Richard Stallman: Free Software, Freedom and Education

As per the schedule we were at IIT, Chennai to attend talk of Richard Stallman, founder Free Software Foundation and man behind the Gnu project. The title of the presentation was “Free Software, Freedom and Education”

 

 

The event had over 3000 participants mostly from various engineering colleges across the city and area nearby, apart from ilugc members and fsftn folks. People were in queue to enter inside the conference hall few hours in advance.

So this time he started with Facebook, and how dangerous it is to use/share information there and how federal agencies are using it to spy on you. Then he spoke about how new age programming has resulted into writing malicious javascript code which results in fetching many valuable data of the users. He urged not to use/post today`s conf photo there and make sure to use browser with disable javascript mode.

Then came the old propitiatory OS and the harmful effect of it and how society is getting affected from it.  He even mentioned about Android ported on/by different vendors on there hardware is not a free software. He also mentioned how close is kindle and like services. He was also very unhappy about SAS model, as your data is not secure.

After one and half hour of general philosophy about free software, proprietary, DRM he spoke about the need of Free Software in Education.

According to him if a education system is not imparting education on Free Software nothing is going in correct direction. I would agree to him on that. I just hope some day our Indian Government realizes and removes the mandatory teaching of non-free software with free software alternative. It will not only save lots of money but will also give more independence to a user to explore more.

We saw  St IGNUcius in the last part of the session. It was all about Emacs. It was different RMS which i had seen before, the lighter side of him and i liked it.

Lastly came Q/A session he answered more than 20 questions. Lastly yes i became FSF-India member finally. 😀

2011 passed, 2012 welcome!!

Been a while i wrote anything on my blog. So time to review what all i did/happened in 2011.

Firstly “happy new year 2012” to all my friends whom i did not call/sms/tweet blehh blehh , i was partying with my friends in jungle of Lonavala.

Mithesh Greenmang0 and friends at Lonavala !!

Okey lets begin :-

Moved to Chennai in feb 2011 and joined www.csscorp.com open source support team, thanks to @kiranmurari for giving me this opportunity. 🙂

I have completed almost 1 year here and to be honest second place after www.newsx.com where i have stayed for over an year. 😀

I been told a lot about Chennai, especially about people/food/weather but i am lucky 2 have awesome office folks and friends  i managed all of this and had no difficulty in adjusting with/to it. Autowallahs are morons all across India and  Chennai is no exception.

FOSS Confs :-

Thanks to KDE for sponsoring me during Desktop Summit, Berlin to present a talk It was great place to meet people whom i been chatting via IRC for many years. 🙂

I was also at Software Freedom Day celebration at Jaya FOSS club, Chennai. Thanks to the organizers for this wonderful event.

Travelling :-

As a amature photographer i did traveled across Chennai(TN) thanks to @suseendranrb @johnson81385 @eternaltyro  thyagoo for all the trips, many more are in pipeline for 2012 😀

After Desktop Summit in Aug 2011 i took a week off and traveled few places in europe like Athens/Rome/Madrid, I admit am lazy, still i have put some photos of my trip at http://www.atuljha.com/photos

Technology:-

Before coming to Chennai i was a simple Linux sysadmin and FOSS advocate. Things are better now, 😛 I have started coding and working around open source cloud computing platform like openstack and eucalyptus.

I was lucky to contribute few patches 2 Ubuntu openstack packages, any patch is a patch i been told. 😀 Most of my contribution are at lauchpad I am currently spending some time playing with juju and owncloud, i will be presenting some workshop on the same in coming months. 🙂

Reading:-

Well most of my friends would be surprised to hear that am reading fiction/short stories instead of only reading tech books. I am totally addicted to Khushwant Singh and finished 5 of his books so far, hoping to get few more next month via @flipkart

2012?

Well 2012 wishlist includes learning Python and Hadoop apart from travelling some awesome place like Ooty/Kundapura/Munnar/Cochin in India.

Looking forward to make 2012 another rocking year of my life!!

EOF

2 minutes guide to getting started with Launchpad/Bazaar via Lucid Ubuntu 10.04

I just added some contents from allready existing 5 minutes guide to make it 2 mins and work on Lucid. 🙂

Before i start you need to have 2 things allready done,
1. $ apt-get install bzr
2. A launchpad account.
3. Your public key submitted at launchpad.
It means create a key is you don`t have allready
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa

you will see in /home//.ssh/rsa.pub created paste its content there.

4. bzr lp-login john.doe  <replace it with your username>

Adding your own info

$ bzr whoami "John Doe <john.doe@gmail.com>"

You can check what identity is stored in Bazaar’s configuration:

$ bzr whoami
john.doe

Starting New project

bzr init-repo myproject
cd myproject
bzr init trunk
cd trunk

Adding Files

bzr add hello.txt

and then commit, which saves a snapshot of all versioned files:

bzr commit -m “Added first line of text”

Pushing your branch on Launchpad

Replace john doe with your username.

bzr push bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~john.doe/+junk/myproject
your done.
Pushing the changes in existing branch.
bzr push




Original post :- http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/latest/en/mini-tutorial/


thanks @jelmet on #juju helping me.





	


	







	

		
Oneiric release party across India
	


	
	

		
So what i did is, asked for of my friends in Mumbai, Hydrabad and Delhi share there event related photos of Oneiric release party.


That is what i will be doing mentioning about them. 🙂


INMANTEC




 




 


Gaurav is assistant dean IT and a Open Source freak who is trying his best to turn his college into a FOSS friendly institute.   I was  there at a workshop and felt great. They have nice FOSS lab in place as well with students working on Ubuntu and web technology stuff. Recently they have applied for Loco team hope it will be approved soon. 🙂


 


 JMI-Lug


Jmi stands for Jamia milia islamia a university in Delhi. I met Sheel and the team in feb this year during workshop in there college. These guys are doing really great and am sure of getting upstream contribution from these folks.






VIT, Mumbai


Mehul my Fossy & Biker friend told me about them and i was introduced to Rigved and am happy to know about the event they had.Looking forward to meet the folks during my Mumbai trip sometime soon.


Oneiric Release Party was held in Mumbai on 19th October 2011 at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology (VIT).


The event was attended by students of VIT, an ex-student Rigved Rakshit and the Ubuntu Indian Loco contact Nitish Mistry. The event started around 1730 IST.


Rigved showed a demo of using a Ubuntu LiveCD. Then, he went on to show how to install Ubuntu in various (only-OS-on-the-system/dual-boot) configurations. Ubuntu 11.10 LiveCDs were handed out. Also, Rigved gave out two official Ubuntu 10.10 CDs and ISO images of Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop, Ubuntu 10.04 Server and K/L/Ubuntu 11.10 Desktop.


You can find complete event details here


 




 




Telegu Loco, Hydrabad


Pavi mailed in the mailing list of mukt.in announcing the event. It was very short notice and i missed it. I would have to to visit hydrabad and meet my old friends.


 




I will populate this place if i get details of other Oneiric release party around. 😛


 




 


 


 


 

	


	







	

		
Software Freedom Day, Chennai, India
	


	
	

		
Its been over 8 months since i moved to Chennai, the southern part of India. Chennai has a strong free software user as well as contributor base.




I was invited as speaker at an engineering college (jaya college of engineering). I was amazed to see the enthusiasm among student s about free software. The college has students contributing to free software allready.




 


 




I interacted with a crowd of over 200 students. Most of them were freshers and knew what free software is. I am sure with the guidance of teachers/staff/faculty the college will produce more contributors to many more projects.




Apart from regular talk there were Software stalls as well where students were showing demo of popular free software like Scribus, Inkscape, Kde/Gnome, text editors like Vi/Emacs and office suites. I was happy and surprised to see school students participating in the event.


 




 




 


 


I was extremely happy to meet the HOD of college Comp Sc, Mr. Kumaran who is leading this initiative since year 2007.

I had word with them and we are also going to organize Ubuntu “Oneiric” release party next month.


Lastly i did got a shiny memento for my presence at the event. 🙂



	


	





	

		
Desktop Summit: My Experience meeting Gnome/Kde folks
	


	
	

		
First of all thanks to KDE e.V for sponsoring my trip. It was great place to meet g33ks and folks i been chatting mostly via IRC.


Desktop Summit


I met many folks like Andre , Lydia and Aaron to name a few. I was happy to see participation of attendees from India most of them being GSOC students and contributors.


Vishesh and Rohan


The two freaks above they been allready doing some awesome work, vishesh with nepomuk and Rohan with bug fixes on Kde and Ubuntu.


I also met awesome team of kde-www although neverendingo was not there i had conversation with annew on the userbase related contribution.


I also got chance to meet Mr. Shuttleworth and attend his say on copyrights and stuff.


Mark Shuttleworth and Michael Meeks


 


I love KDE and Gnome both, but there are people who are very strict to there choice. I might be wrong but we need to be flexible and give/show love to both. Am happy to see KDE and Gnome folks all at same place. 😀


KDE and Gnome


I been organizer of an open source event and i need to learn the commitment part from  the organizers, hats off to them for everything.


seaLne (setting up connector in hall for hack session)


Its been one of the best experience for me, i would especially thank andre and lydia. They gave confidence to me for submitting my talk


I am happy for all those parties and beer i had during Island and beach party.


Beach Party


 


I am very grateful to work with my awesome OSS team at csscorp who helped me with all the valuable suggestion for my talk.


 


 

	


	





	

		
ImageMagick and mogrify. : My command line tool for watermarking.
	


	
	

		
One fine day i decided i want “watermark” on my photos too, i know am not a great photographer but just for sake i wanted one.


I am too lazy to do anything from GUI so i searched a bit and came to know about ImageMagic and mogrify.


I simply installed it on my ubuntu box :-


sudo apt-get install imagemagik


Once i had it installed i decided using same watermark for all my images which which were lying in my directory at Desktop with name “foto”


One of the photos before watermark


 


before watermark


I simply used the command :-


$ mogrify -font /usr/share/fonts/truetype/freefont/FreeSerifBoldItalic.ttf -pointsize 100 -verbose -draw "fill red text 24,75 '@koolhead17' " /home/atul/Desktop/foto/*.jpg


i am selecting a font, asking for verbose, drawing, filling it with red color text with mentioned size.


This is how it looks after watermark :-






 I would highly recommend any one who is lazy as i am to give a try to imagemagik.


More example and information on Imagemagik can be found at : http://www.imagemagick.org/www/mogrify.html




 


 


 


 

	


	





	

		
My first Ubuntu Cloud Days ..
	


	
	

		
Its been long time i blogged, this blog is about the amazing IRC session we had during 25-26 july.

Another thing i would like to tell is i participated as presenter as well as a student. Interesting session were taken by Ubuntu Cloud developers and from members of OpenStack Team. I took session on cloud-init, a Ubuntu cloud technology that enables a cloud instance to bootstrap itself and customize. It was one of the first experience for me thanks to for kicking me into this. I would say i need a lot of improvement before i present in next cloud days.


I loved all the sessions to start with kim0`sI have few bugs assigned under my belt which needs to be fixed.


I cannot say as which talk i liked most as all of them were equally awesome but i enjoyedthe most. I mean OpenStack project is so active, if you are out of it for a week or two get ready to be surprised. The whole OpenStack Dashboard is changed for example 🙂


I am looking forward to contribute to ensemble as i been following it for some time.


Other topics were Orchestra, UEC, eucalyptus.


Logs for complete session are available at http://cloud.ubuntu.com/2011/07/cloud-days-complete-logs-available/


Thanks again kim0 😀