Moral Lessons! :P :P

Meejan was reading something on his laptop and I was sitting opposite him, having dinner. Just out of curiosity, I asked him that what was he reading. In the answer to my simple question, he told me two stories. They had an instant effect on me. So, here I will try to reproduce them (as-much-as-I-can) …

All right! Lets begin with the first…

Once upon a time ( yes! all such stories still(!) begin with these four words) … a lumberjack was very stressed. The reason: he had managed to chop off only 5 trees in the whole day even after working overtime for an hour and even during lunch, while his other co-workers were far ahead of him. But this was not the main cause of his concern.

The first day, he had chopped off 20 of ‘em and his boss was very happy,  giving him a bonus tip! The next day, he managed 18. One odd day, he thought. But this didn’t stop. Day after day, he put in more and more hours, toiled harder and harder, but was less productive… 15, 12, and so on. Too much, he thought. He went to his boss and sat down, wondering why all this was happening.

His boss asked him whether he was ill, to which he replied that he was absolutely fit. The boss then asked him that whether he had sharpened his instruments. Negative was the reply. He had got his answer.

MORAL OF THE STORY: left to be figured out as an exercise (:P).

The second one now…

uh! am too full to write up now, might fill in sometime later ( might )

Semesters have arrived! and it’s the same pants-on-fire time. Viva begins from 24th this month and theory early next month…  lots (more than all the other 4 semesters, I swear!) to study!

 

Fedora Workshop at IMPS College

A workshop was organised at IMPS College of Engineering & Technology, Malda from the 12th to 14th of October, ‘09 with the objective of introducing the FOSS world to the students. See this.

Kushal Das, Rtnpro, Yevlempy, Meejan and /me reached Malda on 12th morning. That journey to Malda has found a permanent place in my memory. Kushal da and Harsh(yevlempy) boarded the train from Sealdah, while rtnpro, meejan and myself were to board from Burdwan at 00:38.

It was around 00:20 that we decided to check out the reservation charts put up at the station. Surprisingly, we found our name missing from the list. Taking a good look at the print-out of the ticket, it dawned onto us that the booking was made for 11th Oct. (Thanks a lot, rtnpro!) and since it was past midnight, the date had changed to 12th! :-/ It was 00:30 by now and we dashed off to get tickets again.

Anyways, we did reach Malda and also got something to laugh at in the future. Thereafter, for the next three days, there were two sessions everyday, each being of around 2 hours’ duration.  2nd, 3rd and 4th year students from the IT dept. were told about FOSS, the 4F, Fedora, etc. Getting involved, where and how to begin, various ongoing projects, ideas, S0C, documentation, translation, etc. were discussed. Python found a liking among all of them, especially the 2nd years ones, who said that now, they would loath writing C codes for stacks and queues.  Pdfs, links, etc. were given to all and had there been an active internet connection, IRC would have been shown in a better way.

At the end of the day, the whole experience was very good and I’m looking forward to attend many more such events in future. Besides, also got a chance to meet with Kushal da after a long time.

A workshop was organised at IMPS College of Engineering & Technology, Malda from the 12th to 14th of October, ‘09 with the objective of introducing the FOSS world to the students. The event page is here.

Kushal Das, Rtnpro, Yevlempy, Meejan and /me reached Malda on 12th morning. That journey to Malda has found a permanent place in my memory. Kushal da and Harsh(yevlempy) boarded the train from Sealdah, while rtnpro, meejan and myself were to board from Burdwan at 00:38.

It was around 00:20 that we decided to check out the reservation charts put up at the station. Surprisingly, we found our name missing from the list. Taking a good look at the print-out of the ticket, it dawned onto us that the booking was made for 11th Oct. (Thanks a lot, rtnpro!) and since it was past midnight, the date had changed to 12th! :-/ It was 00:30 by now and we dashed off to get tickets again.

Anyways, we did reach Malda and also got something to laugh at in the future. Thereafter, for the next three days, there were two sessions everyday, each being of around 2 hours’ duration.  2nd, 3rd and 4th year students from the IT dept. were told about FOSS, the 4F, Fedora, etc. Getting involved, where and how to begin, various ongoing projects, ideas, S0C, documentation, translation, etc. were discussed. Python found a liking among all of them, especially the 2nd years ones, who said that now, they would loath writing C codes for stacks and queues.  Pdfs, links, etc. were given to all and had there been an active internet connection, IRC would have been shown in a better way.

At the end of the day, the whole experience was very good and I’m looking forward to attend many more such events in future. Besides, also got a chance to meet with Kushal da after a long time. Pics are here.

 

eventful chat with some friends

Few friends came over to my place today… it was pre-planned. But, what was supposed to be a small discussion, took the whole day.

Last night, I was chatting to my ex-roommate and classmate Abhijeet.  We were having a general talk when suddenly, he asked me, “I want to do some work… guide me”. hmm… I thought. And then, I introduced him to Kushal da, and they had quite a long conversation, at the end of which, Abhijeet told that he would come over today.

Today, he arrived with Ashish and Rahul. Meanwhile, Ratnadeep had also come to discuss a few things. Ratnadeep and /me showed them how to connect to the internet using their mobile phone… installed audio and video codecs, etc. Rahul, being an ECE student, provided with an FEL dvd and the iso; explained about IRC, the need to have their nicks registered, various channels, and some general stuff. They registered their nicks. They should be posting a blog on how to connect to the internet using a GPRS cellphone very soon.

Harsh(yevlempy) also arrived. My room was over-crowded but it felt nice. With so many of us gathered there, talks went on till 7:30 p.m. till we thought that we should leave something for the coming days

 

system-config-boot-tui

Past few days, I, along with Meejan, under the guidance of Kushal, have been working on system-config-boot. We wrote a tui version of it, which we sent to Harald, who accepted it, and after making the required changes, committed it in git.

The link to the rawhide build is here.

To get the work done, I had to study the python snack module.

The gui version code at /usr/share/system-config-boot/boot_gui.py helped a lot. There are two examples present at  /usr/share/doc/newt-python-0.52.10/ namely, peanuts.py & popcorn.py , are simple and very helpful. Hack on them and you’ll learn a lot.

Lots of thanks to Kushal for mentoring us. This has been my first contribution to a project… lots more should follow

 

Howto: Install Open ERP

Another HOWTO! 

Install Open ERP on Fedora . View it here.

 

Past few days, an Update.

Past few days have been quite hectic. And, the list of my pending tasks has increased considerably. I am halfway through with the conversion of the Fedora 11 installation wiki(the small install guide) into a pdf, hope to complete it by tonight… also have to make a wiki page in the fedoraproject wiki for the same and another one on how to install Sahana.

Besides, I am studying python for the Subtitle Downloader at the DGPLUG Summer Training. I have been slow with python and wish to pick up some pace (but how!! )The class on RPM packaging was very good and I am going through mbuf’s presentation and the RPM Workflow link… could anyone guide me to something very easy to try a hand at ?

Ah! I almost forgot… translation! I also have to translate the wiki into Hindi. Typing hindi on the keyboard is sooo… tough, I am painfully slow at it, but still have begun and will complete it soon (hope so!)

In the meantime, my classes have already begun and I will have to leave (probably tomorrow) for Durgapur to submit a letter to the college for additional leave

 

West Bengal State University, Barasat: Day-1

Yesterday was my first visit to the West Bengal State University, Barasat. Rtnpro, Meejan, Yevlempy(Harsh), Chandana and /me being led by IndraDG and StephDG reached the university around 12:30 p.m.

IndraDG led us straight to the Server Room. He got us acquainted with the equipments in use there. We were given a briefing about the wiring and the connections of the room, the batteries being charged by this *big* UPS (I have to admit, first look, I thought it was a CPU, a big CPU. But then, I noticed just a small display and no optical/usb drives… then I understood… this was one big UPS). This UPS is used to charge some 20 batteries which are arranged on a shelf, blocks of 4 in each of the five rows.

The UPS is a Liebert GXT-MT 6KVA UPS with a OpenComms Web Card.Indradg then explained some details about the UPS.  We were then told about the mechanism used to provide back-up during power cuts, IndraDg actually recreated a power cut by shutting down the power supply for a while. We were also introduced to the network configuration of the university.

It was time to get started… we set up a Desktop in place of the already-setup one. But the system was in a bad state… so we had to install Fedora 10. After the installation was complete, rtnpro began his task: downloading the Fedora 11 repository. But, rtnpro seemed to be having some trouble with it. A call to Susmit da… he mailed some instructions and finally…  there was some progress.

While rtnpro was busy with the repository, I had a cup of tea twice. The server room is so cold!… had to step outside every hour or so… Some posters citing “Do not switch off this machine! Work in progress” were prepared by StephDG and stuck on the desktop and the doors. IndraDG then showed us how to configure the router so that it can be controlled from outside. rtnpro could now login and check the progress sitting at his home. But, as we were about to leave, rtnpro hit the halt command on his terminal, not realising that he was logged in to the server. (thank you very much rtnpro! ) The system had to be booted again and the whle procedure cost us some 20-30 minutes.

However, we finally left the university at 5:30 p.m. I reached home at 8:50 p.m. and was so tired that I went to bed instantly, waking up at 7 this morning.

As of now, I am sitting alone in the server room – Day 2. rtnpro and meejan were supposed to be here at 11, but its almost 1 pm. and they haven’t arrived.

 

HOWTO Install Sahana

Just completed a HOWTO on installing Sahana, a Web based Disaster Management System. Hope this wiki would be able to guide people who want to install Sahana on Fedora. The link to the wiki page is here.

I would be grateful to receive any feedback or suggestions which would help me in improving my work.

 

HOWTO: Install Fedora 11

Yesterday, I was installing Fedora 11 Leonidas on my laptop virtually. I was using VirtualBox for the installation. I took snapshots of each and every step during the whole installation procedure and now, the result is a wiki page, where I have written down the installation procedure step-by-step along with the screenshots. The page can be found here.

I am currently translating the same to Hindi and will put up the link ASAP. Any comments/feedback for further improvement would be really hepful.

 

Project : Subtitle Downloader

SubDownloader is an application used to download/upload subtitles for videos(movies). Click here to visit the site and here for the project homepage. Download the tar.gz  here.

Basic Features:-

Two operating modes . First,  scans a directory for video files => based on the names, searches subtitles from opensubtitles.org => lists all available subtitles => one can download them. Second, one can search for subtitles of a video by its title/name.

The app is quite efficient and does the job fairly well. The whole process of scanning, seacrching and downloading hardly takes any time.

Intended Additions :-

1. Add support to download lyrics of audio files. I intend to make the workflow similar to the one used in downloading subtitles for videos ( scan=>search=>download ).It should be able to scan a directory for audio files, extract its metadata like title, artist, album, etc. => search for lyrics => download them. Alternatively, one should be able to search for the lyrics based on artists, albums, etc.

2. User should have a choice to download the lyrics as a separate document or integrate the lyrics into thr audio file’s metadata.

2. The ability to watch a directory for changes (additions, updates, etc.)

3. No rpm for SubDownloader exists, I would like to package it.

Problems I am facing:

1. Where to download the lyrics from? May be lyricsdownload . Any other alternatives?

2. How to integrate the downloaded lyrics into the audio file’s metadata? Is this possible? If the lyrics are downloaded as a separate document, it would cause some trouble for users having a huge collection of music.

I have created a wiki-page for the project and  started studying python (all SubDownloader coding is done in Python) but, I don’t have any idea about Qt. I would be glad to receive any comments/help/feedback/criticism which would help the proceedings.

Update : Meejan is also in this project with me.As of now, we are studying Python from the Byte of Python and the python docs. We are practising writing codes as we are studying, and getting used to the language. Initially, I did have some trouble with the language, but with time, I am getting used to it. But, browsing (and understanding) the code of SubDownloader is still some time away, at present, it completely goes over my head( ). Lots of studying to do…