December turned out to be a pretty busy month for me – here are some of the stuff I have been involved in/working on:

• FOSS.in: As always FOSS.in ‘09 turned out to be an amazing affair. Being someone who works remotely, this event is probably one of the best opportunities for me to have “real” interactions. It’s a place where I can simply sit down, have long face to face conversations, come up with new ideas, be inspired, and most importantly, have fun. My heartfelt thanks goes out to the people behind the event for making this possible. I have some photos in this Flickr photoset.
• Book reader: This month’s priority has been stabilizing the Sugarlabs/OLPC book-reader code, and a large number of important bugfixes landed during the last few weeks. More in this status report.
• Arduino: At FOSS.IN, thanks to the efforts of the ever enthusiastic Kushal Das, I managed to get hold of an Arduino clone board (it is terribly difficult to get hold of one in Kolkata). I had heard of Arduino before and wanted to get one, and the session on it at FOSS.in by Russell Nelson finally served as the “kick” which made Kushal and me call up the local distributor and get a couple of boards for ourselves. I have been playing around with sensors support in Sugar for sometime (I helped make the Measure activity work on XO 1.5 hardware), and realized that this would be yet another interesting way to connect Sugar with the “real” world. So after a couple of weekends worth of work, I got Arduino support in Turtle Art.
  
  
  
  
  
• XO keyboards: There may be a new AZERTY keyboard for the XO laptops very soon. See this wikipage for details.
• Pootle: The Pootle developers have released version 2.0, which is a vastly improved edition compared to the previous releases. I have been testing it out with plans to upgrade the Sugarlabs/OLPC translation server soon. While testing, I added a quick (and ugly) hack to implement msgfmt –check style syntax checking in Pootle. This would definitely make the process of integrating the translations with the upstream code much less painful – and here’s a screenshot (click on it for a larger version):
  
  
  

Last week I took a mini vacation and went to a trip to the Sundarbans (the largest Mangrove forest in the world, formed on the delta of the Ganga and the Bramhaputra). I hadn’t realized that it was so close – Gosaba, which is the gateway to the forests is only around 2 and a half hours drive from my house. (we took a “package tour”, which minimized the hassles as we got a car taking us from Kolkata to Gosaba, and at Gosaba a launch was waiting to take us into the forest)

We arrived on a day when Cyclone Reshmi was approaching the region, and the first night in the forest was to put it mildly… interesting . Fortunately the skies cleared up on the second day, and for the next two days, we had an awesome experience, including one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen in my life.

More photos in this Flickr set.

..and no – I did not see any tigers – we were busy hopping around from one watchtower to another.

Durga Pujo changes the face of the city, at least to a certain extent. Here are some of the things I came across while wandering around in the neighbourhood (all of these are makeshift structures, in case you are wondering):

Sometime I feel sad.. thinking that these will be pulled down by the end of this week . But, on the other hand, as they say, “আসছে বছর আবার হবে” (we’ll be back next year) .

• For this year’s GSOC, I will be mentoring Julen Ruiz Aizpuru, who will be working on Effective user experience for Pootle.
• I badly needed a break this week, and so three of us from college went for a trip to Mandarmani, a sea side resort around 200 km from Kolkata. It is still somewhat isolated compared to the other sea side resorts nearby, and the last 7 km of our trip consisted of driving over the beach, and getting stuck in the sand, which was fun. However, due to Mandarmani’s isolation, and since we went there in the middle of the week (no weekend tourists), we had almost the entire beach to ourselves for the next two days, and it was an awesome experience. Some pictures
  
  
  
  Driving on the beach

  
  Desolate beach, dotted with red crabs

  
  The beach

  
  Sunset

The picture above (I took it during September 2006) looks very similar to a photo published in this month’s Linux For You. A scan of the page is available in Ravishankar’s blog.


…and it looks like this is not the first time Linux for You is doing this .

• 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.

• The beginning of 2008 has been a little rough for me, as I had fever and headache for the past few days (starting from the 2nd, to be exact). Luckily, things seem to be getting better now, and currently, the fever seem to have subsided, leaving behind a pretty nasty cough though .
  My Hyderabad trip, on the other hand, turned out to be a refreshing break, and I met my little niece for the first time .
   
• It looks like I’ll be going for Gnunify, though the details are not finalized yet.

• 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.

OLPC India’s pilot project has been running at a rural school near Mumbai, and they have put up a very interesting report on the wiki.
In related news, a XO-1 arrived at my place today, and here’s a picture of it rendering some of Sukumar Ray’s work:

Speaking of sunsets , here’s a nice sunset picture that I took from our college hostel a few weeks back.

I use a 7 year old CRT monitor at home for my primary desktop (which is also my main “work” machine). After coming back from the UK, I found that it was refusing to work (and was making some really nasty crackling noise). However, it seemed to fix itself yesterday, so things are normal once again, though I guess I should buy a new one asap.

In SoC related stuff, I have created a seperate branch for Nautilus (nautilus-lockdown) for the deployment and lockdown related code I’m adding to it.

I also managed to upload some of my pictures of London yesterday. Will be uploading the rest of the pictures (football match, Diego being carried off the field, etc) by this weekend.


I finally ordered a laptop for myself – a Dell XPS M1330. Hopefully this will arrive before September, since there seems to be some major delays with this particular system. The config I ordered though is pretty sweet (2 Ghz Core2 Duo processor, 160 GB hard disk, 2 GB RAM, Geforce 8400GS, LED backlit screen, etc), so I think it will be worth the wait.

OK… not really, but we do have a deployment/administrator’s BoF tomorrow (21st July), where we’ll try to figure out interesting ways to appeal to desktop deployers and administrators all over the world. Everyone who’s interested should probably attend – apologies about this shameless promotion .

Simos and myself had a great buffet dinner at a local Chinese place tonight – here are the pictures (I am supposed to upload a few other pictures too… I’ll do them as soon as I get some proper bandwidth, promise).

Finally arrived at GUADEC after a 13 hour flight from Kolkata (excluding a 3 hour break at the Dubai airport). I don’t know if it will help, but here are the directions I followed to go from the airport (BHX) to the Etap hotel.

• Get the connecting Rail Link to the rail station near the airport (it’s a free service)
• Buy a ticket to the New Street Station and ask for the platform number
• Get down at New Street Station and get out via the main exits
• Follow the taxi line (I didn’t get a taxi though)
• Once you reach the intersection, turn right
• Keep walking till you reach a roundabout with a Chinese looking structure in the middle
• Turn left
• You’ll be able to see the Etap Hotel on the other side of the road after walking for a few minutes – use the subway to cross the street

If you get lost, ask for the Etap hotel – people did not seem to know Great Colmore Street – and apparently there’s a Colmore Row somewhere in the other end of the city, as Shreyas found out the hard way.

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??).