4 days to go…

No. It’s not the countdown for launch of my start-up, neither is countdown for start of a new TV game show.
4 days remain for the start of my semester exams and I still don’t know where my books are. (Do I have them?). “Ah, I’ll just read them from internet”, is how I try to console myself.
All these days I’ve been busy at maintaining mukt.in and tasted the pressure of lead responsibilities. Today, after lots of effort into writing our own forms, the attendee registration is up finally. (Yes, we chose not to use CMS even this time).
I would like to thank sivaji, kidfoo, deepsa, AJuOnLiNE and sanjayb for their efforts at it, while I was merely debugging stuff. (Ok, I know some names sound weird, but those are IRC handles)

I thought, “Atleast today I should sit and read something today”. I use my blackbeauty(PC) for reading for exams/e-books, coding for KDragons and on lappie its django, PHP, MySQL.
It almost skipped my mind that I had messed up my Desktop yesterday. KDE4’s plasma was crashing and I didn’t fix that yet. The problem was that widgets support isn’t really great on my build.
Here’s how my desktop looked yesterday – orkut album link
While most of the google search look-up’s and chat at #kde(freenode) suggested deleting plasma* from $KDEHOME/share/config, I figured out that moving plasma-appletsrc to something like plasma-appletsrc.old should do for me. Really no reason to delete plasmarc for my problem.

And this was not the end of issues. My downloads stopped due to insufficient disk space. What in the world could fill up my 45GB of /home?
A quick du -h showed me 31GB being consumed by .strigi folder in my home directory.
There were no options to disable strigi from my systems settings and I was not finding a clue whether this belongs to KDED services.
After lot of head scratching I found strigi-daemon running in my process table and it was eating away my resource like a glutton. (77% of CPU time!) No wonder why I felt KDE4 was being slow.
A small work around for this problem is ’sudo apt-get remove strigi-daemon’ and then delete all items from ~/.strigi/clucene
This seems to work fine, just that I don’t know the after-effects of reboot. Let’s wait and watch.

Oh by the way, would someone want to help me lose the habit of going to sleep at 5:00 am?
I’ve got exams from 18th, and all of them are at 10:00am. Time is ticking like always…

mukt.in 2008 – Call for sponsors.

Why do companies/organizations sponsor `free & open source software` events?
The most common answer would be ‘Marketing’. On a second thought, companies/organizations have another good reason to do that, especially `foss & open source` based start-up’s.

Wondering what that could be?
Supposedly, it one of the best ways to express that they support FOSS community. The priority between marketing and showing support could vary for each company.
In the end, it matters that they have supported.

One such wonderful ground is mukt.in; should we say mukt.in v2 or mukt.in 2008.
We are trying to create multitude opportunities of marketing for sponsoring companies by providing banner space on venue, logos on mukt.in website, conference hall banners, slots for talks to demo company’s products/service, job center and more.
This serves true for any domain, be it product development or a service company.

Details of sponsorship opportunities are available in our sponsorship brochure.
Readers of my blog can help by passing this information to potential sponsors or sending us contact details.

It’s Spring

Yes, it is spring now. No, I don’t mean the season but the new distribution on my lappie.

From the time I quit CSC, I’ve been using k/ubuntu for stable production work with little time for distro trials.
I picked up March and May issues of `Linux For You`and to my delight I found slackware12 and mandriva 2008.1 lying cute and cuddly in their shiny seal covers.
Then came hopping, the bully of our house a.k.a my girlfriend and snatched the slackware DVD to fulfill her new found madness – “Distro trials on Virtualbox”.

So, I spent my night yesterday installing and configuring mandriva spring. It took almost 5 hours to finish backups, installation, Look & Feel hacking, installing my requirements (apache, MySQL, Django, python, php) and a bunch other packages.
As a part of Look & Feel hacking, kiba-dock is the new app that makes it to my list; it took time to configure it not to look bloated, decide & place my launchers, refine the shadows & effects and last but not least was to suppress the black background render by using xcompmgr package.

I thought I did everything right, but no – I did screw up. I forgot to backup the database being used by my django models. No worries, it was just test database being used for my django learning.

Using debian derivatives has made me depend on deb packages. I also installed alien in case I need some packages from my backed up archives when I am away from internet.

That finished my configuration to be used for stable work. It feels good getting back to mandriva – the distro I was faithful to (mandrake 10.1 – mandriva 2006.)