On the track

Lots of back packing + back to blogging

Two sessions there + ongoing slides for that … and yes I am going to #fudconkl2012 .

See you all there

Packaging pyflag was one of the 3 mistakes of my life . Rest two will not be related to fedora, so has escaped the planet. Not only it has a dead upstream but also have so many issues, that after fixing may be 50 issues you are left with another 60. The problem is because of a dead upstream there is nobody to respond to your queries or solve the problems in the application tarball.

After getting so many pointers from @FranciscoD and @praveenkumar was able to submit the package for review with issues I cannot resolve without upstream help. Thankfully got someone to review after mailing Fedora-devel. The next problem occurred the very next day where the package did fail to build in 64 bit boxes due to some make issues in using libdir.

A patient @FranciscoD guided me throughout and debugged what may have been the cause of the issue as I told him to build it and check in his 64bit laptop (Mine is still a 32bit old monk). He got the issues and we fixed it (the “we” here is mainly “he” ). It was midnight by that time, and so he did doze off leaving to me a SPEC file which by any means got a new line or a carriage return and failed to get build either in mock or koji scratch build. I got mighty pissed off and slept off at around early morning.

Bullish way to say screw them, is to write the spec file from scratch and I did it to remove the holy carriage return which went undetected with all the sed tips and tricks across the internet. SUCCESS !!

Uploaded the current version to the review request, hopefully this time it doesn’t fails at the build itself. Amen !

From few days I was trying to install some third party Rhythmbox plugins on my F16 machine. I did try all the means to do it (copying it to the /local/share) and other folder whichever had a plugin name in it and associated with Rhythmbox, but nothing worked. Thinking it was the problem with the plugin I downloaded, I left the task there.

Today after a question in AskFedora I tried to install the cover flow plugin and to my surprise found that I even couldn’t get that installed anyway. After lot of googling found out that this is a bug with the latest Rhythmbox shipped with Fedora 16, in which you coudn’t install new plugins. The bug is already filed here

Hopefully this problem resolves soon and some patch gets released so that 3rd party plugins can be installed again in Rhythmbox.

Problem in staying with @kushaldas and that too regarding a Linux event is your sleep gets mostly screwed as he will be having some responsibility for which he has to start at early midnight (at least for me) and so I have to follow.

FUDCon Day 1

Wakeup call starts at 5:00 am. Brain senses fails to understand what’s happening and why, trying to sleep : but not feasible. So woke up and got ready within 6:30, me and Kushal had to reach Cocoon Hotel by 7:00 to make sure that we all have our breakfast and start by 8:00 am. After a healthy breakfast in Cocoon we started at around our scheduled time with all speakers. We were accompanied with the Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith (@jsmith). I am meeting him first time, and he was really a nice and humble person down to earth. Our target destination for FUDCon was COEP, Pune. We reached there more or less on time and it was the time to start the Keynote Speech from Jared Smith. One great part as a event in FUDCon is that you could see people are always trying to make the things better (starting from the volunteers, to event organizers). Jared Smith’s keynote was very inspiring specially regarding the point about upstream and river, and also “talk doesn’t cook rice”. He also shared along with everybody what he thought were the coming challenges and what is his vision of Future. It was full house, and very interactive Start to Day 1 FUDCon. You can watch the video for his talk here.

Another thing worth mentioning is I met with lot of new people (Fedora Contributors across the world and India) some of them are @praveenkumar, @FranciscoD , @azneita , @jsimon , @rsc , @sagarun (Don’t get afraid by his twitter profile pic, he’s not that dangerous ) , @maktrix , @vaidikkapoor , @SrishAkaTux , @danishka … ahhh a lot of names. Went to Transifex session hosted by @rtnpro. It was a nice insight on the translation platform. Post lunch attended Fedora Web of Trust where I signed my gpg keys, thanks to @azneita. @sagarun ‘s session got a mass audience but sadly I missed it. Vaidik’s talk on FUDCon and similar COD development framework was very helpful, and from that I got some encouragement to get started with COD and Drupal regarding my web development work. But having same clash I missed Sitaram’s talk on Gitolite, you can watch it here . It was nice to listen to his talk on video and also he being from TCS, gives a extra happiness. Ending Day 1 with your own session is the only thing you can ask for, and I got it. When I thought to speak regarding tracing, never thought I will get a audience of 20 or 25+. Had a nice session except some initial hiccups with the projector and the good thing is crowd was bearing with me. It was nicely interactive and people started asking questions after the session and I felt happy to answer all of them. After coming to hotel from COEP @rahulsundaram headed a fun filled gossiping and chatting session involving Vaidik, Praveen, Laxmi, Daniska , me and Ankur and @tuxdna. The discussion went from Politics to God knows what not subject and ended up on horrible lines written everywhere in Cocoon Hotel rooms. @rahulsundaram’s “bugger” was a term I heard more than countable times that day. The day ended with a awesome dinner at Cocoon where @sagarun was the talk of the evening (due to his [or not his] #BabyPink Slippers). @sagarun tasted his first drinks that evening with a Mojito and later did all sort of post actions possible in this world. That evening’s dinner details would take me a page to discuss, so cutting it short here. Day 1 was super smooth, its very rarely of a event as big as FUDCon to go as smooth as silk. Numerous volunteers, Lot of talks and most importantly a group of Friends, that’s what was FUDCon Day 1.

FUDCon Day 2

I hate waking up from bed early in the morning, but the past repeats itself and again we are out of the Cocoon by 8:30 towards COEP. I was super excited from the Day 2 start regarding the FUDpub in the evening. Keynote session started with Harish Pillay. That day the next thing to do was to attend @sagarun’s talk on Django and a hands on on how to create web apps with it. Me and Vaidik was following the session and just after Vaidik downloaded and installed to Django to follow @sagarun’s session, the wireless went off and I coudn’t try anything hands on, just had to listen to @sagarun speak. But his talk was very organized and nice for any beginner (specially his slides). In all these 1st and 2nd day the most peaceful and Speaker’s hanging out place was Speaker’s Den . My laptop wireless was facing some issues and so me, vaidik, Ankur, and Arun was at Speaker’s lounge. After that the lunch schedule started and everybody was busy eating, @kushaldas was busy clicking.

Kushal started making his videos regarding experience of FUDCon from all speakers and on 3rd day from all volunteers. Next pit stop for talks was Security Exploits by @siddhesh_p. Stack Smash Attacks was what I came across when I was working to develop the Interrupt Handler for PMC counters for PowerPC Architecture. It was nice to see Siddesh explaining it with practical examples using GDB. Stack Back Chain and the LR can be overwritten (with assembly hack) and thus used to open something fishy was the major takeaway for me from that workshop. Even Siddesh talked about the recent improvements in GlibC which has protection against such attacks. 2nd day was going pretty good considering both @sagarun and @siddesh_p session helped me a lot to know new things. @SrishAkaTux session on #PyGoocanvas was good considering the amount of college students got interested to know about it later on, and thus they were moving all round Srishti. @SrishAkaTux made @sagarun (The person associated with the #BabyPink Slippers) delete a tweet which I was not allowed or rather supposed to tell.. Oops . There was a all together group photo shoot of everyone in FUDCon and that was super Fun because of the @rahulsundaram’s famous quote “I say FUD, you say CON – FUDCON or FoodCon” I am still confused with the pronunciation as many people pronounced otherwise than FUDCon. And now we were slowly getting set for #FUDPub.

Jared got himself sick so he missed the experience but I can just say it was a experience you need to have. Electrifying atmosphere, friendly people, snacks and food and most importantly Beer. I don’t like Beer, but still managed to drink 3. Dance Floor was on fire as all the volunteers and many of us speakers were into the floor, some started unwillingly but later enjoyed it a lot. Ankur lost all his tiredness created due to his earlier 4 talks with innumerable bear bottles. Arun did Push ups even drinking half beer, Praveen Kumar being lean as a stick managed 7+ beer bottles and @rahulsundaram called me Moron++ after me mistakenly made face drinking water from Kushal’s glass which I presumed to be Vodka. Moron+++ should be Kushal to be drinking water in a f #pub. FUDPub for me was a great event to socialize and interact with people on a personal level and it was awe …. wait for it… some experience.

FUDCon Day 3

Thankfully and nicely we didn’t woke up so early in morning (Nobody was in a state to). We started late at 9:30′ish from Cocoon. COEP was ready to host FUDCon day 3 (#hackfest). I had my hackfest on packaging tracing tools for Fedora, but decided to merge it with the @rsc’s package review hackfest which also had @jsimon, @azneita, @praveenkumar, @FranciscoD. Ankur and Praveen helped me a lot to get through the packaging of my stuffs and also to start packaging pyflag. Lunch was awesome Pizza’s from my favorite Smokin Joe’s. All people were either in the audi or Seminar hall 2 working on various topics of there interest. Starting from Transifex to AskFedora to Dorrie and Puppet. Day 3 didn’t have that rush of talks and thus was mainly concentrated on individual liking of technical hackathon.

After Day 3 end in COEP we all met at Cocoon for Dinner with Jared and the good news was he was completely feeling fine. @rahulsundaram can make u laugh your everything off and he was on his full flow that day. Dinner table was full of fun discussions and leg pulling and of course the never ending #BabyPink slippers. It was a long list of people and all were somehow or the other having loads of fun during the dinner. There came the famous token of “nested bullshit” too by Kashyap After food we all headed to Jared’s room and there began the serious part of discussions relating to Fedora, its future, developments, #whattoimprove , community, challenges and targets and few measures. We had Coffee in between along with few beers. Lot of people left in middle as they had to travel coming morning. I too had to, but I didn’t wanna miss any part of it.

Didn’t sleep the whole night, packed bags till Arun was already on the doorstep of Kushal’s building (where I stayed) to pick me up at 4:00 am in the morning to get the flight at 6:00 am. Whole through the cab we discussed about how FUDCon was and how much we did like it along with many other stuffs (about Arun’s new job). Soon thereafter Arun Boarded the flight followed by me marking the end to the journey of this year’s FUDCon.

Every good thing comes to an end, and so did FUDCon. Irrespective of erratic sleep and wake up timings, irrespective of lengthy sessions and tiresome whole day, irrespective of sleepless night and directly landing to office, this moments which I did spend here for last 3 days would be cherished years after by me. I have attended few technical workshops and conferences across India and few outside, but no where it gave me so many new friends to start with. FUDCon to me was more than FoodCon, it was a friends hangout circling one of the awesome Linux distros I have ever used, “FEDORA”. Cheers !!

FuDCoN is a huge event, and that’s why the pressure is huge on all organizers and volunteers. We witnessed the largest ever Fudcon here in Pune, India. Its the night before Fudcon and @rahulsundaram , @kushaldas , /me and @rtnpro were those who were at Kushal’s place discussing something. Suddenly Rahul pointed out that there are power failures in the venue (transformer failure to be accurate) and thus there will be no Electricity, which means in short and sweet “Speak without slides“. Thanks to @kushaldas this type of news never remains a secret for long and thus more or less it started to bring a series of mixed reaction of fear and forced confidence in the speaker’s camp. Thankfully I read speaker guidelines in wiki day before coming to the event and strangely abide line by line. So, I have printout of my slides

When I did arrive in Pune at night 10:30 pm, many speakers were yet to reach and @kushaldas made me run just after keeping my bag at his place, to accompany him to hotel to make sure all speakers got there T-shirts, goodies and the schedule for next day. As more torture, @kushaldas made it sure that hotel gives a wake up call at morning 6:00 am to the speakers :O

With all these happening and a full mind of thoughts in everyone as to how India’s first ever Fudcon will be, sleep conquered us !!

Its been 2 months since I blogged, was much busy in my final presentations of DSD (Distributed Software Development). A very nice final demo, in which all the prof’s were very pleased. Expecting excellent grades from this subject.

After the completion of that subject marked the end of Semester 1. A very happy smiling faces all through every people, with the temperature also shooting to bit more higher level at -12 degree C (Earlier it was -30 degree C ) adding cherry on the frozen cake

Good things doesn’t last long and again thesis (the main hurdle) comes forward. Its a thesis at Ericsson and the topic is also quite interesting. For the first part of it I was trying hard from the last few days to recompile the kernel to install LTTng.  Presently working on a Ubuntu 9.10 virtual box (as because it is same as Uni lab) and after 3 days of kernel panics, clock synchronization errors, blank screens while booting finally and successfully installed LTTng kernel and Control packages. Excellent tool to use and seeing the trace results makes you feel more good.

At present LTTng happily, am working on the document for LTTng Installation along with the problems faced by me, and also use of certain kernel patching tools like quilt.

Will blog soon taking time from my hectic but awesomely interesting thesis work , ciao

From Thursday night coding for the Distributed Software Development project. PHP being something new which I was using for this project and so it took bit time to learn it but thanks to Google and some ebooks I learnt how to work on it. All the 4 modules of our project assigned to me were completed by the start of Saturday morning. I didn’t sleep for Thursday night and Friday half night though . All standalone modules were working really very good and at last on Saturday (after Thursday night) I moved out to meet my project team at the University. We started integration but I don’t know why every module just after integrating inside the CakePHP framework was getting beaten badly. All the conventions and all are being followed still some strange variable mapping errors are given while specially integrating Google maps and Forums. Whole night have passed through .. no sleep and food (had just 1 apple) and still struggling. We have to present this on Monday and so all are worried and working day IN night OUT to complete the project.

Hopefully Integration works out well for us and we be one of the successful teams to demonstrate the complete project in BETA release

At last I was able to do internet through a adhoc connection set up in Windows 7 from my F11. But still the problem is there for a secure adhoc connection. nm-applet crashes every time you try and connect a secure adhoc connection. But as of now I am atleast connected with an adhoc unsecured network and the best part is to access internet through it. I have filled a bug regarding the secure adhoc connection problem in bugzilla. Lets hope it gets fixed in F12.

Not letting anybody to start guessing on what is the title meant for, actually I completed one of my scheduled courses for MS studies. Today was the last day of the course and we literally had to write a research paper and present it in Mini conference where all the professors’ were rating us. Never did actually found such a interactive class session earlier. After we completed the presentation there was a lots and lots of questions from the audience which was very interesting to answer. Faced a huge lot of crowd and presenting in front of them needed me to prepare it for three time yesterday night till 4:30 am. The preparation requirements was mainly as because I had to narrow down my presentation within 15 minutes

Loved this new kinda experience. Now as this is over I should get back to programming in OCL.

Long time since FOSS.IN at 2008, didn’t sit up for writing blogs. I was not too busy in between, but something or the other happened I don’t know due to which I was away from my E – diary or the blog. FOSS.IN this year is around the corner starting in December this time, but I am at Sweden now. To brief you my journey during this whole year which I missed writing blogs, I didn’t had a smooth one. During December 2008 or so decided to contribute to Sugar, for which I started working on just before the FOSS … but like most of my plans this also didn’t last longer, though this time it had some different reasons. Some personal reasons and points came up deciding to which I thought of starting my MBA preparation. MBA studies are tough and getting into it is more tougher. After hectic and stretched office hours, believe me you don’t feel like doing anything, forget OLPC, Sugar, Fedora. For some difference tried to study hard for MBA entrances and was gaining confidence as the days were moving on. Suddenly one day during mid May in the inside portal of TCS (the company which i work for) there was a advertisement for studying MS in Sweden for 10 TCS’ers. It would be a TCS sponsored event and there will be a bond of 2 years after the completion of MS. I also applied like several others , though initially there was a hiccup about I should go for MS or continue with study for MBA’s. After 3 rounds of interview got selected in the month of July for MS at Sweden and now here I am doing my MS in Software Engineering. During this turmoil my Open Source contribution activities took a major dip (just few rpm packages and few contributions here and there) and that’s why for some reason lost my fedora people account though my FAS account still stays active. Too much pressurized classes went from August till now where everyday I sleep for maximum 4 hrs. Lunch is delayed till evening 7 and Dinner starts at night 2:30.

Though there is a lot of pressure from all sides regarding many things, but that’s life and U can’t complain regarding it. Life has changed a lot, but suddenly seeing my lack of Open source activities and thus getting much far from the community makes me sad. I have to regain back the lost arena or else bear the sadness which I can’t. Lets hope to find a more successful, motivated Soumya than earlier … Amen