Last Saturday, I appeared for what was the last examination of our four year BTech degree course. College life has ended for me, at least for the time being. It was fun while it lasted, bordering on insanity sometimes (can you imagine “normal people” participating in a sport which involves pouring rotten, and really stinky paper-maché over each other’s heads ?). The last few days were bitter-sweet, with a lot of memories, some of them happy, some of them not so happy, coming back all at once. I guess, in the end, all of us had a wonderful four years, years that made us mature, strong, and much more acquainted with the ways of the world. Thanks to everyone who has been beside me during the past four years, through all my ups, downs, successes and failures. Thanks a lot .

This week, I’m starting full time with OLPC. Apart from facilitating and helping with the l10n and i18n efforts (which I have been doing for the past six months), I also expect to start helping out with various parts of the OLPC software stack.

This part of life is called: interesting :-).

• OLPC Nepal is having a translation night out - read all about it here, and feel free to join the fun.
• Warm Holi/Doljatra greetings to everyone.

• Exams
  End semester exams are over. Only one more semester to go before I graduate. Yay!!
  
  
• Hyderabad
  I’ll spending Christmas in Hyderabad - and will be probably there fpr most of the week as well. I will be online though (hopefully), except when I’m travelling (it looks like I’ll be coming back by train - a 30 hour journey).
  
  
• New Camera
  I finally decided to replace my aging Canon A95, and thought that I would move to a DSLR. Kushal had got a Nikon D80 a few months back, and after playing around with his camera for sometime, I decided to go for the same. I also bought a 50mm prime lense to go with it. ..and I’m having fun with it
   
  
    
  
  
   
  
  
• OLPC Translations
  I must admit that the rapid progress of the OLPC translations has somewhat surprised me. The project is barely over a month old, and we have a very active and enthusiastic community growing up very quickly. I think that the decision to use Pootle has worked out very well for us, inspite of the initial pains, primarily due to
  • Low barrier of entry for translators
    You need not worry about VCS access, or having to understand PO files - you simply create an account, and start to translate the strings.
    This of course, requires that the language coordinator has to be extra careful before pressing the “commit” button, and check that all the translations actually make sense before they go into the master git repository at dev.laptop.org. But in some ways, this is also applicable to translations being done via other methods as well, and Pootle has a system where the language coordinator can actually approve each translated string before it is integrated into the PO file.
  • Support for offline translations
    This is very important, because it is wrong to assume that volunteer translators have good quality internet access all the time. Pootle allows you to download PO files, and upload them (with options for either merging the translations, or overwriting them) when you are done.

  In the end however, all of this boils down to having an active l10n community, and I would really like to thank each and everyone of the translation community for pushing things so far. You all rock :-).

• A report on XO deployment at Peru

  Parents in Arahuay are asking Mendoza, the visiting psychologist, what the Internet can do for them.
  Among them is Charito Arrendondo, 39, who sheds brief tears of joy when a reporter asks what the laptop belonging to ruddy-cheeked Miluska — the youngest of her six children — has meant to her. Miluska’s father, it turns out, abandoned the family when she was 1.
  “We never imagined having a computer,” said Arrendondo, a cook.

  The entire article makes for a fascinating read - it is available online here.

I was looking for something (in Python) to parse the bn_IN PO files (to get some statistical data) and found POlib. POlib is a python library to manipulate and extract data from PO and MO files.

In other news, my exams have finally ended, which means I’ll be able to devote all my time to my SoC related work from now on. This was the only semester where I had all CS related papers (Object Oriented Technology, Computer Networking, Computer Graphics, System Administration and Software Engineering), so hopefully my grades would be comparatively higher this time. I’ll know by the end of August.. :-).

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??).

We have started an unofficial wireless network at the college hostel, (though access is mostly restricted to my batchmates department). We do authentication using FreeRADIUS, and at the center of the network is a donated D-Link DWL-900AP+ access point (thanks! IDG), which is connected to Sabbir’s desktop (which functions as the RADIUS/Proxy server). Maybe I’ll also experiment with NoCatAuth for the network. Another thing that the users want is some kind of cross platform Instant Messaging solution within the LAN (Jabber+Rendezvous, maybe ??). Here are some pictures of the networking “gear” and the users:



Access point - hanging from the clothes line



Network users

Last week, we didn’t have much to do at the hostel - so we decided to have a feast, where we would be the cooks. After a lot of excited discussion - we went for the simplest possible menu, chicken, rice/roti, and salad. After a head count (and recount), we found that there were 25 of us, and we decided to go for 12 Kg of chicken. So, on Friday afternoon, Abhijit, Gajendra, Gourav, Somnath and myself went to the Diamond Harbour market and bought around 14 Kg of chicken (undressed), 1 kg of yoghurt, 2 kg of tomatoes, 1.5 litres of mustard oil and half a litre of kerosene. The rest, we managed to salvage from our college canteen store. Meanwhile, Sourav, Arin, Kushal, Debangshu and the rest of the guys at the hostel setup a temporary kitchen at the balcony and collected the firewood.

After a lot of debate on the recipe, we kind of arrived at a consensus, and started to cook, with various kinds of goof ups happening (for example, we put the onion pieces in the oil first, and after a few minutes, decided that we should be putting in the ginger/garlic/onion paste instead… got a big spoon, fished out all the onion, and put in the paste in the oil, let it fry and then put in the half fried onion again) and all kinds of advice on cooking coming in from all quarters.

After almost 4 hours of cleaning, marinating and cooking, the food was ready (and believe me, it tasted really good). In the end, we had a really good feast - the only casualty being the HoD’s class on the next day, which none of us attended :-P. Here are some pictures (I didn’t have my proper camera around, so I had to work with the camera of the A780):

Subject says all. (just keep in mind that some of the pics may not be suitable for small children)

Post title says it all. Yay!! I’m back in action once again:

So, I’m back to blogging after almost a month. A lot has happened in the past 3/4 weeks or so, especially in my personal life. There were also a few troubles at college, which, hopefully have been resolved, and life (at least in the work related domain) is more or less normal now, at least for the time being. My Hutch mobile phone is down (some kind of charger problem), so if anyone wishes to contact me, please call my Reliance no. (or on weekends, call my landline number).

I’m going to Dr. B. C. Roy Engineering College, Durgapur tomorrow, to speak on Localisation and Free Software, and I’ll post a few pictures when I get back home. I’m also looking for someone to take over the maintainership of the Free Bangla Fonts Project - I’ll be posting the details within the end of this week.

Yesterday, I went to the bookfair with Saumik-da, Ashikur-da, Samarpita-di, Tania and Tania’s (not so little sister), Sonia. Somehow, the crowd almost bearable (or maybe I’m just getting used to crowds), and after around four hours of heavy duty dust inhalation, I came back home with the following books:
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I also bough a special edition of The Hithchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which contains all the four parts.

In my other life^tm I’ve been checking out Zimbra for the mailing solution deployment at WBUT. It does seem to be a very solid and tightly integrated product, though I need to get some data on how well it scales up.

I stumbled across Steven Garrity’s blog post on using Mediawiki for normal, traditional non-wiki websites, and indeed, MediaWiki would probably be the ideal thing for the typical knowledge base cum news portal type of sites that are so common nowadays. However, the default look and feel of Mediawiki is perhaps slightly intimidating, especially for non-technical users, and I guess that a more user friendly/less cluttered up skin (like the one used for the Tango Project site) would be a good idea. Currently, I’m working on converting the Delciously Blue design from OSWD into a MediaWiki skin, and I’ll try to upload the results of my effort within the next few days.

Last November, there was a major hardware failure in the server that hosts the Randomink.org website, and as a result, the last six months’ posts have been lost. However, the hardware failure provided me with the excuse to upgrade my Wordpress installation, and now I’m running Wordpress 2.0 RC3. The theme is a slightly modified version of the Wuhan Wordpress theme (the header image was GIMP-ed to include a picture of my room).

My 3rd semester exams are finally over, and at present, I’m frantically trying to clean up my mailbox and make a proper prioritised list of the pending tasks ahead. I’ll be going back to college sometime during January, and hopefully, the new FSF India site, as well as the Ankur Bangla site will be officially up and running by then. I also plan to complete the XMPP support in Senpai during this break, and if I get some time, I’ll be upgrading the Drupal installation in the iLUG-Cal site. I’m also attending the regional FLOSSWorld workshop to be held at CDAC Mumbai, and maybe, I’ll also try to go to Linux Asia 2006. Right now, however, the priority is to put the various randomink services back online. If you used to utilise any of the randomink.org services (mailing list hosting, email, web hosting, etc), and if you are facing problems, please do email me at sayamindu randomink org with the words randomink repair in the subject line. I’ll try my best to restore all services as soon as possible.

This morning, I went to college, and found my room to be like this:

Apparently, the rooms are being prepared (or rather, restored, hehe) for the new batch, and so things are in a really messy state.

It was raining outside:

So, I stayed back till around 4:00, and then packed my bags again, and came back home.