rohitj's domain

Finally Bluehost guys didn’t listen to any logic. I sent them a complete list of all songs and their source and license. They still weren’t ready to listen. Of course I didn’t remove the songs. So, my site was pulled down. 1 day before the given deadline. I hope I didn’t loose any important email. The mailing list I made on my account are still working .

Anyways, I now plan to run my own server. Where (yes, this is the first question)? Not sure. When? Not sure. Will decide very soon. Till then I am using NearlyFreeSpeech.net . Because of the tight schedule, I couldn’t do this before. NearlyFreeSpeech ‘s services are rather impressive. Leave emails, for which they don’t provide any near decent solution, rest of the things are quite good. I will be charged for what I use. I think if I remove my photo section (which I have as I don’t have enough net speed) my cost would be pretty low as compared to Bl(oody)uehost. Also, they didn’t ask for passport copy or license copy for ssh access. That was nice. The concept of “site” is pretty nice. You can make as many “site”s as you want, and you can ssh to the site individually. I had some glitches with php file write permissions, but it was settled soon. Their  control panel is way too decent. They have put the neccessary things only. Not like cPanel where you find lot of random stuff which you never use. I hope to have happy time here.

There might be some broken links in this site now. Please excuse me for that, I am in process of fixing some broken links that I could find.

So, I had to change the feedparser code to run it behind proxy. Basically the idea is that python by default doesn’t user environment variables http proxy. You have to specify it in the python code.

In feedparser code, url is accessed at the line # 1895. Now, opener has to have http settings so that it could access the url. For that, I added 2 lines before calling opener:

proxy_support = urllib2.ProxyHandler({"http" : "http://<username>:<passwd>@<proxyserver>:<proxyport>"});
opener = urllib2.build_opener(proxy_support)

Here is the final feedparser : FeedParser With Proxy Support

So, again, we were expecting 50-60 people. Before FOSSKriti whiling planning for FOSSKriti, I was arguing with Arun saying that there wouldn’t be much participation for linux kernel workshop and we dont need 50 computers. To all my surprise, we had around 300 people interested in the workshop.

We had a Lab of 40 computers booked. We had to have 2 person per computer. We also had to kick out IITK students, and we asked them that they will have another kernel workshop. There were still non-IITK students who were kicked out because there was no place for standing the lab. We finally had 100 people inside the lab.

In evening we arranged same workshop for IITK students, in which we allowed non-IITK students as well. It again had awesome response. That even when it was clashing for i-Quiz.

Ankita Garg took the workshop. She was kind enough to take the workshop again for IITK students. People who came for the workshop varied from people who had heard about kernel for the time and people who had their “own” kernel.

Wow, I didn’t expect such an awesome response. I was thinking that only 10-20 people will come, but we had a huge participation. Rather I told Nanda, one of the guys from Cleartip.com our sponsor and IITK alumni, that we are expecting 30-40 people. Wow, we had like 60-70 people.

It was a great start for FOSSKriti. The first day itself when Techkriti team usually think that there wouldn’t be much participation, we got like 60-70 participation. Awesome. Cleartrip brought us some TShirts as well, which we gave to some participants. And we also had some Gnome badges and Gnome stickers.

The event started at 10PM. After 20-30min talk about beagle which Arun Raghavan gave, we shifted to lab, and people started hacking beagle. Well, there were people who didnt know much about beagle and linux. But still some people stayed there till 5AM. Yes,  10 guys stayed there till 5AM.

And more to it, we finally have 3 submissions from the workshop. One is a firefox extension to include beagle in the search engine list. Second is bibtex search. And third is searching in beagle for the select words in Pidgin chat box.

For last few days, I have been talking to people (mainly IITK students) about different events we have in FOSSKriti. I found people pretty enthusiastic about different events. I am pointing out those events here:

0: RoR : Y4 batch, being highly affected by Prof. TVP’s, is highly interested in attending RoR workshop. Some people want to learn RoR, some people want to discuss RoR. And I assume that some people will come because they know Saurabh Nanda.

1: Linux Kernel : Those who eff around there linux distro, especially Gentoo users, and those who have slightest interest in systems, were found interested in this.

2: Lisp : I personally am going to attend this event as a participant, not as organizing team. . And I am sure I will bring 10 more people. Actually no, some people were found interested in this workshop, specially those who are doing compilers course, or those who have done compilers course.

3: Linux Chix :

(female.isIITian())&&(female.isGeek())&&(female.hasTalkedTorohitj()) = 0

So, I am not sure how many females will turn up, but I am sure people will be there. This is the second event I want to attend. I want to see what they are upto.

4: KDE4 : Those who do not know, recently there was a big shift in IITK linux community. People broke their long loyalty for Gnome, and shifted to KDE. Alas!! KDE4 is still not in official repos, but they are still on KDE. They think its worth waiting for KDE4. Of course, this talk will attract these people.

Left are beagle hackfest and Clutter talk. Beagle is a must-attend hackfest. (afterall it substitutes stupid google desktop ). And clutter? I have no idea about it.

So this year in Techkriti, we are going to have FOSSKriti as well. FOSSKriti is basically a set of talks, lectures, workshop, hackfest and BoFs about different open source softwares. We have called people from Gnome, KDE, LinuxChix and cool people from Cleartrip (who is supporting this event) to give talks and workshops. Everything has been planned. Checkout the FOSSKriti site to get more information about it.

Basically, there is going to be talks on RoR, KDE4 and LinuxChix. There is going to be a beagle hackfest and kernel hackfest and workshop. And there are some BoFs. In short its going to be awesome. Those who are coming for Software Corner can easily attend these events, we have ensured that there is no major time clash between Software Corner events and FOSSKriti events.

And those who haven’t registered for the event, don’t worry. There is on the spot registration as well. ….

All 7 IITs in India and IISc joined together to open their course materials so that people could use them. IITs and IISc are the best technical schools in India and are pretty much world renowned. They have started collecting course materials in the form of slides. The slides can be accessed from http://nptel.iitm.ac.in . Its still an on going process, and it will take time to have course materials for most of the courses. But its surely an awesome initiative. Now, they have also started uploading lecture videos. I don’t think they are actual classroom lectures, I think its all staged. But I think it will still be helpful.

These institutes got Google’s help to get the videos uploaded on youtube. All videos can be accessed from http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=nptelhrd

For more details see the IITK site here .

So, I got to see this youtube video. Actually I saw the actual version of the video, but you can find it in the youtube link. It talks about some habbits while using Vim. These are not some very techy stuffs, but it talks about some basic tricks and tips which can make you use while using Vim as your editor. I found some of the tricks very useful. Specially the use of the “Ctrl+N”.

Yes, I can also see some changes on my site. I wanted to try this before I decide somethings. Advertisement is a big business no doubt. I could see the power of this business within a day. I hope to see more things. For internal news, stay tuned. haha…