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.

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.

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.

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.

Huh, when did my exams finish? How did I write the exams?
Ok, Let’s not ask questions that I know nothing about!

Immediately after 1 exam, I had work all around my table. I did give up my rest 2 exams.
This has delayed my degree by another 6 months; that’s two years to graduation now!
By this year, almost all my school mates have attained the salvation of graduation.

My grandpa still says “Graduation didn’t matter for Bill Gates because he was a very smart guy”.
May be I should take my academics seriously from now.

Let’s talk about work now. It’s been going through my mind to reach out FOSS to schools/universities and this is not community help or free service. This is not supposed to be one time help that people offer and then vanish from the scene, leaving the client baffled.
We are talking about thorough professional service here, right from deployment, technical service and training the staff to handle any technologies we deploy with a full transparency.
I’d like to emphasis on the word `transparency` again. The focus is to maintain true open source spirit at service and training too; ensures that clients have enough knowledge during technical glitches.

While most of the business guru’s wouldn’t agree to this and would call it an axe on your own feet. And yes, this might be a real cut off in revenue generation, but I believe that deceptive businesses do not earn any respect.

The market for FOSS tools to schooling/universities in India is quite low, yet worth a try.
Only time can tell if `element idea Labs` would be able to grab a decent share of it or not!

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…

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.

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.)

My new lappie rested in its bag for some days. I had no time to use it and may be I was even waiting for my opensolaris shipment to arrive. It was my third attempt to get free opensolaris shipment from SUN. Hoping atleast the third one would come.

I tried downloading from the website, but the download breaks. One of ilughyd members, theju tried from torrent, I guess he got a bad checksum. So, all in all last, trust was on SUN to grant me an opensolaris DVD.

The wait was getting longer each day and one fine day ubuntu released 8.04 LTS version. This tempted me to try out the distro and still keep waiting for opensolaris. ubuntu studio seemed a good deal to try out. The download was another long wait.
After install affects:
1. Atheros wi-fi device was not detected.
2. Low quality sound.

Sound could be taken care of later, but lappie is really not mobile until I can go wireless. Limited by time, I left it in that state for few more days. The day I got back to it, I tried using the restricted drivers and madwifi.
Then I tried ndiswrapper deb package and used winXP drivers; no avail.
I was suggested to try compiling ndiswrapper from source rather than using packaed deb, at ‘The GNU/Linux Group‘
That attempt ended in CFLAGS error. Checked around in the internet to find lots of reports on CFLAG errors from various people trying to compile apps from source. Most of them are related to kernel 2.6.24

I was lost in thoughts on what can be done and lo - my opensolaris shipment arrived(release 1/08). Eager to get it run, I tried installing and ended up with bad/non-existing X server on the disk. I couldn’t get into GUI installation and I didnt want to spend time doing command installation and then patch my X.

It is not my natural self to upgrade / install new releases - Long lost habit. I wait for a month or two after the release and upgrade/install, only if necessary. Running low on time, I decided to pull debian4.0/kubuntu7.10 from my CD pack and get done with distro installation.
Atheros didnt work by default in it as well, but then ndiswrapper 1.51 did the job to an almost ok level. I say so because my wi-fi switch doesn’t blink, though I am able to connect to internet and it also works as toggle to switch on/off.
I’ll save the lights thingy for some other time. Got loads of other things to address on priority.

11 May this time it is, second sunday. Doesn’t strike you yet? It’s mother’s day and it’s gone already (atleast here in India).

So well, I hope people didn’t forget to wish their mom.
At least I didn’t, and we (gf & I) packed neat surprises for our moms’.
We purchased gifts two days in advance and ordered for cake on 10th. The cake was sneaked into my gf’s fridge and it lay there unnoticed until the clock struck 00:00 (digital life)

We woke up our moms’ at midnight to celebrate mother’s day. They were taken by complete surprise; they must have thought we forgot about it. Who wouldn’t? We showed no signs of remembering it throughout the day.
Gift’s were presented before celebrating the cake and what should I say, I guess we made the opposite choices of gifts. It’s up to them, if they want to exchange their gifts now.
Everyone was drowsy and we decided to continue celebrations in the morning.

I found out that mom had to go to office this Sunday. That was so heartbreaking. Nevertheless, when she returned in the evening, we ordered food from a Chinese restaurant. Thanks to my gf’s overestimation of our eating capacity, we all were full by the time we could complete only half the food.
I overate (may be due to good taste) and heck I have a belly now that looks almost like a near delivery pregnancy. Worry not, I will not be wished on mother’s day next year; heavy food just takes some time to digest.