For some time, I have been working on a content delivery application called Senpai (the application was designed with education related scenarios in mind – hence the name). The plan is to create a complete system, one component of which would let you package your video (lectures, product info, ads, hands-on-guide, etc) along with slides (basically HTML pages), transcripts, FAQ, and the other component would bring all these items together and present them to the end user. The basic skeleton of the end-user component is ready, and is at quite a “demoable” stage. There are a few remaining hacks which is needed for the FAQ renderer – and I plan to do those within the next few weeks. The application is “network friendly”, ie. it can access files across networks (using either http, or ftp, or scp), while the video playback mechanism can handle streaming video. It was designed with thin-clients in mind, and it works fine on LTSP nodes (with network transparent video as well as audio). For handling video, I am using Xine (with the option to switch to GStreamer if needed), while for the HTML rendering, I am using Gecko (yeah – the same thing which is used in Mozilla). It is uses GTK2 and also makes significant use of GNOME-only technologies (Gconf, libgnome, libgnomeui, gnome-vfs etc). However, the file format is plain and simple XML (with publicly available DTDs), so anyone can build a clone for his/her favourite platform/desktop.



Future plans include support for interaction with the instructer/lecturer/whoever did the presentation (maybe via Jabber??), integration with Kino, etc. Suggestions are welcome.

At present I am cleaning up the code and removing the profanity (hehe..), and I’ll probably release the code (under the GPL) sometime during November.

Have been looking into the m17n library recently. Pretty interesting stuff. They even have a modified version of Magicpoint that uses the library to render complex text. Another idea that comes to my mind is to modify the GD support in PHP so that we can have a imagem17ntext() which will be able to render complex text on images rendered by PHP (using GD). Maybe this can be my next fun-hacks project.

Apparently Soumyadip’s box has also been affected with the blown up capacitor syndrome, reaffirming my theory that it is nothing but a conspiracy of the most wicked kind.

In other news, the GNOME Foundation election has started, and I followed up Vincent’s announcement by sending out the renewal requests to all members whose terms have expired.

And if you get any mails that look like this, ignore them – they are fake.

For some reasons, IDG’s main production system, as well as mine (Athlon XP 2600+, 512 Megs of RAM), decided to go bonkers. IDG’s box won’t start at all, while mine would start after an almost endless cycle of turning it on and off. I decided to run memtest86, which gave me around 700 errors in the first 5 minutes, and then it hung. Very nice – I said to myself, and opened up the box. Apparently, one of the larger capacitors of the motherboard has gone kaput, and IDG reports that in his mobo, around 5/6 capacitors have leaked/burnt up. So both of us are working exclusively from the laptops.

This is bad news for GRIND, since the big machine was my primary workhorse, and running heavy duty compile jobs on the laptop is next to impossible (I don’t even have enough hard disk space).


Normally, I would have blamed the Taiwanese crappy capacitor manufacturers. However, with IDG’s production system going down simultaneously, I am inclined to believe that we are the first victims of a heinous evil conspiracy aimed at destroying the very core of the Free Software based Indic l10n movement.

….yessss.. I am a conspiracy theorist.

Of recent, I have been reading Mono – A Developer’s Notebook, and I really like the approach taken by the “Developer’s Notebook™” series. My first lessons in doing something useful with computers (writing HTML pages – nothing fancy) were through a very similar direct, task driven approach, with almost no theory, just practical examples and code snippets – and I still find this kind of method to be the best in most situations (especially when you are self teaching yourself). Anyone who is interested in Mono should get this book.

Finally, I managed to get the fonts to look good in my notebook’s LCD screen. The steps to do this are as follows:

1. Do a USE="bindist cjk" emerge freetype.
2. From the GNOME fonts preference dialog box, go to “Details…” and set “Hinting” to “None

That should do the trick (I am using the BitStream Vera fonts).

On screen writing – using Gromit

Gromit is a tool which allows you to simply draw on the screen, ignoring any window-borders. This can be extremely useful while giving presentations – especially hands-on demo kind of things.
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Sharing files – using EPittance

EPittance uses WebDAV and Rendezvous to share file among systems using GNOME 2.8 (I think Mac OSX users would also be able to access the shares). It does not support authentication yet – but its good enough for me in its present shape – so I’m happily using it.

Setting up Gentoo Hardened remotely

Recently, I have been setting up Hardened Gentoo on a remote server (over ssh) – and it has been fun (in general). The only scary part was when I had to reboot the machine to get the new security optimised kernel up and running – since the server has some pretty new hardware features (SATA and other fancy stuff), and I was not sure whether I had configured the kernel correctly for those new features. Had it refused to boot into the new kernel, the system would have been down for the entire weekend – but anyway, it did boot successfully – and right now, it is merrily recompiling gcc, glibc, binutils. Next step is to do a emerge -e world.

weee…. Desktop pr0n….

[Update]: Ok – here’s Mark Shuttleworth’s explanation.

Yesterday I went to WBUT, and helped Dr. Lothar Richter (a member of the ARB development team) to get ARB up and running on the Gentoo PPC64 (on the IBM pSeries machine). The good news is that ARB now compiles on the system with GCC 3.4.2 (though it took us a whole day to get rid of the compile errors). However, it still segfaults while trying to show the main window – and it seems to be a bug with the Xlibs. Our plan is to get the latest Xorg and compile ARB against that – let’s see what happens.

Today, I went out and bought myself the following books.

• Learning Python (2nd Edition)
• The Art of Unix Programming
• The Official GNOME 2 Developer’s Guide

I think I’ll be busy with these for the next few weeks .

I also installed GNOME 2.8 in my laptop – using HAL and DBUS enabled GNOME is really a pleasure. I also installed F-Spot in my system – it is not ready for production use yet, but from what I could see, it is going to rock!! Next week – I’ll try out Beagle. I also plan to start UI reviewing the GNOME 2.8 Bangla translations very soon.

Another thing that I tried out during this weekend is Software Suspend 2. It works flawlessly in my system. Can’t wait to see it integrated into the official Gentoo kernel (gentoo-dev-sources).