hour, we first enquired in a Conti travels depot whether I can board my bus there, then left Aanjhan in the airport, dropped in back to the same depot and rang the main depot to inform them of my change in boarding point. Bharathi then left to the railway station and I had to wait till 9.30 pm in gentle rain to get my bus back to Chennai.

Our expectations and preconceptions about PSG Tech got entirely negated during this trip. We rather started feeling that the private engineering colleges we usually visited are far better in many aspects (other than drawing monetary benefits from engineering education). Thus, this trip leaves us with a contempt of an otherwise highly thought institution and not a content of another good workshop.