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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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07:37 pm
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Dil Maange More.
The month of February was an eventful one. I represented KDE at four different foss events in India. Four events in four different cities in 4 different states :). First event one was Mukti '09 at National Institute of Technology, Durgapur. Second was Gnunify '09 at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research. Pune. Third event was at Magnum Opus, Banaras Hindu University Institute of Technology, Varansi. Finally, one of my yearly pilgrimages, FOSSMeet'09 at National Institute of Technology, Calicut.
I had an very interesting time at each of the event and each deserves a separate blog post. Made many new friends and many new contacts. I am still in touch with many of them and its really cool to see so many new faces getting into Qt/KDE contribution.
My favourite dude currently is Shantanu Jha. Met this dude at FOSS.IN/2008, one of my regular and yearly FOSS pilgrimages :). Yes, Atul, I know, I have to write that report :). Anyway, so this dude attended the KDE Project of the Day at FOSS.IN/2008 and all the KDE talks. Volunteered along with his college gang at the KDE booth and helped us a lot during those five days of FOSS.IN ( and before/after the event ). So he attended the talks, got interested, spoke to the speakers. Then went back home, started poking with the code, and asked questions on the lists when he had doubts and started fixing bugs and sending patches.
Some days back he wrote me an email telling me about what he has been upto since FOSS.IN/2008 and how excited he is that Aaron accepted his patches. So I told his mentor friends and BMS college seniors Madhusudhan, Santhosh and Krishna to bring him along to FOSSMeet, Calicut. I was going to do a Qt/KDE development workshop for beginners. Asked him to join me as "TA" :P. And boy! he did an awesome job. He took a very interesting session on RAD with Qt Designer. It was fun meeting the whole BMS college gang again.
Now all that is over. New things to look forward to.
For starters, I am sure most of us know that Akademy will be held at Gran Canaria this time as a part of larger event Gran Canaria Desktop Summit.
The Call for Papers went public couple of days back. Read this news on the dot. So what are you waiting for? Go submit your talk. You can even submit a technical paper if you wish to do so. :)
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: akademy, call for papers, contributor, kde, shaan
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11:44 am
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On my way to ....
... Kharagpur for a few days. Writing this blog sitting inside a train. The train is Bombay-Howrah ( Kolkata ) Sunday Superfast train, a weekly service since a year or so and most importantly reaches Kharagpur around 17:30, which is much better than any/most of the other trains going to Kharagpur / Howrah.
Also trying to get kdepim-e4 built on this box as I munch on some snacks. Yay! for Indian Rail for providing us with power sockets for each seat cubicle. I am carrying my own internet and hope it works for most of the route ;).
Current Location: Train
Tags: bombay, howrah, in-laws, indian railways, kdepim, kharagpur, power sockets, sunday special superfast train, train
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11:35 am
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The Making of " We Are KDE".
Some of you might have already seen the video of "We are KDE" song. But here is the inside story behind the song.
So we ( folks from the KDE-India group ) were working really hard to make sure that KDE has a blast at this wonderful conference called FOSS.IN/2008. One of things we worked on were the "KDE Handbook"
Here is the "His Highness Geek God and Mighty Blogger" Gopal V endorsing the brochure/handbook. More about the handbook later.
But for now, you must know that the the layout and design of this brochure was done by a dude called Lakshya Shrivastava ( Lexi ). Over a period of time, I was interacting with him on daily basis over IM and phone with regards to the brochure. One fine day, I came to know that he is an painter and amateur musician as well. I saw photos of his painting and even heard him sing and play guitar. Then one day, when he was almost done with designing the brochure, I generally asked him, if he could write song. He said, he hasn't done that before but can try. I also contacted our dear Summer Of Code ( Marble ) candidate Shashank Singh ( shanky ), who is btw, Lakshya's classmate and of course the one who got us introduced in first place and told him about this idea. Shanky loved the idea and told me something that made me even more enthusiastic about the idea. Apparently, his childhood friend Lokesh Gupta ( Loki ), magically knew to play a guitar as well. Shanky wrote the first email to all of us concerned with the subject "Lets Rock FOSS.IN ... literally". So we had two guitarists, one dude doing the vocals and a possible song :)
So Shanky, Lexi, Loki, Sharan and myself got together on irc and fleshed out what we could do. Problem we faced was, Lexi and Loki were more or less KDE agnostic. But thankfully by then we had our handbook ready, so we told Loki to read up the booklet and Lexi found it amusing that he has to read up the handbook he designed ;). Shanky, Sharan and me tried to explain them a few KDE points that we could stress on. Free Software, Freedom, Pillars of KDE and such was some of the things we decided upon.
We signed off that night with Lexi promising to deliver the first draft soon. The dude did all nighter, not only wrote the song but also put the lyrics to a nice tune. Sang it, and sent it across to us. Next few days, the song went back and forth between all of us, trying to polish as much as our amateur musician brains could. We kept a complete "Radio Silence" about the whole sub-project ;).
We had some glitches, one of them being Lexi told us that he won't be able to make it to FOSS.IN/2008 which was unfortunate. I must have had hours of discussions with him over im/phone, trying to get him to FOSS.IN/2008, but in vain. Anyway, we realised that we have lost our vocalist. But kudos to Shanky and Loki, who took it upon themselves and practiced themselves from then.
So, once the conference started, I revealed the idea to Ade and Piyush on day 2 of the conference. On day 2 evenning, after dinner, all the KDE speakers ( Ade, Shanky, Piyush, Sharan, Me ) met up at the hotel. We were joined by Loki and his friend Kingshuk. At the hotel lobby/atrium, we made ourselves comfortable on the nice big couches and started our first and only group practice session. Our hotel roommate Ajay Kumar of Sahana fame also joined us. Together we blazed away to glory.
First it was Shanky and Loki, who sang the first version. After which it was Ade and his trust KDE@Solaris laptop all the way. Ade reviewed the lyrics for like 30 minutes or something, suggested some changes and then we started practicing. Ade automagically became our Lead Singer and rest of the wonderful chorus. Some of us even had coffee during practice. Btw, all this was happening in the middle of the night, and a night before our talks. Most of us had 2 talks next day ;)
So as we practiced really hard ;), fellow FOSS devs, ace photographers and all round cool dudes Kushal Das and Sayamindu Dasgupta came downstairs with their photography artillery. I guess we were singing really loudly in the middle of the night and they couldn't sleep ;). Kushal video recorded the practice session and the dude has nicely put together a "collage" of what he recorded. The video ends with a beautiful picture by Sayamindu. Cool stuff!
Here is the Ogg version.
Thanks Lexi, Loki, Shanky, Sharan, Piyush, Ajay. And Adriaan, thank you so much, I knew you as a friend, as a leader, my first ever KDE contact back in early 2005 ( helping me with some pilot-link code ). But now I also know you as a singer ;). Thanks Kushal, Sayamindu for giving us company and capturing the moments of what was truly so much fun. We can cherish memories for a long time thanks to you both.
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: foss.in, fun, kde, kde song, music, photo, song
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11:12 pm
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Feels as if it just happened...
...but its been an year exactly. Good fun.
( Thanks to Kevin Ottens for taking countless pictures :)
Current Location: New Panvel
Current Mood:  cheerful
Tags: first anniversary, marriage, mousumi, pradeepto, wedding
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06:57 pm
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Indic KDE :)
This poster show cases all the official Indian languages ( Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali,Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu ) in which KDE is being translated into and has a entry in the KDE localisation website. A heartfelt thanks to all the translators in India and elsewhere who are doing an amazing job.
This poster was done by Kamaleshwar Morjal as well. Thanks dude.
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: foss.in/2008, indian languages, indic, kde, localisation, translators
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08:24 am
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"The Pillars - FOSS.IN/2008 Collection"
The journey to KDE 4 has been a long one, it is still on and has a long way to go. It has come a long way since the last major release KDE 3 on April 3, 2002. This journey involved many contributors - developers, artists, translators, sys-admins, technical writers, marketing dudes, bug-triagers, users and more. Many meetings, many sprints, many commits, many news articles later the KDE community released KDE 4.0 on January 11, 2008.
KDE 4 firmly stands on very strong foundations - Oxygen, Solid, Phonon, Decibel, Akonadi, Nepomuk, Plasma - also known as the "Pillars of KDE". So we ( KDE-India ) proudly present you the "Pillars of KDE" poster collection.
Like last year, these posters has been made by a good friend Kamaleshwar Morjal ( btw he used only inkscape for all his work ). The logos are of course the official logos made by the members of Oxygen and KDE-Artists team. The high resolutions version of the posters can be found on Anurag's Flickr account :). The desktop wallpaper versions will be put up soon.
So did you register for FOSS.IN/2008 yet? It is a wonderful FOSS event and you *got* to be present there to know what it experience it.
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: foss.in, kde, kde-india, pillars of kde, posters
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09:43 am
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Happy Diwali
Wishing everybody a Very Happy and Prosperous Diwali. Bengalis ( and some other communities ) celebrate this day as Kali Puja. Today evening my family will go to the Kali Bari ( Goddess Kali Temple ) in my town, New Panvel, for the Kali Puja rituals.
Yet again, I have not bought a single fire cracker, don't even remember when I did that last. Thankfully, for some reason, this year even others around the place I live have not bought many. Nice to have a beautifully lit but less noisy Diwali for a change :). Have fun!
[Image : Courtesy Wikipedia]
Current Location: Panvel
Tags: happy diwali
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11:09 am
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Shubo Bijoya
"Shubo Bijoya" to one and all. Last 4 days were some fun. This was the first Durga Pujo after my marriage so it was quite interesting. Its like the whole Bengali Community - "Milan Tirtha" - in your locality is watching you or such ;). Too much pressure, I must admit :P. Everybody wants to see the "notun bou" even after 10 months of being "notun" ;). "Sindoor Khela" is quite interesting. For the first time I volunteered to do "pori-beshon", liked it, loved the enthusiasm that surrounds the whole thing. Oh and "Sandhi Pujo" was around mid-night, attended it. Cool thing was a senior police officer attended it as well and he was quite down to earth and humble, sat along with others like a common man, actually refused any special treatment, and during the whole "mangal aarti" he was praying with his eyes closed. He even had gun carrying personal guards.
Mamata Shankar performed here on one of the nights, plus the local artists did their bit. But like previous years, my favorite was the folk songs session by a "baaul" artist. A Kolkata band - "Abriti" also performed.
Planned to do pandal hopping and go atleast to Vashi if not to Dadar and Lokhandwala, but that never happened. Pujo at New Panvel kept me busy. Saw Kidnap one of the days at Kharghar Adlabs, nothing to great about it.
Oh and my sister and my brother in law attended a Durga Pujo some where in New Jersey and she being a big khichudi bhog fan was sort of dazed at pizza being offered as bhog there and not to mention 60 USD being charged for the "Darshan" even. I pray and hope it never comes to this here in India.
Tags: durga puja
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07:41 pm
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An Idea ....
An idea, I have been nurturing since a long long time, ever since I started my KDE life back in late 2005 is going to come true coming weekend. I always read that on the dot and lists that a hackathon has been organised somewhere in Norway or Germany or somewhere else where KDE developers/artists/contributors would meet and do some good KDE work to produce stuff like Plasma or Oxygen or Akonadi or KOffice and some other really wonderful stuff. I always wanted a KDE hackathon here in India.
And yes!!! we are going to have our own KDE Hackathon - "KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon". It will be held in Bengaluru ( Bangalore ) on 11-13th of July 2008. FOSS.IN is sponsoring the event and will be held at Geodesic's Bangalore office. I bounced this idea off Atul Chitnis, the FOSS.IN Lead and Geodesic's Sr. V.P. and he whole heartedly accepted it from the day 1 and helped me incubate the idea into reality. Since some of us - including me - are not from Bangalore, travel sponsorship, venue sponsorship, internet facility is all being sponsored by either FOSS.IN and/or Geodesic. Coolness! Thanks guys!
Now the important part - the participants of the hackathon. Atleast 3 KDE contributors along with 3 KDE GSoCers from India would be coming together for this wonderful event. Sharan Rao, Akarsh Simha ( SoC ), Gopala Krishna A ( SoC ), Shashank Singh ( SoC ), Tejas Dinkar, Kushal Das (?) and me. Idea is that the SoCers would hack on their SoC projects ( unless they want to hack on something else ) while the rest of the gang would hack on their favorite KDE project. So for example - Sharan might be hacking on Kexi/Umbrello, while Tejas would be hacking on Kopete/Bonjour plugin and so on. They guys are all excited even, since it would be their first hackathon as well, I think.
Current Location: New Panvel
Tags: bangalore, foss.in, gsoc, hackathon, kde, kde-india, meeting
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08:23 pm
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Rains, Electricity, Nuclear Power, Bandhs
Its raining here like crazy since last few days though today was day off or something since it rained only "cats and dogs" today. Its nothing unusual for people living in this part of the country. We have seen this in 2005. I like many others have were in the middle of it back then in 2005. I know that my good friend Anurag just managed to escape drowning that day ( check the link and see the pics that Anurag took with his cell phone ). He took shelter at one good Samaritan's place with some others. We didn't know each other back then. I used to stay in Kandivali as a paying guest, some 15 minutes walk from my previous work place. 3 of my colleagues stayed over at my place that day since it was impossible to go back home. They even tried to go back home and managed to survive the rains and came back from Borivali station. Next day when the rains stopped ( for some definition of stopping ), me and my friends went back home. It took me some 9 hours to reach Panvel instead of 2.5 hours or such. One of my friends reached the day later since he wasn't allowed to enter his town Kalyan and took shelter in some temple or such. The story didn't end there, I came to Panvel right after the flood was over but the effects remained there to be witnessed. There were many buildings which had mud marks above their ground floor level and just below the first floor balcony lever. Imagine the rise of water level. I remember cleaning atleast 2 of my friends house along with their family. Rooms full of mud, cupboards full of mud, books, wedding gifts all soaked in muddy waters. Some of us volunteered at a relief camp at "Kali Bari" organised by Bharat Sevashram. We didn't have any electricity for next few days. Joined work exactly 1 week down then line Yes, that was back then in 26th of July 2005.
So electricity in Panvel is in a better shape than what it was few months back but still I would like to go back to 1993-2004 or even 1986-2004 ( all my years in Maharashtra ), when there was no such thing as daily power cuts. Occasional failures yes. That is why I think we need the Nuclear Agreement with USA. Because about time we solve such issues and stop relying on Oil for everything. As it is inflation at 11+% - which is at all time high in many many years is not helping at all. Solving the energy issues might help the cause a lot.
But the polical parties are busy doing politics over the whole issue and other issues as well. Some call for nationwide bandh, others just do a "rasta/rail roko andolan" and some others do something else. I know, all this will stop soonish. Its election time in few months anyway - maybe sooner thanks to the Indo/US Nuclear Deal.
Anyway, after such a grim post - expect some good news in a day or two - thanks to friends in Bangalore, Mumbai and Allahabad ;).
Tags: electricity, floods, good news, power, rains
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01:37 pm
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Difficult Times Ahead!
Just came back from lunch, watching news during lunch is a bad idea after all. All the news channels were showing just one thing - Price hike in LPG, Petrol and Diesel. LPG rises by INR 50 and Petrol by 5. Now I don't have a car and such, so I am not directly hit by petrol price rise but indirectly, I am hit big time. Prices of food and pulses have already shot up since 2 months or so. They are going to hit the roof now if they haven't already. I am sure now auto rickshaw and taxi fares would increase now. Considering that, it is awesomely unbearable hot here in Panvel/Mumbai at the moment and we will soon move to rainy season and we get little too much rain ( for my taste atleast ), using rickshaws is almost inevitable for distances which are not walkable in this heat or in stupidly heavy rains that we get here, its going to hurt, the day they increase the fares.
Worst hit is the LPG price, which is most middle class households use in this country. I remember my family using LPG cylinders since 1986 or earlier, back when we lived in Damonjodi, Orissa. But I have seen the use of electric heater at my home but that was just around the same time when we were phasing those out and replacing those with the LPG stoves. We used to have a Kerosene stove but I don't remember using it much. But in my native place, Kanpur, we still have those pressure stoves and have seen my family use it in case of emergency and such. Actually, many years back in Kanpur and Krishanagar ( my Mom's place ), I have seen my late grandmothers use "coal" chulla ( stoves ) as well. The smell of burning coal still lingers in my memories.
But anyway, if there is no rollback, which is highly unlikely, its going to be hard on me, my family and few million others in my country. The political parties are already into their blame game politics and the allied parties ( *cough* left parties *cough* ) are blaming the ruling Congress for all this? And want a roll back. This is usual politics. Its widely known that BP and IOC - the two largest oil companies have already announced that they have cash only for next 2-3 months if the prices were not reviewed since the last price hike by OPEC countries and as a result they were suffering huge losses daily. How much can the government subsidise anyway?
What can I say? Just cross my fingers and sit tight, hoping against hope.
Current Location: Panvel
Current Mood:  disappointed
Tags: bp, food, government, ioc, lpg, memories, oil, opec, petrol, prices
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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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