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Random thoughts and serendipity | A collection of jottings on various issues that excite no one else | Page 43
Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

Make your own CD

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marcus.bauer at gmail dot com writes that:

Creating a customized GNOME liveCD yourself is easy and takes just a
few minutes of time:

It involves three simple steps:

1. download and unpack http://project77.info/gnomelive/liveCD-0.2.tgz
2. ./make_livecd.sh en en_US
3. burn the resulting .iso onto a CD-ROM and enjoy!

You can customise in an effortless way:

* the default language
* background images (boot splash, gnome splash, desktop)
* add sample files to the Desktop
* add and remove packages

Catchall Scribbles

Uneasy lies the head…

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The recent issue of Businessworld has an interesting insight on the symbiotic relationship between eBay the company and eBay the community [membership login required]. Providing a sort of loving insider’s view of the economy model of eBay, it provides tremendous insights into how service delivery platforms are influenced in unthinkable ways by end user consumption of services. What started off as a trivial buy-n-sell forum is in many cases the bread-earner for families. In a fascinating number of instances, the power of eBay the model has been brought across to the board members of eBay the company. So why talk about eBay today ?

Simply because for a economy model that revolves around a broad base of user community, it is important for the focal company to be agile and receptive to ideas. The experiences of eBay are not of User Driven Innovation (something that I keep on talking about ever so often) but of User Focussed Business Model. In a service driven economy, the variables of service delivery (from operations to processes) can be replicated and provided at a knockdown cost. What remains as the only differentiator is the way in which flux is handled. eBay has learnt its lessons (and still learning them) by burning its fingers once too often. But what sets eBay the company apart is the eagerness to respond to user pressure. Success in a community based model is really a measure of the user footprint. Being nimble enough to respond and being sensitive enough to properly convey the message is required. Long back when we were discussing about productisation of FLOSS services consultancy, the only thing that kept nagging was the means of differentiation and the focus area of the consultancy. Looking back, I can see how naive we were. The differentiation onus is not on the parent but embracing the practical feedback is the parent company’s.

And perhaps this is one way the Indic L10n process model can grow…

Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

Linux and Audio Production: Simplicity Required

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Linux and Audio Production: Simplicity Required

The second issue is usability. Multi-track tools are renowned for being complex to use. This complexity is not necessarily an issue with the concept of recording audio into tracks, but the issue of having the requisite knowledge to spit shine the track with EQ, dynamics an effects to get the best out if it. This knowledge sits outside of the application. The same can be said for IDE’s – creating a project in an IDE is fairly straightforward; the challenge lies with understanding the code – an entirely separate issue.

Free/Libre/OpenSource Software

One more time – Let’s go for a complete desktop

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Hmm…here we go again. This time it is a rant about why we should attempt to make a localised desktop complete. So why is completeness important ? Or more precisely, why is this important now ?

In the light of the analysis of everyday incidents, and their very remarkable conclusions drawn in The Tipping Point – it is easy to see why a complete Linux desktop is in the offing. For a moment, just think about the wild upswing of Firefox. It started as a trickle and then slowly turned into rolling thunder gathering tremendous momentum along the way. Now that the initial spate has tapered off, a study of Firefox downloads might provide greater insight into the number of people upgrading Firefox. The upgrade part is important. Since each upgrade represents in some ways an incremental feature enhancement, the increasing usage of higher versions (for repeat consumers) would signify the need to have more feature creep into the software development model.

What would be the ideal desktop in any local language ? At any point in time this is a difficult question to answer. Currently more so than ever. Indic L10n shows remarkable maturity skew when it comes to desktop environments and the various development libraries. Choosing either GNOME or KDE immediately limits the number, type and user interface of applications one can have on the desktop. That said, both GNOME and KDE ship with a number of redundant applications, or applications which collectively make a lot of sense but fail individually in terms of feature value. The ideal localised desktop could aim to be modular in terms of applications. The concept is to replicate the stack model made popular by Senpai and Spikesource and extend it to the desktop space. A base set of applications which provide for comprehensive localisation would enable a lot more usage of it than one which provides an unstructured collection of applications.

What could be the basic stack of applications ? To begin with, one needs to look into providing the following: a user manager, a system services administration tool, a web browser (with plug-ins enabled), a ftp client, a mail client, a downloader program, an office suite, a task manager, basic games (card, strategy and the like), sound and video player and graphics tools. In a normal day, these are the applications a normal user would be more likely to use.

To begin with, one could make a list of the L10n status for each of these top-level categories so as to enable one to create a prototype desktop. A tentative plan for the same was unveiled as GRIND. Already GRIND has thrown up some interesting side tracks in the form of Senpai and the Koha stuff. One only has to wait and see how it goes further.

My Reading Habits

Reading Books

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I have an odd habit of purchasing a book and then just rushing someplace to sit down with it and leaf through. Last week I read through Pour Your Heart into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time. I am still reading it for the second time and I must say that it has been a very humbling experience. I would recommend this for anyone who wishes to start off a new business venture that is customer facing and based on service delivery. Sure, the products might not be the same as Starbucks, but the engine of growth that runs through a customer service industry is the same everywhere – generating Customer Delight

For some time now, I have been trying to figure out what makes software services companies in the FLOSS space tick and how should they carry out business to enable them to sustain themselves. I have known too many companies starting off with very adrenaline ambitions only to peter out within 2 quarters. FLOSS is a technology driven space – and this is where the catch lies. FLOSS based business should not be driven by the lure of every moving target technology, but based on a solid foundation of core concepts. Figuring out what one can be the absolute best at takes sometime. But once that exercise is complete, building on the foundation through discplined action is just a matter of natural follow-up. Discpline must prevail at all levels of service delivery chain – from making the first proposal to getting recurring revenue out of an account. Taking a look at these chaps might be a good idea. Additionally, if you do have access to a good library, go get this book. It is worth every moment you spend on it.

Finally, anyone who can provide me with a download link from the Project Gutenberg site for The Seven Pillars of Wisdom would be profusely thanked.

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

Encrypting Local File/Folders in Evolution

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Yesterday I had posted a Feature request for enabling encryption/password protection of local files/folders in evolution. There are pros and cons to this. The immediate benefit is that a few local folders can be password protected and thus some measure of security put in place. The flip side is the additional amount of metadata that goes into putting this implementation into practice. Is there any MUA that provides this feature ? I would love to ake a look at the user benefits in the way this feature is offered.

Have read through a staggering amount of documentation in the past 2 days and the head is reeling under the strain. The more one stares at the screen, the stabs of an imminent headache are obvious. However, a few friends have recommended that Maximum City would be a good read. This is for July as well as Zorro by Isabel Allende. I have till date not read much of Isabel, only these two and liked the way the prose flowed through the pages. Nothing more to be read in June – I have exhausted my quota and the books were on the near side of being not good.

On the other hand, I read and reviewed Linux Cookbook which is a very nicely compiled collection of tips for sysadmins and the like.

My other reviews are here.

Could not resist posting this:

(Parenthetically, I’d like to formally offer the CDDL to Professor Deepak Phatak of the Indian Institute of Technology, whose comments suggest we share a licensing philosopy. We designed the CDDL, leveraging the wonderful work done by the Mozilla Foundation, as a resuable license, to promote participation – along with community, opportunity and independence.)

Catchall Scribbles

Tagging and then some…

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1. Total books I own:-around 700
2. Last book I bought:-Wild Swans (Jung Chang)
3. Last book I read:-Last Days of the Reich (James Lucas) Five Point Someone (Chetan Bhagat) The BookSeller of Kabul (Asne Seierstad) Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) Black Friday
4. Books that mean a lot to me: Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll), The Prophet (Gibran), Roots (Alex Haley) To Kill a Mocking Bird (Harper Lee)
5. A book that’s on its way out of your house as you write this: Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
6. The book I found most disappointing:Black Friday
7. Funniest book I ever read:Alice in Wonderland
8. Books I want to read but have never been able to: Catch 22
9. 5 people I’ve now tagged:ummm…only Runa and Soumyadip

CHANGELOG: Soumyadip is added as a result of this

The boss gave me this to read.

Execution is “the missing link between aspirations and results,” and as such, making it happen is the business leader’s most important job. While failure in today’s business environment is often attributed to other causes, Bossidy and Charan argue that the biggest obstacle to success is the absence of execution. They point out that without execution, breakthrough thinking on managing change breaks down, and they emphasize the fact that execution is a discipline to learn, not merely the tactical side of business.

A collection of jottings on various issues that excite no one else