OK, so this entry should have been posted a few months ago, at least.

Along with a bunch of other posts I should have made. Oh well, better late than never.

My old laptop, an acer travelmate finally gave in. The battery life suddenly became < 10 minutes, and Fedora stopped booting. I tried to get it serviced, but my warranty had expired long ago.

I was thinking of what I could get to replace my old laptop, and I finally settled on the T61.



I decided to name this one yoda. I was listening to this Weird Al Song when the machine arrived.

It was actually quite difficult to get the machine. Lenovo, at least in India, has quite badly informed service in India. A couple of gripes over here:
* Lenovo (or at least the vendor I went to) doesn't keep any Thinkpads in their Sales center, or their service center.
* The specs on the Lenovo website are all inaccurate. The wireless card and screen are not the same as on the website
* The machine came installed with Windows Vista. But if course I b0rked it to install Fedora. When I put in my 'recovery DVD', my machine is suddenly, magically downgraded to Windows XP. I mean, wtf? Lenovo says they give the downgrade intentionally, and customers can ask for a free Vista DVD, but customer care here is unaware of it
* I went and bought a new battery for the laptop. They said it'll take a day or two to send the battery, as they don't keep it in the showroom. When they send it, the BATTERY DOESN'T FIT in my laptop! It's last years battery. When I call and tell them, they tell me that 'It fits, you must not be putting it in right'. Of course, they never tested what battery they send. Eventually, I had to send my laptop as well as my battery to the lenovo service center before they admitted their mistake, and gave me the correct battery.

One of the greatest things about open source apps is that they get ported to a huge variety of platforms.

I was playing around with my new phone, and I was alarmed to find that someone had ported putty to it.

Now putty is an SSH client, and lets you log into a remote terminal. I usually check my mail via mutt running remotely somewhere, so I use putty a lot when i can't get near a linux machine.

Putty has been ported to almost every single platform I can think of: Windows, Linux/*nixes, Windows Mobile, SymbianOS, MacOS

Yesterday, my exams finished so I went back to working on my pet project, the Bonjour Plugin for Kopete.

I commited Revision 758598, and with it comes a very functional plugin, which completely supports chatting (at least with pidgin)

Here is where YOU can help:
* I need help working with other IM clients (possibly). If anyone has iChat, or Adium, or any other messenger client, do me a favour. Start a small chat with anyone (via bonjour) just say a few words, and send me the packets that wireshark reports (port 5298)
* A Nice ui for configuring options. The old UI is in bonjouraccountpreferences.ui, and is fugly. I basically need all the same options as pidgin. At the very least, a 'First Name', 'Last Name', 'email address' box.
* KConfigXt. I just can't seem to figure out how kopete plays with KConfig. This is what I'll be working on next
* Does anyone know if the name bonjour is trademarked? I'd hate to have to rename everything :|
* I need some help with icons. I am not sure if the icons pidgin uses are trademarked, or some other legalese I don't understand. Does anyone know if is restricted? If anyone has some nice, free icons, please send :D


OK, OK, It's time for the big screenshot:


On a Sidenote:
I'm wondering how much of my code is pidgin specific, as I don't think the standard is very well adhered to. Bonjour is a strange protocol.

Happy New Year.

So far, this years been awesome (at least the first 30 minutes) thanks to some amazing Strawberry Cheesecake.

Also, I got my car back from the body shop today. I'm glad to see that everything in it still works, and the car wasn't as badly smashed as I thought it was.

Have a happy and prosperous New Year all!

This Has to be the coolest open source game EVER written.

Frets on Fire
Frets on Fire on Wikipedia

FOSS.IN means a lot of things, to a lot of people. For some, it is a great chance to come down to Bangalore, and talk about the new, awesome stuff that they are working on. For some, it's a chance to meet some of the big names of the FOSS spectrum, and learn how to contribute. For a few, it's a great chance to meet a bunch of friends for a Quake III Open Arena fragfest, and maybe catch a few beers with friends.

However, for a small groups of people, FOSS.IN much more than just the five day event that the rest of the world sees. FOSS.IN represents an entire year of hard work, and five days for the whole world to judge our efforts. And this year, the planning started incredibly early, because this year, we knew that FOSS.IN was going to be unlike any previous edition. We knew that we were going to shake things up enough, especially with the inclusion of Project Days, that we needed to start early.

From that day on, nearly every Sunday was dedicated to FOSS.IN. Some of the most important decisions were made, while sitting around Atul's family room, eating Biriyani and sipping on (diet) Coke. This is where the schedules were finalized. Where the Call for Participation was written, and where it was published from. This is also where Pictures for the posters were taken, edited and released.

And Team FOSS.IN decides everything for the event. And I mean everything. From the format of the event, to arranging for speakers to live, the the food at the event, the Bandwith of the event, to how often the toilets of IISC are cleaned. Absolutely nothing is left to chance. Talk to Shreyas. He'll tell you about a certain Taxi Driver, who decided to call up at 3am, to tell shreyas 'Saaar, it is raining. Are you sure I have to go pick someone up at the airport?'.

And everything doesn't always go as according to plan. Every now and then, we found a little stink bomb waiting for us via the team mailing lists. Or a clever blog post as a reminder to people who kept forgetting (ie: Me) that the event is FOSS.IN, not `foss.in`.

Being on the Team is probably one of the most fulfilling things I'll ever do. It's an awesome feeling knowing that you helped to put together one of the world's largest community events. I got to hang out with a load of speakers, in particular Till Adam, Kévin Ottens, Pradeepto and Lennart Poettering, all of whom I learned an incredible amount from.

This year's FOSS.IN is definitely the one which I learned the most from. In particular, this is the first FOSS.IN where I had a project I immediately wanted to complete. Throughout the conference, I saw people chatting over Bonjour, and was incredibly annoyed that Kopetedidn't have support for it. Well, it's a work in progress!

Team FOSS.IN is an incredibly close knit family. The day before FOSS.IN, as I was driving outside the venue, my car was hit by a truck. Pretty badly. It was Shreyas who came and rescued me and helped out at the Police Station. When Atul said (during the closing ceremony) that `Team FOSS.IN is incredibly unique. We don't even have to say a word to each other, we all just know what needs to be done, and it gets done`. He wasn't joking.

Some of the best people I know make this event happen, and they do it well! (special mention for Gopi and Sugandhi who do not have blogs). It makes me swell up with pride to remember that I am part of TEAM FOSS.IN.

I've been trying out various blogging clients today.

First I tried out Blokkal. It's the blog client I just want to like. It's pretty integrated with KDE, down to querying Amarok for songs. This I guess is pretty good for people who have a number of blogs, as it keeps track of all of them.

Then I downloaded and installed Chota by Kushal Das. Unfortunately, it doesn't have support for LiveJournal (yet at least). But screenshots show that it's looking pretty good!.

Finally, I just did a `yum search blog`and picked up on Drivel. It's a GNOME thing :p, but it's still pretty cool. Nice syntax highlighting for HTML tags. Using this to post now

Another Livejournal only client I saw was KLuJe, which is another KDE one. It's pretty cool, nice and small. No syntax highlighting though :(

Anyone else have any recommendations for a blog client?

Ever since FOSS.IN/2007 I've been procrastinating about writing a Bonjour protocol plugin for Kopete

I've actually come quite close to finishing it.

The protocol currently tracks people coming online/offline, and dynamically keeps track of all users. I still need to implement the code for sending and receiving messages

Too Bad I have exams soon, I'd really like to finish this project.



Code here

FOSS.IN always makes me feel that it is about time I stop talking, and start Hacking.

This years theme was the old quote from Linus Torvalds Talk is Cheap, Show me the Code!!

Everyone at FOSS.IN/2007 seemed to be using the Bonjour/iChat protocol to chat with people on the LAN, and I was a bit annoyed that there was no support for this protocol in my favorite chat client kopete.

So, I've started playing around with Bonjour/Avahi/DNSSD, and I'm trying to write a Bonjour Plugin for Kopete.

I thought i'd try and get used to the KDE-Avahi bindings, and I came up with this, a Command Line, Read Only Bonjour Client. Currently, it just runs in a shell, but anyone that can see it on avahi can speak to it. Just that you can't reply to them. Yet at least

It's a good enough minor benchmark for now. I plan to work on the entire plugin as soon as my exams get over.

Ironically, it seems that the only time I get to code something interesting, is just before my exams start, I wonder why.

I'll post more on FOSS.IN later. It was a blast. I'm still recovering from it.

All right,

It's that time of year again. The FOSS.IN/2007 Call for volunteers was officially released yesterday. You can find it over here:

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/foss-in/message/4791

Please go register as a volunteer NOW. We are planning to have the volunteers meet on Friday. Yes this friday, the 23rd, so please keep yourselves free.

We _especially_ need volunteers right now to reach students in colleges. All students on the list, please write to me offlist. I'll make sure I rush posters and FOSS.IN stickers to you.

We've had a letter from VTU in the past explaining why students should be attending FOSS.IN (in 2005), and it's more than likely that there will be another letter this year to the same effect.

I'll see you at the volunteer meet

Does anyone have a recommendation for a place where one can get DVDs duplicated in Bulk?

justdial.com has a lot of places, but I wanted to know if anyone knows a place that they have used personally.

The List of Selected Project Days at FOSS.in/2007 have been announced

The announcement is here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/foss-in/message/4362

The Eight Selected Projects are:
* Debian/Ubuntu
* Fedora
* Gnome
* IndLinux
* KDE
* Mozilla
* OpenOffice.org
* OpenSolaris

Congrats to all the selected project.

I've been working on a small project under my FAFL teacher, Dr Kavi Mahesh, on converting a Regular Expression to a non-Discreet Finite Automata, and then using it to match a string.

Interesting Stuff. I want to make a Qt graphical front end for it, but for now, all I have is the backend working.

I need to develop a good algorithm to draw the NDFA, without having to re parse the Regular Expression


Also, I haven't blogged in ages!!!

Wtf!

It's about 3am, and I'm studying Microprocessors for an exam. I thought I'd just leave the 'New 7 Wonders of the World' webcast playing on my laptop.

It's alarming how shoddily the thing is put together.

When Ben Kingsley is reading out the names of some monuments, he is on the second one, and whoever is controlling the video is showing the fourth one. Then the video guy suddenly realises what he is doing, rewinds and starts showing it all over again.

And then Ben Kingsley calls someone onto stage (the representative of the UN Something). The guy is a no show, and they have to announce that he was unable to make it. Fair enough. But then Ben Kingsley and the Director of the N7W walks off stage, and then for a few minutes, you can hear some shouting going on before the mic guy disconnects them.

And they are taking so freaking long to announce the results.

They only 'formally' announced that the pyramids are honorary members

Also the sound recording at venue isn't so great. There is this sort of band with members from around the world playing, and you can only hear the drums.

There is also a HUGE amount of 'discreet' signaling to people off stage by everyone on the stage.

The Seven Wonders (in order they were announced) are:
1) The Great Wall of China (announced by Neil Armstrong. Ironic as it's the only man made structure visible from the moon)
2) Petra
3) Christ the Redeemer
4) Machu Pichu
5) Chichen Itza(announced by Christiano Ronaldo)
6) The Colosseum
7) Taj Mahal

PS: I'm going to keep editing this post to add complaints :P
PPS: It really sucks that the Statue of Liberty didn't make it
PPPS: Pyramids are an honorary member

FINAL EDIT: Overall, it wasn't so bad. Congrats to all the winners :D Oh, and the software that you use to watch the webcast, OctoShape, accepts 'mplayer -dumpstream' as a valid player :D

The Bujinkan India is having a one day course on Self Protection for Women taught by Sheila Haddad

The Course is on the 14th or the 15th of July (either day) at the St Joseph's European High School from 9:30am - 6:00pm.

You can register at:
1) Time Out Cafe, Sona Towers, off Cunningham Road;
2) Road Trip restaurant at Indiranagar;
3) Levitate @ 100 Ft. restaurant on 100 ft. Road, Indiranagar;
4) Miller 46 on Millers Road;
5) Opus; Palace Cross Road / off Sankey Road
6) Ashnil - opposite Namdaris, Koramangala.
7) Contemporary Arts and Crafts on Victoria Road

Call Any of the Phone Numbers on Poster for more details.

EDIT: Oh Yeah, it's Rs. 2500/- for the one day course

There is just so much information out there:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_games

The world largest online addictive-waste-of-time (orkut) has just added a `My Feeds` link.

Wow!!!!

Now I predict I'll waste even more time orkutting

Bwahahaha

Hilarious Video

April is going to have one _Amazing_ BLUG meet.

Haralde Welte, of the Netfilter project, and Sean Moss-Pultz are coming down to Bangalore and will be speaking on the OpenMoko project.

The meet is on the 10th of April, 2007, At 4 pm at the Chancery, on Lavelle road (NOT the chancery pavillion on richmond road).

It's open for all, and free to attend.

But please, drop us a mail over here, and tell us you are attending, so we can get the right numbers to the hotel.

openmoko-event AT blug DOT in

Don't forget to let us know you are coming.

See you all soon.

PS: Yes, I am the new BLUG co-ordinator.