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.

Amit (Gogna) called me up today to say that Prof. Negroponte will be coming to India in the 1st week of August and that Reliance Communications (ADAG) will be setting up video conferencing around the country on matters of the little green laptop. He has asked me to send him a list of names of the people who can make a difference with the OLPC project in this part of the country.

I’m looking forward to the event to see where OLPC goes from here on.

On a related note, yesterday Kushal had punched in the panic buttons saying the Bijra School’s LTSP system was not working, so I had asked Subhodip and Arindam to do a site visit today and fix the problem. They reported back that it was a dusty and loosely seated RAM problem on the server, which they managed to fix.

Which reminds me that we need to hold a fresh re-orientation workshop at the school soon.

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!

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.

There is going to be an education fair with a difference (Bal Vividha) to be held at Birla Industrial and Technological Museum (BITM) from 6 - 9 December 2007. The program has a strong pro-FOSS agenda.

FWIW, I’m helping WBUT to put up a stall at the venue where we’ll be showcasing LTSP with Bengali / Hindi Desktop and Multi-media Support; AMD Geode based Ultra-Value Clients PCs running FOSS s/w and using just a 12V DC input to power themselves.

I’m terribly short of hands to manage the displays for 4 days. So, this is a general call for help to you all. We need stall volunteers. Anyone interested will be “rewarded” with a quick-n-dirty hands-on experience on LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) technology and cups of coffee and my boring company . Interested persons can get in touch with me over phone - 98300-20971 or by email off-list

And I have a bit of exciting information for the last, we (the organisers) have managed to invite OLPC (One-Laptop-Per-Child) India team to come and participate. And so you may actually get to fiddle around with the latest XOs. So, even if you are too busy to volunteer, do come down to the exhibition, it would be rather exciting

This morning Tamal-da (Sen, of WEBEL) mailed me in all urgency about his immediate trip to Berlin tonight to attend the First International ODF User Workshop in Berlin to be held on 29 - 30th Oct, 2007.

On visiting the website to check out the agenda, I was left with a bit of bad taste in the mouth. The site has been rendered as Flash movie. That’s funny, in the sense that the site claims the following :

The objective of the workshop is to create greater public-sector awareness and understanding of both the technical and policy-oriented considerations involved in migrating to an open format.

I wonder since when did Adobe Flash become exactly an “Open Standard”?

… about 5 more to be precise, I should be in Chennai. I’m going there to attend a meeting of NRC-FOSS, and looking forward to meeting up with a lot of old friends who are also attending.

While reading the proposed agenda of the meeting, on the topic of how to encourage more FOSS contributions from India, I couldn’t help but recall this post by Toolz.

Yesterday evening was rather nice. The Operational Research Society of India (ORSI) are holding their 39th Annual Convention between 5th and 7th January 2007 at the Heritage Institute of Technology. I was invited by the organisers to be a member of a panel discussion - “Information Technology in Decision Making as the Cutting Edge“.

I reached the venue to find everyone waiting eagerly for the arrival of Dr. Debesh Das (MIC, Dept of IT, GoWB), who was also on the panel. My other fellow panelists included representatives from Oracle India and Mahindra British Telecom (Tech Mahindra). It seems like even in a place like Kolkata, a fledgling FOSS startup is beginning to become accepted to be a part of an Industry panel. 3 years back, no one here would have given us a second look in a general, non IT specific conference. It sure felt good!!!

Once everyone had arrived, we moved to the A/V Room. The session moderator Prof. A.K Mittal from IIT Kanpur, gave me the opening slot, perhaps being the least known entity helped. I spoke about my favourite topic these days - “IT Asset Management - Energizing Your Enterprise Processes and IT System“.

Despite being an obvious FOSS spiel, I deliberately kept away from the politics of FOSS vs. proprietary software. Focusing more on the value proposition and drawing from L2C2’s case studies, I found that my apprehension about my presentation being on the periphery of the topic of discussion was somewhat unfounded. In fact, the Oracle India rep (Ambarish Sengupta) actually built his presentation from where I had ended (service/stack consolidation and server virtualization) and moved into grid support in Oracle 10G.

[On a side note : Luckily my Thinkpad didn’t act funny, and there were a few people in the audience who came up to speak afterwards, recognising that I was using Ubuntu, but were rather taken aback by the on-screen antics of the Beryl powered display.

It was Ambarish’s Windows XP powered Compaq wide-screen laptop that played hooky with the room’s hi-funda projection system from LG. That brought about a tongue-in-cheek comments from the moderator on the _need_ of IT Management *evil grins*]

I’m still surprised how people do not realized that IT itself needs management. Somehow, people are yet to realize that IT is fast becoming one of the most mismanaged and increasingly more and more complicated affair in any enterprise. Such a scenario is capable of playing havoc with the TCO, with simply too many loose ends and unnecessary wastage.

When his turn came, Dr. Debesh Das re-iterated his stand, stating “we would use opensource wherever possible…“, adding with a grin, “and where not possible, we shall use Oracle”

During the Q/A session, Dr. Das clarified to audience questions that e-gov implementation in the state would seek to go vernacular and announced that in the workshop at PDSIT, BESU on 20 - 21st January, some of these issues should achieve a greater clarity and of course direction.