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):
  
  
  

We have been informally discussing the idea of hosting GNOME Asia 2009 in India this year, and a initial TODO list and a set of ideas has been just posted on the gnome-india mailing list.
We would need a lot of effort to make this happen successfully, and if you are interested in helping out, by all means, please jump in . Join the mailing list, and start taking part in the discussion. There is also a set of pages on the wiki, please feel free to put in your thoughts and suggestions in those page as well.

Last week, I attended FOSS.in, and in short, it was awesome. The organisation was superb, the weather was fine (well, maybe not for people who do not like a drizzle or two), and the food was excellent. Many people had doubts regarding the efficacy of the workouts, and in the end, almost all of the workouts had some concrete results to show, which, I would say is a major achievement, considering that each workout lasted for only around 3 hours. There was occasional problems with the bandwidth, but with an event of this size, minor glitches are bound to happen.

My Sugar/OLPC talk went OK-ish, though it did seem to generate a lot of enthusiastic queries and discussions. It was quite a pleasant surprise on the next day, when a few guys came up to me, asking me to help them with their Sugar installation in Ubuntu and Fedora. Moreover, on the penultimate day, Nirbheek, Piyush and I stayed up till late in the night, excitedly discussing possible Sugar activities that can be developed/adopted. The XO-s, as usual were crowd pullers, and since there were three of them (I was carrying two, Kushal one), we also ran stock Fedora 10 with GNOME on one of them (booting off a SD card). At a certain point, we also ran the Fedora KDE spin on one of the XOs, much to the delight of Pradeepto-da and the rest of the gang in the KDE stall.

I spent most of the time in the Fedora stall, and it’s really awesome to see the enthusiasm of the Fedora guys. The most common query seemed to be “Do you guys have a copy of F-10?”, and unfortunately, initially, we did not have that. Afterward though, thanks to t3rmin4t0r, we had ISOs available, and quite a few enthusiastic visitors copied them into their portable hard drives/usb sticks. Kushal was slightly over-enthusiastic with his camera (both the still and motion varieties), though he did come up with some totally amazing stuff. Going by the number of DSLR carrying shutterbugs at the event (including yours truly), some have proposed renaming the event to Camera.in for 2009. While talking with the rest of the Fedora guys, I also discovered Kobold, which can be quite useful for distributing Sugar based live images to interested people at events.


I also had some interesting discussions on various Indic related stuff (going back to my roots with Gora, Santhosh, Rahul and Pravin. It was mostly comparing notes, and I figured out that this bug in glibc affects all Indic scripts, and not just Bengali. Gora’s session on collation and spell-checking was also pretty interesting, especially since doing affix support in Aspell for Bengali has been on my TODO list for a long time.
In the end, Foss.in is one of those few conferences, which reinforce the feeling of belonging to a community in you. It turns IRC nicks into real human beings, and takes your sense involvement in the community to a new level altogether. Free/Open Source is about more than sharing a common set of beliefs, or a common set of ideas, or having a common set of skills. Free Software brings people having similar passions together, and then creates a bond of friendship between them. It’s about enjoying something together, having fun together, and personally to me, that is perhaps the most important thing. Thanks to FOSS.in, and the Fedora project for letting me have this wonderful opportunity.

My only disappointment during the conference was Karunakar. This was the first time in nearly five years, where both of us have been to the same conference, and I have not been able to take a picture of him dozing off. However, Kushal did manage to get an awesome picture of his teeth, and unknown to him, this picture was the subject of a headline in the first page of the Indlinux wiki, for around an hour or so.

Karunakar's teeth