ILUGC Monthly Meeting June 2009

The monthly meeting of ilugc, which usually happens every second Saturday, for the month of June 2009 happened yesterday. There were two talks, Emacs’ org-mode by Ashok Gautham and CUPS configuration in the Configuration Series by Raman P.

As we did not have projector this time, both of them had to resort using the white board, which made them actually finish the talk sooner than expected. Although Raman managed to make the talk interesting by including real life situations he had faced, thanks to his experience, Ashok struggled a bit as his was more a practical demonstration. We should try our best to get the projector for the meet from next time, as well as the speakers should be prepared to do without one.

There was a lot of first timers to LUG meet this time, and one of them is involved in a project developing custom made embedded boards, which they plan to make available for a cost of 3ooo INR so that students can buy and play with them. He will hopefully be demonstrating the board during the next meet, so embedded fanboys mark your calendar in advance.

Here are some snaps from the meeting,

Ashok Gautham during his org-mode talk

Raman speaking about CUPS configuration

the surprise sunday meet

My weekends have either become boring with housekeeping chores or traveling to villages meeting my relatives. But this one was different, with 4 of my Ubuntu Indian Team buddies turning up at my house for almost half a day. Aanjhan (tuxmanaic), Onkar Shinde (slytherin) and Roshan (ubunturos) made it to my home by 1 PM, soon followed by Barkha (baks17) who managed to come close to my house and then lost the way. It was a farewell meet for 2 of them and welcome (to Bengaluru) meet for another one 😉 (I leave it as homework for you to find who is who :P)

Then as all of us were quite hungry, we made a little walk to Nandini at R T Nagar and managed to get a table for 5 within 5 minutes. The poor thing was all of us were vegetarians 😦 and hence we ended up ordering Andhra Full Meals for 3 of us while the other 2 resorted to Naans and Rotis. The food was very good and we were half asleep when we came out of the restaurant. Onkar then picked up some sweet corn on the way. We came back home and starting preparing for the hackathon/bug jam. Aanjhan and I managed to fix my router to work without fiddling with my modem and thereby all the laptops got some wireless internet.

Aanjhan and Onkar started working on some GNUSim8085 stuff while I was trying to hunt some bugs. Barkha was busy buying train tickets for her trip tomorrow to Chennai. There was some fun with Barkha booking wrong train and getting confused with her plans. It was followed by much funnier “Install Linux without messing my Vista” adventure, with Fedora not having a back button during the installation process and hence we succeeding in making Barkha resort back to Ubuntu. As she wanted to shrink a NTFS partition, we decided to give her the helping hands of GParted, but as the partition was too big to be shrunk to half its size it took tooo long that it didn’t even finish when she left my home in the night.

In the mean time, Barkha got some milk (and some biscuits which nobody ate) and everygot got some hot cup of Bru coffee 😉 Also, thanks to Barkha for the sweets which she got from Mumbai 🙂

All together it was fun with 5 Ubunteros meeting on a Sunday and after a long time I had some visitors at my home 🙂 I won’t be meeting Aanjhan and Barkha for <unknown-value> months as they are both flying out of the country. Looking forward to one such meet sometime someday 🙂

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 #183958) 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!