Arindam’s Weblog

dgplug talkies @ NIT Durgapur: Today there was a seminar-cum-discussion at Assembly Lab, IT Department, NITDGP between 2nd & 3rd year students over there and dgplug members lead by Kushal da. So, the catch line was “you guys have so good infrastructure and brains, why not just come up and contribute in different upstream projects”. Kicking off with a introductory session about us & what we were doing etc, there were discussions regarding how & where to contribute in FOSS, the different tools out there like demos were given for irc, svn, python, bugzilla, creating patches etc. It was quite something when irc went live….lots of people online including pradeepto da & runa didi waved at future developers, document writers and translators Also a special mention was made about Indichix to inspire girls into linux. There were talks regarding Google soc and also the job benefits of learning foss tools. It was a very open environment & credit goes to them also, “learning foss thing in the foss way”. Lots of stickers and some lug posters wre also distributed. After lunch at a food court called vatika, we moved for another session at BCET which was also more or less okay.

fedora installfest @ BCREC: Big or small, knowing the thing is the ultimate goal. Couple of days back, dgplug conducted a fedora installfest for 1st & 2nd year guys of BCREC. There were atleast 20 students with 5 laptops. So, it was a fantastic beginning. Apart from the basic installation steps of fedora, people got lots of important packages for audio/video/graphics etc from a local repository. In this process, they learnt to do yum, install rpms. There was also brief discussions about how to draw big stuffs in small time with inkscape, connect to internet, basic directory structure and preliminary commands to work in linux etc.

We hope they will in turn help their peers and also get more foss contributers apart from users from both these colleges. I must mention that NIT Durgapur has a 34 Mbps dedicated internet connection and they were thinking of a fedora mirror inspired from WBUT Kolkata & NIT Hamirpur. Hopefully we can see that someday

The LAMP of Freed.in 2008 was lit with huge round ofapplause & cheers vibrating around the breadth of Gyaan hall a.k.a., the auditorium of School of Information & Technology of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Some formal registration typo thing was going in the reception stall of the event. So in the very beginning ‘was gifted with some goodies like free media, some freed stickers, gnome badges etc. After all this fresh beginnings, the event finally kicked off with quick intros from core ilugd members like Kishore Bhargava, Andrew Lynn, Raj Mathur, Gora Mohanty followed by the first talk of the day ‘Community is an oft mis-used word’ by Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay. He basically described some of the deep-rooted fundamentals that decides the direction of a community so to say, what it is, how it should be, what are the mindsets you ought to carry to be a part of it. After another session by Samiah regarding educational softwares, we pulled off for lunch (muft from sponsers). It was some real fun around there apart from good food. Had chit-chats with people whom i knew only online like Sankarshan da, Pradeepto da, Mishti di, Niyam bhusan, Rene and unending others. After that, I spent the second half of the day mostly at the conclave where rounds of discussions went on regarding defining knowledge and some possible areas to work on for better sharing of information. In this context, we did mention the Bijra school project @ durgapur which actually created a better computer-aided learning environment. The day ended with Mane’s talk regarding accessibility & dev areas of orca. It was pretty late, so signing off we (me & subhodip) went back to my brothers’ place at uttam nagar, west delhi where we actually stayed.

The second day was full of talks and more talks…I enjoyed all of them. Typically, the OSM talk of Mikel & Schuyler, Rene’s talk regarding mesh network, Runa didi’s talk regarding translation communities were very interesting. Also between all these, I also fond myself in the group which Mikel was explaining about collecting GPS data, integrate & edit them in JOSM etc. This actually took me on because it was something rather new in India particularly the GPS devices. Its’ exciting!! That evening, Anand actually proposed us “why don’t you map your way back to Kolkata (train route)”. This was really cool and we two talked with OSM guys and they seemed to like it at that point of time. Since dinner was ready, we decided to discuss about that the following day. Now, what a dinner!! Above everything, it was really charmed by freed.beers & cool starters. And I definitely remember those ‘happy birthday’ gift & wishes to Gora. Overall it was lot more fun at there. As it was pretty late we stayed back at the JNU guest house thanks to Andrews.

The next morning i woke up early. Anyways, packing sacks ’strolled down to to halls which was rather only few hundred metres from the guest house. This day filled with really cool talks like, AanjhanR’s nice talk on FOSS for Electronic enthusiasts (which is an angle i am sure can increase FOSS enthusiasm in different colleges like ours, because some people think it’s for CSE/IT guys only which is not true), this was followed by a great lunch and then more excitement post-lunch, two talks on Independent Music and Radio by Shreyas, Friji and Raj. I typically liked the Radioverve spirit. After these were the talks on OLPC by Sayamindu da & KDE educational softwares & games by Pradeepto da. The evolving Step app (kde-edu) rocked there & also i must mention i checked my g(e)mails on the olpc. I liked sugar very much and installed on my desktop back home. After this was another interesting thing, Mikel came to me & beton and handed over a gps reciever as he told the other day so as to map the train route from New Delhi to Kolkata. That was something cute takeaway at the end of the event. So above everything it was loads of fun out there…!!!

Here are the loads of photos: freedin2008

Last fortnight was a real mess. Our college announced for campus interviews all of a blue!! However, right now got campus offers from couple of top Indian MNC’s (TCS & Satyam) . Feels great….here’s a glimpse of the fun & frolic

More photos: Flickr photo set

As a follow-up of my last post Insight into KGeography, I would like to publish the completed release of my presentation regarding “lets’ add the map of India in kgeography”. Download it from here. Also, do post any comments or suggestions for improvements.

Have fun!! And HAPPY NEW YEAR 2008

Update: Here’s the first cut of the bangla (বাংলা) version of this presentation. Though its’ still half-complete, have a look. Will post the completed version soon. Download it from here. Also, post much needed comments & scope of improvements.

Btw, had some rough times with openoffice. The theme which i used in the original presentation won’t render bangla fonts. So, i had to recreate lot of thing all over.

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.