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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Pradeepto Bhattacharya" journal:
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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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11:35 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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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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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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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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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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01:01 pm
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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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10:54 am
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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
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: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
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"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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09:27 pm
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Doctor Evil ...
errr ... I mean - Ervin aka Dr Kevin Ottens :). I am so glad about this latest development. Yesterday he defended his thesis and got his Ph.D. on "A multi-agent system for building ontologies from texts." ( please ask him what it means, I think I beat t3's blogs for complexity just by that line ;). For those who are not in the know - Kevin is the dude behind Solid framework. One of the nicest people I have met since my involvement with KDE.
I met him for the first time at aKademy '06 - one evening before the actual event at Kennedy's pub in Dublin. I remember distinctly how we landed up on the same table at Kennedy's and shared a huge platter of chicken, prawn (and more) fries. He has been on the aKademy talk selection committee since 2 years atleast if not more.
Other than Solid, his work with his University to get students into FOSS and KDE in particular is a case study in itself. His slaves ... err ... students have been contributing to Umbrello and KPlato. The regular hack sessions have been a success as well. Some of his students were at aKademy this time, they were a jolly lot.
This year at aKademy, I didn't even have to go the event location to meet him. I reached Glasgow quite late ( Heathrow sucks, btw ) in the night and was waiting near the taxi stand with a very nice gentleman from Trolltech when I heard somebody calling my name. I looked around and saw it was Kevin Ottens, Thiago Macieira ( QtDBus dude ) and one of Kevin's students. We took a bus to the hostel. One thing I can never forget is, on the last day of aKademy, on our way to the university from hostel he literally snatched my bag from my hand because I was carrying two laptops plus my luggage and also accompanied me and Sharan along with David Faure to the bus stop and again helped with my bag. A *Nice* Guy. Period.
Congratulations dude! :)
Current Location: Panvel
Current Mood: cheerful
Tags: kde, kevin ottens, nice guy, solid
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09:34 am
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The Return Of Irregular Blogger ...
... so I was MIA from blogosphere. Was lazy, was travelling, doing random stuff and what not ....
I went to CCU for about 24 hours to drop my Mashi who had come from my sister's wedding. In the sidelines met Prof. A. R. Thakur and Indranil Das Gupta at WBUT campus. A nice meeting, we had about Foss workshops at WBUT. Lets see how it goes and how much I can actually contribute to the same. Looks very promising.
Met Kenneth G. and Dr. C. N. Krishnan at VJTI to discuss and start the NRCFOSS Mumbai node ( the first NRCFOSS node outside of Chennai ) in Mumbai. Anurag, Mrugesh and Vihan were also present in the meeting. The plans look good on paper and Mrugesh is doing a great job and working real hard on this. He btw, is our benevolent leader. Just love his enthusiasm. Oh and we are talking to Kelkar college as well. To be honest we have been talking to them before anybody else and its looks more promising that ever. That college is different ball game and we need to cater to a different set of students and so we are working on the same. For some reason, I like this NRCFOSS-BOM team a lot, great people to work with and best thing is everybody has a unique set of fresh ideas and often all of the ideas just fall into place and are in tandem instead of being competitive. The ideas and plans look really great. Implementation is not tough but is not easy either for various reasons ( we need to talk to other people as well who might or might not like our ideas ) . I just hope things fall in place. I will report more as things shape up.
Went to Pune to meet my Sister and Bro-in-law and other friends. Boy, Pune rocks! So I went there and Abhijit picked me up from the bus stop and we went to his place. On the way he showed me his office and the RedHat office in Pune. We went out for dinner and didn't get tickets for the night show of ``Shootout at Lokhandwala". Got the next day's afternoon one. Met up with Sankarshan and Runa ( People from FOSS scene and GNOME world surely know this couple. I was meeting them for the first time. ) for few minutes, planned a next day. Met up with Sameer ( best friend from schooldays ) and Madhu at CCD. We all chatted until late night. That was some fun.
Next day after the movie, I met up with Runa, she ordered some nice pizzas and gave a me short tour of RedHat Pune office. Then went to her place and Sankarshan was there. We did some nice adda after which Ramkrishna joined us with another RedHat dude - Pramod who apparently left before the Pizzas were served. Now this Ramkrishna dude, man he has like countless anecdotes about random things. The way he described the movie Spiderman 3, I will not see it even if somebody paid me to see it. We spoke more various stuff over pizza and dinner at nearby food place called Polkadots. I listened and learnt a lot that evening. Thanks again for the treat and good time.
This place called Kalyaninagar in Pune, seriously rocks! Nice food places nearby, most importantly, coffee places nearby by - so you can hang around till late in the night drinking ``Caffeine Kick". If you feel like, you can go for a movie even, or just hang around. Lots of food places catering variety of stuff. Koregaon Park nearby, which has good food places it seems. Above all, many friends and known faces around, you invariably bump into them. If you feel like you can just go back to your home or office and work if you want too. If you want to stay in little less expensive place to stay but still close to all the above then Wadgaon Sheri is the place you need to look for.
That's what I did. I made my first commits from a place that is not a village called Panvel ;) . I did a personal merge sprint ;). Made it to the top KDE commiters weekly list ( 3rd in the list ) for the first time and painted India deep grey in the commits map :). Though I was beaten by Laurent Montel hands down. Laurent really rocks! As of yesterday morning the merge is complete - ah well almost complete!
So basically, I was busy with loads of stuff - fun stuff often. Pune was great fun, I have been contemplating a move to Pune since I have come back ;)
Current Location: New Panvel
Current Mood: calm
Current Music: When Love And Hate Collide - Def Leppard
Tags: food, kde, kolkatta, nrcfoss, people, pune, redhat
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11:28 am
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Applied FOSS :)
So I was mostly absent from IRC and blogosphere for a while. And the reason was the wedding of my one and only kid sister. It was pleasing, hectic and <insert everything that an Indian wedding comes with> experience. But I happen to notice a few things while all the preparations were on and some how it occurred to me how things are often ``foss-y" in real life even. And things just fall in places even just the way it happens in a successful FOSS project like KDE.
The issue was that the guys family decided that ``ok, we would like to have the wedding on Akshaya Tritiya - *the* most Auspicious day in Hindu Calendar." And we had hardly 3 months or less to arrange everything. And my Dad's job is to keep roaming around the country ( where ever our fave organisation - ``The GoI" tells him to go ) and build gas pipelines or petroleum plants and some such thingies meant that we had to do a lot of work separately and lots of coordination was needed among all involved. So roughly geographical locations were - Grand Dad, Mom, Sis and yours truly in a village called Panvel near BOM. Dad either Ujjain ( mostly in recent times ) or Indore - and even in Kota, Sawaimadhavpur, Manmad, Chembur etc. Our relatives/*very* old friends were based in West Bengal or in Kanpur/Lucknow. Abhijit - the dude whom my sister married and his elder bro were located in Pune while his parents were in Jalgaon ( some where deep in Maharstra, takes 10+ hours by bus to reach Panvel from there. ).
So here we were, *everything* to be done in some 2-3 months. Shopping, painting the house, getting invitations done, send out the invitations, hiring caterers, photographers, transport and more more stuff and concerned parties all scattered all across the country.
Work was distributed from the day 1. Painting work at home started after Dad visited us briefly. After that it was Mom, Sis and Me. Dad came back and saw through the completion of painting work. Between all this my Sister submitted her Masters thesis even. Shopping was done before and after that. Since we couldn't really do the shopping together, we went separately - well at least I did, I went alone with my buddy and bought cart loads of Kurtas :). The invitations were done in 3 languages - Bengali, Marathi ( Because the dude is a Maharashtrian ) and English. Bengali for our relatives and close Bengali friends, these were done in Krishnonogor ( somewhere deep in WB and was take care of by my Mama ( Mom's bro ) ), Marathi for guys family and alike ( were done in Jalgaon by their family ) and English ones for everybody ( were done by my Dad in Ujjain ). So do you see l10n somewhere in there ;) ? Somehow I do :).
Another thing that Dad did was to distribute work to people who were good at it. Since we don't really have many relatives in Panvel, very close family friends were the people on whom we relied on. One guy took care of all kinds of arrangements that was needed for the "hall decoration" and flowers etc while another family friend took care of catering stuff ( and even to take care of guests wrt their food on the wedding day ). I did the scouting for people who rented vehicles, photographers and such since I am the local dude and could get tips from my local Panvelites and school buddies. So basically each module had its own lead dev or some such. We even arranged for a cook at our place for a week because we expected like 30 people (relatives and friends) at our place on the wedding day and day before.
The day before the wedding- there were many rituals according to Bengali customs - ``Nanni Mukh", "Gaaye Holud" and "Ayie Buro Bhaat". Before all those rituals, we even had a "Satya Narayan Pujo" at our place even. And the ladies ( Mashis and Kaakis ) present there for some reason put a lot of turmeric paste on my face even.
On the day of wedding, it appeared more foss-y than ever. It was the ``release day" after all. We were up early and ready to go to the wedding hall before the "``Baaraat" reached Panvel. They apparently came in a Bus from Jalgaon. So I went there to see if the tea/coffee and breakfast stuff was ready or not. Dad and a family friend directed the group to the venue. Another guy was taking care of the flowers and decoration etc. Among other things I attended the guests and made sure they had breakfast properly since they were traveling since 6PM last evening. They guests got ready soonish. I changed to a brand new silk Kurta and Payejaamas and a Nehru jacket even :P.
The wedding was supposed to happen Maharashtrian style. For some reason, the guy's Dad said that he was interested in wearing Bengali "Dhuti ( koncha-ala dhuti ) and Panjabi (kurta)" because he saw someone wearing it some where. And so did Abhijit. So after the some rituals which included ``Introduction to each others family", "Aarshivaad" etc, Abhijit changed to traditional Bengali kurta and dhuti. My sister and Abhijit both wore their respective ``Topors" ( funny head gear / caps that Bengalis wear for their wedding ). The wedding rituals proceeded according to Maharashtrian customs. And some Bengali customs happened in between as well. So what do you call this? ``Collaboration" or whatever between different projects to arrive at common standards or some goal. You know like the freedesktop.org where KDE, GNOME etc collaborate with a common goal or some such.
The wedding ceremony got over and thus my Sis got ``tagged" as Mrs Paromita Apte ( from Ms Paromita Bhattacharya ). Lunch followed by some rest. In the evening we had a nice reception party. Call it the ``after release party". This time we had many more guests. By 10/10:30 PM most guest had left. Only people present were the Baraatis, and people whom we knew from last 15-30 years or more even maybe. The whole Baraath group left finally at around 11:00 PM along with my sister and one of her friend. Thus happened the ``release".
During the whole event that lasted two days and was being worked upon for few months, I was insanely making calls and some such, nagging people - driver(s)/vehicle contractor/owners, photographer dude, caterers ( on the wedding day ). Another thing I did and happy about is - often I found that something was needed to be done and telling somebody to do it would have just delayed it or whatever, so I calculated if I could do it or not and did it if possible instead of telling somebody else. Another thing was - invariably there were situations which needed ``hacks" or immediate solution because of an sudden issue. One such example was - when I went to invite my very old friend and his parents. This dude is recovering from Jaundice and 40 days of hospitalisation. So basically he would eat only fruits and nothing else. And there was no way he was going to go without eating from the party. Made sure that we bought ample fruits. The dude turned up at the reception and it all worked fine. His Mom was very impressed with my ``hack" :). But I can't really take credit for this hack, I just applied ( in my own way ) what my parents did for someone very important who due to some customs won't eat anything at all if it had onions, garlic and non-veg. So they made sure that food was cooked separately for that person before the other food. Thankfully their ``hack" was GPLed and I could use the source and modify it and distribute it even :). Anyways, for all such hacks and constant nagging other ``contributors" to make sure we made it to release date just fine, I think I was the ``maintainer" for the wedding while my parents and Abhijit's parents were ``core / original developers" since they started the project. :)
If the wedding would have been an application or some such, it would have a ``About" box or ``AUTHORS" file in which I would like thank all the devs, contributors, guests and everybody involved. Some people just stand out - my Dad and Mom for arranging such a lovely wedding in such a short period of time. I am sure most of us know how important it is to keeps things as close to perfect as possible in daughters wedding. To Abhjit's family for being really nice. My Mama - who is always the dude and my ( Mejo ) Mashi ( Mom's sister and everybody's favourite Mashi :). To three close families from Panvel without whom neither the hall, nor the flowers nor the caterers and not even the guests and the wedding in general would have been such a smooth affiar.
I would love to thank even the guests, friends and family who came to the wedding or even send in their good wishes even. Every little bit helped it to be successful affair.
Current Mood: cheerful
Tags: family, foss, gnome, kde, relatives, wedding
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10:51 pm
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KLuJe
W00tn33s extreme!! ummmm ... well, I shouldn't be that surprised actually. So I am playing with my shiny new LJ account and asked technofreak if there were any LJ clients and stuff like that. He said there were some surely. Searching the interweb tells me there are quite a few these. But on a few interests me. But what *really* interests me is KLuJe. KLuJe is a nice Qt/KDE client by some nice guys called Buddy Brewer and Ryan Breen. Wonder why KLuJe is not there in the Kubuntu repositories ( not even in Edgy, though I am using Dapper ) :(. Anyways why fear when its free software and source is available! Did a cvs checkout and built the nice app. Another thing I noted that KLuJe is just KDE 3.5.2 based or something. Browsing the cvs tells me that there is no sign of porting this fine application to Qt4/KDE4. Hmmm .... do I sense an opportunity? Need to the ping the devs first. The cvs activity doesn't really seem to be very busy kind. It would be a pity if the application is not being maintained anymore. (Btw if you can read this post, it has been posted using KLuJe) *drumrolls*
Current Location: New Panvel
Current Mood: :)
Tags: free software, kde, kluje, opensource, qt
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06:46 pm
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Hello World!
Finally giving in to Anurag 's relentless efforts at making me blog. Oh and this guy once said to me "Dude, you don't get to shout how cool Krita is?" Right, I agree :). Congratulations mates!
I don't think this is going to be techie blog or some such. But managing two separate blogs ... bwahahaha! So let's see it might just be (for whatever little techie stuff I can talk about)!
Hah! When I started writing this one , WinAmp on the friendly neighbourhood desktop was playing GnR "Knock Knock On The Heaven's Door" and by the time finish it (after fighting with HTML :O), Richard Marx 's "Hazard" gets over and Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters" starts! Scary! w00tness! :-O
Current Location: New Panvel
Current Mood: accomplished
Tags: anurag, hello, kde, krita, start, t3rmin4t0r
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