Category Archives: Catchall Scribbles

Those jottings which could not be clipped with any other papers…

Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software, Personal

In the company of a ninja

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It looks like watching the Ninja Assassin hasn’t done Shreyank any good. Else, he would have figured out that it is easy-peasy for a Founder and Chief Ninja like Dimitris Glezos (who is also known as DeltaGamma) to be at Bangalore and, elsewhere. Dimitris paid a surprise visit to Pune yesterday and it was fun. It isn’t always that you get a CEO of a startup provide you with an in-person repeat of his keynote with added wisecracks and side-talks that are too scandalous for a “keynote” 🙂 And, that too, at a fairly crowded Barista. It was awesome.

In fact I wanted to talk with him about how massive the momentum built up by Transifex has been. Just two years ago, in 2007, Tx was a GSoC project within The Fedora Project aimed at looking at managing translations from a developer’s perspective. Today, it is a start-up which is hiring employees, relocating to newer offices, has a foot-print across a significant portion of upstream community projects and, most importantly, has clients willing to pay for customization services and, developer services. Tx isn’t only helping translation communities by allowing them to craft their work in peace – it is keeping developer sanity with the fire-n-forget model of the architecture. I hear that PulseAudio, PackageKit developers are strong supporters of Tx. That is tremendous news. The provocative nature of Tx is also based on the charm that it has been bootstrapped. That should provide hope to developers thinking along the “product” route.

I would say that these two years have done Dimitris good. His focus on the road Tx should take has become more vivid and, he has a deeper insight into the changes he wants to bring about via Indifex. There’s nothing more exciting than keeping a close watch on his team and his company for news that would come up soon. Tx is coming up with a killer set of features in the upcoming releases. That should get the attention of a couple of clients too.

Throughout the afternoon we ended up talking about getting youngsters up to speed to think beyond patches as contributions and, starting tuning their thoughts to products. Dimitris opines that patches are excellent jump-off points but in order to become a valuable contributor, one must start thinking about “architecture”, “design”, “roadmap”, “milestones” and all such issues that form part of the theory classes but never see implementation in real-life scenarios. In addition, there is also the need to inculcate the “CC thinking” in everyday work of creativity – be it code or, content or even be it hardware and standards (the “CC thinking” is a fancy short-hand towards thinking about Open Standards, Open Protocols and so forth. In a somewhat twitter-ish way, we compressed it to a meta-statement we both could relate to and agree with).

Dinner and post-dinner with a couple of us was another story. Having a bunch of hard-core “Fedora” folks in the room creates a passion. Sitting back to savor the flames of discussions and, interjecting with a leading viewpoint to keep the debate flowing is the best way to get action items resolved. Nothing wasn’t touched upon – from the way to get best out of *SCos to mundane stuff like getting feature requests into Tx, OLPC and Sugar, or, talking about the general issues within the IT development community in Greece. And of course, the frequent checks on Wikipedia to validate various points in the argument. We could have done with an offline Wiki Reader yesterday 🙂

I think I finally went to sleep at something around 0200 today – which is impossibly past my standard time. There are photos aplenty, though I don’t know who will be uploading them. There was food, there was coffee, cakes, and, there were friends – in short, a nice day.

Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software, Personal

Pleasant experiences and project loyalty

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As a general case, my experience with most of the FOSS projects whose products I consume or, contribute to, have been very pleasant. Feedback has generally been well received, requests listened to. So, what I am going to write is not very special. But, they are striking by themselves.

Sometime ago, I was shopping for an off-line translation tool. I was fed up with Lokalize’s issues and, the fact that it wasn’t letting me do what I wanted to do at that point in time – translate. Additionally, I wasn’t in the mood to actually install a translation content management system to do stuff. Face it, I am an individual translator and, calling in the heavy shots to get the job done was a bit silly. So, I turned to virtaal. Actually, I think I was goaded into giving it a try by Runa.

Virtaal was, at that point in time, not really a good tool 😉 And, you can figure from the blog link above that I wasn’t interested in it too much. However, since I ended up giving it a chance (you cannot simply ignore a recommendation from her) I ended up running into two issues. One was predominantly more annoying than the other and, in effect was what was putting me off the tool. However, the developers took interest to get it fixed and, in the latest release have resolved it.

The other bug was resolved in an even more interesting way – over IRC with hand-holding to obtain the appropriate debug information and, then on to editing the file to put in the fix. At the end, the fix might be trivial. But the level of interest and care taken by the team to listen to their users is what makes me happy. In this aspect, the other development crew I can mention is Transifex. I haven’t met most of them and yet they keep taking suggestions, reports via every communication channel they are on – blogs, micro-blogs, IMs, IRC and trac. That makes them visible, gets them into the shoes of the users and, I am sure it earns them invaluable karma points.

Yesterday, while helping (I just did the file editing while Walter did all the brain muscling) to close the other bug, I felt incredibly happy to be part of a system where it isn’t important who you are or, where you are from. What is important that you have a real desire to develop better software and, make useful artifacts for all.

As it goes – “Your mother was right, it is better to share” link to video.

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Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

GSoC and beyond…

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Karsten has a nice blog post and, an even nicer report on GSoC 2009 from the perspective of The Fedora Project-JBoss umbrella organization. If you haven’t already gone through it, it would be good to read it up and, provide feedback.

An immediate benefit of any project participating in the Summer of Code is the ability to get exciting extensions or, innovations via a group of highly talented individuals – both mentors and, contributors. Having had the opportunity to look at the projects from fairly close quarters over a period of years, there are a couple of things that stood out. Some of them are listed on my wiki page. I’d say that the most important thing is to “have a plan“. A stage of proper planning which sets the expectations and deliverables for a GSoC proposal goes a long way in becoming a successful proposal. That, coupled with a scheduled update-review cycle makes it a proposal that has a constant communication channel. I was reminded of the this fantastic mentoring how-to today while reading the latest issue of The GNOME Journal (as an aside, you should read this issue).

If you look at the wiki page I pointed out earlier, you’ll note that I mention an “annual round-up”. This by itself is very trivial to do and yet very important.. It provides an yardstick by which to measure the success or, failure of a GSoC experience of being able to generate sustained and relevant participation. For example, if projects did more of this kind of “where are they now ?” series, it provides upcoming and potential contributors with role-models they can look up to or, be like.

That single act of being able to have role models makes for a tremendous motivation to become a sustained contributor to Free and Open Source Software.

Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

GPS data logging and, a nifty data logger

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Primarily due to Kushal’s enthusiasm, I got myself a GDL-3204 GPS Data Logger from Sparc Systems Limited. In spite of the somewhat “home brew” looks it is a nifty little device with great accuracy. Kushal has been having fun with it during his recent visit to Malda and, we (Runa and me) have been learning how to get tracks and waypoints done using the simple manual that comes with it.

At some point in time I should start getting familiar with the JOSM application and, upload the logged data using the script here.
For now, it is great fun.

Kushal holding up the device

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Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software, Personal

A bunch of stuff

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  • Recently, I had the chance to use Lotte to translate and, it simply blows me away. The Transifex crew deserve some well earned applause for including elements that make it incredibly helpful for those involved in the work of translations. There is a slight annoyance which has now been turned into a ticket.
  • Read off Planet Sugar that “several weeks ago”, activities.sugarlabs.org has exceeded 1 million downloads of activities. That’s just too awesome not to talk more about. As is mentioned in this tweet, imagine an activity developer who sees a steady increase in download and consumption going up to 20000 downloads. That’s just so amazingly sweet.
  • The thread here looks to be an interesting one with regards to securing professional translations and, getting an open source project translated via community building. Should be good to see how it pans out.
  • From the time I micro-blogged this, the thread has gone ahead and had more discussions. And, reading it early in the morning, it does appear to be a good thing to have. Those who are coming on to a Desktop Spin from other OS should have an easier way to adapt to and adopt the desktop. Good stuff.
  • In other news, here’s a picture from our diwali celebrations this year

Diyas from this year

Catchall Scribbles, Music and Movies, Personal

Two of my favorite songs

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আমি কান পেতে রই         ও আমার আপন হৃদয়গহন-দ্বারে বারে বারে
কোন গোপনবাসীর কান্নাহাসির গোপন কথা শুনিবারে — বারে বারে ।।
ভ্রমর সেথা হয় বিবাগি নিভৃত নীল পদ্ম লাগি রে,
কোন রাতের পাখি গায় একাকী সঙ্গীবিহীন অন্ধকারে বারে বারে ।।
কে সে মোর কেই বা জানে, কিছু তার দেখি আভা ।
কিছু পাই অনুমানে, কিছু তার বুঝি না বা ।
মাঝে মাঝে তার বারতা আমার ভাষায় পায় কি কথা রে,
ও সে আমায় জানি পাঠায় বাণী গানের তানে লুকিয়ে তারে বারে বারে ।।

and…

কী পাই নি তারি হিসাব মিলাতে মন মোর নহে রাজি ।
আজ হৃদয়ের ছায়াতে আলোতে বাঁশরি উঠেছে বাজি ।।
ভালোবেসেছিনু এই ধরণীরে সেই স্মৃতি মনে আসে ফিরে ফিরে,
কত বসন্তে দখিনসমীরে ভরেছে আমারি সাজি ।।
নয়নের জল গভীরে গহনে আছে হৃদয়ের স্তরে,
বেদনার রসে গোপনে গোপনে সাধনা সফল করে ।
মাঝে মাঝে বটে ছিঁড়েছিল তার, তাই নিয়ে কেবা করে হাহাকার —
সুর তবু লেগেছিল বারে-বার মনে পড়ে তাই আজি ।।

I realized that I had nearly worn down the LP during my childhood listening to the above two songs along with this song. In fact, my favoritism to Debabrata “George” Biswas’s songs came immediately after this phase. These days, every trip to Kolkata is a hunt for the CD versions of my favorite LPs. Sadly, not all of them are available. Which is a shame really. Not that the current crop of singers aren’t good. Just that one tends to hang on to those singers one grew up with.

Catchall Scribbles, My Reading Habits, Personal

Education and, educators

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Around 4 days back, I had an interesting conversation over micro-blogs with a friend. When he was at Pune, we spent a small part of the evening talking about education, educators and, the process of educating as observed here and elsewhere. It did boil down to a (somewhat idle) lament that “the system isn’t performing according to expectations”. I thought over this over the weekend and, while I am not an educator, I am a “person interested in education”, and, it makes sense to attempt to try and see what the expectations are.

Any functional education system has to provide the participants with the tools and constructs that allow them to have independent streams of thought. While it teaches the formal discipline and rigor needed to pursue new topics, its scope should ideally encourage original thought. More importantly, it should encourage creativity, be intolerant of casual approach and, be ruthless in demanding excellence.

The problem is that reality isn’t always like that. There are a significantly high number of education institutes, some of them of past repute, who are sliding down the slippery slope of mediocrity. This fall is aided by the fact that the “education system” doesn’t lend itself well towards measuring the quantum of knowledge passed on to the students by the educators. And, it is compounded by the sad truth that the prolific growth of institutes have encouraged a somewhat exponential fall in the quality of the staff. The final nail in the coffin is the datum that the system of measuring “education” is around the results of an examination. The fact that the examination pattern does not encourage “thinking” is somewhat of a greater problem.

It is true that the better educators have not involved themselves within the system as much as hoped for. It is also true that the students have been lax in bringing themselves up to speed. The refusal to be aware of whom to benchmark themselves leads to a sort of navel gazing that is self-destructive at best and, a society-exploder at worst. With the current trend of public-funded schools not getting the number of teaching posts at the expense of wider inflow of private education (both at primary and, higher education levels), it does mean that the situation is possibly going to take a larger turn for the worse – a significantly higher section of the school-ready population is going to be unable to get decently functional education.

I don’t have any solution. That rankles. I do observe with rising alarm the somewhat inevitable slide. That needs to change.

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Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

Oh, Facebook, Facebook, thou little knowest the mischief thou hast done

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The morning brought forth a micro-blog/dent from Karsten pointing out that Facebook Wants To Own Idea Of Crowdsourced Translations (read more on the link).

Embodiments of the invention provide techniques for translating text in a social network. In one embodiment translations of text phrases are received from members of the social network. These text phrases include content displayed in a social networking system, such as content from social networking objects. A particular member is provided with content including a text phrase in a first language, and the member requests translation into another language. Responsive to this request, a translation of the text phrase is selected from a set of available translations. The selection is based on actions by friends of the member in the social network, the actions being associated with the set of available translations. These actions can the viewing of or approval of translations by the friends, for example. The selected translation is then presented to the member requesting the translation.

Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

Lost in translation ?

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From a recent mail on the Foundation list, here’s an interesting quote:

Collaboration among advisory board members: Now that we have a sys admin team in place would like to find ways that we can collaborate better. Mentioned an article by J5 that talked about that RH, Novell and others are less involved because of the maintenance burden.They spend time on money on things like translations. No process to get them upstream and so they do it all over again next year.

It is the last line that I find a bit off-key and, out of context.

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