Just wanted to mention that I’m back from a volcano/tropical rainforest trip (still in Indonesia though), and will be back in India on the 31st. Internet connection here is not very good (too many people on a slow link), and will be posting photos, etc once I’m back at Kolkata. There’s a nice picture of the forest at WikiTravel though…

After a long time, there’s a release of Sabayon with a lot of much needed bug fixes – read all about it at the mailing list.

The day started off with the introductory morning session by Gunner (apparenly he also did the wake up song, but I couldn’t hear it – I went to sleep too late at night yesterday). The Indonesian minister of Science and Technology also paid us a visit and we had a small question answer session with him. It was really great to see his pro-FLOSS position – very few ministers actually have that outlook (and Sunil told us that he also administers his departmental mail server.. wow!!). We had spectograms on quite a few topics (It’s OK to copy, It’s never right to use proprietary software, etc), and after a fabulous lunch and a leisurly afternoon, we had our introductory migration track with us breaking up into groups and dicussing the challenges and needs of migration to FLOSS. We also had a case study from the people working on Nepalinux, and Simos did a demo of Ubuntu install using Gayatri’s “guinea pig” laptop. After the session was over, we had dinner (with a great chicken soup to start off with – I also took some pictures – will upload those later) and we got a chance to hear some traditional Javanese music and some traditional Javanese music which ended with almost all of us trying to dance (and Simos sneaking away stealthily.. ).

…anyway – my laptop battery is dying right now, and I don’t see a plug adapter around – so more from me tomorrow…

So I finally arrived in Indonesia for Asia Source II – after around a 8 hour journey from Kolkata (the total time is around 5 hours, I had a 3 hour break journey at Changi airport in Singapore). The place I’m staying is around 4 hours ride from Jakarta – the capital city. It’s a really nice place (I really like the dorm I’m staying in), and I’m meeting a large number of people from all over the world (also met old friends like Dirk, Simos, Suni, Marek…). The next 7 days are going to be really exciting, and I’ll try to blog the things happening here as much as possible. The weather is pretty good (not too hot), and the food is great (I stuffed myself with stuffed hot pepper (“piper”???) today during lunch time ). I think I’ll also try to learn the local language – it did not seem to very difficult to me [:)].

…and oh, to make things more interesting, we are situated at the base of a twin volcanoe… dormant though [:D].

I came up with a small script which lets you apply a given Sabayon profile to members of a given group. It’s a very simple script – but I guess it will work as a stop gap for many admins (support for groups has been on the feature request list for quite a long time) till we figure out a proper way to implement this in core Sabayon itself.

Continuing on my new found love for Python , I have been trawling the Exaile bugs as well, and adding patches occassionally. Recently I added support for notification of volume change via OSD (this should be useful for people using LIRC and similar stuff). Right now, I’m trying to modify the banshee plugin of Tangerine into a plugin for Exaile.



In other stuff, Kerala’s draft IT policy seems to be very pro-FLOSS – here’s a snippet from the article:

The policy stresses that Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) will be used in e-governance projects. Open standards such as Unicode and Open Document Format and Open Architectures will be followed in e-governance projects to avoid total dependence on select vendors. The Government proposed to develop the State as the FOSS destination in the country. It will provide special incentives to companies developing FOSS.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been playing with Sabayon (mainly trawling through bugzilla and submitting patches occasionally). I have also added a wiki page for Sabayon at l.g.o and a short guide (work in progress) on how to utilise Sabayon from your own Python scripts. If you have used/evaluated Sabayon to do deployment, please do put it in the wiki and/or contact us at the mailing list with your story and your suggestions/comments.

Does this happen to you ?? It does happen to me….

Based on suggestions from quite a few people (thanks everyone!!), I made a few changes/tweaks to the Planet FLOSS India theme. Things should render slightly more gracefully on screens with width < 1024px . I'm also working on a few Javascript hacks for the site and also on a customised search engine for the subscribers of Planet FLOSS India, and hopefully they will be implemented by the end of next week.


In other news, I’m going to attend Asia Source II to be held at Yawitra Resort, Sukabumi, Indonesia. I’ll be participating in the FOSS Implementation and Migration track and will be leaving Kolkata on the 20th of this month and will be returning on the 31st. Asia Source I at Bangalore was a great experience, and I really look forward towards attend this camp as well. I got my Visa today – the only thing remaining is to get a ECNR stamp on my passport which I plan to do tomorrow.

After a lot of poking from SM and other people, I finally came up with a new design for Planet FLOSS India. This new look and feel is largely inspired by Planet GNOME, though it incorporates some ideas from the latest theme installed in my blog as well .

The design seems to work in Firefox (and all other Gecko based browsers), Opera 9.x (I tested with the Linux client), and MSIE 6.0 and 7.0. However, it is optimised for a 1024×768 screen, and it won’t work on resolutions lower than that . If I get the time, I should probably write an alternative stylesheet for devices with lower resolution. Meanwhile, patches are, of course, welcome.

Feel free to play around with the new design, and if you find anything broken, please do let me know by mailing sayamindu randomink org. Also, if you are associated with India AND FLOSS, and your blog is not listed in the subscription list, mail me with the URL (and if possible, a picture of yours), and I’ll add it to the feedlist.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep tinkering with the design (and probably also add a custom Google search engine for searching the subscribed blogs), and if you have any ideas, please let me know – in other words, comments/flames/patches for the design are welcome .

Finally, we have completed shifting RandomInk to a new host, and I took advantage of this shift to do a few things that have been pending for quite a long time:

• Upgrading all Wordpress installations to 2.0.6
• Getting rid of the abandoned subdomains
• Cleaning up the comment spam in all the blogs hosted at RandomInk
• Changing the look and feel of my own blog
• Cleaning up Planet FLOSS India – I would really love to have more hackergotchis in the site. If you are on P-F-I and if you have a picture that you want to turn into a Hackergotchi, just mail it to me. I’ll do the GIMP-ing for you.
• Rejuvenating Blogs @ RandomInk – if you want a wordpress.com style blogging account for you at Randomink, mail me at sayamindu randomink dot org, and I’ll create one for you.
• Getting an instance of Trac running for my coding related stuff (more on this in a later post).
• Installing Tracks to do task management.

I tried to make this shift as transparent as possible – but if you notice anything odd (missing files, dead links, PHP/Python/Ruby errors), please mail me or ping me in IRC/IM, and I’ll try to sort it out.