Weekend Aantel’s Blog

The friday dawned cloudy with promises of rain and the TMC brigands…. er brigades, promising to bring the city traffic to a stand-still between 4 - 5 PM. Around 10:35 AM, Susmit and Sayamindu landed up near my house and together we headed down to RCCIIT - a local govt. run engineering college with a whole bundle of equipment - 3 laptops, 1 OLPC XO, 1 AMD UMPC, 1 Intel ClassmatePC, other assorted hardware and freebie goodies like stickers and badges from Gnome and Firefox. The occasion was TechTrix ‘08 - the college’s annual Tech Fest which Susmit wrote about here.

Reached the college, the final 120 meters had to be trudged on foot as the road was all dug up, courtesy a sewage project under implementation. Dipanjan and a few others from the local RCCIIT LUG (which is called a SLUG or Students’ Linux User Group for some reason). There was a power-cut and we were late in starting off the “show”. There were about 85 - 100 students, mainly from the 1st year and a few from the 2nd and the 3rd years, as well as a few teachers. I went up first, it was more of a general introduction to Free & Open Source Software and how it pervades all aspects of computing - from super computers to embedded applications like mobile phones and everything in between. Susmit was up next and he spoke about the Fedora project and how to start using and contributing to it. Finally with time running short, Sayamindu went up with a short but lively talk about the OLPC project.

In about 2 hours time, we tried to give these young students an overall idea about FOSS - using and contributing, trying to share with them the excitement from multi-dimensional perspectives. By the time it was over, the heavens had opened up. So we sat down and finished off the packets of snacks that the organisers had arranged. We ended up discussing with our young hosts what they could do next. Around 1:45 PM, already getting late for a proposed meeting with Tamal-da, we decided to call up a taxi and leave. Dipanjan our principal host volunteered to venture out in the torrential rains and get a cab as we were anxious not to get our equipment wet.

Dipanjan disappeared for 15 minutes and then suddenly came back thoroughly drenched. He informed us that the cab was there, but then very apologetically added that we would have to cross the sewage-cum-storm water canal over a foot bridge as the taxi can’t come to this side (college side) of the canal as the roads were all dug up.

The rains had by then dropped down to a drizzle but the roads were flooded. So, we jumped across large pools of water using slippery bricks as toe-holds and hoping not to skid and to get our gear across as dry as possible. The footbridge turned out to be standard issue rickety construction made of bamboo, over a hyacinth covered water body that looked poisonous in color. We crossed it in a single file and they even charged 50p (about 1 cent) per head as “toll”, finally clambering up the slippery slopes covered with slush from what-nots and finally we got into the cab waiting there for us.

By then it was already late and the spectre of the TMC road blocks looming large and ominous we decided to cut out proposed trip to Tamal-da’s office short and headed into the China Town for some much needed food and a place to hangout for next 3 hours so that we could “ride out” the crazy road blockade enforced traffic snarls.

We decided to go to our regular joint - Kafulok. But on reaching there we found the place’s to remain closed between 4 - 6 PM (we had never come at this time of the day before)… baah!!!!! Having left our taxi, it was now left for us to trudge back through the slushy lanes overflowing with the effluents from the tanneries…. nice touch… even nicer with Sayamindu detailing an even more worse Lake Market during the monsoons… YUCK!!!! suddenly our present situations looked a lot better.

We ended up going to the Hot Wok (very imaginative name indeed . Since Susmit is a teetotaler, it was left to Sayam and me to polish off a pint of Vodka and a couple of Bloody Marys while Susmit nursed a plain water and a Virgin Mary. That the excitement was far from over was pointed out by Susmit - the label of our bottle of White Mischief vodka

By 7:45 we decided that we should be able to get transport and get back home. And so we got on the 2nd cab we found and headed home without any further incidents.

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!

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.

Day 2 and 3 from Bal Vividha

A small video of the reactions of a young city-based kid to the OLPC XO. The editing, subtitling and title card creation was done using Kino and Gimp. The video was shot using a Canon Powershot A610 digicam. This is my first attempt at doing something like this, so rough edges and bad technique is to be expected The uploaded version has loss of details, thanks to conversion and compression, it’s not *this* bad in the final edited version on my lappy.

A slightly older lad (studying in Class VII from the South Point High School) can to our stall, and played a nice game of
chess on one of our CASTLE Labs terminals.

Among other things, Lipika Bansal from Waag Society, Nederlands came around to the stall. She was very interested in knowing what we were doing. She wanted to visit Bijra to see what we were doing. It was a lovely exchange of ideas. She shared with me details of several projects that Waag was into at present. I particularly liked the idea of the experimental Scottie

On the last day of the exhibition, Satabdi and Debamitra from AID India came over. They too wanted to go and visit the Bijra High School project site. Probably we’ll all go for a visit on Tuesday (the 11th).

Mr. Arup Chakraborty - a member of ILUG-CAL.ORG and a key person with the Kolkata efforts of Indian Assn. for Blind Persons, came down as well, along with a colleague. They are presently using Orca screen reader and are interested in getting it to work with Bengali Unicode text. They have expressed a keen interest in closely working with ILUG-CAL in setting up a training program for the visually challenged persons in using Free and Open Source Software. We all agreed to establish a base-line reference for the program within December 2007.

Bal Vividha drew to a close on Sunday, 9th December. Chandita from Comet Media Foundation, Amit from OLPC India and myself, we all sat down for a quick review. We drew up the tentative plans have a program on ICT in Education at Mumbai during the 3rd week of February, 2008.

Today we had our visitors - the kids!!! KGeography, KHangman and the huge trove of games proved to be a _H_U_G_E_ hit. Some kids even asked how to get the net connection going on the systems and how to view movie CDs.

The OLPC XOs which were on the first-ever public display in these parts of the world was a major hit as well. I spent quite a bit of time with Amit from the OLPC India team discussing the project’s progress in India and possible plans for West Bengal and the east. In between we went down to WBUT and had a meeting with Prof. Thakur as well.

Also had a nice chat with Lajpat, the guy who volunteered me his Ubuntu lappy yesterday. It was a good exchange of ideas. Also got Parantapa to meet with Jitendra, the lead devel for the Physics engine for the Virtual Lab authoring software from IIIT Hyderabad.

Tomorrow promises to be a busy day. In the meanwhile here are some of the pictures from the first two days.

Went in early today to setup stall… found that others (Dr. Rituparna Chaki of CSE Dept, WBUT and other WBUT volunteers and staff) were already there. We didn’t yet have an electrical connection, so Rituparna-di had poked the BITM staff for one. The connection arrived soon enough, but without a proper ground. The OLPC-India guys at the next stall managed to escalate the issue and got it fixed for all. Thanks a bunch guys!

Meanwhile I managed to get hold Mr. Chaudhury, the Curator. He promised me that our flex stands, additional tables that I had requested for would arrive soon. True to his words, things worked out within the next hour or so. In the meantime, I did a quick-n-dirty orientation of LTSP and BN-IN interface for the two volunteers - Ira and Suparna (both ME students). Atanu informed me that one of the 12V DC TFT monitors have gone kaput and so one of the thin-clients we had fetched from untested stock.

Therefore, leaving Rituparna-di in charge, I took Atanu and went back to WBUT for replacements as well as the LCD projector. Unlike the day before yesterday, the driver I had with me today (Rajesh) was a good one who knew the bylanes et al nicely and we were soon at office.

I had planned to be back in 1 hour as I still had my presentation to prepare for my talk in the post-lunch session - “Innovative Experiments in using Technology within Schools”. However it was double of that. All thanks to Oishila and a loose CAT6 jack at WBUT. Somehow managed to fix that and left for BITM again.

On my way back, I got a call from Parantapa (a final year engg. student from BESU). He had come down to the stall to volunteer. It was great to see at least one person responding to my call for volunteers on the LUG list. He was a big help and has promised to come back tomorrow.

Interestingly the first batch of visitors we had at the stall was a group of relatively elderly ladies from Mumbai. Wearing burkhas and speaking only Hindi (with us at least), they demanded to be explained what was on the show. The volunteers were slightly at a loss in handling the group, partly due to not being fluent in Hindi, so I stepped in to the rescue .Turns out the ladies were housewives from Mumbai, on vacation in Kolkata and decided to walk in on seeing an exhibition. But it has to be said that they were very keen on learning all about it.

The second session at the Auditorium, started off at around 2:45 PM. I was to speak on the Bijra Project initiative and my slides weren’t in shape yet. Met the guys from Pratham, they were really interested in the Bijra Project and want to visit Bijra. Nizam bhai who was there, promised them all the help they may need locally.

At the session, there were a total of 3 speakers. Me, Arundhati from an NGO called Pragati and Dr. Jayanthi Sivaswamy from IIIT Hyderabad. I was the first speaker, however my F7 loaded Macbook’s projector display played hookey. When I had nearly resigned to the fact of speaking extempore, a guy from the audience, came up to me and asked if I would be comfy with presenting using his Ubuntu Laptop. Whoa!!! I finished my presentation using his Compaq lappy, he also had the mpeg codecs loaded so I could also play my videos. It felt really nice!

Dr. Jayanthi’s presentation was really interesting, she spoke about and demoed a Virtual Lab Authoring s/w for Physics, written using VC++ and OpenGL, the project being funded by Media Labs Asia. During the Q/A session, when she mentioned that the software would be given to school for free, I quizzed her about the degree of “free”-ness she was referring to. Her answer was straight and simple - GNU GPL. So I requested her to put up the project on sf.net asap as it looked rather interesting and useful stuff. She agreed. Later I got together with her team’s lead devel who is also attending. We exchanged cards and Dr. Jayanthi asked me if she could access some of the young local FOSS talent pools to further develop the software in a collaborative fashion.

The session closed with the screening of a film by Comet Media Foundation. It was a inspirational piece. Rather nicely done in my opinion. The credits screen had one more item was interest. The film was funded by Hivos.

I came back to the stall, and finally had my lunch around 5:45, since visitors’ streams ended up by six, we decided to wrap it up and call it a day. I went back to WBUT for a briefing session with Prof. Thakur, who in return shared with me the details of his meeting at FOSS.IN. Looking back it was a rather fruitful day. Tomorrow I plan on spending some time with the OLPC India team, particularly Amit (Gogna) who has been leading the Khairat pilot in Maharashtra.

Many thanks goes to Dr. Arindam “arin” Basu for managing to bring the mirror to Prof. Dr. Friedrich Leisch’s attention

As part of our collaborative program for FOSS with WBUT, we had setup a CRAN mirror awhile back. As of yesterday, 26th October, 2007, it is now listed as the 2nd official CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) mirror in India, and the first in eastern India.

URL of the mirror — http://mirror.wbut.ac.in/CRAN
Hositing institution — West Bengal University of Technology,
Country — India
City — Kolkata
Update frequency — Daily at 19:35:00 UTC / 1:05 AM IST

About R

R is a system for statistical computation and graphics. It consists of a language plus a run-time environment with graphics, a debugger, access to certain system functions, and the ability to run programs
stored in script files.

R has a home page at http://www.r-project.org/. It is free software distributed under a GNU-style copyleft, and an official part of the GNU project (”GNU S”).

R is being developed for the Unix, Windows and Mac families of operating systems.

I live about 1 min of driving distance from Ruby General Hospital, on the EM Bypass, Rashbehari and Garia Connector Crossing. I’ve earlier ordered a few times from the Domino’s Jodhpur Park outlet, which is approximately 6 - 7 km from my residence.

Today I was planning to order for 2 large pizzas as a treat for a family lunch. I was told by the customer care person - Dibyendu (i called at the # 24837471), that this was outside the service area.

This was rather surprising as the same outlet has earlier serviced my orders. Dibyendu being “ever helpful” offered me the number of the Lake Town outlet, saying that it would be closer to my place. Well, the Lake Town is like 16 - 18 KMs from my home. I’m sure that it will be closer!!!
Naturally pissed off more with the “helpful advice” as well as the new definition of the “service area”, I decided to send in a feedback through their website. Wonder of wonders, after typing in the text and on hitting the submit button I faced this:

This is clearly a company that doesn’t care whether they retain their customers. Neither could I find any other email address to send in a regular email. Earlier I had signed up for their “WoW! Club” membership, although I doubt if I’ll be using that anymore.I intend to do no future dealings with Dominos, where the customer service is manned by such people without a sense of direction or distance, or websites that are supposed to interface with customers with a screen full of errors.

Goodbye Dominos!

Exactly two weeks after 25th of August, yesterday was the occasion of the next installfest @ WBUT, organised by the WBUT-LUG in association with ILUG-CAL.ORG. Due to some classes being held, it started off about an hour later. Also, I was a little late in reaching the venue and hence Rabi and Ankur got a bit jittery and there were a few frantic phone calls

The number of participants this time was larger, around 27. The number of volunteers from ILUG-CAL was less this time, those present included Susmit Shannigrahi, Abhisek Datta, Debarshi Ray, Soumyadip Modak and Arindam Ghosh (travelling down all the way from Durgapur, once again). However,  about four of the first installfest participants volunteered as instructors in this second edition. This included Abhishek Pandey, Sanjeev Kumar, Shibabrata Basak and Shreya Roy Chowdhury. Adding to this list was Anurag Khan from BE IT 3rd Yr. Eight personal systems (including 3 laptops) were present at the Installfest, and for the first time, it included an external participant - Smita Bhadra, a GLT-Madyamgram member.

It started off with me giving a little “speech” about the history of GNU/Linux, the FSF and the basics of GNU GPL, the stage where FOSS is poised at the moment, ending it with a show to the “Truth Happens” video from Red Hat. The atmosphere in the room was rather charged up and some actually clapped when the short film ended. Susmit and the other ILUG-CAL volunteers took over from there on and got down to the business of installing Linux.
This time, as the 64-bit repos were also up, there were few problems unlike the last time. Since we managed to clear the installfest agenda - installation, basic configuration, adding additional repos, user management, playing mp3, DVDs, games, configuring the
internet etc, we decided to carry on for some more time.

Just to give the participants a taste of GUI programming in Linux, Susmit fired up Glade and quickly demo-ed Rapid Application Development in Gnome / Linux style The participants also played around with changing locales and setting up SCIM. For most, it was a rather surprising experience to see the desktop change into their own native language, while some got tickled by some of the translations of english strings. I sent a BN_IN UTF-8 encoded email to the WBUT-LUG mailing list  (incidentally, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Thakur was the first to reply to that mail . Quite a few of the participants also wanted to join in the Freedom Toaster-alike project that Susmit has taken up recently. 

We wrapped it up and called it a day around 8:30 PM. Among other things, Prof. Debesh Chowdhury, Head of the Department, ECE at the JIS College of Engineering came down to pick up a copy of Debian 4.0 R1 DVDs and the latest version of Knoppix. Since, it took some time to burn the DVDs, he ended up sitting through a part of the Installfest. He was enthused enough by what he saw there, and has promised to try and organise a similar program at his college.
 

Yesterday, 25th of August, 2007 will go down as a very special day in history of FOSS in eastern India. AFAIK, on this day the *first* successful Linux Installfest was organised by a student LUG - the WBUT-LUG. It was supported in this maiden endeavor by the ILUG-CAL.ORG.

Despite being over-cast in the morning with heavy rains in between 9:30 - 10:30 AM, there were 5 desktops and 3 laptops which landed up along with 22 participants (including the 5 volunteers from the first year). The University provided about 12 computers additionally for playing around. From ILUG-Cal’s side, the following people turned up to act as volunteer instructors and as L1 and L2 support.

1. Susmit Shannigrahi (WBUT Alumnus and Fedora Ambassador)
2. Debarshi Roy (Author of Opyum, Fedora Ambassador and GSoC 2007 candidate, perhaps the only guy who did not have a WBUT connection)
3. Soumyadip Modak (WBUT alumnus and GSoC 2006 candidate and long-time FOSS hacker)
4. Arindam “mak” Ghosh (student under WBUT’s BCREC)
5. Subhodip “beton” Biswas (student under WBUT’s BCREC)
6. Ajitesh Chowdhury (student under WBUT’s BCREC)
7. Swagnik Chatterjee (student under WBUT’s BCREC)

The last four deserve a special mention as they travelled down all the way from Durgapur, which is about 200 kilometres away from Kolkata. Thanks a lot guys for so overwhelming answering the call for volunteers

The biggest credit for setting up the installfest infrastructure goes to Susmit, who in his capacity as an intern with L2C2 Technologies, worked hard for the last couple of days to setup the local Fedora i386 repositories - base, updates, everything as well as the Livna repo. Not only did he lead the “show-and-tell” session at the Installfest, he made sure that bootable CDs for i386 and 64-bit ones were in place and that the infrastructure functioned without a glitch. All thanks to him, WBUT now has it’s own internal Fedora repository.

Ankur Kulshrestha (from 2nd Year MTech Biotech) and Rabi Kumar (from 2nd Year, BTech IT) as well as the first year volunteers (some 5 - 6 of them), for taking up the initiative and leading the preparations of the programme.

Support during the programme also came in from faculty members of WBUT, Subrangshu Supakar (Dept of Bio-Informatics), Santanu Chatterjee (School of Information Technology), Raju Chal (School of Information Technology), and of course the programme wouldn’t have happened unless Prof Ashoke R. Thakur, the Vice Chancellor had personally encouraged the students to go ahead.

The installfest, which was scheduled to start from 12 PM onwards, actually got underway around 1-ish, with last minutes preparations. The students asked me to “inaugurate” the programme. The InstallFest Howto had already been circulated earlier by email to all the participants to prepare them for the culture shock. So, I spoke on what to expect, some ideas of possible future roadmaps for the WBUT-LUG, introduced the ILUG-Cal volunteers as well as asking the participants to introduce themselves to their fellows.

We had a good mix. About 50% coming in from Biotech programmes and the rest from CSE and IT. And they came from all the years. Out of 22 participants, 7 were girls. While that may not be great, it’s better than the typical LUG atmosphere of nearly 100% male only participation.

The participants soon warmed up to the new concept of an Installfest. Excepting two systems, we managed to install all the systems, update and add support for stuff like mp3 and DVD playback. On one system there was a slight problem with the mouse. The mouse was working, but without a visible cursor. Soumyadip who is ILUG-Cal’s resident hardware geek, rose to the challenge and soon got that to work as well. Before that, nearly everything, from it being a 64-bit system to it being a Microsoft mouse, got blamed

One Acer Aspire 5000 AMD Turion64 based notebook, belonging to Ankush from MTech Biotech gave us hell, but by 9:15 PM it too got sorted out. Somehow, the participants didn’t expect the volunteers to stay back that late and really help out the way they did in sorting out “their” problems. Again, a culture-shock thing. However, it worked in the programme’s favor as I came to know when Ankur called me up this morning. He expressed their thanks to all the ILUG-Cal volunteers. Rabi and others wanted to know how to become a part of ILUG-Cal’s activities and how to drive the programme ahead within their own WBUT-LUG.

Also, while the programme was going on yesterday, some faculty members from other colleges who had come to attend an Intel Academic Initiative event that was being held in the adjacent lab, came over to our lab to watch. Some, like Kalyan Mahata, a lecturer in IT, at the Govt College of Engg and Leather Technology, wanted to know how *he* could participate in such a programme. To cut a long story short, he has offered to organise a similar programme at his college, provided that WBUT-LUG can assist them by the way of technical know-how and by providing resource persons as collaborators.

We called it a day/night at around 9:25 PM. The total expense incurred (as volunteers didn’t get any payments) was Rs. 1455/- only. The next two coming Saturdays are ear-marked for Installfest with other new participants, who couldn’t be accommodated in the first instance. Let’s hope we can keep up the pace, it is after all the Turn, turn, turn time.