Weekend Aantel’s Blog

when someone you love more dearly than yourself asks you “Tell me… pls tell me… what do I do?“… and when every odd looks like it is stacked heavily against you and the person you love…. there is __only__ one thing to do… and that’s hope… i mean *really* hope… that you are doing the _right_ thing… that you are *NOT* destroying the life of the person who loves you and depends on you to *do* the right thing…

I wish there were simple answers… but life isn’t like that…

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!

“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!

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

The first lot of 22 nos. AMD Ultra Value Clients (UVC), branded Protos PC, which we ordered from Wipro were all delivered in a black painted enclosure. However, I’m less than happy with the choice of color for a few reasons.

I’m sure that the matte black finish look would fit nicely on a desktop, however IMHO, the UVC is far better suited in info-kiosks and similar deployments. And that’s precisely why the choice of color black is worrying me. One of the USPs of this box is that it can work in non-a/c environments. Think about it… outdoors, hot summers and a black enclosure… perfect partners for getting over-heated fast.

The paint job also leaves much to be desired as it smudges and scratches rather easily. FWIW, the lime green test unit originally given to me by AMD ran a bit cooler in hot weather and didn’t quite scratch so easily. Come to think of it, I have carried it around the country for more than 6 months, literally packed in with a bunch of other hardware and junk in my backpack, without a single scratch.

Coincidence? Nah! I don’t think so? What say Wipro?

Back to blogging after a longish break… the days and times have been hectic…. today we concluded the first installment of our fast-track long FOSS internship programme, organised jointly by us and WBUT.

We have chosen the format of a 21-days long internship, which includes working weekends. We are taking in Engg. students, typically from the 2nd and 3rd years from various engineering colleges under WBUT to work on various FOSS projects. Each batch will have a specific focus area. Our goal is to create small, dynamic teams well-exposed to and capable of carrying on activities in a given area of specialization during their post-internship period.

The first batch of our fast-track interns were students of Dr. B.C. Roy Engineering College, Durgapur. They were here from 11th July to 31st July, working on preparing a custom LTSP 4.2 setup on Fedora 7 for the Bijra School Project, Durgapur. It was an advanced LTSP deployment considering it is shipping with a standardised image containing, local device support (local FDD/CD-ROM/USB stick on the terminals), network audio, localised (l10n) desktop support (BN_IN) along with management tools like the fl_teachertool, DR and some content like Project Gutenburg, the Offline Wikipedia, WordNet 3.0, Bangla (BN_IN) Archive Project, and custom-rolled vidcast tutorials (by Kushal Das http://kushaldas.in) for the KDE edutainment pack. We are also took some pointers from the Red Hat High initiative.

[The Interns, from L to R : Arindam, Subhodip, Soumya and Sawgnik]

A more detailed report would be shortly forth coming as well as the publication of a plethora of other resources, however for the time being to keep your appetite whetted, here are the first batch of pictures as we worked towards the deliver of the system.

Tomorrow, we start with our 2nd Fast-track batch. This time, they are from the Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata (HITK).

yesterday on my way back home, my driver parked the car on roadside somewhere along the way, saying he needed to pick up some spare part from a shop nearby. I got down from the car, and there was this tiny ramshackle shop. It was a 1 phone PCO, selling Coca Cola, assorted grocery items… the odd item amidst it all these was a 15″ TFT LCD monitor and a computer. A peek was enough to figure that it was running WinXP and had a few Internet Explorer windows open. As I watched the guy operating the computer, I saw people drop by the shop and talk to the operator. The operator would switch to a window that had all the text in Hindi. I *had* to take a closer look after all people actually using a Hindi website in Kolkata! And what do I find….??? It was an online lottery!

Discussion heard between participants at “National Workshop on Emerging Trends in Information Technology in University Management” organized by Association of Indian Universities and WBUT

Richard finally landed up in Kolkata today for the seminar tomorrow. I managed to pull off a shot just as he was stepping out of the airport gates.

Later at the guest-house, lacking an air pump to inflate his air mattress, Richard pointed out the substitute being lung-power and that it took only about 172 large breaths to get it up and going. So, Debangshu and I took turns at blowing it up while he was unpacking. Must say I haven’t heard so much of “heavy breathing” in recent times

And oh! by the way! must remember the next time he’s in Kolkata - RMS loves to eat “ghontos”

Google often has the habit of decorating their home page with specific themes…. on this independance day, Google’s Indian site (www.google.co.in) has the following graphics

.

I’m sure that it was done with the best of intents and in celebration of the Indian Independance day (15th August). However, what I’m not so sure is whether such usage violated the Flag Code of India, 2002, which tells us the following:

Part I - Clause 1.3 & 1.4 (which deals with size, shape and aspect ratio of the flag)

Part II - Clause 2.1 (vi) lettering of any kind shall not be put upon the Flag;

Part II - Clause 2.2 (ix) the Flag should not be used as a festoon, rosette or bunting or in any other manner for decoration;