In case you haven’t noticed, Exaile 0.2.9 is out, with a number of new features. You can grab it from the Releases page. Adam (Exaile’s lead developer) has also started a blog, check it out at www.vimtips.org.

The equalizer patch is now more or less feature complete (and a basic version of it is already in SVN). The latest patch at the Exaile trac implements the following features:

• 10 band equalizer support
• 17 builtin presets
• Support for saving/deleting custom presets
• Support for importing Winamp EQF files as custom presets (thanks to the XMMS devs for figuring out the format)

You will need gst-plugins-bad from CVS to have the equalizer feature activated. Feedback on the code/UI/features are welcome. Moreover, If there’s any other preset file format which I should consider supporting, please let me know.

Some of us in Kolkata have been working on an experiment called “Nije Shikhi” (নিজে শিখি), a program where young children (mostly from underpriviledged/rural backgrounds) are simply given access to a computer, and allowed to self learn, with minimal/no adult supervision.

The computers to be used for that are based on the Geode platform, and are powered by a 12 volt DC battery (which is charged by solar cells). The entire setup was recently demo’ed live at the inaugural session of the Tech Fest of Heritage Institute of Technology (where I spoke on how students might get started with contributing to Free/Open Source Software), and the student response was absolutely fantastic.
Currently, the plan is to run a somewhat locked down version of GNOME on the machines, since these will be mostly unattended installations in the remote districts of our state. However, we are trying to investigate methods to provide full freedom to the learners while making sure that the systems remain usable even if someone manages to mess up the settings badly (rm -rf $HOME on a periodic basis??).

After I started to use ipython, working with other Python shells (without tab-completion) became a major source of frustation and pain for me. One of the other Python shells that I use frequently is the one provided with Exaile Python Console Plugin and finally, yesterday night, I decided to do something about my frustation. After some searching, I came across this script, which I modified (actually, just commented out some lines, and changed exactly two lines in the Shell_Gui class) and added it to the existing console plugin. The result looks like this:

Of course, there’s some further fine tuning that needs to be done, but I’m quite happy with the current results.

In other news, Kushal and his friends at BCREC have been doing some great work at the Bijra High School project. They recently setup a blog, documenting their day to day progress, and there are some really fascinating stories in that blog. I’ll just copy paste one of them:

The next big deal was to make them understand what is a password and why do we use it ? Actually we had to give a example which they have seen in real life, So I choose taking the example of key combination locks and even number locks. I think the idea behind using password will not be very clear till they have a hands on, till they now know what is password and why using it. The next stunning thing which happened is a boy while telling this told “amar monehoy password anekta mobile phone er PIN er moton” which in english means that I think password is something like the PIN in mobile phones. Beleive me I was really shocked as we are teaching someone about password of computers and he is replying with PIN of mobile phones is strange…Then he told something which make us feel ki getting shocked is something which we shud make habbit. When he was asked about how do you know about PIN He told “asole mobile hate niye dekechi tai jani, computer thakleo sike jetam” which in English means I have seen mobile and used it if i would have used computers i would learn this things too. After this i think i am not in a state of commenting on his line and so i kept mum.

As is the case with most volunteer driven projects, they need a lot of help, and if you can help them in any way, please do contact Kushal at kushal at gmail dot com.

Federico has started to put in information on Sabayon internals and error logging related stuff in the wiki. If you are thinking about contributing to Sabayon, this is probably one document you should definitely read.

I have been playing around with Cairo for some days, and yesterday I came up with a patch to implement semi transparent OSD support in Exaile. It still needs a lot more polish, and suggestions on how to do that would be really helpful :-). Also, I would love to get the patch tested on older systems which do not have support for COMPOSITE (and if possible, on Windows as well). Here’s how the existing implementation looks in my system: