Maryo is in Universe

While reading the latest issue of Full Circle Magazine today, I came across the Game section and was surprised to know Maryo was available in the Ubuntu Universe repository. The package is named smc, short form of Secret Maryo Chronicles. I downloaded it (some 41MB totally) and went running it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get added in the menu. So I had to manually add it and also set its icon.

Always I have the habit of running a newly installed software from the terminal to check whether it spews some error or not. So did smc, there was some dependency error confirming to this launchpad bug. Luckily some one had prescribed a fix that makes it work. Had some fun playing Maryo after a long time. Hope they fix the bugs and we get a really super Maryo game in Hardy.

miss it this time

Due to unforeseen circumstances, personal reasons, financial crunch and “leave” reasons, am not going to join the party at FOSS.NITC this time. It was fun last year with pradeepto, kushal, aanjhan, vivek, jace, kiruba, atul, shreyas, tejas, praveen and lot of known faces joining for a promising FOSS meet. This year, a majority of the tribe will go missing. I fear this was mainly due to the postponing of the schedule a couple of times, from feb end to march end and again to april first weekend.

For me with little penny left in my pocket, mother to be taken back home and morally can’t take successive weekends off from work, I mailed them that am dropping off. They felt so bad, am sorry, so did I. Hope you still rock on this year and we all can join you next year. Good luck!

the meet, the misery and the mess

The title looks interesting, so does the 3 things. First the meet, which happened this weekend. Hobbes` had called for a welcome meet for Kartik moving to Bangalore. We had originally planned to have it in South Indies, Indira Nagar but due to unavailability of  seat we  moved to Tangerine,  just on the opposite side. As the man of the meeting rather went to talk about Debian in some college, we still decided to carry on the party. The #linux-india meet was attended by moi, Hobbes`, tuxplorer, vegpuff, shastri and his friend (forgot name/nick).  The place was nice and the food was nicer. I tried my first hand on a cheesed vegetable steak sizzler and it was awesome. The meeting lasted around a couple of hour, with people trying to find what BLUG was/is and Hobbes’ suggesting that we reactivate linux-india mailing list as the primary list. Then we had a small chat about bikes (not the ones with motor, but the ones with pedals) before we started fining our way back home.

Now to the misery. Summer has started in Bangalore and so does the water problem. We were originally getting Cauvery water filling up the sump directly. Now it got stopped and we have to fetch water from the common water tap in the area. As a single water tap is shared by a dozen houses, each house gets a limited volume of water which has to be further shared by the various tenants. What our owner does is get the water and pour it into the sump, then use motor to pump it to the overhead tank, which finally comes in our taps. Though this idea sounds logical, it doesn’t seem to be practical. The water doesn’t come before I leave to office, hence am not there when it comes. Second, once the limited water gets to the over head tank, you have to be quick in filling up your storage vessels otherwise you will be left without water. As am not there when the water is in the tank, am left without water. Even if am there, I manage to get only one or maximum two buckets of water. This has to be shared between two for all purposes. Third, since there is no water in the tank, my water heater doesn’t work. So no hot water supply, unless I manually boil water in the stove. Life has started sucking, and I have 3 more months to pass before summer ends.

Time for the mess. Someone posted a bug (bug #18395 on BBox, which is surprisingly listed under project’s section for Ubuntu India Loco Community in Launchpad. Thus, the team automatically got subscribed to it and the whole junta who were in the team got the bug mail. This resulted in half of them wondering why they got the mail and replying back to it. Their response lead to cumulative effect of mails and ended up as a major spam. It also resulted in half of the people who were in the team to realize that they have no reason to be in the team, resulting in an unjoin spree. When I poked people for help in #ubuntu-bugs, even the bug control guys reported the bug to be not visible to them. Then we found out that some one made it a security issue. I wonder who did all these things, messing up everything in the pipe line. Please people, do not panic on such an issue, poke around the team and find out if some one is trying to fix it out. If not, ask them to. Phew!

visiting the client side

If I was one among the mass of outsourcing fed code monkeys, it would have been a trip outside India. As I was lucky to work for an Indian company operating rural business centers in rural parts of Karnataka I was blessed with a chance to visit the urbanized rural part of Bangalore, around 15 kilometers from our office (not sure, just a guess).

It wasn’t a planned visit, at least for me and my team. We had a deployment plan for today and a couple of guys were to visit th kiosk for deploying. As most of my colleagues were interested in joining them and as we had an extra car to ferry us, we all decided to go to the kiosk. We left office in two cars an hour before our usual lunch time (hence most of us were hungry too) and reached the kiosk in half-an-hour or so. There was a small hotel opposite the kiosk, so most of us grabbed our lunch from there. Jacob and me trying raagi muddhe (with jace telling some personal horror stories about the experience of eating it), while others resorted to chappathi.

We had quite a nice time in the kiosk, finding various issues which we had not thought about especially the usability ones. This has given us some more insights about real situations in the kiosk and how we have to improve our systems to counter it. We also had a fun time with 7 out of 9 from our team being there.

We were done with the deployment by 3 p.m. and 5 of us left a bit earlier back to office. In the way, jace told about the food street and others wanted to go there for an afternoon snack. We ended up having the Gulkand icecream and Masala pepsi. One other important thing about this trip was, jace used his GPS device to track our entire route in the map which can now be uploaded after making some minor edits. Thus, we ended up in a surprise field visit and food street visit today

* Kushal, we all missed you a lot

My 5 today: #127274 (hal), #199362 (synaptic), #59397 (xfce4-session, hal), 33794 (hal), #199358 (nautilus)
Do 5 a day - every day! https://wiki.ubuntu.com/5-A-Day