Category Archives: Open Source

Privacy and Activity Manager (Zeitgeist) Release

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We all love privacy and we take it seriously. Most of the people whom I have met are pretty much vigilant about their data and which makes complete sense to have a tool which can you can use to fine tune your privacy settings. Till now most of our experience with Privacy Settings are related to Facebook which makes me feel like

Layman control center?

If you are a Zeitgeist user, it is pretty expected to expect a Privacy application. Yes, we have it. Today we are releasing it. The first release was a hastily assembled up together application using pygtk (gtk2) which served it’s purpose well for the time being.

Older version of Activity Log Manager

Older version of Activity Log Manager

Soon it was decided in Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando that Activity Log Manager will be included in Ubuntu Precise to provide greater privacy controls to user. We improved the looks based on the design provided by the Canonical Design Team.

The interface was kept as simple as possible. This first release lacks a few things as of now and some more UI polish is pending including localization support. Both of them will land sooner.

It has been integrated in Gnome Control Panel (which works only on Ubuntu). In distributions where it cannot integrate in Control Panel, it runs as a standalone application.

Here is how it looks

Entry in GNOME Control Center

Entry in GNOME Control Center

Blacklisting Applications

Blacklisting Applications

Files and Folder blacklisting

Files and Folder blacklisting

Activity Log Manager History tab with Icon

Activity Log Manager History tab with the Icon

The Zeitgeist Team worked on it and ported the application to gtk3 and vala in a few weeks which was a pleasure (and I finally learnt vala. Finally!)

Geeky Juice:

The release is named “Friendly Dolphin” 0.9.0 and can be downloaded from here.

This application would be made available in Ubuntu Precise soon.

If you are building it yourself and want Control Center integration, then pass –with-ccpanel to the configure script.

./configure --with-ccpanel

This would work on all the Linux distributions which derive from Ubuntu and don’t change the gnome-control-center packaging since this integration relies on a Ubuntu specific patch for control center.

Please log any bugs which you come across. To make sure that we are able to help you, please provide detailed explanation of what led to the issue. You can file your bugs here

GNOME.asia

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GNOME.Asia was held in Bangalore from 28th March to 3st April. It included a hackfest from 28th March to 1st April and two days of GNOME.Asia summit on April 2nd and April 3rd.

On 1st of April I attended AndroidCamp and was drenched by the time I came back home. only to find myself not well to attend on the first day of the summit. The first day was cut short to half because you Cricket World Cup Finals. India was in finals, the summit is in India and India is a country where cricket is religion and you expect people to turn up? :)

As I heard from Manu, the first day turnout was huge. That day India won the World Cup (YAY!). Next day I somehow managed to get up and head towards the venue (only 30 kms from my home).  I was one of the few people who reached the venue before 10AM on Sunday.

The first session I attended was from Allan Day on Designing the next generation desktop. Then I proceeded to another hall where Andre Klapper was giving his talk on Contributing to GNOME Documentation. He had some examples which was more easy to understand than plain talk on concepts and theory.

By the time Andre finished his talk, I met more friends – Yuvraj, Sindhu and Shashi. Next talk was from Yuvi who was talking on GStreamer 101. He explained GStreamer from a newbie perspective and slowly his talk started carrying more geeky explanation (expected). He continued even after his session got over by explaining his he got into GSoC on the Cheese project. He is the REAL motivator :)

When Yuvi finished his talk, Manu and Sankar were waiting for me outside the hall. This is the first time I met both of them even though Manu is from my college. There were more students from my college – two names I can remember is Vikas and Saurabh. Looks like LUG Manipal bore some substantial results.

After these session, I had a golden moment of my life when I went and met Vincent Untz. He is the current Godfather of GNOME. We both talked a bit on Zeitgeist when Allan Day and Andreas Nilsson also joined the conversation for a minute or two before we all moved for lunch.

The only two talks I attended in second half was on GDK(entered late so didn’t remember much) and another on DLNA in GNOME3 world by Arun Raghvan. I could not attend any other talk because I came out to talk to our friends when we met after a long time.

I am a bit sad that I missed a few talks. One of them was by Manu on Libyui and Contributions made by a newbie to free desktop’s empathy by Chandani Verma. I should have stayed back and also attended the Lightening talks. All the slides are available here

The event was well organized. I could not see any kind of chaos or anarchy. The openSUSE stall was filled up with students asking for it’s CD. I saw many students trying out openSUSE and guess what – most of them had Ubuntu installed. Whenever I glanced here or there, I could see people using Ubuntu everywhere :)

Techrights/Boycottnovell – Bane or boon? An experience

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Yesterday I was browsing through  the internet when I came across this link with the quote

“Microsoft has pushed DirectX into Intel’s silicon,” explained to us a reader

Can there be a limit on sensationalism? Dr Roy cannot escape his responsibilities by quoting misleading facts. Now, instead of cribbing all over, I headed to their IRC channel and met schestowitz and explained him the case. He did agree that that quote is not exactly true. Still that article is not edited to reflect the truth.

Roy was very polite and patient while I expressed my opinions, which is actually a good thing. Since it was a weekend and I could not go out due to some personal reason, I decided to stay on the channel just to know their real motives.

Microsoft employees are devils

This is a common belief that Microsoft employees are working day and night to destroy the world. Arn’t all the policy decisions taken by the top execs.  How many of the employees actually nod everytime Ballmer says Linux is cancer? Probably physically yes, they do nod. How many care?

Then MinceR jumped in and started proposing that they are evil/unethical people. I tried my best to explain that they need to earn their bread and butter. A vast majority of the software programmers don’t care about FOSS ideologies nor Microsoft’s ideologies. For them employment is a contract – you pay me, I work for you. Every person has a family to feed and a life to live. Social and peer pressure is also a factor why people want to work for Microsoft/Google/Yahoo etc. The dream of a better future is also a reason. I don’t paint every Microsoft employee as a devil.

Name calling is nothing new on #techrights/#boycottnovell , even I got flared, but I ignore those comments. It never came to my mind that some people think they have a right to be not polite. A strange right I never heard of.

Tobacco Industry

Roy thinks that tobacco industry is responsible for people’s death. I don’t disagree 100% as these industry cannot be completely absolved of their responsibilities. If people smoke and die, isn’t it the person’s fault. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. You cannot drop a nuclear bomb somewhere and blame nuclear technology for the devastation. Lastly remember that tobacco industry works only because we consume tobacco. It is a simple demand-supply equation.

I was even advised to go and read the principles of Gandhi(Ghandhi), which is strange since I was born and brought up in the country of Gandhi. If you want to take a page out of Gandhi’s struggle, look at civil disobedience, esp the Dandi March. He never needed to abuse or spread violence for achieving his target. Civil disobedience in FOSS world is to use FOSS products exclusively. Gandhi even called off Civil Disobedience when violence started occurring.

David Nielsen

So there is a common understanding that David being abused was good for the whole world.  Look at the statement which David got

Matthew Woehlke: I’m going to guess a lot of that “disrespectful personal mail” revolves around the use of mono? And why shouldn’t it?

So there is a clarification that disrespecting is a right. There is also an explanation that this isn’t a harsh reply.

If this wasn’t enough, then you can even find out of context cooked-up statements like

MinceR once again, m4n1sh explains that verbal abuse is the greatest crime one can commit
MinceR presumably right ahead of copyright infringement. :>
MinceR murder is way behind

I have no clue how this all comparisons were made or I ever used murderer and copyright infringement ever. By the way nothing special, this is expected.

At that moment it was only sebsebseb who was actually talked rationally. He did explain his stand and took the pains to read the backlogs before discussing further.

Identica

As I am not on identi.ca, so sebsebseb told me “People on identi.ca don’t like omgubuntu“. Actually I don’t find any reason to be on identi.ca. Just because it runs FOSS? Identi.ca is the smaller brother of twitter which lacks wit and sarcasm. There is no humour in any dents. Twitter community rocks. identi.ca community needs to improve themselves. StatusNet software for running identi.ca is great, but that hardly matters if you don’t have a good community.

I wanted to pass some links on how identi.ca is sort of usless, but I would reserve them for further use.

OMG Ubuntu

So the crime OMG Ubuntu committed is that they don’t scream and run around the room crying “Mono is crap and a threat”. I have seen all kinds of reviews on OMG Ubuntu including applications written in C, C++, Python, Vala, C# or any other language out there. It’s a news site and does it work as required. You cannot be impartial by leaving out Mono applications and calling yourself great. Leave that decision of using mono applications on the authors. They probably have more brains than you actually think.

They are pissed off at David writing blog posts about Banshee on OMG Ubuntu. Joey is not a programmer not any super-techie guy. Everyone does his fair part of job. One great comment is

the entirety of omgubuntu is juvenile, ignorant, and not worth our attention

That comment holds good for techrights actually. I firmly believe that you cannot say anything without annoying people. If you are being opinionated you will hurt sentiments. People love to get annoyed and take offence.

Conclusion

I chuckle when I am called stupid, and weird comments like qu1j0t3: he’s reaching for any insult he can hurl at us especially I never used a single abusive word. When 4 people were answering at once with huge messages, it takes time to reply. When I could not, I got this compliment

he can’t pay attention, both of his neurons are occupied with worshipping m$.

The usage of constant M$ makes me laugh. That’s all you can do to promote free software?

schestowitz needs to make it clear whether he agrees with all these abuses and  dogpiling? Otherwise people will consider all these comments to be the views of techrights community.

Does FOSS community need techrights? Is it bringing good name to the FOSS community? To the non-FOSS world are we looking extremist?

Now excuse me, I have to go and get some work done unlike techrights activists. I have a few assigned bugs, a few packages to build (learning) and write some documentation for my personal pet project.

So should I fork?

3 Replies

As the same time, there’s often a hypocrisy in these communities. When a change is suggested, half the developers shout “show me the code”; when the code is written another half complain about the style or how it’s the wrong way to do it; and when the code is released independently because an upstream merge is just too difficult, yet another half complain about the project being forked. However, the fork allows the code to prove itself in the real world and not simply in theoreticals, and what more proof is needed?

via a commenter on a famous Linux portal

Ubuntu Hour Bangalore

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I have noticed that Ubuntu community based activities in India are lot less than expected and Fedora leads the game here. To give a boost to Ubuntu, Nigel proposed to hold an Ubuntu Hour for Ubuntu users/power-users to meet. Apart from ubuntu-in mailing lists, rest everywhere the activities are pretty much nil.

Nigel sent a mail to ubuntu-in telling that he was organizing a small meetup. Initially I was also not very much  hopeful of a huge turnout, but to my surprise 6+1 people turned up.

Nigel blogged about it on his weblog on the turn of events. Initially he was sitting alone with a laptop with Ubuntu sticker for confused people. Initially four of them were sitting inside the Cafe Coffee Day on Richmond Road, Bangalore when I turned up. Since I had never seen any of them, I was not sure whether I should ask them or not. Nigel suspected that I was “Manish” as he recognized me by my pic. After talking for an hour we left.

Just before leaving, I found Ritesh waiting for us. I had sent a mail to him telling that there is a meeting of Ubuntu users and as a Debian Developer does he want to attend? Well, he got lost and came only after we left.

After everyone left, me and Ritesh went inside again to have a coffee. In the next one and a half hours, we talked about Ubuntu and Debian communities, their policies, their cooperation, the plus and minus points of both the systems. We also talked on apt-offline, a tool which Ritesh himself developed for offline package management. He is also a maintainer of laptop-mode-tools in Debian. He gave me a lot of insight into kernel development, APT and a plethora of other technologies.

The day was fun filled and we Ubuntu people expect to meet every fourth Saturday of every month. Meanwhile I might meet Ritesh again this Saturday to finish the work on apt-offline, so that the changes me and Abhishek made on our forked repos can be merged back upstream.

Above Pic: Arjuna, Nigel, Ganesh, Harish, Manish, and Venkatesh

Above Pic: Manish, Ritesh, Harish, Ganesh, and Venkatesh

Introducing WADL#

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Of late I have been working on a small project which deals with C# code generation. I named it WADL# by the way most of the C#/.NET projects are names. If Apple products can start with i , GNOME with g, KDE with K and Windows with Win , then  I think WADL# is an apt name.

For all the people who have been working on .NET and web-services must be diving deep into SOAP based web-services. Right? How many of you know that SOAP based web services are not the only type of web-service which exist on this planet? How many of you have heard about RESTful web services? I know the fight between SOAP and REST is just like Emacs v/s Vim and GNOME v/s KDE and SQL v/s NoSQL. If someone worked on SOAP based web service, they must be familiar with WSDL. They added a “Web reference” and voila – Your IDE generated the client proxy for you.

For people in the RESTful world, don’t have something called WSDL. Sun came up with something called WADL. It is again a XML based representation of operations offered by the web-service. WADL doesn’t get so much of love since RESTful people are opposed to anything such as WADL. Whatever may be the case, WADL is still pending with W3C and not yet finalized. This makes the situation more complex for people from WSDL background who have been in a habit of getting their client proxy code. Hardly anyone looks at the actual XML. Why does it make the life tough? This is because I along with many people could not find any such code generators for WADL. After days of hunting I finally gave up.

I actually needed the WADL -> C# code generator as I wanted to write a client side proxy for Launchpad. After figuring out that LP provides a WADL, I started researching how to use it, but only in vain since no such code generators exist. This inspired me to write one of my own. I got the WADL schema, read the reference, sent some mails to launchpad-dev mailing list asking for clarification and finally came up with v0.1 of WADL#, download the assembly file.

I am still learning WADL and not everything is clear. There are many conflicts which might take time to grasp, but the current assembly works flawlessly for Launchpad WADL. Let me know if it fails for some WADL file which you provided. Take the pains to mail me the WADL file too. My email is mail at manishsinha dot net

Documentation:

This is no magic or rocket science. All you need to do it to call the Convert method of WadlConverter which implements IConverter interface. This means you need to use LpNet.WadlSharp.Common.WadlConverter class and call it’s Convert method. The signature of the method is

void Convert(string inputFileName, string outputFileName, string rootNamespace)

The explanation of the method:

  1. The first argument is the filename of the WADL file.
  2. Second argument is the filename of the .cs file. If the file does not exist, it would be created. If it does exist, it would be truncated and then overwritten.
  3. The third parameter is the name of the namespace which you would like the generated code to have.

Languages Supported:

WADL# uses CodeDom which is provided both in .NET and also Mono. WADL# can theoretically gen rate code for all languages which CodeDom can.

In reality, there is a small problem in the file Customizer.cs at line 215 where there is a hard coding for C#. Next release of WADL# will remove that.

Code:

WADL# uses Launchpad for development using the Bzr source control system. Get the code from trunk, make changes, push it and add it to merge queue. I love contribution and patches. :)

License:

WADL# is an open-source project released under MIT/X11/Expat License. This means you can use it freely any way you like it provided you do not remove the Copyright notice. Know more about MIT License.

–

Just now I got a mail from Softpedia informing me that they have added WADL# to their repository of Linux Softwares.

Please don’t start with Mono and patents talk. Please point your browser to Slashdot, Hacker News, OSNews and Reddit for such discussions. You’ll get better responses in such places.

Please let me know if there is any mistakes on this post which includes typos, grammatical and factual ones. I would correct it at the earliest.

Update: I just got a backlink from a blog at weblogs.java.net on a post titled Bumper Crop of WADL Tools

The Ubuntu Rebranding

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When I look back at my college days, the only two distros on which I can count on for simplicity was Fedora and Ubuntu. I used the latter just because it suited me and for exercising my right of freedom. Let me jot down the biggest problems I faced whenever I wanted to propagate Ubuntu in my college days under the LUG Manipal banner:

  • People disliked the dark brown theme
  • It didn’t look professional
  • The graphics card didn’t work (The ATI ones)
  • Atheros wireless driver has it’s own share of problems
  • It wasn’t windows
  • …..list continues

The change in branding

This is what I actually wanted from Ubuntu. Just making things doesn’t work. Normal people don’t want advanced things like GIMP or a desktop mail client. All they need is basic things should just work and an eye-candy. Everything should look cool and pleasant.

The new Ubuntu logo: Looks better

This font looks better and more professional than the earlier one. The one before this looked someone like Comic Sans.

Improvements

  • The re-branding brings in much needed boot-screen change. A simple boot-screen is a lot better than a constantly animating one. Remember, the blink tags and marquees for HTML. They do nothing more than distraction.
  • I liked the light theme more than the dark. The reason being that it looks better to my eyes and not because it remotely looks like Mac OSX.
  • Read Mark’s view on this whole saga. Orange will represent Community and Aubergine would represent Canonical. Every branding should be looked with three parameters: Community <=> Commercial, Consumer <=> Enterprise and End-User <=> Engineer. Aubergine with white dots means it is more Commercial and Enterprise based branding.
  • The newer website is a lot better than the previous one. Hope they are not moving away from Drupal.

New Proposed Ubuntu Website

The Roadblocks

Ubuntu has many roadblocks in becoming a major Operating System. Many of them are from within the Open Source community itself. Probably Ubuntu is growing quite fast, but when compared to overall OS market, it is stagnant.

  • Wireless driver problems need to be fixed. Many people just give up because they cannot make Wireless to work on it.
  • The graphics support is still quite weak. People with ATI cards report more problems with NVidia ones. This is one of the places where everyone has been bitten one or the other time. Since I have Intel 945GM graphics chipset on my laptop, those bad days have not struck on me yet.
  • Another roadblock is that Ubuntu has to face a lot of hate from within the OSS community itself. People bash it because it brings in non-technical people into the Linux worlds who don’t want to compile their drivers or don’t want to use the command line.  Some of them go even one step ahead and claim that Linux isn’t meant for people who can’t understand computers. My situation would be the same if I was asked to open the BMW engine(Linux kernel) and fix something deep inside by pulling some random wires(typing commands)
  • Linux in particular was designed to run on ever goddamn architecture on this world. Even though it is a good thing, the effort is split up.

Solution

  • OEM tie-ups: To me, this is the only left to fix the current mess. If you buy a system, the people supplying the hardware will make sure that everything works fine with the OS they provide.  In this case, graphics and wireless drivers can be pre-installed. Depending on patent jurisdictions, even codecs can be pre-installed.
  • Focus on Looks and Usability: Many of the GNOME apps have such horrible looks that I feel it was hacked overnight by devs in half-sleepy state. Some apps like gnome-system-monitor eat up 50% CPU and report the CPU usage to be 50%+.

Finally I am thinking of shifting to Lucid once it comes out.

Mozilla Developer Day Bangalore, 27th February 2010

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Mozilla along with Mahiti organised a Mozilla Developer Day at NIMS, Bangalore at JRD Tata Auditorium. For people who want to know about the event via tweets please check the hashtag #mozdevday on Twitter

Introduction

As per the schedule, the event was supposed to kick-start at 9:30AM in the morning. After getting up in the morning and beating all the traffic as travelling 33KMs, I finally reached NIAS Campus at 11AM. After getting the badges, feedback-form and other delegate stuff, I went inside the auditorium to see what’s cooking inside.

Web Standards

Speaker: Arun Ranganathan

When I entered Arun was speaking on Web Standards. I think I missed the drum-beat part of his presentation as I was late. Abhishek Mishra and Rohan Prabhu had reached at 10AM itself and were a part of the audience from the very beginning.

Arun gave us a presentation on

  • Geolocation based services for pictures.
  • Font-face support in Firefox and other HTML5 based controls.
  • API for drag-and-drop
  • 2D support in Firefox. He showed us a Mario kind of game made using Canvas.
  • 3D support in Firefox using WebGL
  • Accelerometer support for Firefox. He showed a game which we can play by tilting our devices (Mobile/Laptop)
  • Video support in Firefox using HTML5

Arun even showed us how powerful video tag is on Firefox. We can embed a text inside a video, or even a video inside a video. Don’t believe? Have a look at the page where Arun pointed us to visit

Web.Next

Speaker: Seth Bindernagel

Seth is the localisation Director at Mozilla. He was speaking on what we can expect next from Firefox. His presentation covered mainly:

  • Out of Process Plugins
  • Improved cold startup time
  • Personas
  • Extension Manager
  • Weave

Seth discussed a bit on how Flash crashed are a big headache for the web. The next Firefox will have these plugins running as separate processes, so that the crash effects can be isolated.

For people who actually want to see how Flash crashes on the browser and how easy it is to make Flash go bonkers, just visit this site http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/

Seth also gave a lot of time on Weave and how useful it can be for a person to sync his preferences on the cloud. For privacy fanatics, he explicitly stated that all the data is encrypted at client side and then sent on the Mozilla servers. People can even run their own Weave servers.

Mozilla Labs

Speaker: Ragavan Srinivasan

Ragavan came on the stage to  present Mozilla Labs and what all they develop apart from the browser. The products which come out of the lab are Weave, Bespin and Jetpack.

Broken Sites

Speaker: Arun Ranganathan

If you visit MS Ramiah Institute of Technology’s Student Information System or FYJC’s site using a non-IE browser, then you can experience the over-smartness of the super intellectual web-masters behind the site. FYJC takes the situation to extreme levels.

Arun explained how we are supposed to report these broken sites using Firefox itself or using Mozilla Bugzilla. When using bugzilla, the explanation needed to be very exhaustive. He even asked us to tag such reports with “India” so that Arun can personally hunt down such sites.

Hack Session

Speaker: Arun Ranganathan

Arun recorded a video using a camera. Then he transferred it to his MacBook which was in MP4 format. He created a small page using HTML5 video element and opened it in Firefox,Safari and Chrome. The video which was recorded showed up properly in Chrome and Safari and not in Firefox. This was posed as a question. Many hands went up, with the first answer being the correct one. Yes. Firefox wants the web to be free and doesn’t want to license proprietary codecs for the web.

The million dollar question remains – How to convert H.264 videos to open format. Arun introduced us to a Firefox Addon named Firefogg. This converts the video to ogg which can be now played using Firefox and Chrome. Safari doesn’t want to support ogg.

I know I made no reference to Mahiti’s speech and Praneesh’s too. The post would be just too long.

Finally I would like to thank Mahiti and CIS-India for organising the event, providing free WiFi and arranging Lunch, tea and T-shirts and badges.

Seth Bindernagel

Directi Hackfest – 31st January, 2010

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Ever since I learnt how to use git, there has been an urge from within to share my code, look at others and collaborate and develop something useful which everyone else can use. For me, usability is as important as functionality. Both are as equal as the other in general cases.

Rewind

Long back I once asked Abhishek Mishra (ideamonk) if we could meet up and organise a small hackfest. The aim was to let know each other’s project, meet new people, learn new things etc etc. One in these *etc* was to complete our unfinished projects due to lack of time, motivation or even know-how of some of the aspect of a technology. Long back Abhishek and Yuvraj Pandian T (YuviPanda) have collaborated on a project named PyMos which was to generate Mosaic for any image. It was written in Python and works like a charm. Give it a try.

Since me and ideamonk live in Bangalore, having a hacking session being physically present would be better than working online. Abhishek liked the idea and tweeted whether anyone is willing to give us space for this event which has wifi. He instantly got a reply from The Chef of CodeChef and there we had a space in the Directi office. Thanks to all the kewl cool people at Directi with “Hacker Mentality” for supporting us.

Agenda

Abhishek invited his friends for this session and two of them turned up – Ishaan Chattopadhyaya and Rohan Prabhu. Naresh from Directi was waiting for us. When we came in, there wasn’t any plan on what needs to be done, as we expected to work out on a common interest field. Ishaan had to speak on Location Based Search and me on CodeIgniter (PHP Framework). Abhishek had some projects like sahanapy and creating a GUI over apt-offline.

Talks

Till this time I had a feeling that we won’t be working much today since I didn’t knew anyone apart from Abhishek. To learn more, we first had small talks so that we can know each other and their interest of fields. Ishaan talked on Location based search which includes geographical searches like Google Maps. It wasn’t a very exhaustive one, but a pretty nice explanation of what all complexity lies beneath the hood.

At this time, we were total 4 people – me, Abhishek. Rohan, Ishaan and Naresh(Directi)

Then I went to speak on CodeIgniter which is a Framework of PHP. As opposed to what I said earlier, it actually doesn’t look like a framework, since it does not have many of functionality which make a F/W. This is what I explained – why it has only the things which we want, awesome documentation and a dead simple setup. It is just a set of classes which relive you from messing with  lower level functionality. Since it is very simple, there is hardly any overhead with speed. You get only the basic boring things and complicated and interesting things are left to you.

Code

Abhishek showed us apt-offline which is an utility for getting updates, upgrades and packages on a Debian based box which does not have internet connection. The system on which these updates,upgrades and  package download is done can also be windows. Typical situation is you have a very slow or no internet at home, but blazing fast net at workplace. You would be tempted to use office net to download the packages and update your local index, install updates and install packages.

This utility was created by Ritesh Raj Sarraf long back and was just a command line based application. Abhishek had tried it and it works flawlessly. All which was missing was a GUI over it. It first looked like an easy task. Use Qt Designer and drag-drop every control and here we go. This way of development had a big flaw. The GUI developed is no better than the CLI since the clueless non-techies wont understand words like “apt-offline set”, “apt-offline get” etc etc. Even it took me a minute or two to actually get what all these mean.

Rohan can be called a Qt geek. The guy knows each and every class and it’s properties and event etc etc. This made us even more interested since he is always at disposal to help us and teach us more. By this it was pretty late and we were wondering if could do something worthy at that time. Then we decided to work only on UI as of now, make small changes in the core class to accommodate the GUI which is otherwise hard-coded. We had to dive in the code to get better knowledge of how apt-offline works as there is hardly any documentation apart from one written by Ritesh himself.

Conclusion

I don’t have much idea of Qt and this was a good learning curve. I agree that this hackfest didn’t pay off well as we expected. Most of the time we spent in discussing data structures, algorithms, Qt, git etc etc. which was again as usual – AWESOME.

My personal expectations from such sessions is to create some useful software and not just YAXX (Yet Another XX). Functionality, Usability, Accessibility and Documentation – all matters equally. I would also like to slowly slowly move on more tougher and promising things like kernel and filesystem level coding.

Winding up, this is just a start and I have great expectations from these sessions. I would like to again thank the Directi guys and the other people who were supposed to come but were not able to turn up due to their personal commitments.

Feminism

8 Replies

Looks like Mark Shuttleworth has created a storm by uttering something which is not well received by a few Feminine Geeks. First I thought that ‘asking for apology’ is only my country’s national pastime, but probably it’s international.

The way everything is put forward, I can only say that things are blown out of proportion. Did Mark say that women are incompetent? Did he say that they are dumb or anything even faintly similar?  Quoting from Skud’s article  on geekfeminism

I’m sorry I wasn’t able to make it to LinuxCon this year; I hear it’s a pretty good event. I’ve been listening with some interest to people’s reports of what’s going on there, and this afternoon I heard from multiple sources about your keynote, in which you referred to our work in Linux as being “hard to explain to girls”.

She was herself not on the venue and all she knows is from *multiple* sources. Sometimes words get distorted and lose their context if they get passed from person to person. LinuxCon is not a place to  vent someone’s anger, nor to abuse anyone. If Mark wanted to abuse them, he would have said it somewhere else.

It just works

It just works

The reality is that the population of girls/women in FOSS world is very marginal. I know that situation is improving, but it would not happen overnight. In my country girls are more attracted towards  medical, healthcare, product services etc. First, India’s female literacy is less than male’s. Secondly,  the percentage of girls in Indian engineering colleges is quite less. Thirdly, most of the female engineering graduates want to pursue MBA. So, hardly girls are left whom you would find interested in FOSS. Those who are really enthusiastic surely go a long way.

Shuttleworth said that Linux is hard to explain to girls. I can only say that it’s even tough to explain to guys who are not interested in technical matters. Probably Mark must have tried explaining it to girls who are not even interested in computers. Neither me nor Mark has any intention to look down upon women, but nit-picking at each and every phrase is somewhat lame. This actually does more harm to women who want to be more involved in FOSS.

For those who are still trapped up in the same array of tweets and dents related to this event, you may prefer reading Matthew Brennan Jones’s response to geekfeminism. He has written a post on his blog clearing the misconceptions. Go read it as he was physically present that time of the event.

I know am late expressing my views, but it hardly matters.