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 met with Subha-di (Das Mallick of Bal Vividha) and Malini (Intel) at the meeting at the Indumati Sabhagriha at Jadavpur Vidyapeet . The occassion was to review the Master Trainers Program from Pragati which is supported by Intel and to felicitate outstanding contributors to that effort.

FWIW, Dr. Sthanapati, Director, BITM (Birla Industrial & Technology Museum, Kolkata) has proposed a series of camps with funding from Dept. of Science and Technology, Govt of WB. Comet Media Foundation will be the ICT program partner in that endeavor and as such we are supposed to be developing the program outline. The backward district of Purulia will be the pilot site.

Based on the brief discussions yesterday, there are plans to involve Pragati, Intel and others in the initiative. The deadline to get everything in place is November 2008.

So this is basically a call for help and volunteers… any takers so far?

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.

Our mirror is ready and standing by for the Fedora 9 bitflip. Fedora 9 is planned for release at 15:00 UTC today. Out of the 141 global public Fedora mirrors that are supposed to carry the Fedora 9 content, about 41 has till now synced up for the i386 iso.

Thanks to Susmit’s efforts, the WBUT FOSS mirror is among these 41 mirrors globally that are first off-the-starting-block. Cheerio!

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.

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.