my top words

Tried wordle.net and here is the result of feeding in my blog RSS feed..

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.

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!

5 a day

What is 5-A-Day?
We, that means everybody, will do 5 bugs a day - every day. With only
five bugs that everybody looks at every day, we will cover a lot of ground.

What you can do? That's up to you, your interests and your abilities.
 - If you're a developer, you can help out reviewing patches and getting
them uploaded.
 - If you want to just confirm new bugs, you can do that.
 - If you have experience with a certain package and want to triage bugs
you can do that and forward them upstream if necessary.
 - If you know your way around Ubuntu quite well, you can help assign
bugs to the right package.

What you need to do to participate?
 - Do it! Follow the instructions on the 5-A-Day homepage
 - Spread the word by adding your 5 a day to your mailing list posts I have been trying my best to triage 5 bugs a day, but max I could do was 3. Hope I can try better in future.

the hackday

I am sure my colleagues should have published the same in their blogs, but I do it anyway. Since I joined here, each one have been working individually though I have done some pair programming with jace a couple of times.  But today was a special day. For the first time, 5 of us were working on a single project, each one playing a unique part. But still we found a lack of proper communication and collaboration between us that jace resolved to make us sit together in one room and work together. Suddenly we saw a lot of things fixing up and things moving faster towards completion. Still we have a night to go through, to test everything and make sure it just works. We ended up having a hackday, with 7 of us moving our systems into the discussion room. Sorry, I am not uploading any snaps of it but think kushal has done that.

the best ever recruitment call I have ever read

Hello. This is yet another recruitment notice, though one that will
hopefully not pass for being just Yet Another. I’m posting this to a
few lists. For those subscribed to them, I hope you don’t mind the
repeat posts. If you think this is worth forwarding elsewhere, please
do.

I represent a small team at Comat Technologies (www.comat.com). We’re
seven people, with two joining later this month, which will take us to
nine. We’re looking for a tenth person to round off our skills and
take us into double digit team size. Maybe even a eleventh and twelfth.

But before I describe the job, let me describe what we do.

Comat is a ten year old born-again startup that operates in rural
India. You’ve no doubt heard the rhetoric of the digital divide and
how it needs more attention. We operate in that space. We’re not a
charity. We’re a proper business that pays competitive salaries and
believes there’s a genuine opportunity that may not be easily
accessible, but is very real.

In real terms, what we do is setup and operate computer telecentres in
villages across the country. Our first project was in Karnataka, where
we operate the 800 telecentres that you’ve probably heard of as the
government’s Nemmadi project.

These telecentres are basically a shop on the main street of the main
village in each cluster of villages (aka a “hobli”) containing two
computers, a printer, scanner, webcam, UPS, satellite internet
connection, and a human operator who talks to customers. The services
offered include getting a copy of one’s land ownership certificate and
recharging a pre-paid mobile phone.

Does this sound exciting? Perhaps as much as the rundown neighbourhood
DTP shop where the fellow who once must have been a glorious computer
professional now appears a lowly typist, augmenting his income with a
Real Estate desk that finds you local Paying Guest accommodation? What
would you want to be doing in there?

Consider this: the average village that we operate in receives four
hours of power supply a day. The supply is often at 150V, far too low
to power a computer or charge a UPS battery. The place is also a good
four hours from the nearest urban centre, and given the state of roads
in much of the country, that’s four agonising hours for anyone who
must go attend a support call because the operator complained that his
web browser is saying “Page Not Loading” and he’s got a long queue of
agitated customers who are threatening a riot because that printer is
not producing the document that will determine their livelihood.

You, the hotshot Web 2.0 and assorted buzzword compliant web
developer, must produce an app that will keep that crowd happy. You’re
not going to get away by telling them that your JSON-spewing Ajax
application requires a low latency internet connection. You’re going
to have think this through very carefully.

If your family is from a village that you visit on vacation once a
year, you’ve probably fantasised having to explain to your
grandfather’s neighbour what Python is and why it’s not a snake, and
what the heck a programming language is if it’s not a snake.

What we’re offering you is a telecentre that is already in your
village (if that village is in Karnataka), where folks will directly
or indirectly use the code you write. That’s a guarantee.

The trick, and the challenge, is to do this in a manner that’s
applicable across the country. A field trip to one location that’s
reporting weird behaviour is probably an adventure. You’ll pack for a
day trip, leave early in the morning to avoid the rush, drive till the
road turns bad, grit and bear the next two hours to the location,
break for lunch, have a nice chat with the operator, take some
pictures of the neighbourhood, and maybe even figure out that his
problem is that his browser somehow got set to cache too aggressively.
Someone must have told him it was good strategy given the low quality
connection. Maybe you’ll make a new note for the helpdesk people to
check before they ask you go to have a look next time. And then it’ll
be evening and time for a ride back, shower, dinner and a good night’s
sleep. A day well spent.

But do this five times, and it no longer seems an adventure. You want
to write code, not be trapped in this debugging nightmare.

We’re not supporting five or fifty or 500 centres. We’re currently
close to a thousand operational centres, scaling up to six in the next
six months and aiming for ten thousand by the end of the year.
Operations on this scale require a wholly different thought process,
for both software development and support.

I’d like to tell you that our little team of seven does all this, that
we’re superhuman ninjas who write code so great, it never fails, who
oversee operations for thousands of centres, who uphold peace and
harmony everywhere, and still go home at 6 PM.

But you know better. An operation at this scale literally requires
thousands of people. There are all the telecentre operators, at least
one in each location, their supervisors, people who specialise in
various forms of support, people who talk to other people to introduce
new services, people who count even when they’re sleeping, and people
who think deeply about the larger purpose of all this.

We’re the little team in the middle of the operation that provides and
supports the technology everyone depends on, and that is constantly in
pursuit of greater automation to enable larger scale.

We bear a great deal of responsibility for such a small team and it
shows in the way we’re structured. We have no patience for
bureaucratic approvals and hierarchies. Everyone is their own manager
and must see their project through its entire life cycle. In return,
everyone gets to decide how they want to work, when they want to work,
and what they want to work with.

Since the company has an overall HR policy, we fit our team structure
within it. We recognise the notion of people working On Site (ie,
home) and offer compensatory leave if someone works through a holiday.

We meet once a day to catch up on what we’ve been up to and determine
if someone needs help or could do with the experience of another.
Actually, calling that a “meeting” makes that sound more formal than
it really is, because we also sit close to each other and talk
throughout the day (with the more discreet types using IM with the
chap three feet away).

We don’t follow any formal methodology as we’re making it up as we go
along. Two standard features so far are the daily stand up meeting and
two week iterations for the folks whose primary contribution is in
code. Our next iteration starts on Feb 18.

Several of us hang out together after work. We share hobbies and
intellectual pursuits, we blog, we organise events, we superpoke each
other on Facebook, and we go to conferences (even the un- variety) to
talk about our work. We do not de-bar the personal from the workplace.
We believe in taking personal pride in what we do.

We are, however, not superhuman or all knowing. We lack certain
crucial skills, and where we do have them, there are just too many
things to be done. It would be nice to actually go home at 6 PM every
day. It would help to be working with people who can round off our
skills. In particular:

* Python (but of course!)
* Ubuntu/Debian Linux admin (both servers and user desktops)
* Windows desktop admin (the uncomfortable reality of working in the
space we do)
* Windows/Linux network management (thousands of machines, remember?)
* Project management (people who know what a gantt chart is and why
it’s useful, or not)
* Process observation, documentation and automation (let’s see you
repeat that complicated setup again)
* Technical documentation (for interface with external entities)

Any combination of these skills is useful, interesting combinations
better. An advanced ability with at least one is needed.

If interested, send your resume to my work id (kiran dot j at comat
dot com) with a note on why you’re interested. Or if you’re just
curious and have a question or a comment, I’m ‘jace’ on
irc.freenode.net, usually in ##linux-india, and ‘jackerhack’ on most
IM networks. You could also call me during a reasonable hour. My phone
number is easy to find.

Note: Feel free to poke me (techno_freak @ irc.freenode.net) if you want to know more before you talk to jace, I can tell you how awesome it is to work in such a dynamic, responsible, proud team where every one is a manager of his own. We share a lot between us, even though we might work on entirely different projects or environments (yah, we have some windoze guys too). If you ask me what do you need to, I will reply “never say can’t do attitude” and just that.

the new KDE era begins

All Ks are excited and rather celebrating. Wonder why? Because their new baby is out and it’s rocking the world. Still have no clue of what am excited about too!? It’s all about the new version of KDE , the KDE 4.0 release which happened yesterday. This has been the work of lots and lots of contributors to make a yet-another-endeavor to bless this world with a rocking Desktop Environment. As KDE has always been doing, this time too it has come out with really awesome desktop. The additional good news is that the KDE 4.0 release announcement is also available in various languages like Hindi, Bengali (India), Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi and Tamil (coming out soon!).

It’s time for the party, one is indeed happening at Mumbai and one is being planned in Chennai as well. Thanks and wishes to all the Ks who have worked to bring out this wonderful version of KDE. Thanks also to those wonderful buddies of mine who translated the release announcement in various languages and to the one who pitched in this whole idea of having localized version of the release announcement

KDE 4.0, its roKKKKKing!

Bangalorians from ILUGChennai

Following lawgon’s mail to the Chennai LUG mailing list a few days back, stating that there is no single point of contact for FOSS patrol in Bangalore, especially those belonging to ILUGC, have started a new Google Group named “Bangalorians from ILUGChennai“. Though this group is mainly for Chennai LUGies who have now settled down in Bangalore, it is also open to Bangalorians and Non-Bangalorians who would like to participate along with us.

Its hard to get one

When we were attending foss.in, we got a good news from our higher ranks at the place where we work (we = jace, kushal, me) that we can go forward and recruit some more programmers. We are also in need of a Release Manager (hopefully we are soon getting some one for this) and a Sys Admin exclusively for our team (we have one, but he is heavily loaded from all corners).

As we are basically a Python shop and work extensively on FOSS, we need some one with an exposure to both of them. It would be great if we get one with experience in Zope/Plone, but our minimal requirement is “should be able to work with python from day 0″.  We are still hunting for a Python Programmer, whom we need as soon as possible. We aren’t finding one easily, rather am getting invites from other Python shops to join them

If you are a programmer, who knows Python, have some exposure with Web Development, and looking for an interesting and challenging job in a nerdy environment surrounded by well known faces from the Indian FOSS community, then please poke (PM) us (jace, kushal and teKnofreak). We are always available at #linux-india @ irc.freenode.net, else leave us a memo

Notes from Roger’s OpenJDK talk

I happened to be the Hall Marshal during Roger’s talk on OpenJDK (or Open Sourcing Java) during foss.in and happened to make some occasional notes on what he said (though the last 20 mins, I had something else to do).

• Nov 2006 - gpl v2 hotspot VM jav compiler - openjdk.dev.java.net
• Jan 2007 - kitchen sink language project
• 8 May 2007 - the rest of java code, interim governance board (almost)
• 25169 source files, 4% binary only, 8% not under gpl
• font rasterizer, graphics rasterizer, crypto providers, color mgt are gpl’d
• sound engine, snmp code, imaging api are not
• sun in control, patches via email now —> community in control, non-sun committers
• write a constitution, get it ratified by community, hold elections for open seats
• initial projects - free font, free graphics, free sound rasterizers
• Gentoo openJDK ebuild done in 3 hours
• Fedora source rpm build in 13 hours
• IcedTea icedtea.classpath.org, June 2007
• framebuffer toolkit project, May 2007
• Mercurial support for external committers, Oct 2007
• Dec 2007, drafting constitution
• April/May 2007, ratify constitution
• openjdk.java.net, planetjdk.org, mail.openjdk.java.net, #openjdk
• 2 trillion handsets with java on mobile

RBC TCConfig is now in Google Code

When I joined Comat this August, the project which I had to start contributing was RBC TCConfig. Though this was started as a internal project for telecenters that comat was operating all over rural Karnataka, soon it had the potential to become a separate product with indivual value. Thus a couple of days ago, jace moved a part of the project code to Google Code. Now it stands as an Open Source project.

RBC TCConfig stands for Rural Business Center - Telecenter Computer Configurator. This was initiated to configure and manage the rural telecenters which are at a minimum of 4 kilometers from an urban area, where it could get technical support, which happens to be places having frequent power outrages and system meltdowns, connected by intermittent or low bandwidth networks. Thus managing these remote rural centers becomes a vital task for some one operating these RBCs. RBCs are places where technology is used to serve the rural people, especially in providing basic government services like issue of birth/death certificates, IRCTC booking services, Bus ticket booking services, land record document service and many more. If not the RBCs, the rural people have to spend a lot of time in the government offices in their local taluk head quarters which needs a lot of patience and most time proves to be a bit unnecessarily expensive too.

Thus, we were working on a management framework to configure and administrate these remote computers which are very far from our physical reach. We basically developed this framework to work on a GNU/Linux machine as the base operating system, if required there is a provision to run M$’s proprietary operating system on top of a virtual machine. The main features of this management system are remote monitoring, remote updates and installs, and remote administration of the computers. We have been facing many challenges during this project, which is still in its early ages with a lot of things to be improved from their current state.

The Google Code project for the same is an endeavor to share this experiences and make it open so others can pick it up, tweak it to their needs and implement as a solution to similar requirements of remote management of computers. We hope this will open up more suggestions, interesting ideas to improve our current framework and some free contribution as well.

Though I am a member of this project, the right person to contact for knowing more specific and technical information about this project is Kiran Jace. But you are most welcome to put your comments to this post if you have anything to say about our project. He had indeed plans to speak about this during the foss.in 2007 schedules to happen this December, but unfortunately his talk got rejected stating it is not yet an FOSS project. Hope we will soon be able to get a recognition of ours as a FOSS project,of value, considering the need to take technology to the rural parts of India.

chroot is not a security gate!

Happen to see a /. article about popular misconception of chroot being a security tool. I have heard a lot about chroot and how people generally use it as jail environments for security, but this article really contradicts that idea. The one who says is Alan Cox, so we need to get our eyes and ears a bit wide open

Improved desktop

Off late, I was not satisfied with my desktop i.e. how it looked. One of the main things I like it to have is display fonts small but still crisp so i can comfortably read them. I like small icons, small window border, etc. This makes me have more stuffs on my small 14″ display. I was even thinking of trying other desktop managers/window managers.

Yesterday when me and Onkar shinde were discussing about something else, he told me about the availability of Intel drivers as the default one. He asked me to install the driver and try. So did I, installed ‘xserver-xorg-video-intel’ and restarted X. The main aim was to get a better resolution option and ability to reduce my resolution at times when projectors ask for a 800×600. When I logged in back, I was surprised to see everything a bit smaller than what they were. Suddenly my desktop seem to be more spacious and I just love it.

Even the font rendering has changed, now I see crisper fonts (am not sure, I feel so). But surely I have more space on my desktop to keep stuffs. I was also trying out gdesklets (on my KDesktop) and with the new drivers, everything seems to be perfuct for me.

If you have an Intel video card and using the ‘xserver-xorg-i810′ driver, then give up a try with intel driver. But remember to edit xorg.conf in the “Device” section as shown below,

Section “Device”
Identifier “Intel Corporation Mobile Integrated Graphics Controller”
Driver “intel”
BusID “PCI:0:2:0″
EndSection

The Comparison

The hot news I heard from Digg today was about the new “Compare” site from M$ as a replacement of its famous “Linus Hate Site”. I was curious enough to look at the fresh load of charges on Linux under a new cover.

In contrast to the older version, now there is not direct tabular comparison at all. Each category is filled with case studies from firms who have turned up to using M$. But looking at the stories in many of the case studies I tried reading,

I feel that the stories are too ancient. One of them talked about moving to Microsoft from using Red Hat 9 servers and another one talked about trying to use Staroffice. It reads ” using a Linux/open-source solution would have necessitated an “unmanageable migration expense,” especially because individual Microsoft Office documents and solutions would not have been convertible“. Eh!? Which world are they living in?

There is no mention of Debian servers as far as I read. There is no mention of other Open Source softwares like Blender, not even OpenOffice anywhere. The reason for the new comparison site is stated in a corresponding article as “It turns out people wanted 3rd party validation in addition to people’s experiences making OS purchasing decisions so in addition to customer case studies, research reports that compare platforms the site will also offer guidance around best practices, web casts, etc.“

Should I stop and laugh, or keep my ass moving along not minding these poor jokes ?

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).