RPMs for GScribble released

Today is another big day for me, I have made a new release for GScribble along with RPMs for Fedora. I take this oppotunity to thank my seniors Debayan Bannerjee for all round support that he gave me during the collge, Shreyank Gupta who did the artwork for GScribble and Rangeen Basu who helped me with packaging.

Being the first release the app is missing a lot of basic functionalities which I will provide later on. I will try to release as soon as I make some changes so that I keep myself involves in it.

I remember when I first started using Twitter I lost my patience to blog, then I realised that it was TwitterFox which was the main reason, I then tried to search for blog clients. Eventually I coulfd not find any nice app. Since then I had decided that I would write an app for me.

I would also like to thank Srijan technologies who provided me sufficient free time during my internship that helped me a lot to work on it.

My first big contribution to FOSS

I really feel proud to announce that I have written a client of my own today for posting contents on my blog.
I am really looking forward to fix problems with the interface very soon. As I am new to GUI development, it will take some time till then I ask you to be patient.

The project page is here.

A wonderful experience at Srijan

On Friday, the M.D. Mr. Rahul Devan took the entire Srijan Team to a outing so that people may get to know each other and decide what the company’s strategies should be. Though I am an intern over here but I also asked to be a part of the trip, which initially I had thought that I would bunk, but later I decided to go ahead and see it.

Mr Vivek Puri, who had just left IBM and joined Srijan, picked me up from Khanpur bus stop in his car and drove us to ‘Teri Resort’ on Faridabad-Gurgaon Express way. On the way I saw Qutub Minar (which I had been planning to visit since I came here) and Chattarpur Temple (which has a statue of Hanuman which is over 40 feet tall). We reached there at 9:40 AM. As he parked his car, we were taken to the conference room in a battery-driven auto-ricksaw. There was greenery everywhere. I must say they had well maintained the resort.

Then the proceedings for the day began. It started with the introduction of the 22 members of Srijan team. Everyone had to speak about his past, his experience with Srijan and his ambitions for future. I was overwhelmed with thoughts when everybody spoke how they wanted to help society some by teaching kids, opening schools at their respective villages. I would like to mention here are Mr Hari from Andhra Pradesh who was deeply touched by farmers of his village and some other nearby villages who were moving out of villages to cities in search of job, where they had to live on footpaths. He said that at some point of his life he would return to his village and teach them how to use new technology to get better harvest and earn money.

Apart from that I saw some people here are not very well educated but with the help of others they are also progressing. It was also great to see even the peons sat with and told their story.

I must say that in the past month that I have stayed here, I never felt this place like an office, its always full of humour.

Then we had lunch after that we again sat down and decided bout the strategies and points of success and failures of the company. Here they were trying to decide the company’s policy. The M.D. has always tried to make it a democratic place to work and thus he was seeking everyone’s say in how the company should be run. Almost everything from administration to finance everything was discussed. Later in the evening we played Cricket and guess what I dropped two catches

It was really an experience to be remembered.
It was really interesting to see a company shape up.

Quick update

These days I am quite busy with Drupal and have learnt that Drupal is not merely a blogging software, you can make a full fledged website out of it. You can make modules, themes, customise it, and much more than I used to think initially. Apart from that I have learned to use CSS which is also very important for web development. If you are trying to develop websites use Firebug extension from mozilla firefox, it is very useful and you can make your website look better. I am trying to integrate Drupal blogs module and planet module to make something which would let the client make a site which would give blogs from the site and blogs from wordpress, blogger etc stay together and would enable commenting. Apart from that I learned to use various other modules. In short this time Mukti website would be on Drupal not wordpress.

Apart from that I am learned something about XML-RPC module of Python. I have been longing for a desktop blogging software for Gnome. I tried some but they were not good. Now I think of making something.
In the mean time I have spent sometime with opendchub and have found a major flaw in the software, I think I will be able to fix it by this weekend (the only time I am free these days).

I have also made my first rpm for opendchub. I will very soon release rpms and debs for opendchub.

Lastly, I declare that I want to go to Agra, I need a companion, if somebody is willing please leave a comment . Everyone is invited.

Working at www.srijan.in

The story began nearly one month back. I had hardly any work and no internship for the coming summer. Debayan forwardrd a mail from ILUG Delhi’s mailing list for an opportunity for an internship to work on Drupal. Since I had PHP knowledge and I had been managing the GLUG website, so I felt I had some chance. So I sent them a mail with my resume. Though I was not expecting any replies ( I had made similar attempts earlier also), still I made an attempt following my Golden rule – “Try, rather than repenting later that I should have tried”.  Two days later I got a reply that there would be a telephonic interview which happened the next day. The interview was okay. I hardly have anything in my resume that I could boast about. The person was Mr. Sidharth (thanks to the list of names of employees on my desk for the spelling).  He said that he would reply in 15 days about the confirmation which made me think that that they will dump me. To my amazement the same guy called me two days later that I was selected and asked about my convinience for work.

I was very happy and now I am at Srijan trying to digg deep into drupal. Today is my third day here. I must admit that sitting here 8 hours makes me so tired that I fall sleep as soon as I reach home. I hope that I do something great in the coming two months of my work here.

ScribeFire Plugin for Firefox

I like to use Firefox because of the add-ons it provides. I mostly use Fast Dial, Webmail notifier, Download Them all, Twitterfox, Google toolbar. Just now I installed ScribeFire blog editor. This is really a cool add-on. You just have to press F8 and you get a nice interface, go ahead and type whatever you want to and just publish your post.
I have written this post from ScribeFire and from now onwards I will use it to write posts. 

Some things I have been doing these days

I have become a kind of person who does not care about examinations any more and keep on doing some stuffs.

1. I always wanted to have a bot on our channel (#nitdgplug on Freenode, though we have very less to log, you all are welcome to our channel ). So i used eggdrop to create a bot and log messages. It is really a great software, and needs a hell lot of configuration. Here is the configuration bot file. Strangely wordpress does not allows to upload txt files, so you can simply rename it as bot.conf and use.
I made an important change to log all the messages and log it in directories whose name bears month name and year as Apr2009. I played with the configuration file and then it was done. Just create a directory with this name Apr2009 (three letters per month name.
This did the trick

logfile jpk #nitdgplug “logs/” //removed the name of file name
set logfile-suffix “%b%Y/%d%b%Y.txt” // I just added ‘%b%Y/’ to what it aleady was.

you can see logs of our channel at http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/irclogs/.

2. Today I created a video section for our website with wordpress. I was struggling with Drupal, even if it has a flash player module it is not properly documented (If you know tell me I will be pleased to know). With wordpress it was just a matter of 10 minutes. http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/videos.

This was really fun. Looking for more things to do .

How to /boot/grub/menu.lst for network install

Yesterday I went to help a Professor from Mechanical Department who had mailed me for help. He was really struggling with windows as desperately wanted to get Linux installed as he was not familiar with windows software. He was the first man I have ever met who said that he was struggling with office excel and wanted Linux.

He had an old HP workstation. I never had opportunity to see a workstation but yesterday I saw one and even installed Fedora 10 on it. I must say the machine was really fast even better than the new Centrino Duo / core 2 duo processors that we use. The instllaion took only 20 minutes and i must say here that he had nearly selected almost all the packages (GNOME & KDE both).

There was another machine whose DVD drive was not working. I had SUSE Enterprise Server installed with barely any software. So I installed openSUSE 11.1 on it from the Local Installation repository that we have. We generally use Unetbootin (Google if you dont know) for network installation. But I was not able to install that due to some dependencies. So I downlaoded the kernel and initrd filles from the installation medium and then i edited menu.lst.

• First I made a new directory in /boot and called it install.
• Then I copied the initrd and linux(kernel in opensuse DVD) to /boot/install.

• Then I edited menu.lst. Since my boot partition was same as root /dev/sda2, so for me i added

title Install

root (hd0,2)
kernel /boot/install/linux
initrd /boot/install/initrd

• Then I rebooted and selected “Install” from the boot menu and it worked out.

Once again it can be noticed how powerful Linux is, I dont know if any other OS gives you such options, if you know then please tell me 

using java on linux

This was a problem faced by my friend. He happens to use only JAVA that too JAVAC. He does not like to use Netbeans I don’t know why. And he said that it was the only problem that stopped him from using Linux. So I decided to help him. These were some links which were really helpful.

http://en.opensuse.org/Java
http://en.opensuse.org/Installing_Sun%27s_Java_on_SUSE_Linux (to be more precise)

The problem was that the openJDK which provides JAVC which is the default installation on openSUSE is different from JAVAC provided by SUN because the same Hello World program which compiled on SUN’s JAVAC failed to compile on openJDK’s JAVAC.

The details can be found out here http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/wiki/index.php/How_to_use_Java_on_Linux

The repositories described there are Local to our college you can use your package manager to locate the packages. For openSUSE users sun’s packages are in Non-OSS repo

mouting network directory as your own directory, NFS

I manage our local GLUG server. And the server was running out of space. So I was thinking of some alternative, so NFS clicked my mind. I am trying to mirror Ubuntu repo for our college students.

There is another server in the college which I happen to manage, so I decided to give NFS a try. Since both the machines are running openSUSE the distro of my choice, it was not difficult at all. http://en.opensuse.org/NFS This link gave sufficient information about using NFS.

Within 10 minutes I was done. But I need to see how fast it actually is once the download completes. Hope it works out. Then our repo will be complete with support for Fedora, openSUSE and ubuntu. Check out the repo here. http://lug.nitdgp.ac.in/repository/