mukt.in 2008 Schedule up

After loads of restructuring, rearranging and rescheduling, the talks, demos and sessions page are finally up.

With just 6 days to go for the event (Oh, I will start the counter tomorrow), there are pretty much tasks left unfinished. I just hope we can complete them in time.
The daily 4 hour power cut is driving me nuts.
This was an unforeseen hick up for the event. The venue host does have a generator, but it is a diesel shortage season. We need to stock up diesel for encountering power interrupts at the event.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of volunteers for the event from Department of Computer Science, University College of Engineering, Osmania University.
This should give me some helping hand at tasks.

Thanks to everyone who contributes.

Spread the word about mukt.in 2008; some posters will be available for help.

launchpad changes look

For people who are new to the term – Launchpad, is a collaboration place for project management and code hosting for free software. It is supported by Canonical Ltd.

Probably the most famous project that uses Launchpad is ubuntu

Launchpad had a nice green top and left side menus. Green has been one of my favorite colors.
With the new look, there are no green menus’, the left side menus are shifted on the right and there are other features added which are aimed towards a simpler interface.
If you are searching for the left menu to change details, update ssh keys etc., on your profile page, check under ‘Personal Package Archive’ available as a top menu on the same page.
Also, there are now easily accessible menu items arranged on top at your profile page.

I also noticed a tag cloud type listing on https://code.launchpad.net/, may be I should call it a branch cloud; it looks nice, though I am not sure if this is one of the new features of Launchpad 1.2.4

Another very nice feature is that you can now post on mailing lists without subscribing. This is very useful when you want to make once-off posts.
Spammers – Do not rejoice, such posts are moderated before they can appear on the lists.

If someone wonders what I didn’t like about this new change, here they are
1. Green menu’s were removed
2. New Launchpad logo
3. New launchpad favicon.

Anyway, these don’t stop me from using launchpad.

KDragons screensaver

Just wrote a simple scrolling marquee screensaver with pygame. Bad thing, it runs in 640 x 480 display mode.

Image:

Konqi taken from Wormux.

Source:

#!/usr/bin/env python

bkg_image_filename = 'images/wormuxkonqi.png'

# Running in windowed mode
SCREEN_SIZE = (640, 480)
message = "    KDragons coming soon...   "

# Get functions needed
from random import randrange
import pygame
from pygame.locals import *
from sys import exit

pygame.init()
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(SCREEN_SIZE)

font = pygame.font.SysFont("freemono", 30);
text_surface = font.render(message, True, (0,255,0))

x = 0
y = ( SCREEN_SIZE[1] - text_surface.get_height() ) / 2

bkg = pygame.image.load(bkg_image_filename).convert()

while True:
	for event in pygame.event.get():
		if event.type == QUIT:
			exit()

	# set speed for scroll and change of y axis position
	x-=5
	if x < -text_surface.get_width():
		x = SCREEN_SIZE[0]
		y = randrange(100,450,20)

	# konqi scrolls opposite direction to text
	screen.blit(bkg, (-x,y/2))
	screen.blit(text_surface, (x,y))
	pygame.display.update()
	screen.fill((0,0,0))

Happy Birthday Mom!

Oh yeah, that cake tastes so yummy. I always avoid sweet edibles, but guess what?; I am eating a big piece of cake.

My mom went to sleep at 00:10. May be she was sad thinking that I must’ve forgot her birthday. She probably didn’t remember that the wall clock was running 15 minutes fast. So we had a 5 minute mission; as soon as mom turned off her room light, my gf sneaked into the house (she was standing at the door with the cake). We quickly arranged the chair, table with cake and candles. By this time, my gf’s mom gave a call.
I woke up my mom and handed over the phone telling that someone called for her.
She wondered who! (still believing that we don’t remember her birthday). With puzzled voice she said “Hello” and the next second she was smiling.

I left to the other room before she started talking to my gf’s mom, only to return after the call was over. Here’s our conversation after that:
me: Who was it mom?
mom: Your gf’s mom. She wished me.
me: Wished!!! Is it your birthday?
mom:
me: OK. If it’s your birthday please come to the hall room.

This left my mom totally confused. I took her to the hall where we had switched off the lights. The first thing she could see was the dazzling lights of candles on her birthday cake. She then noticed my gf standing in the dark, that made her go all smiles.
We celebrated the cake and hmm I just finished gobbling up the last bit of it.
We didn’t know mom had bought some kit-kat chocolates for us; funny thing we had also bought kit-kat for her

I may be leaving for khammam by today evening; I wish I could stay but I guess it can’t be avoided.

/dev/null party and the amazing gift!

2 meetings is all what I did yesterday. It’s one of those `almost nothing productive` days.

The kdegames meeting ended at around 02:30 and I must’ve fallen asleep early, may be around 03:30.
The next meet was at 11:00, Subway Begumpet. Expected attendees: neenaoffline, vimzard, shriphani, punchagan and me.
I turned out almost 1 hour late. Why? Pushed my bike for more than 2kms. It almost slipped my mind that my bike was already running on reserve.
Anyway we did nothing at the party but just eat. Punchagan didn’t turn up for the meet; good for him. We didn’t find a good use for our laptops too; why did we bring them at all? Even the wi-fi at subway was down.
So well, the party is now officially named `/dev/null` party.

When I came back home, I got a call from country vacations trying to explain me that I have won an amazing gift..er. 3 gifts actually. If I remember it right, they said One kitchen utility product, holiday sponsor of INR 25,000 to Goa and a card to spend on anything for a day. They were throwing a party at Amrutha castle and invited me to come and collect my gifts. Supposedly I have won this so called gifts due to a lucky draw coupon which was dropped at Exhibition grounds.
I wondered when I did so? Its been ages since I’ve attended an exhibition!

I asked my mom whether she had dropped any such coupon. The answer was “No”. I wonder where they got my landline number from. If no one filled any such coupon, how do they even have my numbers and name? And moreover she insisted that we come and collect the gift.
I also called the Amrutha castle’s reception and they confirmed that country vacations were indeed having a party next day evening.

So, its true. I have won a gift for a non-existing coupon! Anyway, tomorrow when they call me again, I will tell them that it doesn’t belong to me.

A month away..

Excitement and tension builds around us as we are just another month away from mukt.in 2008.

Our IRC channel #mukt.in, is attracting more people and their questionnaire.
I would like to mention a special thanks to unixpod guys. They provided us a free server to host our site, an svn, bugzilla and most importantly very friendly support. They are young guys with awesome talent; some of them are younger to me.
They are upgrading services on their servers and it would be of real help if we could donate for good service (Donate button on bottom right corner).

The new services being added to unixpod (especially the LDAP support) is going to take some time. We decided to move our repository to googlecode as we were adding to their already heavy traffic.
Also, most of us would have noticed that mukt.in 2008 registrations are open; we have separate forms for attendees and speakers.

We are trying to include another new feature at mukt.in 2008 – FOSS Start-up Meet up. This is aimed to be a collaboration ground for few FOSS wanna-be entrepreneurs, and may be some already entrepreneurs as mentors. Another wonderful ground to find out if services can be exchanged/outsourced between FOSS based start ups.

Qvantel is the only current confirmed sponsor yet. Discussions are in progress with few other organisations and hopefully we should be able to grab a few more sponsors to sustain the event.

Ride KDE4 with openSUSE 11.0

About Six and half hours of leeching from torrent and 117.4 MB of seeding contribution for self-satisfaction, adds another distro to my wallet – the all new openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 Live CD.

Watching DragonBall on lappie and simultaneously installing openSUSE on my PC made the installation feel fast. After post installation configuration, it automatically logged me in with my username.
I was expecting to see the shiny black KDE4 panel and it turned out that openSUSE build had something else in mind.
A grey panel…err..not so attractive!

KDE4’s panel settings doesn’t have customisation for color and transparency like it did in 3.5.x series. Anyway, I thought I could figure it out somewhere in configuration files or may be live with it.
Some things I found missing during installation include setting hostname, choosing Network Type, Package selections.
After installation I also noticed that an extra user `linux` was created apart from my username.
Who asked for that? Is it a feature or did I do something during installation. ( One eyeball was watching lappie and the other was on PC – trait of suse mascot )

I decided to redo installation with careful check. This time I found that I had not unchecked the option of using same password for my username and root. Using this feature simulates ubuntu’s sudo kinda environment where you use your own password to do administrative tasks.
Even after the second installation, I find the ‘linux’ user existing on my system. So, well may be it’s not something I did and probably it’s a feature which I need to find an use for.

Moving on to KDE4 desktop now. openSUSE 11.0 ships in with KDE 4.0.4 which seems quite stable than my trunk build 4.0.7. Yes, quite stable but has issues.
The plasmoids on desktop lose their rotation when you relogin. They get realigned at their default vertical orientation.
Another issue is when I change colors in my look and feel settings and apply them, I get logged out losing all my open tasks.
openSUSE 11.0 also ships Firefox3 beta5 which hangs when your machine comes back from power save mode. Yet to test out Firefox3 Final on this.

Nevertheless, I am loving KDE4. Soon this ’shipped’ KDE will be removed and my PC should be living on KDE trunk.

Current distro profiles of my machines – openSUSE 11.0 on PC and Mandriva 2008.1 on lappie.