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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Pradeepto Bhattacharya" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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10:08 pm
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Open Technology Summit 2008, Taiwan - Part 4 - The Beginning
recap...
Day 6: The last day in Taiwan!!! :(. I woke up and had my breakfast, checked out from hotel, kept my things there though and went to NTU Hospital station which was 2 stations away from Zongshan MRT. The reason for going there was Taiwan Handicrafts Promotion Center. At the MRT, I asked for directions to the centre and was pretty much dropped at the centre ( lovely Taiwanese people :). The centre was big building with 4 - basment + 3 - floors of goodies waiting to be sold. Paintings, scrolls, gifts, koji pottery, chop sticks, books, clothes, just about everything was on sale. Bought a few things - a scroll painting, a tea set ( wifey asked for something for the first time ;) and some more such things. Oh and I bought chopsticks even, so that I can practise eating with it ;). Thanks to Wendy and Bellring, I always found a fork or spoon when I was in Taiwan :). After all that shopping, I was supposed to meet up with the gang for a "follow up" / "retrospection" meeting. We were supposed to meet up at Mr. Brown Coffee just near my hotel. Bumped into the gang at the MRT itself. Thanks to them for helping me carry my stuff from there. Dropped things at the hotel, Frank kept his newly bought Eee PC ( the latest 900 model with 20 GB SSD ) and headed back to the coffee house.
We spoke about our experiences from the conference over coffee and some snacks. Everybody had nice things to say about. But what is still etched in my mind is what Wesley said and later Marek seconded it - "for its not just a week of experience, its been like a month long venture ...". We could see the satisfaction and pleasure in the eyes of these two brave souls who fought numerous battles to get all of us there, work out the little details, make this conference happen. We went to discuss - "whats next?". How OHI website should be and what can be done about? Joy Tang and Steven Chang ( most jolly and happy person I have ever met ). It was almost evening when one by one people started leaving either to pack to leave or something else. But a final get-together and dinner still remained. So all of us planned to meet at a Sushi place at Taipei Main Station. I picked up my luggage from the hotel and we left for dinner. Marek, Simon, Xavier and Florian helped me a lot. We put my stuff in a locker at the station and went to the Sushi place. This was my first Sushi experience and I can't complain :). Loved the shrimps and salmon. Have to try Sushi again sometime soon. Its quite cheap even, 30 NT per plate you take. Soon rest of the gang joined us. It was awesome that even Brian and Bellring joined us, so I could meet them one last time before I left the Taiwanese shores. I bid farewell to all my new friends from across the world. Wendy and Marec came to drop me upto the bus stop for airport. That was quite nice of them. Finally wished them goodbye and good luck and left for the airport.
TPE Airport is quite nice. I had no problems with extra hand luggages ( all that handicrafts foo I bought ), the checkin executive allowed all of it without any extra charges. I had done a webcheck-in anyway. Btw, I flew Eva Airways ( huge business house in Taiwan, you must have seen those big containers with Evergreen written on them, same group ), which code shares with Air India and has a direct flight to and from BOM. The flight both ways are quite empty :). Tip - select the seats from row 40 onwards, you might get a whole row for yourself. I did. :). The flight timings are odd though - leaves BOM at 5:30 AM and reaches BOM at 4:00 AM or such. Reached home safely, had no issues with customs, didn't have anything worth getting caught anyway ;). The porters of course bugged me to eternity of course about helping me get through the green channel. They do that everytime and to everyone anyway.
Finale: It was a wonderful experience. One of the best meets I have been to. Wonderful and warm people were a huge plus. Thanks to all those involved and made it happen. Made a lot of new friends, learnt a lot from people, saw new places, saw a different culture. I will blog about Taiwanese people , Taiwanese food Taiwanese culture and the some of the gang members separately later.
The End. The Beginning!!! :)
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: akademy, asus, b.a.t.m.a.n, culture, eee pc, foss.in, freed.in, handicrafts, kde, mrt, one, open hardware initiative, open pcd, open street map, open technology summit, openmoko, opensource, students, sushi, taipei, taipei 101, taiwan, tamkang university, trains, univesity, xandros
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10:02 pm
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Open Technology Summit 2008, Taiwan - Part 3 - Tall Buildings, Robots, Doctors, Wisemen and Visions
recap ...
Day 4: Woke up and had breakfast. Pretty much everything went according to plans until the rains happened. Anyway, I left hotel on time but had to go back to the hotel because I wanted to check something in my room which meant that I missed the Amarok guys but anyway, we went with our own set of plans anway. I visited the (ex?) World Tallest Building - Taipei 101. It was wonderful being there on the 91st floor outdoor observatory. Taipei 101 has high speed elevators which takes you from 5th floor ( where you can buy tickets to go to the obvervatory for 400 NT ) to 89th floor in 37 seconds :O. When I reached there the 91st floor was closed because of rain etc, but by the time I was done with the 89th floor indoor observatory and the dampener ( a HUGE sphere suspended by large steel cables which provides balance to the building against winds and such ) in the 88th floor, they opened the 91st floor to the public. It was a wonderful experience, standing tall high up there and looking over all of Taipei. There is a nice room which shows a 15 minute movie about Taipei 101 - foundation, construction to inauguration on night of Dec 31st 2007. The indoor observatory has some shops selling everything from food to souvenirs to "certificates" which certified that you have visited Taipei 101 ;). Shops sold even batteries, camera rolls and SD cards - good idea really, you never know when one of those betray you. 1 pack of 4 AA cells ( with 2 more thrown in for free ) were for 129 NT, which should be around 170 Indian Rupees. I bought a few souvenirs from the shops there and left Taipei 101. I had a chicken sandwiches for lunch at Starbucks and finally went back to Zongshan. Met Frank and Lisa near my hotel who were just starting with their touristy stuff. Idea was to go the night market later in the night, but I think I was too tired for it. I slept for a while, walked around for a while in the evening, went to a Japanese food place for dinner and finally went back to hotel.
Day 5: We had to start an hour earlier on this day, it was the second of the university days. The gang met Marek and Wendy at Taipei Main Station from where we took a long distance train to Taoyuan. To bad it was not one of those High Speed Rail (HSR), since they won't stop at Taoyuan. We went to Yuan Ze University / 元智大學. The proceedings started almost immediately after we reached there. After a brief round of introduction, it was a open discussion session / a bof moderated by Kueifong Li ( Thinker )- on how to get involved in FOSS, what needs to be done to attract more people to FOSS projects. After that we went for lunch. After lunch it was the university students who showed us the robots they had built and other stuff as well. One of presenters was Jim Huang - a OpenMoko dev/employee, he also showed his robot. Pretty nifty. There was a repeat of the Intel Moblin talk, I chatted a while with the speaker. After that, Simon and Wesley conducted another B.A.T.M.A.N workshop. Meanwhile, Juergen and I went outside to have some warm tea. Over tea I spoke to Juergen and I learnt a lot from him, the OHI vision in general, about freifunk.net, openstreet maps. I was and am very interested in the whole open hardware idea and vision. However, there is no licensing regarding the open hardware atm and standard GPL won't apply as it is. Even CC licenses ( modified to suit the purpose ) might work. Looks like people are working on these issues. Oh and Dr. Po-Feng Lee, another doctor and M.D. at that and a big time foss enthusiast was making sure everything was streamed live for those who couldn't attend the conference. Finally we were on our way back to Zongshan. We pulled Wendy's legs on our way back and she stopped talking to "certain" people ;). Anyway, I had a long discussion with Hong Jen Yee ( lxde dude ) about using Qt for his future projects. It took us quite some time to decide where to have dinner. We walked from Taipei Main Station to Zongshan through the underground street and the MRT mall. Met Ian who was on his way back to home in US. We finally found a place that was open after 9:30 PM :O. Xavier and Florian joined us for dinner. Xavier told us stories about his hardware shopping stories and how well he can bargain ;). After a few more drinks we left for hotel. Xavier of course went to party some where :).
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: akademy, asus, b.a.t.m.a.n, culture, eee pc, foss.in, freed.in, handicrafts, kde, mrt, one, open hardware initiative, open pcd, open street map, open technology summit, openmoko, opensource, students, sushi, taipei, taipei 101, taiwan, tamkang university, trains, univesity, xandros
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09:56 pm
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Open Technology Summit 2008, Taiwan - Part 2 - ASUS Days
recap ...
Day 2: After breakfast the gang went up to meet Marek at Zongshan MRT and off we went Guandu for the first of the ASUS days. The ASUStek Computer HQ was five minutes walk from Guandu. Met Martin Michlmayr ( tbm ), erstwhile DPL over breakfast (btw). After reaching there I met up with some known faces from previous days. Next was meeting the Amarok devs Seb Ruiz and Ian Monroe. This was the first time I was meeting Seb Ruiz in person , though I have met/seen Ian before at Akademy. Ellis Wang the Eee PC product manager started the conference with Juergen and Marek. Juergen presented Bellring Sheng who works for ASUS and was responsible for a lot of support and ground work ( one of them being my visa invitation ) with a nice Tux soft toy :). Many talks followed after this - a talk on OHI by Juergen, how to hack on Eee PC by Brian Rolfe from Xandros. Xavier and his merry men gave a talk about their OpenPattern project, those chaps are *really* intelligent folks. The talks was quite nice. At lunch, where the chicken was quite good :) - Seb liked it a lot afair - we generally chatted over lots of things. Main discussion was between Seb+Ian with the Brian and things they should do to/modify newer versions Amarok into EeePC. After lunch, Seb, Ian and I had an impromptu discussion about this year's KDE SoC. Batman workshops were conducted simultaneously after that.
There were a few short talks after that. Some of them were by Asus devs, I liked the speech recognition talk. Newer versions of Eee PC will have that feature. One talk was presented by Hong Jen Yee (PCMan) ( a intern doctor by the day, a hacker by the night ) and it was about "LXDE - Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment". One of my favorite talks was by Walis Buya about Taroko and Truku. The Taroko people and some other aboriginal tribes of Taiwan have an interesting challenge ahead of them. Their people are quite less and the languages are spoken by quite a few people. There is no locale designated to them so translation / localisation is going no where in their language. Walis along with brave men like Andrew Lee and Arne Goetje who now works for Canonical and is resident of Taiwan since 8 years now are trying to change this and work out solutions for this challenge. Andrew and Arne have travelled quite a lot around Taiwan and met up with these people concerned and are doing a good job at this venture. This was followed by two talks on "free culture"/music/creative commons. MoShang and other artist ( whose name escapes my mind ) treated us with some nice live ( CC-Licenced ) music while we digged into more Taiwanese food in lawns of ASUS office. MoShang's played from his Asian Variations in which he experiments with Chinese instruments. He gave out CDs of this album. I completely forgot to get it signed :/, but I have listened to it couple of times since I have come back, quite nice. After so much fun, most of us we head back to hotel
Day 3: Second day of ASUS Days and the day where we ( I, Ian and Seb ) present our talks. But first it was Martin's talk about Debian. It was an impressive talk, I really liked how he packed in a lot of small and obvious details about contributing to FOSS and being a good FOSS citizen in his talk. Openmoko talk by Sean Moss-Pultz and Open PCD by Harald Welte followed. There was a talk on Open Street Map by Arne, who has done a lot of mapping in Taiwan. Open Street Map is not new for me since I have attended their workshop before at freed.in, Delhi and I must admit its more than just interesting. There was a nice talk on Intel Moblin and the One Village project by Joy Tang.
Then it was my talk on KDE-Edu. KDE-Edu application suite are a part of the ASUS Eee PC, hence the topic selection. I had earlier done a KDE-Edu talk at freed.in, I had updated my slides for OTS and made a few changes with respect to the new conference. The talk went fine, I think. I love giving a demo of Step, it just rocks. Of course I demoed Kalzium and Marble as well. I wish I could have demoed the 3d molecular view of Kalzium but I failed to get it working properly. It had a run time crash. Thanks to Seb for helping me to get it working but in vain. Anyways, I spoke about KDE-Edu in detail - its origins, its objectives, its importance to KDE, its future. You can find the slides here. The slides don't use the regular KDE theme on purpose :). I could use some feedback on the slides surely.
The Amarok talk followed after that,Seb and Ian gave a nice joint talk. They covered Amarok, its development, its future and the online music service. Everybody liked and laughed when they spoke about their "Inspiration" behind Amarok ;)
We went for a awesome cool traditional Chinese/Taiwanese dinner in a nice traditional food place in Danshui. We chatted over dinner. After some group photos, we were all off to a nearby place for drinks and more chitchat. The place was called "Waterfront" because it was facing this river. Quite late in the night, after 3 beer towers ( and some Green Apple Juice for me :P ) and lots of chitchat, we were ready to head back to our respective homes/hotels. One the way back, I spoke to Brian from Xandros about a few things related to KDE. Next day was a off day and everybody planned what touristy stuff to do next day. Seb, Ian and me planned a few things. Anyways reached hotel back and Xavier managed to convince a few to go to some club, some of us went to bed. ( to be continued ... )
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: akademy, asus, b.a.t.m.a.n, culture, eee pc, foss.in, freed.in, handicrafts, kde, mrt, one, open hardware initiative, open pcd, open street map, open technology summit, openmoko, opensource, students, sushi, taipei, taipei 101, taiwan, tamkang university, trains, univesity, xandros
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11:21 am
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Open Technology Summit 2008, Taiwan - Part 1 - One Man, His Vision and Few Brave Souls!
On Thursday I came back from Taiwan.I was invited to Open Technology Summit 2008, Taiwan to represent The KDE Project. So here's a report of the wonderful conference.
Background : Taiwan has a small but active foss activity. They actually have a very thriving Creative Commons ( CC Taiwan, love their logo btw. ) chapter in Taiwan. For some reasons, mostly cultural, foss/community activity doesn't work very well in Taiwan. The reasons are deep rooted into the culture and people of Taiwan. Some brave souls have of course broken the very same shackles and are doing a wonderful job.
The power of one! : One fine day about 3 months back or so, our 25 year old super hero from Germany, Marek Lindner lands up in Taiwan on a personal visit or such and after looking at the situation there in Taiwan decides to something about it. Do you remember the tv advertisement ( maybe it was only on Indian televsion channels )? In that info-mercial they show how "one" individual can be the cause of the change - the inspiration, the catalyst, the one who takes up the challenge in spite of every odd put in front of him. Organising a conference is *not* easy - we all know that. Maybe ask foss.in, freed.in, fossnitc or the akademy gang. So Marek who obviously likes challenges of higher order added a little bit more complication to the conference organising puzzle - organising a conference in different country in which he doesn't know the native language or culture at all. Fun no ? Now once he took up the challenge, a lot many good souls from across the globe rallied around him for this conference. ( these people deserve a separate post, so will talk about it later. ). To quote him, "I am willing to take the headache/trouble if it shows results."
The Conference: The conference was organised by "Open Hardware Initiative (OHI)" who played the main hosts and was spread over 5 days with 1 day break in between. 2 of those days were allocated to local universities and 2 days were termed as ASUS days. ASUStek Computer ( manufacturers of Eee PC ) played co-hosts for the conference. Other organisations also played co-organisers.
Day 0: I reached there on 24th April. It was afternoon when I landed and found Marek and Thomas at the airport who had come to pick me up. I wanted to exchange currency at the airport but the bank executive didnot accept INR. I had a few Euros but I hate parting with my Euros ;). So we decided to try other bank in Taipei later. Airport to hotel was almost an hour drive. After a quick shower, I got introduced to part of the gang in the hotel lobby. Juergen Neumann ( Freifunk founder, OHI Chairman ) from Berlin, Xavier Carcelle,Florian Fainelli and some more OpenPattern folks from France. Juergen was wearing a "Air Jaldi" t-shirt - the Jaldi part written in Hindi :). When somebody asked what it meant, he looked at me and replied - "he will know what it means" ;). From there we went in two groups, met up near the Chang Kai Shek memorial and then went to the "introduction" party. I met a lot of local folks there. Marec proudly wore his shiny new KDE t-shirt ;). Met Wendy for the first time, who was the local contact for the event. She also doubled up as my local food guide later throughout my stay :). More people joined us in a while, Frank Lachmann and Elisabeth Rank ( a journalist, both were Berliners ) joined us. Harald Welte also joined the party later. After some short speeches by Juergen and Xavier, we had many discussions ranging from -inifinity to infinity. Interesting discussion was about Chinese names and how they are derived. Juergen even got one for himself - Leh ( iirc ). Reached the hotel after all that fun and slept like a baby.
Day 1: Had breakfast at the hotel with the gang. It was the first university day at TamKang University / 淡江大學. We met Marek at the MRT ( the local trains in Taipei ) station and took a train to Danshui. On reaching the beautiful campus of TKU, we were greeted by Flora C.I. Chang, the President and Professor at TKU. Flora opened the discussions with her opening address which was followed by Juergen Nuemann short speech. After this a Intel representative presented some of the new things from Intel camp, primarily the Intel Atom Processor. After this, TKU university students presented their projects which were quite interesting. They were sort of shy at first to present them, but Juergen went and talked to them and encouraged them. Soon they were presenting their work. We moved to a smaller classroom after that for the workshops. Simon Wunderlich and Wesley Tsai then conducted a hands-on workshop on Wireless Meshing with B.A.T.M.A.N. Marek and Wendy lend them some help at times. It was a fun workshop. Simon/Juergen had bought a lot of small wireless routers for the workshop. Wendy and me took part in the workshop together. Later the university students presented another of their projects, this was about "A Wall of High Resolution Television base on Embedded System". Really nice work by these students, they really need to talk more about their projects and maybe even release the source code of their work. Between all that, we had some nice food during lunch. There were some nice snacks even in the evening. But food in Taiwan deserves a separate post :). I also got to speak with Andrew Lee who is a sysadmin and a Debian Maintainer. I learnt a bit about debian packaging from him, awesome dude btw.
Lisa, Frank, Juergen and me left TKU together in the evening. I bought pin converters on the way back to Danshui MRT. We were all quite hungry by the time we reached Taipei city, we looked for place to eat and ended up in a friend's bar/coffee shop where we kept our bags and then went for dinner. Came back to the coffeeshop and worked on my slides for sometime. Finally we took a taxi to the hotel. ( to be continued ... )
Current Location: New Panvel
Current Music: Message in a Bottle by Police
Tags: akademy, asus, b.a.t.m.a.n, culture, eee pc, foss.in, freed.in, handicrafts, kde, mrt, one, open hardware initiative, open pcd, open street map, open technology summit, openmoko, opensource, students, sushi, taipei, taipei 101, taiwan, tamkang university, trains, univesity, xandros
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08:40 am
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2 Hot! 2 Cool! 2 Birthdays!
Yesterday, I celebrated her birthday.:)
Today, I celebrate his. :)
Tags: birthdays, mousumi, pradeepto
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07:17 am
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Shubho Nobo Borsho
Shubho Nobo Borsho ( Happy New Year ) to one and all. Today is Pohela Baishakh (first day of Baishakh ) of Bengali Calendar marks the start of year 1415. Good wishes and cheers to everybody.
/me eagerly waits for Saat ( 7th ) Baishakh and Aath ( 8th ) Baishakh ;)
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: bengali calendar, happy new year, pohela boishakh
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11:22 pm
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The Hottest Cover Page Model Evah!!!
* The model is atm busy hacking Plasma somewhere in Italy. Please wait in a queue in case you want him to launch your next uber cool product.
Current Location: New Panvel
Current Mood:  cheerful
Tags: aaron seigo, cover page, interview, kde, kde4, linux for you, model
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08:46 pm
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Yet Another Yearly Pilgrimage!
Every year since 2006, I have been to FOSS MEET at NIT Calicut. Its a fun conference full of students from all across Calicut and the state of Kerala. Its one of my favourite conference, though it happens in March generally which means its starting to get warmer there in Calicut. This year, the conference happened last weekend ( 4,5, 6th April ) after a few hiccups - exams, clashing schedule and much more but it did happen finally. Lots of speakers and organisations backed due that reason. I wasn't sure if I would participate this time around. But just about 4-6 days prior to the event Hari Vishnu and his gang somehow convinced me to come there. I managed to trick Kartik Mistry into changing his plans of not attending the conference. My good friend Aanjhan was going to be there as well. So it was worth it.
On my request, the NITC folks were kind enough to book my flights instead of me booking them and then getting it reimbursed later. A huge thanks to them for the same.
I took the day flight to Calicut from BOM, reached exactly 45 minutes before my talk :). Kept my bag in the campus hostel. And went straight to my talk venue. My talk was going to start right after the Open Office BoF that Vikram Vincent was conducting. Meanwhile, I made sure the laptop and the projector worked fine - not that I was going to use any slides :) but I had a different idea. Soon, the delegates joined in as well. Some of them were known faces from last year, but lots of them were new. Plus the usual culprits like Kartik, Aanjhan, Hiren and others. Oh and I met this guy called Madhusudan, a student from Bangalore. He had contacted me last year regarding SoC and wasn't sure how to go about it. We had discussed it then, the dude worked on his skills the whole year and this year is participating in SoC for Hurd and one real time operating system. I got opportunity to read his proposal this year which he had sent for a review, quite well done I must say. It was great meeting him for the first time.
My idea was do a talk about various avenues to contribute to KDE since the most known/talked about topic is mostly developer centric one. So I talked about wonderful artists,terrific translators, documentation masters, marketing dudes, bug triage champs , hackers of course and more. I started with development considering the audience present. I stressed on Junior Jobs (JJs) which are lower entry points into KDE development. How can new people get introduced to KDE code base under mentorship of experienced hackers by taking up JJs? Went on talk about translators, thankfully had Kartik to help me out. Spoke about other avenues. The whole talk was pretty much interactive and I kept asking questions and taking questions as I went on. Lots of interesting questions were asked, some wanted to contribute but often didn't know where to start or how to start. So the talk fitted the audience well. Oh and I distributed some KDE t-shirts :).
After my talk there was a small gap for sometime during which I spoke to these enthusiastic chaps who had more questions, we exchanged email ids. We had a small impromptu BoF. It was Aanjhan's talk next who talked about "FOSS in Electronics". Best part was a he demoed Qucs among other things during his talk. I just love that application. :). After the talks, we went to the hostel and move to the guest house, the usual place where I have stayed during my last two visits. Kartik and Aanjhan had a car at their disposal so we went to the city to have dinner. We chose Malabar Palace since we had food there as well last time. The same place where the famous fresh lime soda incident happened. We had a lot of discussions over dinner. Appams and chicken step for dinner ... mmmm :) ( one of the most important motivation to be in Kerala ) . Kartik showed me a few debian packaging tricks at the guesthouse. By then I was very tired and pretty much half asleep.
Next morning we met Niyam Bhushan at the breakfast table. We spoke for a long time about various things including, why Niyam takes impromptu interviews of people and notes those down in his PDA Phone using his funky bluetooth keyboard.:). After that, Aanjhan, Kartik and yours truly did a collaborative talk on doing college projects using collaborative means. Basically we talked about wiki, irc, mailing lists, svn, bugzilla and how they can use those for their college projects and learn those simple rules which in turn educates them partly in becoming good FOSS citizens. Those simple things are often misunderstood or not even spared a thought. Often they are suddenly taken to kernel programming or some framework or some other such thing. Often the delegates get all excited about it, but they face the first block when they come across the daily tools that most of us use for our FOSS work or otherwise. Our talk went really smoothly, though I think we were a bit apprehensive since none of us had done a such a collaborative talk before. We demoed the tools as we went on explaining them how and why. Kartik did some nice Gujarati translation commits to the KDE trunk while demoing svn. We got many questions and that was encouraging.
After the talk, I bid farewell to the friends and organisers there and left for the airport almost immediately. I didn't really have to wait at the airport, I had already done a webcheckin. Flew back to Mumbai, reached right on time.
It was another year of job well done by FOSS@NITC team. It was great to see them all happy. We could see the sense of relief because of all the delays and the problems with the event. Well done chaps, see you next year. Aanjhan has reported it here and Kartik has done it here.
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: appams, calicut, foss, fossmeet, kde, nitc, talks
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08:33 am
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The Top Ranker Who ( maybe ) Failed Somewhere Else ... ( with due respects to Robin Sharma )
Few days back, I was channel ( TV kind and not irc one ) surfing until I stopped on news channel - Times Now. They were telecasting a program called "Youth Diaries" (iirc) at that point. The programme was profiling certain types of schools/schooling - they termed it as "alternative schooling". I somehow got glued to the concept and kept watching the program until they stopped it in between for a breaking news of that hour - "Tibetian protests in Delhi and storming of the consulate in Delhi".
But the thought of "alternative schools/schooling" and the all things related kept lingering my mind. I wondered how does it work, which education board do they follow, it seems too good to be true and much more. I discussed it with some good friends - Barkha and Sankarshan. While chatting up with good old Sankarshan, I did a bit of interweb searching and found about the schools that were profiled in the program I saw couple of days back. Bhavya was one of them and another one was Shikshantar. I found their way of teaching kids very interesting and thought provoking. These schools don't teach the children to run behind marks. Teaching them about life and sensibilities whilst they learn to spell words and do math was their goal. Interesting!.Sankarshan liked the idea, it seemed so and wanted me to blog about it. For some reason I didn't and that in a way turned out to be a blessing.
Somewhere back of my mind, I kept thinking about this concept and how it works. Where it originated? Was there a center in Mumbai which followed these principles? Say hello to "universe and its conspiracies". :).
This weekend I bumped into a group of people, none of whom I have had met before or known before, never ever. No two people worked in the same domain. There was a doctor, home-maker, makeup artist, innovation strategist, counselors, remedial teacher, just out of 12th grade, yoga teacher, a fresh lime soda evangalist ( who sometimes talks and codes KDE ) ;) and more. 13 people in all.
Out of nowhere one of them - the remedial teacher uttered the word "alternative education". We were *NOT* discussing this topic at all. My eyes brightened up at the sound of those two wonderful words - "alternative education". I asked her, how does she know about it and she said proudly - "my children go there.". Later when I got a chance, I bought this topic into open discussion and oh boy apparently the most successful person ( one of the most brilliant minds I have met, serious fun talking to this person ) among us ( probably one of the best in the profession she was in ) said - "Our children go there.". By 'our' she meant hers and her friends - the counselor and the remedial teacher were her friends apparently. I mentioned about the news programme and how those children were taught and I could see them grinning widely and feeling really happy about it. Then this person told me things that I was subconsciously thinking about since the day I saw that news - suddenly all my questions about "alternative education" were answered.
These schools were basically based on Rudolf Steiner's school of thought. Also known as Waldorf Schools" worldwide. There is much more to it better read up if you want to know more. And there is a lot more to know.
Tridha is the Mumbai avatar of a Rudolf Steiner school and Sloka is in Hyderabad. Their children used to go / still go to Tridha in Vile Parle ( Mumbai suburb ). I had a lot of questions and pretty much did an impromtu interview. Asked them if their children found it difficult when they were compared to other children from the mainstream education. Pat came the reply 'No, they don't feel the need to compare themselves with others.'. She said that her children actually waited for exams and were mostly toppers - now that they have moved to mainstream school. ( Most of these schools add a class every year, so a lot of them have only uptil 7th grade or 8th and are adding new ones ever year ). Apparently these schools still come under the purview of ISCE board. The student-teacher ration is about 1:25 or so, which is wonderful. There are no exams until 7th grade, no uniform as well.
As the discussion progressed, she said - how many parents think about their children as marksheets and not children? She said she has stopped asking parents how their children were because the stock answer would be - "achha hai, lekin sirf 75% marks laata hai" and she is waiting to hear - "woh bahut aacha hai, bahut creative hai, sundar clay modelling karta hai. Gaata bhi accha hai. 70% marks laatah, lekin drawing mein har jagah first aata hai, aaj kal advanced painting courses be karna chata hai" or something to that effect. Her standard reply to such people is - "you have given birth to a child and not a marksheet.Think."
All of us should just do that THINK! THINK about it especially if we are parents or going to be one. I certainly will when I become one few years down the line.
( Sankarshan, Atul - Thanks!, you know why :)
Current Location: New Panvel
Current Mood:  contemplative
Tags: alternate education, bhavya, children, education, marks, rudolph steiner, schooling, schools, sikshantar, sloka, tridha, waldorf
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01:01 pm
[Link] |
How to write applications for KDE Google Summer Of Code?
I posted this. And Till Adam replied with the following ( please read it *CAREFULLY* if you are planning to participate in GSoC and KDE GSoC in particular ) -
> There is a nice *idea* page on the KDE techbase page [2]. Feel
> free to browse through that and find something that you like or you
> might be able to pull off. *Strong recommendation* - Please be
> creative and write your own project proposal. Nothing impresses
> mentors more than your own enthusiasm to do something uber cool for
> the project. It is million times better if you write your own project
> proposal - may be even your own idea that is not there in the idea
> page which you think might be a cool feature / addition to KDE -
> instead of copying something from the idea page.
As someone who will get to read and rate the applications again, this year,
I'd like to strongly second that. Obviously copy-and-pasted applications get
an immediate massive markdown, at least from me. We have hundreds of
applications to read and review, I won't waste time on people who don't even
take the time to write up what they want to do themselves, even if the idea is
from the ideas page.
The following are the questions I ask myself while rating proposals, and I
know that many of the other mentors have similar frames of reference:
- is the idea directly relevant to KDE, if not -> suggest a better mentoring
organisation and throw it out. Many proposals are submitted in several places,
often KDE is not the right one
- is the proposed project non-trivial and requires more than painting by
numbers? GSoC is not supposed to pay people for a busywork summer job, but for
creative, challenging work
- does the application sound like he/she knows what the hell they are talking
about? It's ok to be unsure about stuff, and say so, but being blatantly wrong
and ignorant of basic facts doesn't help, nor does pretending to be super-
experienced and knowledgeable.
- is the project doable at all? "I shall find a cure for cancer. if I have
time, I will also cure HIV." -> gone
- does the applicant have the necessary technical skills to accomplish what
they propose in the timeframe? "First I will learn C++, then I will learn Qt,
then I will learn KDE programming, then I will write KCureCancer." -> gone.
Starting completely from scratch just isn't possible in the time frame.
- is there a clear plan and/or roadmap detailing what the project entails?
"First I'll need to do this, then investigate if this or this is better, then
ask this person for help with that over there, then evaluate this technology,
then implement this, and this and this." -> good. Rough time estimates are a
plus too, they shouldn't be off by two orders of magnitude, though. "Then I'll
need a day or two to rewrite kiosk framework" -> gone
- does the applicant have the necessary communication and other soft skills to
work succesfully with their mentors? This is a judgement call based on how the
proposal is written. We'll also often ask questions, during review, in the
comments, which the applicant can answer. If those answers are very terse or
they don't get what we are asking -> gone
- is the proposed project interesting and do I see it benefiting KDE and being
integrated? This is subjective, of course. It can trump everything else,
though, for me personally. I'v emarked up one-paragraph proposals solely
because they were truely interesting ideas.
- does the applicant seem passionate and genuinely interested in what they
want to work on. "I had a brief look at GNU Contact, and it seems nice enough,
although I personally use Outlook, mostly." -> gone
- are they willing to learn and be mentored? Again, judgement call, but it's
often pretty clear while reading an application that if I were to tell the
person "No, you are wrong there", they would come back with "You don't have a
clue, sod off, I'll do it my way anyhow." Not helpful, obviously.
- have they put considerable effort into the application overall? does it seem
well researched, thought out, revised, shown to friends, revised again,
worried over, etc., or does it look like it was thrown together in half an
hour to see if maybe it gets in. This includes stuff like formatting, language,
spelling, etc. Treat it like a job application. Seriously, in other words.
I realise that this seems harsh, and that many of the criteria are not
objective and reflect my personal biases (and obsession with spelling ;), but
given the avalanche of applications we have to process, one has to find ways of
getting rid of most of the crap ones quickly so that there is time to
appreciate the good ones in more depth. If you get a question from one of the
reviewers, that means you've survived the first round of screening and your
application might have a chance, so by all means answer the damn question, and
take sufficient time to do it. Failure to do that has killed many a decent
application unnessecarily.
If you have any further questions, I'd be happy to answer them. I will not
write your applications for you, though ;)
That said, I would love to see a strong showing from India this year, got to
beat last year's record of three, right? So get cracking, free Indians,
Till
I am sure that helped a lot. Now writing the application and pursuing it further will be clearer and easier. Thanks Till. And yes, would be great if we can beat last year's record of 3 :). Do take some time and read up on last year's applications, talk to last year candidates to find out what they did right and how they did it :). Good luck!
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: application, google summer of code, gsoc, kde
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09:11 am
[Link] |
cd $HOME
I returned from Kharagpur on Sunday. It was a short visit to my in-laws. Had good fun there. Lots of nice things to report ( awesome Bengali food - from jhaalmuri to iilish maach to sukto to phuchka to ) but all that in some other blog post maybe :). Still replying to some of the backlog emails. Sorry about the delay. In the process, I have missed - FOSSConf in Chennai and Gnunify in Pune.
In other news, my IBM TP T42 ( my primary laptop for all communications and dev work ) had HDD failure. It served me well in last couple of years. Anurag ( can I thank him enough? ) has been kind enough to help me get back some of that important data. Last known condition - some data from $home retrieved. Have moved pretty much everything to the other laptop in last 2 days since I arrived from Kharagpur. Have set up the development environment for KDE stuff. Already have a working branches/kdepim and trunk/kde on this box now. T42 is still with Anurag and so is the data ( utms ) card, should get them back this weekend if not earlier. :/
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: disk crash, food, hdd, in-laws
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08:59 am
[Link] |
More KDE news!!! :)
* Jonathan Riddell writes about the newly adopted Licencing Policy by KDE e.V.
* Piyush writes about nice starter tutorial about KDevelop. It misses screen shots as of now. Roshan is going to upload it in sometime.
* In my previous post - I forgot to give the Hindi link for the KDE 4.0.0 announcement. Sorry about that. And thanks Ravishankar again for the translation.
* Santhosh writes about KDE 4.0.0 release in Malayalam. Thanks Santhosh.
* Also thanks to Petr Tomeš for Czech announcement and the Russian friend ( st.mpa3b, sorry thats what shows up as your name in the email) who did the Russian announcement.
Current Location: Panvel
Current Mood: cheerful
Tags: kde 4.0.0, licensing, release
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08:59 am
[Link] |
Be Free!
w000ah0000!! KDE 4.0.0 is released. Congratulations to all *contributors* involved in this journey to achieve this common goal. Its taken more than two years to reach here and the results are beautiful and it is becoming better with each passing commit. This is the first time ever that the announcements have been translated into few of our own Indian Languages. Bengali ( India ), Gujarati, ,Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi and Tamil as well ( but its not yet published and will be asap ). Kartik Mistry, who did the Gujarati translation - also makes a nice post in his mother tongue - Gujarati. HUGE THANKS to all the translators ( Runa Bhattacharjee, Kartik Mistry, Ravishankar, Ashik and Swantantra Malayalam team, Hrishikesh, Amanpreet Singh and Shri Ramadhas ) for their hard work on such short notice.
Also huge thanks to Albert Astals Cid (TSDgeos) for being a awesome localisation co-ordinator.
Regards and good wishes are pouring in from everywhere even from our old good friends at Trolltech.This journey has been a nice one and after reaching the 0.0 milestone, we move forward towards the next goal. Expect lots of better stuff from KDE 4.1. Cheers!
Current Mood: accomplished
Tags: indian languages, kde 4.0.0, release, translators
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08:45 am
[Link] |
KDE 4.0.0 Release Event . in
We are very close to the release of much awaited KDE 4.0.0. Its been slightly more than 2 years since the community started out on this mission called "KDE4". Now we are at the doorstep of this new era. To commemorate the release of KDE 4.0.0, a main event is going to be organised at Google Campus, Mountain View, California. Also other events will be held in different parts of the world by the local KDE communities.
KDE-India will also have a commemorative event(s). For now, one event has been decided in Mumbai. Local communities are encouraged to have more such events. Details for the Mumbai event will follow. Mumbai event is planned to be held in association with the local lug - glug-bom on 20th January 2008.
It would really cool to have such an event because such events and meetings foster new developers/contributors to the project. Speaking of new members who have recently started working for KDE ( and / or are doing it since some time ) are - Runa Bhattacharjee ( KDE - Bengali Translation ), Tejas Dinkar ( Kopete Bonjour plug in ), Arindam "mak" Ghosh ( KDE - Bengali Translation / Awesome KGeography tutorials and more ), Sri Ramadhas ( KDE - Tamil Translation, but he is a seasoned dude by now ), my favorite twit - Sharan Rao ( now also works on Kexi, thanks Jaroslaw S for mentoring him, appreciate it ), Kushal Das ( for the lovely videos you have been creating, nice patch for KGeography btw ). Runa and Tejas actually just got their svn accounts few weeks back and its wonderful to see their commits. Can never forget Anurag, Barkha, Roshan, Kamal for every minute of slogging that you folks did in last 2-3 of months. I am afraid, more work coming up.Cheers! Of and thats not over yet, some more new people and some new work happening.
Update about translation - after reading yesterday's blog post Lauris Bukšis-Haberkorns from Latvia contacted me and volunteered to translate the announcement to Latvian. Did all the co-ordination work, got it checked by the Latvian team leaders and sent back the translated announcement. Thanks Lauris Bukšis-Haberkorns :). There is still time, if anybody is still interested - please mail me ( especially if you are one of the Indian Language translators) or Albert Astals Cid (TSDgeos) ( aacid ATTT kde D00T org ).
Current Location: Panvel
Current Mood: cheerful
Tags: kde 4.0.0, new contributors, release event, translators
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12:34 pm
[Link] |
tr( "KDE 4.0.0 Announcement" )
Afaik, KDE release announcements have never been translated in any of the Indian languages before. But it seems this time we are going to have translations for KDE 4.0.0 which is impending release.
If other language translators are willing to help out, please email me ( pradeeptob SHIFT+2 gmail dawt com ). Thank you all the translators who are helping out.
Current Location: Panvel
Tags: india, indian languages, kde 4.0.0, kde4, translators
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09:32 pm
[Link] |
KDE-Indians
FWIW, since some chap bothered to commented that "he didn't know aseigo and others were from India.". So hear this - why certain people are there on that poster.
Till Adam has been a part of KDE India since *day 1* of KDE-India. He has been a friend and guide ever since.
Aaron was the first KDE contributor ( other than Ade ) whom I ever came in touch with. It was him who was guiding me on mails and irc ever since. That was before foss.in/2005 which he was supposed to attend ( along with Taj and Till ) but couldn't due to some other important meeting. He did come later in 2006 and made a huge impact. I have never seen anybody going over to each booth and talking to each of them patiently and understanding them. He taught me a lot of things during those days at foss.in/2006. On the sidelines we had quite lot of chats where he guided me what to do and how to do within the community.
Kevin Ottens, Till Adam and Volker Krause btw voluntarily pinged me a few days back and said they would pool in to help me print the posters.
Swati and Tarique Sani are there because one fine day I woke up and saw a mail from Swati which just said - "Hi, we ( our company ) would like to sponsor KDE/KDE-India t-shirts. We don't even want our logo on the t-shirts.".
Aanjhan R because he did all the running for those posters, stickers and more.
Yes, they *are* a part of KDE-India. :)
Current Location: Panvel
Tags: kde-indians
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10:54 am
[Link] |
KDE-India
KDE India has got a shiny new website. Kudos to Roshan, Anurag, Barkha, Sharan and Piyush for their hardwork.Thanks to Cornelius and Dirk for their timely help at a very short notice. A new poster as well - this time KDE India -
Dot also reports about the new website along with main news about KDE Project Day at FOSS.IN.
Current Location: Panvel
Tags: kde, kde-india, news, posters, website
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09:35 am
[Link] |
:O
Anurag reports here that the posters are a rage since it was released. :) Danny Allen of Commit Digest fame has included the posters in current edition of the digest :).
Cheers!
Current Location: Panvel
Tags: foss.in/2007, kde, people., posters
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07:54 am
[Link] |
"KDE Posters - FOSS.IN '07 Collection"
"The KDE Posters - FOSS.IN '07 Collection" has been launched!
Ann-Marie Mahfouf, Celeste Lyn Paul, Ellen Reitmayr, Sharan Rao, David Faure, Aaron Seigo, Allen Winter, Philip Rodrigues, Sebastian Kuegler, Jos Poortvliet, Piyush Verma are our models :). They are a random sample of KDE contributors from our "large KDE family". The theme for the posters has to show case the "human face" behind KDE Project - the wonderful community that keeps attracting people from all corners of the world and from all aspects of life/profession. All of us join together to form a beautiful team family.
The posters were made by a very enthusiastic team over some juice and some unnecessarily expensive bhelpuri and with some help from Till Adam and Celeste Lyn Paul. The high resolutions version of the posters can be found on Anurag's Flickr account. :)
So did you register for FOSS.IN yet? Oh btw, they are looking for volunteers as well. Choose your pill :)
Current Location: Panvel
Tags: family, foss.in/2007, kde, kde-family, kde-india, kde-posters, posters
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10:06 pm
[Link] |
Work of Art :)
Now does that poster rock or what? Hari made that poster for FOSS.IN along with other posters. You can get them here ( seriously have a look! ). Awesome work of art! Apparently the posters and stickers are being grabbed like nothing before. At BarCampBangalore5, those stickers and posters were a rage among the delegates.
Have you registered for FOSS.IN yet? No? Bah! Register here now!
Current Location: Panvel
Tags: foss.in/2007, posters
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