Category Archives: Catchall Scribbles

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

Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software, My Reading Habits

Yes We Did !

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A manifesto is defined as a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. The word itself has a genesis in the word manifestus meaning clear, evident.

For those who haven’t been following it, the FOSS Manifesto which was published recently, provides the clearest articulation of the will and motivation of the followers and practitioners of FOSS as both a technology and a philosophy. It breaks new ground from two aspects:

  • by demonstrating that there is a need for the political parties within the system to grow up and embrace the newer issues that are relevant in addition to the existing (and, somewhat age-old) issues that are raised during the time of elections and,
  • by providing ample proof that a completely inclusive process of asking for and receiving inputs in the effort to shape and mould public policy works

There would be some objections on the second point in terms of reach out to the masses, but the very fact that the world of FOSS isn’t limited to the elitist groups of folks who are interested in FOSS for the mere sake of FOSS philosophy is something noteworthy. Having FOSS (where the last S isn’t just software) plonked bang in the middle of a political consciousness is an effort worth applauding. This is thought of to be the elections where the youth of the country are expected to exercise their will, their comprehension and their ability to shape the nation’s destiny. The youth now have an agenda which they can feel comfortable rallying around and strive towards making a change. To borrow a phrase from an electoral process that was filled with hope, optimism and choice – Yes We Can !

For all those who worked tirelessly to make this manifesto happen and, get it accepted into the mainstream political spectrum – here’s a round of applause.

Read more here.

Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

Getting off the grid…

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I will be getting off the grid from tomorrow till the first week of April. And, I expect to be significantly telco-challenged. So, if you :

  • have been promised some swag, I’ll try and make sure that I have put them in the courier or, have someone accountable for it. (Note: since this was a week of holidays, I’d suggest that you wait for a response from me on this before talking over various channels about the lack of a response)
  • have been requested to submit the expenses for an event for which there has been a previous ACK, please do send over the bills to my address (check the Pune office one). However, re-imbursements would have to wait till I get back to office
  • want to discuss an event for which you are requesting some funds from The Fedora Project, make sure you put Susmit in cc: of the mail and, we can get a discussion going
  • want to get in touch with me, please send me an SMS (if you have the contact #) or, send a mail to my Gmail ID (which you should have) and, I’ll try to respond if GPRS permits. I’ll be using a mobile device, so please don’t put in attachments or, expect me to traverse hyperlinks. A short mail that states the meat of the story should work out nicely.

Meanwhile, have fun. Don’t forget to use Rawhide. It is awesome.

Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

Jottings on education…

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There are 3 trends I notice when we talk about Education and FOSS in the same sentence. Especially when it comes to conferences and workshops in India. These are:

  • FOSS in Education (FiE) – in all probability this can be the one aspect that is quickly done. There exists a curricula and content, and, the aim in this workflow is to ensure that the needs of the curricula are met via FOSS tools and technologies. A pretty much on-topic example could be consumption of Fedora Electronics Lab (FEL) towards teaching the content. Or, using parts of the GNU ToolChain when teaching programming and development.
  • FOSS for Education (FfE) – reworking the focus and direction of the curricula and courses towards giving it either a neutral shape (thus allowing easier FiE) or, going full-throttle and making change happen. Since curricula creation has a lot of traditional (and, sometimes unusual) stakeholders, FfE is a game of constant flux, push-n-pull. For obvious reasons, it is also the place where a large amount of community involvement is required. Changes need catalysts. Community participation and direction provide that bit of spark which starts getting_things_done.
  • Open Content in Education (OCiE) – have heard a lot of discussions around this but, am yet to see any University or College take this up seriously. Making the entire course content (syllabus, reading, references – the works) open and available for re-distribution or, re-use is something that Universities need to consider seriously. The era of classical education being driven through ‘red-brick’, ‘government funded’ institutions is close to being over. There are multiple ways to reach out to the potential learners as opposed to just waiting for the students to come in and enroll themselves. Re-thinking about content and breaking out from the mould of ‘elitism’ is something most educational institutions are not accustomed to doing. And, it requires careful handholding. Both in terms of the ‘coming out’ as well as the legal aspects of putting out the content. I would be interested in knowing about institutions in India that have managed to put this as part of a practice.
Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

Fedora Activity Day(s) @GNUnify09

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GNUnify09, organized jointly by SICSR and PLUG was held on the 13th and 14th of February 2009 at the SICSR Campus. The schedule had 2 half days of Fedora Activity Day(s) and, this is intended to be the report.

Day01

Reached the venue early, primarily to catch up with Susmit on the current plans and conspire a bit about the activities to be planned in the coming year (the financial year for Fedora starts from March onwards). Susmit was looking fresh as usual and over breakfast was a quick run-down of issues, events and plans. Thereon, the group (myself, Runa, Rakesh and Susmit) proceeded to the Speaker’s Lounge, where Rakesh promptly dozed off. The introductions got going and soon we were meeting folks from the Twincling Technology Foundation (Saifi and Namita) along with a couple of students from the institute who on and off do Fedora stuff. Susmit took a couple of moments to survey the room to check for infrastructure, coaxed the organizers to put up a few banners and posters on the boards and, laid out a bit of swag. I goaded the @fedoraindia twitter to come to life with a few tweets while waiting for the usual buzz to die down a bit as the event swung into action. Multiple halls across multiple floors started off with the talks and a couple of them looked promising enough to attend. Ramakrishna and Rahul text message about coming post-lunch and things were looking good. The regular photographer (aka paparazzi) at the event, Vijay swings by the speaker’s lounge to try and take a few candid shots of Vivek Khurana making faces at his laptop.

Since the FAD was not starting before 1430, a couple of us went into various talks particularly one on OSM which had a small but curious group of students talking about GPS devices and thinking up usage models of the OSM data. At around this point the OLPC India BoF notice was also put up (unfortunately clashing with the FAD schedule for the next day). Meet Pradeepto and Ajay Kumar (Sahana).

Post lunch with the arrival of the speakers, the FAD started off. The crowd started trickling in. Primarily because a round of the round-the-clock Fedora install fest that was happening in the next room got over. Rahul kicked off the FAD with his “User -> Contributor in 15 minutes” talk. Themed around the join.fedoraproject.org page, Rahul talked about the ways and means to collaborate in a project, the simple acts of filing bug reports. Questions start popping out and, the FAD is truly underway. Taking cue from a few of the questions, he pitches Art, Documentation and FEL. Joy. The Q+A session becomes collaborative with all the Fedora India folks chipping in to answer queries. Pradeepto goes to his KDE Talk and meanwhile talks with Rahul about the KDE LiveCD in F10 and whether it would solve some of the issues that he had faced while using KDE on F9. He promises to download, install and provide feedback.

Rakesh Pandit takes over from there with his ‘getting your favorite application into Fedora’ talk. Essentially about Packaging, the aim was to demonstrate the simplicity involved in the process and Rakesh took time to run the audience through the processes, necessary reading all the time using examples and on-screen explorations. Nicely packaged talk that took in questions during the talk and, had ample examples of real-life thanks to Rakesh being an avid packager himself.

More folks troop in and up goes Ramakrishna with his series of 4 lightning talks on “Things to know when you want to do FOSS”. A basic run down of list items that one needs to know, he tossed out cheat-sheets by the boatload. As he began, “Life is bad, Times are hard …” with the state of placements of students as they are, the theme sure struck a chord amongst the students. Meanwhile, we start distributing media and, around a 100 odd units fly off the table. More work done by Runa and Susmit in putting the media into jacket sleeves. More media put out, they fly off as well.

Susmit takes on the hard task of pulling together the last talk of the day “mirror-in-a-box”. Relates well to the crowd with his problems and solutions slide deck and the quick demo. More questions and answers and doh !! half day of FAD is over. A tentative schedule for Day02 is announced, the crowd thanked for attending, the mailing lists and IRC channels are repeated again. And, we troop off to the ‘poolside dinner’ organized at SIMS.

More talk and idle gossip at the dinner while waiting for the finger-food to land up at the massively ‘merged’ table that Pradeepto and Ajay created. Karunakar rummages through Ramakrishna’s bag to fish out the camera and starts clicking away. As is the norm, the recent [OT] stuff from various mailing lists come up along with the by-now-familiar lament about the increase in the ‘i want 2 do project’ mails. Having Shakthi around makes for good fun as he shares some of the gossip and chats.

Pradeepto comes back home with me and Runa and, we chat away till wee hours about randomly mundane stuff. Friday the 13th rolls over into Saturday the 14th.

Day02

Slight panic. Turns out that the ‘Genome’ talk by Saurabh Bathe might not happen. Saurabh is busy attending to his day job since he went on-call. Thankfully, we have a surprise speaker up and he is more than willing to make up for the speaker lost. More on that later.

We reach the venue early, hand over the media for the Academics Track to Manjusha, take a peep into the install fest. The immediately visible aspect is that the crowd is considerably lesser than Day01, whether 14th of February was the root cause remains to be found out. More plans with Susmit about the Fedora Ambassadors in India and, their roles and responsibilities. Some good points come up about mentoring the new Ambassadors and making them slip into their roles comfortable. ToDo items around IRC classrooms come up. More media packaged, around 100 more fly out. Stickers are being passed around. The Mozilla Camp during the first half sucks in a large part of the student crowd eager to see the “Bespin” demo and other stuff.

Post lunch the FAD begins in sync with the end of an install-fest round. Rahul begins with his “Spin” talk and demonstrates how to create a LXDE spin along with taking in requests from the crowd to show about creating other spins as well. Kashyap Chamarthy takes it up to talk about PKI. Speaking to a nearly full house he runs the audience down through the background of PKI, relates it to the curriculum, talks about theory and practice, provides real life examples and deployments and in general makes it a well rounded talk that is worth repeating at a couple of colleges and technical workshops. Wonderful work from him to show up and chip in when we realize that Genome isn’t happening. We do the wrap-up session with the usual pointers to the Fedora India community, talk a little bit about projects/internships and, there we are. FAD is over.

Somewhere in between I sneak into the OLPC BoF being organized by Amit Gogna. Good ideas are flowing and there is a nascent OLPC Pune group already being formed and a get-together camp organized on March01.

Little bits of talking with the organizers, we troop back to our house for what is now-called the ‘Konqueror Party’. The K-man said that pizza was his food of choice and so, pizza it was that we ordered and gorged on while talking about the usual banal stuff that comes up when friends meet.

Important lesson from the FAD(s) –

  • if we are facing a student crowd, it is always better to have handouts prepared for specific projects that they can take back. As of right now, I am not too confident about the hand-written notes that they jotted down.
  • putting out the URL for rpmfusion on the board during the install fest is a good idea
  • taking time during the install fest to point folks to IRC #fedora-india is a really nice idea
  • looking at GNUnify as an user generating event and tweaking the focus would reap us more benefits
  • following up GNUnify with a Fedora centric workshop would perhaps be nice

Photographs to be uploaded as soon as I get a decent connection. Some of them are here.

The all important board

Shakthi Kanna in a Fedora talk

Catchall Scribbles, My Reading Habits, Personal

Guy Kawasaki and a ‘Reality Check’ on stuff businesses are made of

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I had signed up for a copy of ‘Reality Check- The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition’ and, the book arrived nicely packed and all. Thanks to the team who took the trouble to ship it. Shipping charges to India are fairly high and, so thanks once again.

The book is “Kawasaki’s all-in-one guide for starting and operating great organizations – ones that stand the test of time and ignore any passing fads in business theory“. That is a fairly tall order, but the book does not disappoint. Direct, often blunt and cutting out the flab in sentences, Guy gets to the bottom of the story. For those who follow his blogs or, have read his earlier books, this would provide some parts of deja vu. And yet, there are new stuff in the book. It is entertaining and there are places where you just have to laugh out loud at the sheer irreverence of it all.

Good stuff around pitching (heh! that was a no-brainer), business plans (but Guy has on and off written about it), innovation, customer service and unsurprisingly schmoozing. Short crisp sentences bristling with ideas that challenge the reader to pause-think-rewind-restart and a list of clear don’ts. This is an engaging work from someone who is the ‘real deal’. Some of the content comes across as commonsense, but then, commonsense is the most uncommon commodity right now in the great game of startups.

Books in the same genre are generally cut-n-dry, full of good natured advice and suffer from a complete lack of delivering the punch line in a form that one can remember. This one doesn’t do that. And, the punchlines would be repeated over various meetings and gossip sessions. It is a thick book but it holds sway over you. In fact, it is highly recommended to have a copy handy.

Catchall Scribbles, My Reading Habits
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From the Wikipedia entry:

In its modern usage, hubris denotes overconfident pride and arrogance; it is often associated with a lack of humility, not always with the lack of knowledge. An accusation of hubris often implies that suffering or punishment will follow, similar to the occasional pairing of hubris and nemesis in the Greek world. The proverb “pride goes before a fall” is thought to sum up the modern definition of hubris.

Catchall Scribbles, Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

2009 would be the Year of …

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Og Maciel writes about the possibility of 2009 being the Year of Translations. With the coming-out of awesome tools like Transifex, Damned Lies, Vertimus etc, it sure feels good to be even marginally involved in the process of translations.

Infrastructural pieces coming together ensure that a translation workflow that appeals to all, is easy for the end-user can be put in place with much ease. And, it would also mean a disruptive playing field for startups like Indifex. Making wide open spaces for innovation in translation workflow and infrastructure is an area that is bound to be welcomed by the folks who spend countless hours making applications, desktops and operating systems available in their local languages/locales. They don’t get appreciated often. They get recognized during release times in release notes and the like, but they do keep the engines running and the lights on. This is going to be their year.

I would venture so far as to state that in a trend of “2009 would be the Year of <insert_your_favorite_prediction>” it would be a Year of Content. Free and Open content un-encumbered by restrictive rights and legalese that would be re-distributable, would be informative, would be educational and would be able to bring about a change. Over a period of the last 24 months, methods and tools that enable content creation on Linux desktops have simplified. Especially when it comes to Indian languages. So, there are fonts available (some of them quite elegant), there are keyboard layouts, on-screen keyboards (like Indic OnScreen Keyboard or iok and even Quillpad), input methods, word-lists and like bits that form the user-experience completion when using a Linux desktop to compose content. In sort, the traditional problems in the fields of input-display-printing have been substantially addressed to bring the end-user experience at a level of where it should be easy to just plug-and-create.

There is a wealth of content in Indian languages, starting right from folk-tales that are part of the oral tradition to commercially generated content which needs to start moving into the UTF-8 encoding space. Projects like the OLPC can benefit from the availability of such forms. Work on Indic OCR remains to move forward at a much aggressive pace than what is currently, but there are signs of good things coming out of it. Digitizing data would also enable a lot of content to be archived and made available for consumption.

This is the year that should see a large part of such things happening. The marriage of content creators with the infrastructure developers is something that needs to happen as well. And, this needs to include folks from fields of comparative literature, media studies and the like. Anyone who really does generate content, should be met with and talked to regarding the need to exert themselves to become part of the process. Content already takes in a large chunk of investment outlay for the mobile players and with the availability of easy means of generating content, it would not be far to start thinking about a need to consolidate, find patterns, predict trends.

The convergence of the computing and application prowess of mobile devices, content creation workflows and upswing in the production of Indic language content for the webspace promises to make 2009 an interesting year of innovations.

Season’s Greetings to all.