Weekend Aantel’s Blog

After Bijra High School, where we had earlier setup the first pilot of the CASTLE (Computer-Aided Studies, Teaching and Learning Environment) initiative, it’s now the time to start rolling out the second school - Radhakantapur High School in the West Midnapore (পশ্চিম মেদিনীপুর) district of West Bengal. This time, the engineering college at Chandrakona town will act as the local partner to the project just like BCREC has done for the Bijra project.

The boys - Soumen Bar and Anutosh Dutta, who will act as local support for the project at Radhakantapur, arrived in the city on Sunday. However, I still needed some volunteers to work on the deployment readiness phase of the project, and so sent out a call to the WBUT-LUG members. Within, 15 minutes, 13 of them (from 2nd and 3rd Year BTech IT) had enthusiastically responded. The teams are in place.

I’m visiting the school today for a site survey. Soumen will be accompanying me. He will liaison with the school in getting the site ready after we make the necessary recommendations. The project implementation ETA - 15th of May, 2008.

We are glad to announce that the first and sole (at this time) time server (NTP) in India has been setup at the West Bengal University of Technology.

You can verify this by synchronizing your computer clock to in.pool.ntp.org. As root:

#ntpdate -u in.pool.ntp.org

This cluster is automatically generated. Due to this, the server may not be included in the cluster for very small time periods. Otherwise all clock sync requests from India should be redirected to this server which hosts the service.

At present, this is a Stratum 2 server, we are trying to ensure upgrading its status to a Stratum 1 server. Hopefully, we will soon get a few more servers across India.

Really happy that two interns of the our first batch of the 21-day FOSS Internship Program - Subhodip Biswas and Arindam Ghosh have been successful as GSoC 2008 applicants.

Subhodip (fondly called as “beton”) is a 3rd year CSE student at Dr. BCRoy Engineering College, Durgapur, West Bengal. He’ll be working on “Improved GPS workflow In Java Open Street Map Editor or JOSM”

Arindam (nicknamed “mak”) is also 3rd year CSE student at Dr. B C Roy Engineering College, Durgapur, West Bengal. He’ll be working on “Internationalization setup for OSM web pages and map tiles”

Wishing both of them the very best! Happy coding!

Yesterday when Schyuler and Mikel arrived at WBUT, Prof Thakur happened to talk about Chaos and non-linear system dynamics. His words turned prophetic today!

Went to the Jadavpur University guest house in the morning to pick up our guests. Turned out that Mikel wasn’t feeling too well… we arrived at WBUT. I had someone go find some ORS for Mikel, he looked close to collapsing.

With Schyuler in the driver’s seat, we started off around 10:15, with a brief 2-minute intro from Prof Thakur. Arindam called up from somewhere en-route to Kolkata in Rajdhani Express, that they would be arriving directly to WBUT from Howrah station. Oishila had managed to secure their accomodation at SN Bose centre guest house.

With Mikel feeling steadily worse, had him lay down in WBUT’s day care centre. Apparently there were no babies in there today. So our big “baby” got to lay down there. Had the doctor come in and check him out. Pronounced it a case of stomach upset.

The workshop was in full-swing with Schyuler explaining the basics and working concepts to everyone. Except for the ILUG-CAL and FSF members, the sheer hands-on format of the workshop was unfamiliar territory for most. Yet when they got to go out with the GPS recievers, most got into the groove quite well.

Some like Santanu Chatterjee, a lecturer of CSE at WBUT and his colleagues, did a wonderfully detailed job of the task at hand, as did Susmit and gang (Subhodip and Arindam)…most importantly others too picked up the thread nicely.

I stayed back at the Uni, as did Schyuler. Urbi from Kalam landed up finally, and we had a nice discussion about how community mapping could find a place in a project like Neighbourhood Diaries. It was interesting to listen to Schyuler outline the idea behind the work he is doing for UNICEF.

We spoke about Free Software localization and the Collaborative Contents Network program which I’m trying to drive since the last couple of months. Urbi expressed a strong interest in having a localized blog setup for Neighbourhood Diaries project. We are planning to sit down with Bishan (Samaddar) shortly to discuss further on this.

With everyone coming back in with their collected data, we proceeded to the lunch. Checked in on Mikel, he was sleeping. We got some “cheerey” (pounded rice flakes) for him. Just what the good doctor ordered, in case he should wake up feeling hungry. The sessions got underway, post lunch.

That where things become more interesting for me, the actual plotting of the collected data and correcting the errors, including the lack of data in some cases. In between, I managed to bug Schyuler several times with questions like accuracy of GPS readings, the atomicity and transaction control of the data upload process, the strength of the developer community and OSM community processes in place for revision control and collaboration.

Once the proxy settings for java were in place, every one played around with the data and we got the first OSM gps data for Kolkata online. By 5 PM most of the participants were ready to call it a day. Only a handful, about 7 people stayed back for over an hour discussing in details and asking questions. Mikel woke up and announced he was feeling hungry. So it was washed “cheerey” with salt, sugar and Kinley bottled water for him… he had it sitting on the Day Care Center bed

Since both Mikel and Schyuler were not happy with the things at Jadavpur University guesthouse, after a bit of head scratching, we hopped over to Hotel Sojourn (”Ho-tell Sujon” in local speak). We were lucky to get accommodation for the night. Both of them were happy with the room. Tomorrow of course we have to look for new lodgings for our two speakers. Ah well!

“Dear All
You are all aware that this incubator works 24 X 7. However, keeping in view, need for security and efficient working of the Incubator, following guidelines need to be followed.

For Ekta Incubation Centre
Arindam Dutta
(Advisor & Member Secretary)”

We received this cease-and-desist note from the manager of EKTA TBI yesterday. Here is the context, since 24th of Jan, 2008, we (a new setup of which I’m one of the startup team) got a place as an Incubatee in the Ekta Incubation Centre - a DST Govt India sanctioned Technology Business Incubator run by the Ekta TBI Society under the aegis of West Bengal University of Technology

We have 7 hard-core tech employees, two of whom happen to be women and also very good at their jobs. Among other things that we do, we are also in the business of remote support and data-center maintenance. One of our major clients is a large and well-known European data-center company. We need to run a 24×7 operation, something that we had explained when we made our presentation to the Ekta TBI board members. We were accepted and allowed to start our operations under a Service Agreement which outlined the dos and donts. There was nothing about night shifts and women on the staff.

And then there was this!

This is a story that unfolded around a discussion on using KGeography in the classrooms.

Managing the transition to FOSS in ICT-bridging scenarios like Bijra has been a revelation. The results are reinforcing my deeply held belief, that far more that FOSS software and tools, its Open Access / Commons content that are needed to drive the uptake. A look at proprietory / patent encumbered formats (Adobe Flash / mp3 for instances), and we know why this is so. There is just **SO** much freely available (as in muft) content for the taking… add to that the bulk of the commercially produced / govt / institution sponsored content that are coming online around the globe and in India.

At our LTSP-based CASTLELabs deployment at the Bijra High School, Durgapur, the students and the teachers alike had taken, like proverbial ducks to the water, to tools like KGeography. But there is a problem… there are *NO* India specific detailed maps in the package. This was of course, not surprising!

The solution looked simple enough. Let’s just write a HOWTO using the functional, if somewhat technical KGeography Handbook! It’s that simple! No??? In fact, one of our interns working on the project Arindam “mak” Ghosh did exactly that! He wrote a typical geeky HOWTO - “Insight into KGeography”

It was fairly good! And it was also just plain WRONG! If we wanted the experiment to get the geography and history and language and science teachers to collaborate, really scale, then we needed to speak in THEIR terms, and NOT speak __to__ them in our langauge. To put it simply, we needed to take an activity oriented approach. So instead of talking tech to the geography teachers about XML layouts, lets discuss with them in terms of drawing maps, colouring them, adding them and creating questions and interactive activities around the maps - Activities with which they are already familiar on a traditional, non ICT basis.

Of course, the technology aspect won’t go away. But rather than being in-your-face, it should be specific and focussed on a step-wise description of the exact part of a tool or a technique, applicable for getting a desired activity going in the right direction. Arindam did do a re-make of his effort… the activity oriented approach draft exercise is over here -> How to add maps!

Geeky howtos are excellent resources, and yet they do not scale in case of main-stream use as functional documentation. For ICT bridge scenarios, they can certainly come in, but only at a later stage and specifically for the emerging potential power users.

Aabida Jamadar is a student of Class IX at Bijra High School. Soon after the CASTLELabs deployment at the school on 14 - 15th of November, Kushal shot this interview video. To me, this video really exemplifies what we are trying to do - to reach out, both in terms of technology as well as the more controversial topic of pedagogy.

I had been wanting to work on the post-production and sub-title this interview. Today I finally found the time. Here is the finished video. Many thanks to Kushal for shooting this spot-on interview.

Much of the credits for the success, go to my friends and colleagues from the Ankur Bangla Project, especially Deepayan’s Bangla Archive Project. Kids just love it!

As posted yesterday, the mirror came back online around 12:15 PM IST today. I ran the rsync scripts once by hand to update the trees. Finally , the things are back online once again.

After serving up over 7+ TB of FOSS content in the month of December so far, the mirror @ WBUT, went down for the first time today. However, like the early-September outage, once again it was the supply of electricity that decided to play hookey.

There has been a major cable fault at the HT transformer on the University campus, disrupting the University’s power supply. Around 2:30 PM, the power was restored temporarily, but there were issues with the load distribution. As a result, the phase the mirror was on, was again taken off-line. Power had to be diverted towards the bio-tech labs, where the incubators needed power to prevent the microbial cultures from going into thermal shock.

The latest update is that repair work is going on emergency basis and services to the affected phase is expected to be restored by mid-day tomorrow. We hope to be back on-line by 1:30 PM tomorrow, or if possible even earlier.

__someone__ admitted to me in private that his near addictive tracking of this has been replaced with a new addiction