Usability by Celeste

I made it yesterday though it was late into the midnight, attending Kubuntu Tutorials Day at #kubuntu-devel. The session I was interested to catch up was the second one by Celeste Lyn Paul aka seele on Usability. I have heard about her, her work, KDE-HIG and openusability.org a few months ago after I attended the HCI workshop at IIT Bombay. The following are the brief notes from my scratch pad on what seele said during her session. Official logs from the Kubuntu Tutorials Day should be available soon (or am not yet aware of the link yet..) and will update when I get it.

( Questions from seele are in italics, with related links I managed to get by Googling and my own comments. A little bit of editing to make it look a bit “blog formal” and readable. Comments are welcome, especially if you find something wrong )

In 20 words or less, what do you guys think usability is? (and no cheating on wikipedia)

If we take this from an ISO standard, usability means that a product must be,
1.learnable
2. efficient
3. memorable
4. prevent errors, and
5. be satisfactory to users

Learnable
This is the one no one usually picks when i ask the “what is usability” question. A product (in our case software) doesn’t have to be so easy that you don’t have to learn it. For a simple task, then you expect it to be simple but for a complex task, it is OK to expect learning.

Efficiency
This probably shouldn’t be #2 even though it is listed in the ISO spec this way, because it is related to learnability and memorability. But it is exactly what the word means, an appropriate use of time and resources in relation to the complexity of the system. Even if you made a simple printing function an easy to use 10 step wizard, it isn’t very efficient if you need to do that every time you print. Clicking one button will get the same amount of work done than stepping the user through all the options and clicking 10.

Memorability
This is what I think should be #2 because it is closely related to learnability.

Have you guys ever heard of the term Information Scent? It is an Information Science Theory

Information scent is a search behavior theory. Information scientists believe we search using the “gathering” skills of our “hunter-gatherer” basic instincts. What it turns in to from a UI perspective is how easy it is to find information (functionality or options) from it’s surface presentation. So, what options you expect to be under menu X before you open menu X? By having good information scent (good labels, structure, etc.), you can use the UI more efficiently because you can stack layers of information.

Basically you are leaving hints to the user to find the information on their own, they don’t need to Remember where options are, but only follow a logical path. This saves the user’s cognitive resources to go on and solve more complex problems instead of using them on the UI. Remember that a UI is a tool to solve a problem, the UI shouldn’t be the problem.

Error Prevention
Have any of you guys heard of Jef Raskin?

He was a famous designer who worked at apple (i think he was employee #12 or something close). He was a true user advocate in the sense that he believed no matter what the circumstance, the computer should do no harm. Also, many of you are probably familiar with the practice of confirming actions, particularly destructive ones, yes? Error prevention is more than just confirming a destructive action. It is preventing the user from having to make that decision to start with.

We dont see this too much in the desktop environment because we model a lot of our work-flows off of existing software, but i see this a lot in other expert systems. “Are you really sure you want to do that? It will cripple the system and you will lose all of your data” (Well then, the user should have never been able to choose that option from the top level of a UI). Even so, there are a lot of confirmations we do in the desktop environment which could be prevented if we shaped the work-flow differently; the user should never have to select Cancel.

Satisfaction (keeping it consistent
Satisfaction is the quality many people tend to identify with usability. But it is also the last dimension in the spec (and i believe the least important of all we’ve talk about). Satisfaction is important. If a user finds a system pretty or cool, they will want to use it more than the other system that is not. Users will sacrifice ALL of the other parts of usability (learnability, efficiency, memorability, error prevention) for satisfaction. our goal is to help them not make sacrifices.

I’ve seen users in usability tests take 3, 4, 10 times longer to complete a task in a terrible UI that looked pretty, and complete the same task in a different not-as-pretty UI much much faster and they still like the pretty UI.This is an advantage and disadvantage: it gives us room to experiment because users will be forgiving if we give them options they want or other cool toys; but at the same time, we should use eye candy as a crutch to solve problems. We should solve problems and make our solutions beautiful.

Have you guys ever heard of a one-time learning event?
Often when you are reviewing a new UI or work-flow, one of the questions you may ask yourself is “will the user figure this out”; and the first time around, sometime the user doesn’t. they can’t find the options, they don’t know the label, they can’t figure it out. But,if they have someone show them how to do it, they find the solution on a webpage, or painfully figure it out, it makes sense to them and they remember it for next time. We call this type of experience a one time learning event

They won’t figure it out the first time, but if they can do it once, they will remember how to do it. This is something that is often forgotten in UI design. You can break users out in to different dimensions - one of them being problem solving skills and related motivation, some users are not afraid to try something and fail, other users will not try new things in fear of failing and the users who do not explore are at risk of never exploring options hidden behind a single-learning event.

That’s why doing user research on your product and understanding who your users are, their motivations, environment, and their skill (it’s not JUST about their skills) is important. This leads me in to a discussion about universal usability.

Has anyone heard this term “Universal Usability” before?

Universal Usability is the belief that any user, no matter their skill, background, motivation, experience, etc. should be able to pick up and use a product. In cases where products must serve the general public (such as e-voting machines), this could be a valid argument, but there are very few products that focus on EVERYONE. Even so, the concept of universal usability would be extremely difficult to achieve, especially in expert systems or systems which knowledge workers use

The ipod, why does everyone use that as an example of universal usability? The ipod is an excellent example of very sexy tech that people forgive its shortcomings for. It doesn’t do everything everyone wants, and not everyone can use it or figure it out, but because it is so damn beautiful, most people don’t care.

Universal usability forces designers to lower the bar of the average user to accommodate more people. This is why it hurts expert systems. If there is a pocket of experience or information that a certain group of users may not have or be able to attain, it must be removed.

[ To a question about apple and the point mentioned above...]
Yes, but apple traditionally does not follow a user-centered design approach. they believe that designers know better. It’s only been recently that they’ve done usability testing.. everything before was market research (which is very different).

[ We seemed to digress a bit, so I tried bringing it back on track with question :P]
There are three domains of usability i work in: User Research, Design, and User Testing. Together, these are part of the user-centered design process (UCD). It is a design philosophy which keeps users in mind while creating a system for them.

User Research is often linked to the Requirements stage of software development. So when you developers are thinking of new features to integrate in to a software, or a new software to develop from scratch. Here are some things you should be thinking of in addition to your functionality spec and other things,

Who are your users?
Try to come up with some example users who you are building the software for. Even if you are a user, try to keep yourself out of the list, it makes it too easy to do what you want instead of what they need.

What will you users be doing too many times?
Not all of the functionality is documented or fully planned. A single function might be discussed and mapped, but the other functions of a system aren’t thought of until afterwards. What happens is you don’t have a complete picture of how your users are using the system, and if the functions are integrated properly mapping out screen flows before you begin coding will help document your functionality (so you aren’t trying to squeeze or force options in later) and give you a reference for when you code.

What problem are you trying to solve?
This is the big one, your Vision Statement. Having an idea of your goals before you start will help development. It is related to the “What are my users doing?” question. If you don’t know what problem you are trying to solve with your software, you can’t know what to provide users or what they will expect? Plus, in larger projects, it is a good idea that all the developers are on the same page. It prevents a lot of road map issues later on

Being able to answer those three questions will give you a head start. On KDE Techbase there are user research templates to help guide you.

I guess we will get in to Open Source Usability 101 now,

First step: Contact the project you want to work with and express interest in working with them.
You dont want to surprise developers by dropping a usability report in their inbox. It will just make them angry, even if the work was good.

Second step: Start small. Open source is a community based on commitment and trust (after the getting work done thing).
Start with a small activity such as interviewing users, conducting a survey, or doing a small UI review. This will help developers get used to your methods, get used to you, and know what to expect from your work.

Third step: Maintain your relationship with the project.
Design is an iterative process, just as open source is iterative development. Developers are wary of seagull designers: designers who fly in, poop on their software, then fly away. Developers are in for the long hull, they are committed to their project and want to see it succeed. They don’t want to work with a designer who will ask them to change a bunch of things, then disappear and not be able to comment on the results.

Obviously I don’t want to see any unhealthy marriages, but keep in mind that you will make a bigger difference in one project than doing a bunch of little activities for a bunch of projects. Design is a VERY iterative process; it is important for both you the designer and the developer you work with to understand this.

[ To my question whether we have something similar like KDE-HIG in Ubuntu/Kubuntu to which we can contribute.. ]
For Ubuntu designers, you will want to look at the GNOME HIG. It might be a little out of date, but one way to get started with contributing would be updating it!

For Kubuntu designers, you will want to look at the KDE4 HIG and the KDE3 User Interface Guidelines.

These are under active development, and so if you have any questions it would be best to ask me or Ellen Reitmayr who sometimes lurks in #openusability.

Other Resources:
Look at other interfaces that do similar things, not just in your own environment but in windows, KDE/GNOME, Mac OSX. You’ll find similar and very different solutions. You will want to look closely at the context of the solutions and make sure it is a good fit before you use it as a mode. Copying a solution will not solve a problem, the goal of reviewing other software is to get inspiration when you have no other better ideas.

[ The End - Applauds!! ]

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!

its foss.in time!

One more week to go, will begin one of India’s famous FOSS conferences foss.in 2007. I have been attending it for the past 2 years, first time as a mere delegate and last time as a part of sponsor’s team from NRCFOSS. This time, am taking up a new avatar, experiencing it more closer by being a volunteer myself. This gives me a chance to be a part of such a big conference, though volunteering is not new to me. This experience might prove useful in future endeavors when I take up more responsible roles.

What brings the people, especially a major part of the community, is an opportunity to meet one another, to match names with nicks (especially true for the #linux-india guys) and meet some international contributors of FOSS projects. Last time I had the opportunity of interacting with Aaron Seigo, and eventually I became Pradeepto’s K-convert (a new term for people converted to KDE, especially from GNOME) It was also an occasion for me to meet people I knew through IRC like t3rminator, tazz, barkha, devmodem|anurag, ubunturos, derek_, n3003n and many more.

This foss.in is special because for another main reason, Ubuntu India LoCo team is participating under the Ubuntu-In banner. Though the team had been in existence for quite sometime, this is the first major event its going to show itself up (after Carte Blanche of course, where we had a stall). We have joined with the Debian-In team and participating in the Project Days. Thus we will be enlightening the junta about “how to contribute to the Ubuntu project?” and “how to become one among the proud (contributing) ubunteros?”. We also managed to put ourselves with the Debian-In team in the FOSS Expo as well. One thing to remind is that this endeavor is purely by the Ubuntu-In LoCo team and has no commercial interests. We need to say this because often people relate us to the commercial side of Ubuntu Project, the Canonical Ltd.

We are getting some stickers and bookmarkers printed. We are also expecting some Ubuntu CDs to arrive (some customs and courier issues are holding it back). We might get some t-shirts printed as well, as a token of appreciation for those speakers who spoke for us (mean the Debian/Ubuntu Project Day). We are also getting some handouts printed, about the LoCo team. Similar things are happening in KDE-In team as well, so do in Fedora and Gentoo teams. I hope to get some laptop stickers to fill the empty space in my laptop

I am also hosting some of my buddies, as I have some extra beds in my house and I am allowed to have another 3 people with me. Though there is enough space to accommodate more, some issues in the water line is prohibiting me to host more people. As Kushal is coming back by Dec 1st after more-than-a-month of rest following his arm operation, we have another place to accommodate some of our buddies. The only thing which makes me feel a bit uncomfortable is this is happening during the weekdays and I have to take 5 days off. May be I can compensate by working weekends following the event (as I have no plans to go $HOME before New Year).

All said, its time to clean my house and make it ready for a few visitors. Hope to have an amazing time this year at foss.in 2007 As a part of foss.in volunteers I wish my best that the event rolls out to be a success

at Bar Camp Bangalore 5

Here am, successfully connected to the wifi (*sigh* there is a proxy) and unsuccessful in connected to irc (oh, am dead today) from the campus of IIM Bangalore. The event has just begun and instructions are being informed to the delegates.

I came here with Raj Shekar (lunatech) and thus arrived just in time. Raj is giving a talk on “Why MySQL Rocks for the Web” by 11 a.m. in the hall next to me. Iwill have to figure out what I do after that. Anyway will be hanging around here till the evening and will try to update as and when it is possible for me.

11.25 hrs, L12, IIMB:

Raj faced a minor confusion regarding the schedule. Raj had added his talk on the board, but when we entered the hall bloggers collective was trying to start. Thus we had to resolve it such that Raj’s talk will first happen, followed by the bloggers collective. Its going to be 10 mins since he started and talking about different ways you may employ MySQL for the web. Am also running out of battery, as I could not find a working power slot. Will power up my laptop in the next room we go

12.00 hrs. :

Raj talk was successful and a lot of people came out with interesting queries. There were even few others who jumped on to the stage to add more points to the topic. Then we moved out, had chaai and were talking on random stuffs (about work, FLOSS, community, fossconf chennai and foss.in). Then we decided to attend some thing and made a move to socio tech collective. The discussion was about how and how now technology enhances our lives, especially in rural India.

13.30 hrs. :

Just had a nice lunch with a lot of jalebis. We finished our lunch within 15 mins and have come back to the central area. Lots of crowd is there, especially a hell of first timers. We couldn’t find many from the last bar camp. We found Shreyas and Tejas here, and got some nice stickers and Kart’s “indian contributor” poster.

15.00 hrs :

We thought of attending Photo collective, but none seem to be there for it. So we went in search of Collaboration collective and ended up with a few Spike Source guys who were trying to display their product. Then we say dumbhead and others arriving, also Vinayak Das started the Photo Collective. We stayed at IIMB till 17.00 hrs and then left home. When we were on our way out, we met Hobbes who was coming in. Hope to meet known faces, especially tuxmaniac tomorrow.

18.11.2007

Here am, the second day morning and tuxmaniac sitting next to me. Both of us are logged in, me completing this blog and he checking mails. Now we both plan to take our cameras out and go out hunting

11.30 hrs :

Me, Aanjhan and one more guy have assembled for the Ubuntu collective in D5, which is nothing but a couple of bed with pillows under a nice tree shade. 30 more minutes and we expect at least a few others to join. We plan to talk about foss.in Project Day, Ubuntu-In team, hear other’s experiences with Ubuntu and help people if they need any.

13.00 hrs :

Ubuntu Collective can be termed as an unexpected success. When I was manning the registration desk, helping jace with new registrations I just queried tuxmaniac whether we can have a collective too. He gave “foss collective”, “free software collective” and I gave “Ubuntu collective” as suggestions. I wrote “ubuntu collective” on a couple of collective stickers and we stuck them to our T-shirts. With a few enquiries coming about where the ubuntu collective is, we decided to have it for sure. But we did not expect it to be attended by many. There was one lady from Australia and many from different perspectives. Our general topic of discussion was how the felt about Ubuntu and what are things they feel should be improved. We have collected a bunch of things and many of them will be conveyed to Ubuntu devels as feedback from the users.

15.00 hrs :

We were sleepy and found a nice shady place with lot of pillows to support us for a half-nappy discussion at the end of which we felt we needed to do something for foss.in and this led us to proceed to Coffee Day to discuss this further. We decided to print stickers for Ubuntu Project Day, something similar to what we have in bcb5. We have enquired about printing stickers and we may go with it this week, getting the stickers printer before this month end.

16.00 hrs :

Me and tuxmaniac are sitting in L21 where Photo collective is happening, with us busily updating things utilizing the wifi and occasionally looking at things being discussed here to improve our photographic skills.  tuxmaniac is yet to get his tees, while am wearing my bcb5 tee

** will be updated time to time, so keep checking

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

FOSS, Food and Fun

I was eagerly looking forward for 24th of March to arrive and this time, it wasn’t me who was going somewhere and meeting people, but people were coming and I had a chance to meet people at my own place. We had a FOSS Meet hosted by NRCFOSS for which around 30 people from Indian FOSS arena were invited. The invitees list included many people whom I know through #linux-india and hence I was very eager to meet the known faces once again.

Unfortunately I got some loads of work to do the same time, so I couldn’t spend much time with my friends other than a 4 hours on 24th night. We had Gora, Gopal (t3rmin4t0r), Anurag (devmodem), Friji Karthikeyan (cray3), Kiran jace, jtd, Indranil (IDG), Sunil Abraham, Tarique Sani, Atul Chitnis, Mohan, Raman, Barathi, SRS, Raja Subramaniam and Abhas with us, along with Kenneth, Prof Srinivasan and Prof CN Krishnan.

Although I wasn’t there during the day long meeting and therefore have nothing to add on what happened at the meeting, I joined them for the night. When we all join where do we end with ? Food and chat Adding to that a lot of our cameras flicked. I have uploaded my pics in my flickr album and waiting for jace and t3 to upload theirs

FOSS.NITC Field Report

I am back from a weekend at Kozhikkode. It was a nice trip, nice experience and nice learning too. Let me drop my quick field report about FOSS Meet @ NIT Calicut, which we call as foss.nitc.

• The organizers, students belonging to various branches in NITC, did a very nice job. This is their 3rd year of conducting the FOSS meet and they did show signs of maturity.
• Though there were initial hiccups in speaker registration and their web site, they managed to have a nice band of speakers.
• We were accommodated in a nice guest house. Though I was lucky to get a room with A/C and TV, other rooms without those were no less than mine in comfort. But there were few not-so-lucky guys who stayed in the International hostel
• The food was good on all the 3 days, but eating North Indian food for 3 days made me run with problems.
• The days were long, starting from 9 a.m. and ending at 10 p.m. Think they can make this something like 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and having open sessions then.
• We all felt and suggested the need to have some open sessions and more BoFs.
• There were few troubles with the scheduling such that a few speakers were left with very meager listeners.
• My talk on Decorators in Python went very well, with a dozen people to listen. We got chairs and sat around. The session went for 1.5 hours.
• My second talk messed up as I did not really prepare and practice for it. Also, I was in a blank mood after listening to 3 hours of the previous talk And, whenever I looked the audience, they showed sign of disinterest so I felt like will end with a few topics than what I had planned for.
• Learnt more info on photography and after seeing Jace with his cam, am more serious about buying a pro cam
• The past one year had been a great time for me, attending 3 conferences (foss.in, Linux Asia and FOSS.NITC). And, I became a speaker in the last one.
• We have got an invitation from a college near Alleppy for a similar FOSS event sometime in mid August.
• Wipro had a talk about ‘TV in Mobile’, and they used a Windows system. We took a few snaps of it. But at the end, we were surprisingly called to present the mementos for the Wipro Guys :0
•  I have decided to really start preparing for talks in future, *I do not want to mess up again!*
• It was nice meeting some of my #linux-india buddies, though not many could make it.
• There were more talks and unconferences on Blogging. The first one by Kiruba was all fun, while Jace’s was more informative as well.
• NIT Calicut has really good facilities, at least for our eyes, comparing to the numerous colleges dotting around Chennai. If am not wrong, it has better facilities than what I have seen in MIT. May be am wrong!?
• Though I missed being at Carte Blanche this year, especially when we had Ubuntu-India stall there, but I feel content about being at FOSS.NITC and very much looking to be there next year too
• My train journey was tiresome, against my hope that second class sleeper will be at least comfortable. I got a slight fever and spent the whole of today sleeping.

I have posted the photos from FOSS.NITC and will try to add more, as well as a lot of my buddies have. Please check flickr.com under the tag foss.nitc if you are interested. There are really cool pictures, believe me

First day of talks at FOSS.NITC

Here I blog from the Software Lab of NIT Calicut, at the day end of a day of talks. I had my first talk on a conference delivered. I landed at this place around 8.30 a.m. yesterday. My train came by time and I was picked up from the station and brought down here by a couple of students.

There was Kushal and Praveen when I landed in the guest house, soon joined by Vivek Khurana, who had come by 1 a.m. last night, and finally Pradeepto joined us at 2 p.m. We had a gala time in the room till 5.30 and then moved on to Aryabatta Hall where the conference started.

As usual there was a formal opening ceremony and people speaking. We had Atul Chitnis talking before we left for the dinner. Dinner was really nice, simple yet tasty with icecream+gulab jamun to top everything. We then came back for an Unconference by Kuruba on Blogging.

I was really tired and woke up a bit late around 8 a.m. I prepared a few slides for my talk and along with Pradeepto moved to the conference area. Shakthi was already delivering his talk while Aanjhan was waiting to follow. Then I went to hear Shakthi speaking about Careerhttp://wordpress.com/signup/?new=technofreakattchennais in Linux. We had lunch then, before Vivek started his talk on CMS.

An important thing at this time of the day was, most people went for the workshop on Wiki and the other speakers merely had a dozen or so guys attending their talks. This includes me, but I turned the thing around and had an informal demo of Python Decorators with a dozen guys around me. I felt better that way and the listeners as well, from the feedback I got from them.

Then we just were hanging over where Shreyas and Tejas were giving their ‘Hacking Evolution” talk which was really a nice one (and a lot of people attended it). I also got a chance to attend the last few mintues of the BoF that Aanjhan and Pramod were organizing. We left for dinner and here am sitting in the lab, checking my mails and writing this blog.

I have another talk on tomorrow. Amarjit is a smart guy, that he was quick to learn and react from today’s experience. He has asked the speakers to tell it to the audience, the first thing to do in the morning, what we are actually going to talk during the day and who is the target audience. I hope I will again have a dozen or two dozen of enthusiastic students hearing to me tomorrow.

I also got the news from Sudharshan that the Ubuntu-In stall at Carte Blanche 2007 was really a hit. Although there wasn’t an expected amount of turnout this year, what I heard was a good number of people who had come there tried their hands at the Ubuntu boxes in our stalls.

Ooops! I have something left to prepare and its already 11 p.m. I have to rush back to the room and start preparing it. And, no slides for tomorrow for sure. Rather I will use my KJots notes

Calicut, here am Coming

My wish to go to somewhere in Kerala is going to come true in another 5 days. After foss.in at Bangalore and Linux Asia at Delhi, am going to FOSS.NITC at Calicut. This is another anual FOSS event happening in India, the host being National Institute of Technology at Kozhikkode.

But, the main difference on my side in attending this coference is am not a delegate or a sponsor this time, rather am a __speaker__. Although giving a talk there was at the back of my mind since the day I heard about this event from my buddies, I did not take it seriously because I had no clue of what to talk about.

But a few days back, while I was checking my second round of mails after coming home from office, I was surprised to get a couple of mails asking me to make a talk at the event. Though I had already booked my tickets and was planning about the trip, I never expected me to be a speaker. But, I do not want to miss this opprtunity. The days when I was not ready to stand before an audience and make a speach are gone.

I had a tough time selecting a topic. Everythign from Python, PHP, Networking stuff and many more went through my mind. I also sought the help of a couple of my #l-i buddies to help me select the topic. At last, I got settled with ‘Virtualization with OpenVZ, with ‘Remote X terminals using XDMCP’ as a fall back topic. But, trying to get acquainted with OpenVZ drove me nuts. it was added by a mail from the organizer asking me to choose a topic which am __most__ comfortable with. Thus I had to again do an introspection based on my own capabilities and interests. Therefore, I made a change in topic and propsed the following two,

• A Dozen Tricks with Unix Tools
• Python - Decorators, Generaotrs, Lambdas and Iterators, an Introduction

The first one came out at the end of a discussion I had with floyd_n_milan and the second one was actually suggested to me by G0SUB earlier.

With less than a week left to deliver the talk, I am now into full fledged preparation. I started with Decorators yesterday, the original PEP 318 at python.org was a bit confusing at the beginning. So, I was searching for a tutorial or introductory article with simple exaples. Came to the rescue was an article by Siddhartha in his blog, whom I had met during the last ChennaiPy meet. His article is really a good starter for decorators with a pretty good real time example. Digging through the del.icio.us bookmarks of some fellow geeks got me some more articles and tutorials on decorators.

Though I have not fully covered decorators yet, I have done a basic preparation on decorators, generators and lambdas till now. Hope I will complete it within available time.

Catch you all back with the Kozhikkode experience

Delhi Chalo!

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”

BOSS is out!

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.

Back to FOSS Advocacy

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

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.

foss.in 2006

Last thursday, I was on the train ‘Lal bagh Express’ leading towards the city of Bangaluru. It was my journey to Bangalore after an year, the last time I was there being to attend the test at MRO-Tek. I had moved to 3 different jobs then, am in my 3rd job now. I was carrying those memories with me, trying to retrieve my kannada vocabulary, which I enjoy inheriting from my father, whose mother tongue is kannada.

This time I was not for any interviews or tests, but was for few good days in life. I was going for foss.in. it was something which had been a buzz word for a few weeks now. Many were looking eagerly for it. The most important thing which drew people towards it was an opportunity to meet people. We have been acqauinted with one another through IRC channels for some time now and we wanted to match names to faces. This was one opportunity for that. Apart from that, there were some cool talks scheduled.

foss.in was formally openned up on 24th Novemember 2006. It was held at JN Tata Auditorium in Indian Institute of Science, Bangaluru. This is the first time am been to foss.in as well as a nation wide event, participated by international figures. I was there, in the early morning (8 am is supposed to be early morning in Bangaluru ). We had been planning for a few days on how to reconize one another, where to meet, etc. And thankfully when I was lurking around, Kushal came there. With his help I got my passes (and for my team too). Slowly one by one started joining in, Pradeepto, Bharkha, Anurag, Roshan aka Ubunturos, and Shrikarnt. I also met Devdas (f3ew), Taj, PowerPork, t3rmin4t0r, kartik, tazz and many others. I really had a good time matching names with faces

Ok, will have a quick look around about my 3 days…

Day 1:

The openning keynote address by Suparna Bhattacharya, about minimalistic development method followed among the Linux Kernel Developers.

Web Development in Common Lisp by Vamsee Kanakala. He is a Chennai LUG member too and one of the guys I was acqauinted with. It was really a nice talk, though he stumbled on some errors during the demonstration.

Solving the fundamental structural problem in free software by Andrew Cowie. It was one of the best talks I had heard. He really made audience enjoy the talk and for the first time, I blogged it live into my live journal pages.

The day ended with the above keynote address. We had got the delegate kit, a nice cotton bag and a ultra-kewl mug with foss.in embossed on it.

Later, our gang (me, pradeepto, devmodem, kushal, n3oo3n, baks) went to a keralite restaurant and ate appams with aviyal and kuruma. Kushal had got his new Lenovo laptop and spent his whole night tweaking it in Fedora

Day 2:

The day started with Aaron Seigo openning up with the keynote address, a talk on KDE4 and the exciting new things which are available with it.

I really missed the talk of Rasmus on Getting rich with PHP.

After lunch, we had a KDE-In BoF. We discussed about what we need to make more people embrace KDE, how to help people who want to start with KDE development, how to make kde-in more active and many more things. As most of us was acqainted with Aaron, we could talk more things freely.

It was immediately followed by FOSS in Education BoF. It was actually intended to be concentrating more on streamlining the activities of NRCFOSS, with inputs from the FOSS community. But, it rather stayed in very low levels of computers in schools. Hope, we discussed much serious things :s

The closing keynote was a panel of prominant FOSS faces in India, compered by Thaths. There weresome hot discussions and wide range of topics discussed.

I stayed at Dushyant’s (derek[]) place for the night, where we watched the Code movie in my laptop.

Day 3:

The openning keynote was a really informative talk on ‘Impact of Patents and Copyright Laws in India on FOSS’. There was an active participation from the audience as well as Sunil Abraham was very informative.

Kartik Mistry’s talk on ‘How to become an Indian Debian Developer’ was another nice one to attend. It had some interesting information about contributing to the Debian development and packaging for Debian.

Priti Patil, of CDAC Mumbai, talked on the Janabhaaratii Project, which deals on making a Distribution with 100% localization support in Marathi.

After lunch, Aaron Seigo talked about KDE4 development. It dealt with developing GUIs with KDE4, how and where to get help, etc.

Sirtaj Singh (Taj) talked about the Qt Graphics View.

The best talk I had heard in my life was the closing keynote on Chaos Computer Club by Tim Pritlove. There was 3 mind blowing videos, revealing the misunderstood lives of the Hacker community.

The curtains of foss.in 2006 fell down with a closing ceremony headed by Atul Chitnis. And, I made my way back home later that night by train.

I have uploaded some photos on my flickr as well as more pictures are available in flickr, which has foss.in photos from all those who have uploaded there.

Software Freedom Day 2006

Sorry, I had been a bit late in drafting this post due to loads of personal and official work. Tuxmaniac’s blog about SFD in Bangalore has finally yielded me to stop procastinating further and write this post. Here I go…

Software Freedom Day or SFD, as it is famously known, is a day for Free Software Enthusiasts to celebrate as an awareness creation day. The main aim is to carry the message and benefits of embracing FOSS to the general public, who otherwise are in the mist of proprietary software. This is not celebrated only in India or one part of the world, its a universal celebration to mark the success of Free Software worldwide.

What is Free Software ? Its the software which offers its users four freedoms which bestows the user the right to use the software as he/she wishes and share it with others. The 4 Freedoms are,

1. Freedom to run the program for any purpose the user wishes to,
2. Freedom to study and adapt the program, with the help of the source code of the program,
3. Freedom to redistribute copies to any one we wish,
4. Freedom to modify the code and improve the program, release the program to the community so as to benefit the entire community, along with the modified source code.

These Freedoms are consider very important for software to grow, develop, mature and reach the far ends of humanity. The community which was built around this 4 freedom philosophy is the Free Software commuinity. And, this community has grown stronger and larger that the Free software has really started reaching the common man. To add fuel to this fire, SFD is aimed at taking the benefits fo Free Software further to the comman man. To know more about Free Software visit FSF.org.

So, as a part of FOSS community what did Indian Linux User Group Chennai or ilugc do ? A lot things were proposed in the past couple of months, most of which melted in air. The main thing amongst them, which is still being displayed an yet to be replaced, is Freedom Walk. We actually planned to go for a walk, atleast a kilometer or two, enchanting the philosophies and benefits of Free Software. We did have enough men to join, with a few engineering colleges around the town supporting us. But, as there more political measures needed to make this happen, it was dropped down. But, another plan was proposed by one of our LUGie, who also runs a Lynus (Training) Academy, was a small public show in a avenue near his training center. So, we finally decided to settledown with this plan, a 2 hour show encompasing Philosophies and Benefits of Free Software at Asiad Colony, in Anna Nagar - West.

SFD 2006 by ILUGC started at the community park named “Asiad-Rohini Park”, a quite spacious greenary situated inside the boundary of Asiad Colony. To say the truth, this was the first 100% public show that I had participated as a part of ILUCG in the past two years. so, it was indeed a different show this time. And, as the audience was non-techy general public, we decided to have 99% tamil show. The show started with Thamizh Thaai Vaazhtu (Prayer for the Tamil Mother) and then Raman gave a brief introduction, followed by a special duo show by Thaygarajan (aka Thimingilam Thayagarajan and Thalaivar Thyagu) and ILUGC’s SuperMan Raja. It was an interactive play, where Thyagu played the part of a computer-negligent father who wishes to get his son a computer but doesn’t want to spend much and Raja as a Linux community representative. The show was awesome, but restricted as we were running out of time. This was followed by display of 3D desktops by Shrinivasan and Bala Vignesh of ILUGC, further followed by briefing about Open Office tools by an enthusiastic student from SRM. The show was compered by Priyadharshini and Srini from Jaya Engineering college. Raman also had a quick hands on session for kids with GCompris.

The another notable part of the celebration was, we had quiz competition where questions were asked based upon the topic which was last discussed and the prize was a 6 month *free* subscription to LFY magazine. There were around 11 people stealing away the prizes and this made people come out of their shells and participate in the show Thanks to LFY. I had to thank the people involved in making the arrangements, the projector and sound system people , and all those physical volunteers invovled in the show.

urgh, forgot! There was a surprise presence of two foreigners who saw the advertisement in the news paper and came to watch the show. Kudos to both of them

So, it was a different but indeed a great day to celebrate the Software Freedom. We are determined to continue our efforts to create awareness about FOSS in nook-and-corners of India I have posted the snaps in my flickr album.

A Day at Stella - Contentment !

Stella Maris College, one of the famous and top ‘Arts & Science’ Womens college in the city of chennai. There is a word among the public that guys aren’t permitted in here, but today we went as guest. Rather call us as mentors. We went to talk about GNU/Linux to the students of BioInfomatics department, as they are intended to use Linux for their work.

It was planned to have our usual session consisting of an Introduction to FOSS, an installation session, moving around in the desktop (KDE) and basic system tasks. Usually we would have faced an incompatible or otherwise old hardware. But this time, we should rather say it as a Bleeding-edge hardware. It was workstations for IBM, not 1 or 2 but 21 in total and all were intended to be used as local machines (mean for ordinary student practise purposes). The installation process went pretty smooth and fast, thanks to the 2GB RAM ( ) and the smart “G-parted” which shrunk the dominant NTFS partition to a meagre 20 GB junk ;). We installed Kubuntu, as they had only KDE in their syllabus (Ohh GNOME, sorry dude!).

The installation was followed by a basic introduction to the KDE desktop and applications that come with Kubuntu. Then we started a Debian installation and slipped away for the lunch. Had a simple yet satisfying lunch from saravana bhavan. Rushed back to the lab, as students were enthusiastically waiting for the next session. One of the girls was called and asked to try her own hand installing Linux, this time RHEL which the college had bought (remember 21 systems!!). While the installation was on, we used the time to enlighten them with basic bash commands. The installation was followed by a brisk introduction to Perl programming and shell scripting by Raman. We called it a day, having done something useful this weekend too.

The reason to include a ‘contentment’ in the title of this post is, the following few reasons…

• The students where enthusiastic and more importantly responsive. They asked us intelligent questions and responded to us well.
• Not only the students were interactive and participated in the session, but also the staff and admin people took active participation. They had some previous exposure and had indeed tried their hands on GNU/Linux prior.
• They were eager to know as much as they could from us and this made us also to interact confortably with the people.
• Usually, when we are about to call it a day we used to ask the participants that how many of them were confident to install Linux in their homes, we used to get only a few or no hands risen. This it was a big “YES!” and this makes us feel content that we indeed did something useful to the students

Long Live Tux!! Long Live the Free/Open Source Community !!