Kishan Goyal~~~HoneyInVeins

Past few months..

kishangoyal — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 14:45:20 +0000

Its been over 4 months since I last updated this blog. Past few months have been very eventful. I did some things and did not do some, like updating this blog, which had its own consequences.

Anyway, I had my sixth semester exams till 20th June after which, had a month-long holiday at home during which I completed a 4-week course on PHP and started working on a desktop app. based on the Spelling Bee. The code is hosted here. A recent screenshot of the app.A lot of work is still left to be done. Hoping to do a release very soon.

Fedora Activity Day, 29-30 May 2010 at Pune.

kishangoyal — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:14:04 +0000

A Fedora Activity Day was held at the Red Hat office at Pune, India on the 29th and 30th of May, 2010. The event page can be found here and the reports by the attendees is here. I had the opportunity to be a part of the event which turned out to be a great learning experience for me.

meejan , yevlempy and /me reached Pune just past midnight on the 28th. We reached the Red Hat office the next day at 9 a.m. The day started with a session on GNU Autotools by debiansid after which everyone present there spoke of the work they intended to do over the weekend. After struggling with many typos for sometime, I finally managed to get things working.

Meejan and /me worked on gFotoStat over the two days. Since the release of v 0.2, we had got a list of around 8 bugs/features to be worked upon and I worked on shortening the list as much as possible. Meanwhile, I also submitted the gfotostat spec for review. Meejan and myself managed to kill some of the bugs and added a Preferences menu to the app. (it is not fully functional as of now). Unmanindu suggested to add an option to select the bar or pie charts to be set as default view from the Preferences menu. Also, on the 30th was his talk on OLPC as a Fedora downstream which was recorded by kushal. View the talk here (111 mb)

Towards the end of the event, there was a feedback session and discussion whether organizing such FADs did serve its purpose and FUDCon among other things.

Some work still left to do after which I will be finishing as soon as my semester exams wrap up (on the 18th) Expecting the v0.3 release of gFotoStat very soon after that.

gFotoStat repo created

kishangoyal — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:47:33 +0000

Thanks to Sankarshan‘s comment on the gFotoStat v0.2 release post, Meejan and myself made a rpm of gFotoStat.

The repo can be found here

The .repo file can be found here.

Please try it out and comment. Any feedback would be much helpful.

btw, found a few bugs already :-/ Also, looking forward to sorting the parameters and adding a progress bar soon

gFotoStat v0.2 released

kishangoyal — Wed, 19 May 2010 19:32:12 +0000

It’s been quite a while since the initial release of gFotoStat. Meejan and myself have been working on adding new features to the app. and killing bugs and are extremely happy to release gFotoStat v 0.2

The latest version can be downloaded here.

New features added :-

All generated images have proper descriptions.
Bar chart functionality added. Now, user has option to view either pie chart or bar charts.
User can save the generated image(s) from the File menu (it saves in the png format as of now

This is the intial screen that greets you when gFotoStat is first run.

Click on ‘Browse’ and select a folder containing some pictures. Click on ‘Generate’ to generate the charts.

A snapshot of the generated bar chart.

Few more snaps :-

Shutter Speed Bar Plot

Focal Length Pie Chart

We did manage to kill some bugs, but there still a few (read: many) are left.

Looking forward to add more features too… any comments/feedback would be of much help!

gFotoStat – A Photograph statistics application v 0.1 released

kishangoyal — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:09:58 +0000

For the past few weeks, Meejan and myself have been working on a photograph statistics application, gFotoStat.

In the form of pie-charts, gFotoStat provides info such as the Aperture, ISO, Focal Length and Shutter Speed of a number of images of a folder. The first release v 0.1 can be found here for download.

All this began on 4th March’ 10, when Kushal Das was in Durgapur to take a workshop on Python and PyGtk in Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering College. Staying up till 4 a.m., Harsh(yevlempy), Meejan, Kushal, Rtnpro and myself, had a lot of fun and that night, gFotoStat was born . Since then, Meejan and myself have been working on it closely with Kushal and now, a basic, usable version is ready.

It’s the first time that we’re working on something like this and this has been a very good learning experience. Over the coming few weeks, we intend to add more features such as an option to view bar charts instead of pie-charts, etc. and kill more and more bugs (got sooo many already! ). The app’s still an infant!

Would be pleased to receive feedback or suggestions that might help…

Mukti’10

kishangoyal — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:49:18 +0000

Mukti is the annual FOSS festival organised by the GNU/Linux Users Group of NIT Durgapur. Mukti 2010 was held on 5-7th Feb. Students from various institutions in and around Durgapur and many FOSS enthusiasts were present through the three days and AFAIK, for the first time, the registrations crossed the 1000 mark!

The first day began with the lighting of the lamp after which Prof. S. Bhattacharya, Director, NIT Durgapur, Mr. Indranil Das Gupta and Mrs. Stephanie Das Gupta addressed the audience. There were many events and workshops and after hanging around a bit at the IOTA stall, I went to attend the workshop on “Developing applications using Android“; although, I missed the workshop on Qt.

The second day, Indradg, Stepdg, Rtnpro and myself went to Bijra High School and thus, missed most of the events. The final day, I attended Debayan Banerjee’s session entitled “FOSS + Me” in which he talked about his own experiences with FOSS. It was inspiring to know the kind of the commitment he put into his work. This was the last talk of Mukti’10.

Although this time I did not attend many sessions ( just two in fact), it was nice to meet FOSSy people especially Indradg, Stephdg and Debayan. Debayan is one of the guys whom I know from the days when I had just begun using Linux and meeting him was a very nice experience.

Congratulations to all those who put their labour to make the event a huge success and hoping that the next year would be even bigger.

Moral Lessons! :P :P

kishangoyal — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:27:50 +0000

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

kishangoyal — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:31:29 +0000

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.

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

kishangoyal — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:58:26 +0000

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

kishangoyal — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:27:01 +0000

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