rohitj's domain

So, here I am, seeing probably 8th movie in Umang’08. This times Umang is surely one of the best Umang in these 4 years. And yeah, I am liking doing live blogging. I just had Pizza from Domino who has a stall just near the auditorium where movies are being shown. Apart from that I am having coffee and popcorns. Surely prices are high. Coffee costed me 10Rs, which usually cost only 5Rs. Pizza prices are 10-20rs higher. Popcorn which should cost only 5Rs. costed me 10Rs. But then you always screw your customers, don’t you.

This time there are 3 screens. 1 in auditorium, where you get to see the wide big screen. 1 is open air theatre, just outside the institute auditorium. And the last one is in newly made outreach auditorium. The outreach one has a really small screen, though the sound quality was good. Open air theatre surely didn’t attract people as even after arranging fire and bed, people didn’t come. Auditorium as usual is awesome.

Today they are showing bourne series in one serious. Right now they are showing Bourne Superemacy. Sound is good. So is video quality. And ofcourse this series is good as well. There were 3-4  non-english and non-hindi movies as well. Audience was like zero till thursday. But from friday onward the auditorium which has a capacity of 2000 students is more than half full. Good, isn’t it.

We also had Mr. Chanakya in opening ceremony, which was surely way too cool. They showed us a episode his new series which is about vedas and upnishadas. The episode was cool. I am now desperately waiting for it. I loved Chanakya.

On a serious note. Its good that Umang uses legal CD to show movies. But they were using illegal songs in intervals. And they even copied VCDs to show movie. (it should really be fine, but its still illegal)

So, Navya @ IITK is finally doing something. In my four year stay here in IITK, its probably the first time when I am seeing navya doing something. Navya is basically a group of people who talk about open source. Most of them are pretty biased about open source. (I guess thats normal) They usually claim to help campus residents with some facilities, though people enjoying these facilities have been limited to 20-30.

So, anyways, this year navya is running a series of lectures to teach people about different Open source softwares. We are also going to have FOSS DAY in Techkriti 08. So, right now I am sitting in CS101, listening to this talk by sainath on “Making images great using GIMP”. Sainath is a great photographer as you might see in his livejournal. He uses GIMP to do some final touching in his photographs. He is talking about basics of GIMP. We have got 25-30 here. Most of them are probably new to photo editing softwares. So, basics are more facinating. I will share the slide very soon.

Updated : the slide is shared here.GIMP Workshop Slide

There was a post on LinDesk about how to use SSH over proxy. Thats surely a big issue for people living in developing country. They have to work behind proxy. So, this post talks about some old way of tunneling. Today we have got transconnect which is much better and makes proxy transparent for applications running through konsole/terminal. All you need to do is something like this : download transconnect from here. Extract it, and follow the following commands :


rohitj@rohitj:~#su
root@rohitj:/home/rohitj# cd Desktop/transconnect/
root@rohitj:/home/rohitj/Desktop/transconnect#make
root@rohitj:/home/rohitj/Desktop/transconnect#make install
root@rohitj:/home/rohitj/Desktop/transconnect#exit
rohitj@rohitj:~/Desktop/transconnect#vim ../../.tconn/.tconn.conf

Now change the file according to your proxy settings. Mainly there are 4 parts where you need to do some changes. 1: set proxy server IP. 2: set username. 3: set password, 4: set local IPs.
After this, when you want to use transconnect just do:

rohitj@rohitj:~/Desktop/transconnect#export LD_PRELOAD=$HOME/.tconn/tconn.so

Or, you can add this to your bash profile.
thats it.
btw, transconnect is GPLed.

So, I was going through some links talking about IPR situations in India. In India people usually do not know what “copyright” is. Copyright is not even enforced to normal people. I guess its limited to large scale industries. The main reasons for this are mainly 2. 1: that people are not at all aware of it. 2: that India is a developing country, and enforcing copyright here will mean enforcing them to choose alternatives. I remember talking to an employee of this big firm (name/company-name compressed) who said that “we” know about piracy. Rather people sell pirated CDs in ground floor our office. “We” do not stop that, “we” encourage it.

I recently got to know about some talks titled “How to exploit IPR”. Apart from that while doing a study on newly made “Competition Act of India”, I got to know how India is bound to preserve IPR from abroad after signing TRIPS. India being one of the highly developing countries will soon start shifting towards bad business strategies. Though some efforts are being taken like CC India and Tempostand, (and soon free culture club at IITK ), we need to move fast. Its good to be ahead.

While doing some search I came by these 2 links which explain copyright/patent laws in India. Copyright period (in general) in India is “life+60″. And patent (in general) period is 20 years. And yeah, copyleft is copyrighted.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Patents-in-India:-Law-and-Procedure&id=69217

http://ezinearticles.com/?Copyright-in-India:-Law-and-Procedure&id=73309

So recently I shifted to KDE. I used to be a gnome user. Rather may I say I used to be gtk supporter. Never liked QT. Didn’t have QT for long time. But with QT4, things have been changing. One should look at articles related to KDE4. KDE4 is going to be awesome. Well, I am on KDE3.5, not KDE4 yet. But I am loving KDE3.5 as well. I like it the way KDE integrates its different applications. They all talk to each other.

Kontact for example is way too cool. Its a proper bundle of applications that I needed as my daily scheduler/mails/feed reader. As usual feed reader doesn’t update properly. It takes time to update, but its fine.  Everything is at one place. Plus it shows notifications in tray. KOffice on other hand doesn’t have good qualities yet. Lets see what KDE4 does to KOffice. But this idea of showing all option on left sidebar is awesome. All your applications in one place. I am in love with KDE now.

Though this left sidebar has problem as well. In KDE 3.5 this sidebar doesn’t minimize itself, so for normal screen people it looks ugly. I hope in KDE4, or lets say by KDE4.1 they will come up with this minimization thing. KDE4.1 will also have proper support  proxy. Developing country like who are not given enough public IPs need it.

Konqueror? I do not like it as of now, but I guess thats because shifting is always difficult. Its been 3 years using firefox. Firefox is still awesome for me. Kopete doesn’t have proxy support in KDE3.5 .

Desperately waiting for KDE4.

2007 was overall good. I got to learn lots of things, and got to do lots of things. Got to talk to lot of cool people. Though I wouldn’t forget that it also brought 7th semester which was like the most difficult semester I ever had. This semester probably took my anxiety level to top. Some of the highlights of 2007 are below:

1. Got a job at Microsoft, India. I am excited about it.
2. Got involved into Free Culture activities.
3. Shifted 99% to open source softwares. (flash )
4. Shifted 100% to free songs. (though, this is true.)
5. Shifted to wonderful KDE. I will write an entry for it.
6. No more Gentoo, it takes time. Ubuntu on other hand is wonderful. (Apologies to all those who are on Gentoo or are thinking of shifting to Gentoo because I asked them to do so. )
7. Hiking
8. Another hobby now is Photography …. need money to buy DSLR.
9. Bought a new web space to play with different things. Its been wonderful till now.
10. Zeropage removed restrictions from their songs.
11. Kelly Allyn sent me her autograph, need to go home to get it.
12. Met some wonderful people during internship at Virginia Tech.
13. <compressed because its personal>

Hopes from 2008 :

1. Grad School or a good job (or a startup?)
2. DSLR
3. Free Culture Club at IITK
4. Passing IITK
5. openmoko / android
6. make IITK music club release an album under CC ( www.tempostand.com should help us)
7. Finish talk with Vox Populi guys