Arindam’s Weblog

Today, the KDE gave a whole lot surprise after yesterday night’s yum update initiated by ‘crond’. I couldn’t recognize kmenu (half Gnome, half KDE typo with no icons). Actually a gtk/gnome-based package was installed that caused this problem.

$ kbuildsycoca -incremental

So, this is what refreshed/rebuild the kmenu for me & its’ in place now

KGeography is a geography learning tool integrated with KDE-Edu. It helps a student to learn geography in a playful way. But it still doesn’t has all the maps as yet. How to add them? For adding a new map in KGeography, we need two things. One, the map (say in a file called mapname.png) and secondly, a kgm file (whose name should be mapname.kgm) to integrate the map with kgeography. Once we have them we can easily add them in its’ home directory (default: /usr/share/apps/kgeography). Now, what kgeography does is an image-processing. It distinguishes a division of the map by its’ RGB values. Then it identifies the division by Name, Capital, Flag etc parameters given in the kgm file for that division.

So, for adding a map we need to do following things:

1. First, create the map using GIMP, Kolourpaint or any other picture editors. Getting a political outline will be the best idea. I couldn’t get one atleast for India. So a good idea will be superimpose a blank outline map over a descriptive political map (in two layers to be precise). Assign separate colours for every division. Care should be taken that no two regions should have same colours. Ofcourse, handdrawn & scanned political outline maps may be an option and there is no real restriction on the scale of the maps.

2. Next, comes the integration part or the kgm file. So lemme show the basic structure of the .kgm file:

<map>

<mapFile>mapname.png</mapFile>
<name>MapName</name>
<division>

<name>DivisionName</name>
<flag>flagname.png</flag>
<capital>CapitalName</capital>
<color>

<red>255</red>
<green>255</green>
<blue>255</blue>

</color>

</division>
………………………….
//Other divisions
………………………….

</map>

A kgm file begins with <map> and ends with </map>. Inside of those tags there are:

• <mapFile> and </mapFile>: the name of the file (without any path) containing the map image, e.g. “india.png”.
• <name> and </name>: the name of map, e.g. “India”.
• A <division> and </division> for each division in the map.

Now, each division has these tags:

• <name> and </name>: the name of the division, e.g. “West Bengal”.
• <capital> and </capital>: the name of the capital of the division, e.g. “Kolkata”.
• <ignore> and </ignore>: can be set to yes, allowClickMode and no. If this tag is set to yes then the division will be ignored when asking for divisions in that map. It is then as if this division does not exist in KGeography quiz modes. If this tag is set to allowClickMode then KGeography will ask for the division in the Click Division in Map… mode but not in other quiz modes. Setting this tag to no means the division will appear in all modes (browse and quizzes). This tag is optional and when there is no <ignore> tag that means as it is set to no. For example “Egypt” has this tag set to yes in the “Asia” map which means that “Egypt” will not be part of any quiz in the “Asia” map. Also this tag is set to yes for frontiers or oceans.

<division>

<name>Not a Nation</name>
<ignore>yes</ignore>
<color>

.........................................

</color>

</division>

• <flag> and </flag>: the file (without any path) containing the flag of the division, e.g. “india.png” in asia map. This tag is optional. Not needed for the divisions whose <ignore> tag is set to yes.
• <color> and </color>: the color the division has in the map.

The color is defined using three tags:

• <red> and </red>: red component of the color. Valid values are between 0 and 255.
• <green> and </green>: green component of the color. Valid values are between 0 and 255.
• <blue> and </blue>: blue component of the color. Valid values are between 0 and 255.

All names should be in english. But when number of divisions are too much it will be better to automate the task of creating kgm file with a bash script (will post lil’bit later). I checked out the helper tool in kgeography handbook which wasn’t effective enough even on the existing maps.

Update: Now, this post may not be enough to dive into this work. So, I created a sort of presentation concentrating on how to add the map of India. It’s still unfinished. But you can have the first cut from here: [http://makghosh.googlepages.com/addmaps.pdf]. The best way to see it is as a presentation in kpdf.

Well, I divided the task in 3 days:

1. Day 1: Create the political map of India (done)
2. Day 2: Color the divisions of the map (done)
3. Day 3: Create the .kgm file (not completed)

Have fun!! And do post any comments or improvements

Finally, I upgraded my system to Fedora 8. Thanks to exams, it’s been pretty late Well some of the cool features which I just loved:

1. Online Desktop: It’s awesome!!
2. PulseAudio Volume Control: Multitple volumes for multiple apps and amazing sound quality.
3. compiz, compiz & compiz…..it was never this good!!
4. Increased utility of the Control Center. I mean that simply by the right menu of the mouse we change not only desktop background, also theme, icons, and all those stuffs.

Well some of the apps which i already tested so far are:

1. Internet: Firefox, Pidgin, Empathy (for empathy sort according to status wasn’t doing good), Xchat, Skype (2.0 beta is not working as it hasn’t got pulseaudio integration as yet, though the 1.4 is working).
2. Sound & Video: Amarok, K3b & mPlayer rocks.
3. Office: Ooo 2.3 is working fine.
4. Text editors: vi (my fav) and gedit are ok.
5. Development: Qt4, Sun J2EE, JBoss, Eclipse till now worked perfectly.
6. Graphics: Gimp 2.4.2 and F-Spot are refreshed.
7. All other packages are updated & its’ whole lot new!

There are hundreds of other packages. Will post about them later. Another notable thing is the Fedora-Packager groupinstall (containing all the scripts and koji, bodhi clients needed by me). Cheers!!

Btw, one weird thing is happening! Planet Fedora doesn’t seem to sync the headings of my blog posts properly. I’m in a blue of what is going on. I checked the RSS feed of my blog. It seemed perfect. Dunno whats’ going wrong

Yesterday members of Waag Society and AID India (as well as its’ USA chapter) came down with Indranil Dasgupta at Bijra High School to have a look at LTSP implmentation over there.

Cross Link Posts: A city kid’s reaction to OLPC XO and other stories

Anyways, what really interested me is waag.org. Based at Netherlands, ‘Waag Society’- mission was to make new media available for groups of people that have little access to computers and internet, thus increasing their quality of living. Over years it grew as a society to provide technology to social and cultural needs of the people.

What’s the difference? Difference lies in the form factor of the products/projects delivered, their creativity and utility. CREATIVITY is what I liked most…have a look at their website:

Well some of the interesting projects they are working on are Scottie, FRUX, Mobile Math, You and your nieghbourhood etc.

After a gruelling fortnight of exams, I finally have some peace of mind to enjoy with :-). But at the end of the exams I ended up with something really good & worthwhile. I have been accepted as a Fedora Ambassador of my region (Durgapur, WB, India). That also entails with all good responsibility of representing and promoting FedoraProject.

View my profile: [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ArindamGhosh]

FUDCon 2008: