Weirdness Central

Bye bye :-(

2009-04-23T21:14:55Z

I've been meaning to do this for a while now -- I have now moved my blog to http://arunraghavan.net/blog. The ads on the front page of LJ just annoy me to no end. I understand that the LJ guys have to make a living too, but this is much simpler for me (and all my content stays in one place).

I managed to export all my data to Wordpress on the new site, and realised that there were more than 2000 comments. There's no way I'm going to get that kind of community after the move, and that actually almost made me not switch. But it is done now. I've not been active on reading my friends posts, and that sucks. Will probably try to move that to a Google Reader so I don't completely lose touch.

It's been a great 5+ years on LJ. See you on the other side, folks! :-)

FOSSKriti '09 is here

2009-02-10T11:36:32Z

Been a hectic few months, but I could hardly miss posting about this. Some of you might remember the little F/OSS miniconf, we did last year at Techkriti, IIT Kanpur's technical festival. FOSSKriti '08 sparked off a number of great F/OSS events in colleges across the country. FOSSKriti '09 is now here, bigger and badder than ever (for small values of ever :P)!

Last year, we started planning the event sometime in mid-Jan, and we did the best we could in about a month. This year, Shashank (better known as Chintal), Zakir, Surya, and the rest of team had more time, and you can tell that they've been busy. The theme for this year is "The Open Web", and we have an awesome line-up of talks, workshops, and hackfests around this theme. We've got folks from Mozilla, Drupal, Yahoo, and Sahana and more. It's going to be four butt-kickingly amazing days!

Bottom line: If you're in the vicinity, be there. It's happening from Feb 12th to 15th, at IIT Kanpur.

p.s.: It blows that I can't make it. :(

Copy -- right?

2008-12-04T05:41:14Z

So derherr were chatting about copyrights and I stumbled upon the website of the Government of India's Copyright Office, and some clickety clicking later, came upon The Handbook of Copyright Law. Wanted to chronicle interesting bits for posterity.

Fair use: Includes standard stuff like research, private study, criticism/review, reporting current events, judicial proceeding, amateur performance to a non-paying audience and some more ambiguous stuff ("the making of sound recordings of literary, dramatic or musical works under certain conditions")
You own copyright to all photos of yourself (caveat: see fair use): "In the case of a photograph taken, or a painting or portrait drawn, or an engraving or a cinematograph film made, for valuable consideration at the instance of any person, such person shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright therein."
Computer programs are abou the same as literary works: With the exception that you can "sell or give on hire or offer for sale or hire, regardless of whether such a copy has been sold or given on hire on earlier occasion."
Translations: Are protected by your copyright
Registering copyright: By default, you own the copyright to work that you have created. "However, certificate of registration of copyright and the entries made therein serve as prima facie evidence in a court of law with reference to dispute relating to ownership of copyright."
Term of copyright: 60 years after death of the author for most things. 60 years from date of publication cinematograph films, photographs, posthumous publications, anonymous and pseudonymous publications, and some other stuff.

Phew! Certainly learned some new stuff today.

It starts ...

2008-11-25T01:12:57Z

So this is the proverbial it. FOSS.IN/2008 starts today. We took some hard decisions to come upon the current format. We have an amazing lineup of stuff that's happening through every day (don't believe me? See the schedule). All systems are, in fact, go (I feel more redundant with every passing year). I think this poster sums it up the best (shoutout to Hari for the awesome artwork!):

In the unlikely event that you're still wondering what FOSS.IN is all about, and whether you should come, just head on over and check out the little video we've made. It should answer any questions that you have about what the 2008 edition of FOSS.IN is all about.

Time to head to the venue now, see you there!

p.s.: I like this one too :-) ...

One small step for student-kind

2008-11-19T06:12:12Z

Today, the VTU (the university that granted me my bachelor's degree) did something incredibly smart. In one fell swoop, they have achieved what Kerala and Andhra Pradesh have been trying to do for years, in vain.

That's right — the VTU has done the one thing that will ensure that no student of theirs will ever learn a Microsoft-related technology — a ton of Microsoft software is now part of the official curriculum.

Thank you, VTU!

Aside ...

Reminds me of the "Basic Computer Skills" Lab in 3rd semester, where we had to create a document in Word and a presentation in PowerPoint. The external examiner expected you to remember exactly under which menu each random feature lay. It took her about 10 minutes to figure out that I was searching through the menus blindly after every question. :)

Not to mention 5th semester, where our DBMS lecturer tried to strong-arm me into learning Visual Basic for a project on databases. This one I managed to hold out on, and did my work in PHP+MySQL.

FOSS.IN/2008: Delegate registrations are open

2008-10-29T05:32:21Z

FOSS.IN/2008 delegate registration is now open -- what are you waiting for!

FOSS.IN/2008: Taking it to the next level

2008-10-09T14:28:51Z

Finally, after ages, "soon" is here, and my loyal readers can ascertain that I am, in fact, still alive. A wider, life update will come later (heh), but for now ...

Preparation for FOSS.IN/2008 is well on way, and this year is going to be different. The Call for Participation is out. The newest thing in there is that there aren't going to be nearly as many talks as before. You'll see the term FOSS WorkOuts rather prominently displayed, and this is where the action is going to be. We're going to be seeing a lot more doing than in years gone by. Head on over to the CfP to learn more.

Atul's post on the new format has caused some furore in the community, in addition to some pockets of encouragement (links abound and the topic is hackneyed, so no linky). All I have to add is this -- a lot of people who are working on distros and doing packaging seem to be gravely offended. Well, I'm a packager too (erm, did I mention that I am now a Gentoo developer?), and there is no reason to take offense. What we're trying to say is that we can be achieving more at the event to increase both the number of contributors as well as the depth of contribution, and the latter especially is the focus. I can expound on about this, but there's been enough talk.

The cool folks over at IndLinux have already started plotting, and we've been trying to get some traction on some GNOME performance work. Hope we can get some more folks to run with it. I, for one, am looking eagerly forward to the proposals we get this year.

N810 - we wantee!

2008-06-16T18:11:57Z

This article by Ted T’so is an excellent commentary on the controversy around Nokia’s Dr. Ari Jaaksi (one of the bigshots behind the amazing Nokia N770/800/810 internet tablets) recent comments (1, 2) on the need for open source developers to understand business constraints. Extremely well-balanced. Bruce Perens also wrote an interesting piece on it.

blink

2008-05-13T09:06:35Z

This college administration (and, by extension, everything), makes me physically sick.

IITK Fascism Update

2008-05-07T23:14:33Z

So we (some of us students) met and decided to do something about the sudden implementation of the Internet shutdown from 0000-0600. Some updates:

The intimation about doing this was sent at 2357 hours today (yesterday, to be precise) to all. The notification basically stated that because of “undesirable activities”, Internet will, with immediate effect, be disabled from 0000 to 0600 every day. And that’s it -- poof. The hostel network is disconnected from the rest of the Institute, thus making sure that nobody can access the Internet (or even the Institute’s own computing facilities). To compensate, the Computer Center (with a capacity of <200 computers) is to be kept open 24x7.

Of course, this was unacceptable, so a bunch of us decided that something needs to be done. There are 2 issues -- the decision, and how it was implemented. While the decision itself needs discussion (more about this later), the implementation is of immediate concern. People were not prepared, and work on several people's theses were affected. Plus, this has been done just a little after the end-semester exams, when most students are not on campus. This sort of fascism usually rears its head under precisely these circumstances. We decided that what needed to be addressed right now is the implementation -- the Internet has to be made available this night.

A couple of our student representatives spoke to the Dean of Student Affairs (the DoSA -- the official channel between the students and the administration). The DoSA basically said that they, the various Deans and the Director (and Deputy Director?) have made the decision at nothing would be done about it. More precisely, the Director, as the highest power in the Institute has taken the decision and that's that. Further discussion may be taken up with him.

About 60-70 of us went to the Director's house at about 2:30 (the entire process was peaceful -- there was not shouting or slogans). We met with the security, who called the Head of the Computer Center (CC) and the DoSA to the place after some attempted dodging.

The CC Head turned up first and started asking what our problem was. He offered such resources as a vehicle to transfer us from hostel to CC as well as as many pen-drives as we require to transfer data from our machines to the CC machines. The DoSA just said that we’ve given you 2 years to think about whether this should be implementing it, and now we will be implementing it, so there.

Our student representatives (who did a pretty good job), after some dialogue, got the connection reinstated for tonight. They will be further taking up the issue later today.

The decision itself is extremely foolish, of course. Moreover, the dictatorial way in which this is being done is just as shocking. Let’s see how things pan out in time. Perhaps sense and sanity will prevail.

Idiots, fucking idiots

2008-05-07T18:37:07Z

So it’s done, then. No Internet access in hostels between 12 midnight and 6 am. This is the most idiotic and regressive thing our administration has done in ages. This with absolutely no discussion with the students.

I don’t know how this college (IIT Kanpur) got to be administered by a bunch of fucking neanderthals.

Twit Erring

2008-05-05T11:19:10Z

I got on Twitter recently after repeated poking, and while I am hardly enamoured by the basis of the service (which seems to be the current human need to cry out to the world about each trivial detail of existence), I found myself actually updating the damn thing pretty regularly.

Why? Obvious -- ease of use! Between updates from IM and TwitterFox, it is really simple to “tweet” (eww ... +1 and -10 for terminology) and follow others’ updates. I value the “Now Playing” and tagging of LJ greatly, and that means using IM to post is not an option for me. Firing up LogJam is not difficult, but certainly not as trivial as IM’ing twitter@twitter.com.

I wonder how long I’ll stick with Twitter, though.

BTW, does anybody know an LJ client that uses the Gnome keyring? Would make life so much simpler.

JK Rowling is teh suck?

2008-05-02T20:50:40Z

Orson Scott Card slams J.K. Rowling for her latest lawsuit.

Knock knock ...

2008-04-07T20:50:39Z

Been a good week. I crossed 50 commits to Beagle. They’re all pretty modest contributions, but it’s been awesome fun.

In addition, pkgcore 0.4.4 has my patch to support HTTP proxies for rsync. This was a fun patch to write, small as it is. The code is beautiful, and Brian Harring (ferringb) and Patrick Lauer (bonsaikitten) walked me through a lot of it. Good stuff!

I’ve also been working on splitting the gnome-python* ebuilds to make the dependency trees for packages that use these bindings a lot saner. This has been longer and more painstaking that intended. It wouldn’t even have happened if Jim Ramsay (lack) hadn’t made an excellent start with the gnome-python-desktop split, since all subsequent work was based on that. Hope this is useful to someone, though. :-)

As I said, a good week.

I don't know

2008-03-30T15:16:42Z

Today was the last day of Alfaaz, the literary festival at college. The last 2 days have been horribly busy, so I missed a lot of good stuff. I did make it to the book fair, though. I browsed around, found a lot of popular stuff, and some less common stuff, particularly from Yoda Press and Undercover Utopia. The former had some really interesting books. I picked up Rahul Roy’s A Little Book on Men and A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s In Those Days There Was No Coffee. There was more interesting stuff (particularly a “Sexualities” series of which the Rahul Roy is a part), but with budget constraints and what have you, this is what I could get. Apparently they have their books at Blossoms so not all is lost.

I just finished the Rahul Roy book (yes, 1 hour). It’s a short, illustrated, book. Very visual. I guess the intention is to analyse masculinity and its social roles and personal influences in a way that is accessible to people who don’t read much, or at least not much literature of this kind. Of course, the analysis is not very deep (I would have preferred more), but I think the experiment w.r.t. presentation style paid off. The book provides a reasonable amount of food for thought and pointers towards more works on the matter. Good stuff.

My second choice might make sense to some who know me. Being a Tamilian whose only real cultural predilection is coffee (something I do rue sometimes), I found both the title and the topic apt. The book is something of a cultural history of Tamil Nadu. Looks a little more heavy than I want to read right now, but will get to it soon. Happy purchase.

While the Book Café guys wrapping up, they decided that they’d give out a few free copies of Al Raines’ Soul Search Engine (signed!) and November Rain. *grin*

And the funny part is I went to the fair once, left without buying anything, thought “what the hell” and went back to actually buy the books, which is when this happened. Oh sweet indecision.

I know there’s something I’m forgetting, but maybe I’ll remember and make another post of it.

Obituary

2008-03-22T09:23:27Z

Nouveau ... I lau eet

2008-03-04T18:40:02Z

I’d tried the Nouveau drivers for my NVidia GeForce Go 7400 a long time ago, and they sucked as much as the nv drivers (I’d tried to help a dev fix a few things, but without much success). I decided to ditch my proprietary drivers today to give them another whirl. I have nothing much against the proprietary drivers — they work pretty well, for the most part. My 3D acceleration is often better than the Windows drivers, though support for projectors sucks a bit.

The Nouveau drivers have improved massively. 3D is practically non-existent, but the normal X experience is very good. I even feel like my fonts are a tad smoother. The RandR12 support (which allows changing orientation etc. of you screen, in addition to picking up new monitors really smoothly) was flawless. I can’t wait for 3D support to get better. This project is really kicking butt.

Junkyard Groove

2008-02-25T18:44:12Z

For those of you who’ve not heard (of?) Junkyard Groove, here’s a video of their awesome song, It’s OK. Watch!

Eastwind Festival

2008-02-25T18:32:52Z

The icing on the cake that was my time at Freed.in was that I got to spend one evening at the Eastwind Festival (thanks to Piyush Verma for the ride that made this possible!)

It was brilliant. I got to listen to the Raghu Dixit Project (and get on their blog, to boot) and Junkyard Groove. These are both amazingly talented bands, and I do hope to catch some more of their music in the days to come. I got some pretty neat photos at the concert.

I bought 2 CDs — Raghu Dixit’s first, eponymous album, and Pentagram’s It’s OK, It’s All Good (the one with Voice) on it. They’re both awesome buys. I can’t wait for Junkyard Groove to get some of their music out too (are you listening guys? Someone point them to this blog post please!)

(Addendum: The Raghu Dixit CD comes with 2 copies of the CD — one for you, and one to give to a friend. This is such an awesome idea — kudos to Counter Culture (the label) for going with this idea. You guys rock!)

(Addendum 2: More photos here.)

Freed.in

2008-02-25T18:18:04Z

So I finally did make it to Freed.in/2008.

I had a great time, though it took me a while to understand what exactly the objective and focus were. The talks were on a variety of topics (as diverse as communities, education, mobility, indie music and open street maps). The single theme, though, was Knowledge, and the freedom associated with it (this is me paraphrasing/simplifying). Since this a really broad topic, I didn’t know what to expect when I got here. The talks were really interesting and well-delivered, but at the end of it, I didn’t get the kind of “closure” I expected. To some extent, I guess I went in with the wrong set of expectations. On the other hand, it might make sense for Freed.in/2009 (be there — I will!) to pick a narrower focus so that we can come there, talk, discuss, and come away with something tangible.

This is by no means intended to take anything away from the massive effort the organisers and volunteers put into Freed.in — as I said, I had a great 3 days!

And here are the photos — not too many, but some interesting ones in there. :-)

FOSSKriti photos and slides

2008-02-20T08:21:55Z

The slides for the FOSSKriti talks and workshops are up on the site.

And late as they may be — the photos!

FOSSKriti Finalé

2008-02-17T13:39:30Z

FOSSKriti is winding up now. Today was also very good.

We started with Piyush continuing the KDE track, this time for developers. It was a good talk — the quick ‘n dirty PyQt demo was the icing on the cake. It really showed people how easy working on desktop apps can be.

We had a BoF session in the afternoon that rotated around Open Standards and Open Formats. We had about 20 people there, and after a 5-10 minute intro, we got around to a pretty interesting discussion. We started talking about whether open standards are really a “good thing”. The general consensus was that companies should be able to make money from their products, but vendor lock-in is bad. People agreed that the Adobe’s PDF model of keeping the format open and making money off the tools seems to work well. We then progressed to talk about how we can impact open format adoption. We settled on:

Use open formats
Accept only open formats in communication, to what extent is possible
Get people to use open formats
- Start with people who are willing to experiment and change
- Then move to people who don’t care, and show them how open formats are better for them
- Keep trying, no matter how bleak it looks
Keep bugging companies that use closed formats to open them

The discussion was lively, and went all around the board — good fun.

Finally, Chaitanya Gupta of Cleartrip.com gave (actually, is giving) a talk on Common Lisp. People are sitting in there instead of standing in the queue to listen to Strings, so I’m guessing something is going right. *Grin*

Oh, and did I mention that we distributed 200+ Ubuntu/Kubuntu-KDE4/$distro_of_choice CDs just today?

So it’s been a fantastic four days. Neither the weather nor colds, sore throats, and $illnesses could get in the way. We had awesome speakers who came here against a whole bunch of odds (thanks Shreyas, Ankita and Piyush!)

Saurabh Nanda made it possible of course, to arrange the event at all.

And of course all the volunteers out here kicked butt. They tirelessly did stuff late into the night if it needed doing — designing and putting up posters, waking up early (or not sleeping) to get to the airport in the morning, and on and on.

A *very* special thanks goes out to Atul Chitnis — our event would’ve floundered somewhere right near the beginning. He guided, helped, prodded, pushed and made FOSSKriti what it is. And there’s Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Pradeepto Bhattacharya, and Runa Bhattacharjee who supported us from the moment we told them what we were planning to do. Thanks, guys!

So things are winding down, and I’m off to pass out in a ditch somewhere. :-)

[Rohit has to get photos up (put ’em up, dammit!), and I really really hope we can get videos of some of the events (update soon)]

... addendum

2008-02-16T20:03:54Z

Can't believe I forgot this — even before the Beagle Hackfest started, Sainath got started on hacking up a Beagle search plugin for Pidgin. You just select some text, and you can easily start a Beagle search with a couple of clicks. And it extends well to any search service. He's going to release this soon, so the dude's made FOSSKriti even better!

FOSSKriti Goodness

2008-02-16T18:47:28Z

So the Beagle Hackfest happened on Thursday, starting at 10 p.m. We expected a few people, but were pleasantly surprised by the 60 who turned up. I might’ve scared off 20 of them with my initial presentation on what and why were were there. That still left us with 40+ really enthusiastic people.

We had some trouble starting up the machines, but our awesome participants stuck it out till we got things hammered out, with an amazingly patient dBera helping a lot. Things went on till 4 a.m. (at which point we needed to get just a little shut-eye (a few didn’t sleep at all) to prepare for the next day). At this point, we submitted a Firefox Beagle Search Bar written by Jai Kumar Singh (a.k.a. flukebox). In a day or two, another group should be able to submit a patch for a BibTeX filter. And there’s another project that I hope to talk more about in the days to come.

Yesterday (Friday) morning, we had Shreyas Srinivasan delivering a talk on building sexy UIs with Clutter. We had about 200 people in the hall, and it was a huge success. How do I know this? There were a lot of questions after the talk and they were almost all relevant and insightful. Afterwards, a bunch of people even got in touch with Shreyas about getting started on contributing. ‘Twas good!

Today started with Ankita Garg delivering a workshop on the Linux kernel. The lab was packed, and we had to turn away a huge number of people. A lot of the crowd was too new to Linux to appreciate what was happening, but some people took away what was intended.

This was followed by Piyush Verma’s talk on KDE4 for users. This went well — good turn out, and people learnt about KDE, asked good questions. He’s going to be talking about KDE 4 from a developer’s perspective. Looking forward to that. :-)

Next up was Ankita again, with a talk on LinuxChix. We had expected a large turnout but had about 13 women and 20 men. But the crowd was interested, and we had a good discussion after the talk covering the LinuxChix organisation, and how it can be useful in the context of the audience. Ankita’s got the list of stuff that came out of the discuss so I’ll link to it when it’s out.

Since we ticked off a whole bunch of IITK people by turning them away from the kernel workshop (we decided to keep only the non-IITKians). So Ankita very awesomely agreed to take another session. And we had a packed lab again. This time, the crowd was a lot more savvy, and things went better. If only we’d had more time, we could’ve had a longer session with more questions. But bravo to Ankita for talking for 6 hours today. Anyone who’s delivered even an hour-long talk will know what a feat that is.

As the finale for today, Saurabh Nanda and Chaitanya Gupta of Cleartrip.com are conducting a Ruby on Rails workshop, followed by a hackfest. We’ve got the CSE department’s largest classroom full of interested and engaged people, so we’re happy to go as late into the night as we need to. :-D

So that’s how FOSSKriti’s been going so far. Tomorrow’s the last day. It’s been legendary! (I told you so ...)

[photos soon]

And the surprises are out ...

2008-02-06T17:24:33Z

And the surprise is out — the wonderful folks at Cleartrip.com (especially Saurabh Nanda), in addition to being awesome and supporting sponsors, are going to be delivering two workshops.

The workshops are on Ruby on Rails (a hackfest will follow the workshop) and Common Lisp. I was around when these guys were planning out the workshops, and their energy and passion when it comes to RoR and CL is incredibly contagious.

So not only are these guys making FOSSKriti possible, they’re helping us make it kick even more butt!

(p.s.: more info on the CL workshop and RoR hackfest will be out soon)