I was pleasantly surprised to find a Bollywood Music channel ranked 60th in the Shoutcast charts. There were 384 listeners when I last saw the page.

I love the moment when you help somebody learn something and they have that sparkle in their eye when they realized they understood it. Here’s one of those virtual sparkles:

Oct 27, 2005:

Decided to abandon “Dive into Python” for the time being, it is REALLY frustrating for me to hanging at chapter 5 without moving forward for so long…. I think it is me, my limitation to understand. So, I decided to surf around the net to look for another tutorial, perhaps a gentler one. Foudn “byte of Python”, 110 pages in all, not too long. So, will give it a go. Hopefully within few weeks, this could equip myself better to go for “Dive into Python” again.

Nov 20, 2005:

Learning Python, still. So far so good, I am on page 85!!! So, that is only 20+ pages to finish it. I consider it a big achievement, hahaha. And, what pleased myself most is that, I finally get through object-oriented programming, hmmm, feel like celebrating already

Nov 25, 2005:

Finished Byte of a Python tutorial, finally. I think the tutorial is good, especially for begineer. But I also think that it is too surface/brief if one really want to take a step further. So the tutorial itself did point out what to do next, where to go for further learning resources.

Dec 2, 2005:

I considered the basic of my contact completed. Now I have function to list out all contacts, add new contacts, delete contacts, and find a contact.

Nothing to shout about really, but the building up of this apps is quite interesting. I just create the barebone of the program to do the basic stuff, then add some validation, or extra functions, like before adding a contact, check if it already exist, if yes, ask whether the user actually want to replace the current one… etc.

Hey, I really enjoy the process. Now I am thinking of the next step, either create a better user interface with some GUI tool, or make it a web application thing. I don’t know if that is over ambitious since this is just the first actual program I wrote in Python, but we will see…

That last part about the contacts program is a task I have suggested to write a program for to test whether the reader has learnt enough about Python.

KDE India has been launched. The Dot has the story.

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From riding on the roof of the jeep, to walking 10 km, to diving in freezin’ cold water, to feasting our eyes to lush green hills, to loads of laughter, we did it all.

Criccer … I don’t know what else to call it. This was a game that is a cross between cricket and soccer, being played in the stadium/grounds near my home. The bowler throws the football and the batsman bats by kicking the football, and then runs. All the other rules are those of cricket, such as the batsman gets out if the football hits the wicket.

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Then, I heard the announcer mention that this is an inter-school tournament, with “qualified referees.” When I left, the score was 12 runs for 7 wickets in 5 overs.

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Watch the Linux Can! video (I took yesterday night) now!

I just can’t get that tune out of my head …

Update : The video is now available on Google Video.

Yesterday was such a long and awesome day.

The day started with me missing Taj’s talk on Entropy and I’m still kicking myself for that one. I attended Gora’s talk on IndLinux efforts and I got to know about the various efforts in localization and translations going on.

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Then, Alan Cox spoke on Modern Linux Device Drivers. There was so much information that he was doling out that I didn’t quite follow, but I did get the gist and understood that kernel stuff ain’t that much of a voodoo as I thought it would be. It simply requires a lot more discipline and awareness of how design impacts performance.

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Then, it was Welte’s turn to talk how he reverse-engineered Motorola’s EZX linux phones to allow a full free software stack to be used on the phone. It was interesting to note the various steps he takes, including using an oscilloscope to find out which probes and points actually work! I didn’t stay for the whole talk because the amount of jargon involved was simply beyond me.

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Next, I was listening to Volker on the Munich City’s transition to free software. Interestingly, in the city’s evaluation, they found the proprietary solutions to be cheaper than the free software contract quotes (we are talking a difference of 10 million or more!) but they took many more considerations such as long-term costs, support, localization, etc. and finally OpenOffice+Linux got lot more points and was finally chosen by the Munich city. The last-minute offers by MS which include cuts of 7 million dollars, etc. were not considered by Munich.

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After that, we were in an Advanced Python BoF with Taj, Siddharth, and many others. With Sid being present, the talk veered off in various directions and that’s a good thing. Sid was talking about how to have some feedback values put in generators and Taj gave an example of how such a problem is faced in producer-consumer setup when they are using python generators. Taj said there’s a relevant PEP that’s out there but with no consensus yet on what’s going to be done about it. There was much more discussed including decorators, metaclasses, and Ruby too (no, we didn’t bash it).

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(more…)

Today, the keynote address was by Andrew Cowie on Inside|Outside, and it was a brilliant talk. Cowie is a very animated and fun person. The talk was about how people are on the inside or outside of the community and what it takes to cross over. He gave various examples, including himself on how he had to step in to take care of java-gnome because the original author vanished from the scene. He also explained we need to be pragmatic and show a united front. For example, he was particularly appreciative of Hari Krishnan’s posters and why it shouldn’t matter whether he used a proprietary software such as Corel Draw. Actually, Hari needed some vector drawing ability which was not available in any of the open source tools. The people who bitched about using a non-open source software would better have spent their time fixing the actual problem. Similarly, he slammed the “GNU/” thingy issue raised everytime in a conference and people actually cheered him! I liked the way he stressed “No one can tell you no” … Cowie has put up the talk slides online.

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Then, I attended Till Adam’s talk on Kolab and got to know how a German ministry funded Kolab 1 and subsequently how Kolab 2 has become a real viable alternative to the Exchange/Outlook combination. The technical bits were interesting, like how Kolab just reuses Cyrus-imapd for everything and treats all the information as just imap mails, including memos and calendars, etc. Since Cyrus-imapd is very scalable and kolabd is a lightweight daemon, Till said that many deployments of Kolab had scaled really well.

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Then, I caught the last few minutes of Dr. George Easaw talking about Moodle. He was very enthusiastic about Moodle and is using this course management system in their college.

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The FOSS in Agriculture : OSCAR talk was very interesting. OSCAR stands for Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture in Rural Areas and has been sponsored by the French Institute of Pondicherry. OSCAR has a database of plants and images of the different parts of the plant. Once a farmer selects how the plant looks like, the list of species that match it are shown, and the correct species can be selected. In the species page, many details are present such as the names in local languages, whether it is a weed or a plant, whether it is good or bad, etc. They have developed this software in conjunction with teams in the field coordinating with farmers. Apparently, they want the software to reach a certain stage of completion and then open source it, which would likely be around March of next year.

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Then, Sai Sreekanth spoke about FOSS in primary education. He presented his experience with schools in Kuppam and how freely available software made a difference to the learning of the children. Interestingly, he said that training and English were not the barriers – just having a computer running with all the software loaded were enough and the kids really learn to explore on their own. He demonstrated a few software that were very useful and the audience were quite fascinated by the breadth and depth of the software such as Tux Math Scrabble, Celestia, Anagramarama, edu.kde and many more. There is a whole lot of software out there available for school education that need to be taken advantage of, especially in hinterland areas where good teachers are rare and there are budget constraints. For example, if a school can’t afford a real chemistry laboratory, then ChemConnection is an amazing piece of software where you can mix and match chemicals and see the result of the reactions. Sai pointed to many more resources such as iosn.net, ofset.org, pratham.org and Edubuntu.

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Next, I attended Kalyan’s talk on Web Application Security. He made revelations on how insecure sites can be and how easy it could be to circumvent the “128-bit SSL encryption high-security” stuff and do nasty things. All you need is 10 min to look around the HTML code. In fact, he demonstrated how we can easily get DVD players from Rediff Shopping or Indiatimes Shopping by changing the price from say 2999 to just 2 rupees in the HTML code and then clicking submit… Don’t try this at home, kids. His stress was that cryptography gave a false sense of security, it was easy to bypass the security. What is most needed is common sense and strict input validation is one of the best ways to be secure.

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Then, I attended the Foss in Education : A Panel Discussion. Yes, it’s a recurring theme in the discussions I attended today. Many points were discussed but Atul came in and set the discussion straight explaining the difference of FOSS in education and FOSS as education and why we need to differentiate between the two. The former is using FOSS as tools for education whereas the latter means FOSS becomes syllabus. Obviously, I think the former is a better idea. There were professors and students participating in the discussion actively. Gopi Garge was chaperoning the discussion and summarizing the points regularly.

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Unfortunately, attending these sessions meant missing Kaustubh’s podcasting talk and Mrinal’s FOSS Studio talk as well.

Finally, I last attended the KDE Development Workshop by Taj and Till.

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Outside, people had gathered in groups and were all discussing away. You could just feel the ideas and discussions and opinions whooshing by.

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Update : Philip has put up his notes on why foss in education makes sense.

A patch I had submitted to Django for the SQLite3 backend, 3 months ago, finally made it through (suitably modified by Adrian). It was a nice surprise to see my name in the list of contributors